Towards a more profoundly satisfying appreciation of reality at large.
A question I’m frequently asked is whether I use LLMs to produce my poetry. The short answer is No👎🏻, not in the way questioners mean. Here is the much more complicated real answer. Financing: Yes👍🏻 The main way AI use helps my poetry is that it constitutes the day job that makes the writing possible. […]
Here is a trick for casting the Sermons (or verbally guiding any meditation, really) that has repeatedly proven to improve the experience of my listeners and seems worth sharing. I call it “localization” because it literally helps bring to mind the local Here and Now, and in reference to the software development process of the […]
I did the premiere as I had planned at the Less Wrong European Community Weekend 2025 in Berlin. It went okay but not perfect: I learned I need to professionalize the process of finding volunteers to sing at Sermons castings, and that I need to remake the printout booklets. This weekend I was in Berlin […]
I have spent much of the past weeks preparing, printing and improving the four new PDFs (Sermons/Songs x English/German) that are now on the Downloads page. These serve a double purpose: I hope to celebrate premiere soon! Best would be two, one English, one German. My ideas for dramaturgy/liturgy of the whole thing as a […]
I am German and the most salient aspect of that identity is that I am of a people that has burdened itself with incomparable guilt. The connection is not too familial; my parents got married and conceived myself partly because my mother’s grandfather and my father’s father met in the domestic Lutheran church resistance to […]
With publication of the German language version of the 7th Sermon, the main part, the hard part, of this project has been complete since January. I then published a video recording of myself reading the Sieben Säkulare Sutras in their entirety… …as a complement to the English language video from last August. My personal health […]
Sechs Sutras waren das jetzt schon. Das war schon ganz schön viel. Warum noch mehr Meditation? Jetzt kommt der Punkt. Das Ziel. Das waren sechs der Ebenen der All-Maschinerie. Staub spielt die lebend Liebenden. Das ist die Szenerie… …die Stimmen durch das Wort benenn’n, von der wir Bilder seh’n. Was weiter noch gibt’s zu erkenn’n? […]
Das ganze Leben, jedes Wort und dieser Atem jetzt erschein’n im Denken, jenem Ort der alles das vernetzt. Nehm’n wir das Denken selbst uns vor, den Denkprozess hier drin. Behaglich atmend wie zuvor, schau’n wir zum Denken hin. Wir alle kennen doch das Glück wenn wir Versteh’n aufbau’n, und das uns hilft, dass wir ein […]
This is a true story. One of overwhelming joy, but it starts in East Berlin under the socialist dictatorship, where Der Herr der Ringe (The Lord of the Rings) was a book of legend. All books printed in the West were illegal, so politically adventurous people like my parents who had some would lend them […]
A new translation of Herrman Hesse’s beautiful German poem “Stufen“. As every blossom wilts and every youth to old age gives way, so every step of living and every wisdom, also every virtue Must flower in its time and can’t outlast it. A heart must heed life’s call with no misgiving, be ready to move […]
The excellent Twelve Virtues of Rationality by the even-more-excellent Eliezer Yudkowsky, simplified to fit into the Common Meter. The first is Curiosity: to hunger for the chance to solve, not worship, mystery, to go past ignorance. The second is Relinquishment: to let the truth destroy all false beliefs and not lament them if they gave […]
German translation of The Words our Voices raise. Durch diese sieben Sutras führt gereimte Poesie. Das fünfte zeigt, woher das rührt was hier passiert, und wie. Jetzt schau’n wir wie die Stimme leicht, im Wort Gedanken nennt, durch Sprache Einigkeit erreicht wie kein Tier sonst sie kennt. Aus Staub kam’n Spiele einst in Fahrt und […]
This quarter, I got very bad news. I also got very good news: Still, the cancer is holding me back. That is also why this quarterly report is delayed. But the most important thing (completion of the seventh Sermon) and also the first video of the entire thing, was already in my extracurricular mid-quarter report […]
Wenn du den Kopf bewahrst, den sie verlieren und Dich beschuldigen für ihr’n Verlust, Kannst du allein Dir selbst Vertrau’n spendieren, Obwohl der And’ren Zweifel wohl bewusst, Kannst unermüdlich wartend Du verharren und als Objekt der Lüge ehrlich sein, als Hassobjekt auf Hassfreiheit beharren, doch nicht bemüht um heiliges Erschein’n, lässt träumend Du doch nicht […]
Oh hell yes, she did it again: a much better recording of the fourth Secular Sermon! Besides adding to Downloads, I am changing the Audio links on the front page to her superior recordings, for all Sermons where I have them.
A brilliant British lady named Wry, with the voice of a trained actor and a heart for poetry that Aleister Crowley could only have envied, has thoroughly outclassed my own recordings of the first three Sermons, and magnanimously allowed me to share them with you. Here (and on the Downloads page) they are: Adrift in […]
Of course ritual is an art form. Different from theatre, the performers and the audience/consumers are not separated. Like all art (indeed all indirect effort) it was used by religions a lot, but arts are eventually secularized and when that happens it is usually good for the art. You can make your own rituals, especially […]
The seventh Sermon is complete, barely in time for me to get on the operating table and have specialist surgeons take care of my large brain tumor. Survival not guaranteed, so I’m glad my life’s work is done. Well, of course technically, there’s more related stuff to do, such as… But for now, I have […]
Six sermons we have had so far. Is there a point to this? To meditating even more? Oh yes. Oh yes, there is. We’ve watched six sequent layers of the Universe Machine. The atoms, playing, life and love… these four have set the scene. The scene in which our voices rise, that’s mapped inside the […]