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November 10, 2026 at 6:40 am in reply to: How Can I Stop Wanting Food So Often, Even When I’m Not Hungry? #462120
PeterParticipantHi Anita,
Thanks for sharing your thoughts and being so open. I’ll be candid—sometimes I feel like I say too much as well, even knowing that I don’t have much to say anymore. That’s usually the cue for me to take a little time away from the digital world.
Yet still, there are times when I take out the Lego blocks just to see what shape emerges. When I was playing with Kevin’s question, looking at how all these different colored blocks – Zen, psychology, gut science – all use different languages and maps to travel the same ground, it actually left me feeling both excited noticing the links and a little sad.
Despite centuries of analyzing the problem, we continue to struggle with it. It occurred to me that the very struggle and desire to know might not be as helpful as we think, constantly distorting the communication channel between the gut and the head.
Sometimes I feel like I spend all this time creating maps so that I might eventually find some secret beach with soft sand, a shady cove, and crystal-clear water just asking to be swum in. Then I imagine finally arriving… and being too afraid to actually swim, for fear of losing the map if I put it down or getting it wet.
I think that’s what we do. Seekers afraid of putting down the map and going for a swim…. I do so enjoy my “Lago blocks” though… 🙂
You must go on a pilgrimage to the chocolate mountain!
Peter
November 9, 2026 at 12:26 pm in reply to: How Can I Stop Wanting Food So Often, Even When I’m Not Hungry? #462107PeterParticipantHi Anita – I have to own my own little slip there, I misread your “did I get you” as a right-or-wrong test, when you were just checking in on whether you followed my trail. My mind immediately defaulted to the old debate gear!
Reading your breakdown of how the gut’s raw impulse got translated into “I need a break from being caged in” and then hijacked by the brain into “I need a mountain of chocolate” is such a vivid look at the machinery in motion.
It makes me wonder, though: if we strip away the whole narrative framework, how does a story actually feed the gut in the first place, and what feeds the story? Is it possible the question itself is enough, noticing what’s happening without needing an answer at all?
November 9, 2026 at 6:54 am in reply to: How Can I Stop Wanting Food So Often, Even When I’m Not Hungry? #462096PeterParticipantThat really might be the ultimate cosmic punchline.
We spend lifetimes building elaborate intellectual scaffoldings, mapping out systems of morality, deciphering psychological depths, and climbing spiritual ladders, only to find out the whole game was just to pause, look at the mess without flinching, and whisper, “Oh, look at that.”
Is this why the Buddha smiles? It’s hilarious to think that the profound, transformative secret at the heart of all these ancient traditions isn’t some heroic feat of self-mastery or a complex technique we have to execute perfectly. It’s just radical, unvarnished honesty. The moment you truly notice what’s happening without immediately trying to fight it, fix it, or dress it up in a story, the spell sort of breaks on its own.
The friction disappears because we’ve stopped supplying the friction. The system self-corrects the second you stop trying to override it.
I wonder if we complicate it just because “sit there and notice it” sounds too simple to be worth the price of admission?
November 9, 2026 at 6:48 am in reply to: How Can I Stop Wanting Food So Often, Even When I’m Not Hungry? #462095PeterParticipantThanks for sharing that Roberta – what a great way to experience the lesson.
Hi Anita,
I don’t think it’s a matter of right or wrong here at all, and I felt your initial response to Kevin really captured a deep understanding of what’s underneath those surface desires.I was playing with the question by moving across a few different lenses—from Zen to psychology, to science, and even looking at the symbolic map of the chakras. What fascinated me in particular is the physical communication pathway between the gut and the brain, and how those raw physiological signals have to pass through the heart level before the mind actually interprets them and shapes them into words like “I want food.”
It’s a bit like that old whispering game where a message is passed down a line of people: by the time the raw impulse travels up from the body and gets translated by the thinking mind, the final message can sound entirely different from what the body was actually trying to say in the first place.
If you think about it, almost every wisdom tradition has its own vocabulary for mapping that exact gap where raw impulse gets translated into a story, an identity, or a demand.
In Buddhism, it’s the chain of dependent origination — how raw sensation (vedana) instantly triggers reactive craving (tanha) and mental proliferation (prapancha), long before we realize we’re caught in a story. In contemplative Christianity, it’s watching how the quiet promptings of the spirit get hijacked by the ego’s urgent desire for control and certainty. Even in Stoicism, it’s the space between the initial impression (phantasia) and our assent to it, learning to pause just long enough to see how the mind distorts the raw event.
It really does feel like a core project of almost every ancient path is just trying to help us catch that whispering game mid-sentence, before the translation becomes an absolute truth we end up fighting or obeying.
November 8, 2026 at 9:40 am in reply to: How Can I Stop Wanting Food So Often, Even When I’m Not Hungry? #462078PeterParticipantHi Kevin – Your question lands close to home for me and I suspect a lot of people can relate.
I’ve been exploring something similar through a strange mix of Zen, Jung, current research on gut-brain communication, and even some of the older symbolic systems. What fascinates me is that they all seem to be pointing toward the same mountain from different sides, though I’m still very much learning.
The Muddy Waters
A student came to his Zen master, exhausted and frustrated.
“My mind is constantly agitated,” the student complained. “Intrusive thoughts, restless desires, and old habits keep popping up all day long. When I try to push them away, they only scream louder. When I ignore them, they just linger in the background. How do I stop the water from being muddy?”
The master smiled, handed the student a bowl of river water thick with silt, and said, “Set the bowl down on the table and do not touch it. Do not stir it, do not skim the dirt off the top, and do not fight the mud. Just leave it be.”
The student sat by the table for hours, watching the bowl. Because no one was stirring the water, the sediment slowly settled to the bottom. The water at the top became clear.
“You see,” said the master, “the mind naturally settles on its own. But every time you argue with a thought, you pick up the bowl and shake it again.”
That story speaks to your second question for me.
When I tell myself, “If I’m not hungry, I shouldn’t eat,” it can work in the moment. But I’ve noticed that I’m still engaging the thought. I’m still treating it as important enough to debate. After a while that becomes exhausting.
Your newer approach interests me because it feels closer to setting the bowl down. Though I’ve also noticed a subtle difference between ignoring a thought and simply allowing it to be there. Ignoring can sometimes be another form of resistance. Allowing feels more like, “Yes, that thought is here,” without needing to obey it or get rid of it.
Jung gave me another lens for understanding this. He believed that many of the forces that move us originate below conscious awareness and arrive in consciousness disguised as emotions, desires, impulses, dreams, and cravings. The mistake, perhaps, is assuming the message should always be taken literally.
Reading Anita’s response, I was struck by how her hunger wasn’t really about food. The longing first appeared in a form the mind could recognize: “I want something.” But by staying with the feeling rather than immediately satisfying it, she discovered what was actually asking for attention was a need for play, freedom, connection, and the carefree joy of childhood.
What fascinates me is that Jung, contemplative traditions, and modern research (GLP-1) seem to point toward a similar process. Something speaks before the “thinking mind” understands.
In the chakra system, this might be described symbolically as energy moving from the belly toward the heart and then into awareness. The belly knows before the mind knows. The heart helps translate the raw impulse into something humanly meaningful. Jung might have described the same movement as unconscious material rising into consciousness. Neuroscience might describe signals travelling from the body through the gut-brain axis before being interpreted by the “thinking” (remembering) brain.
Different maps, perhaps, but pointing toward a similar territory.
So when the thought “I want food” appears, I wonder whether the invitation is not to obey it, resist it, or ignore it, but to become curious about what is trying to speak through it.
And perhaps, as the Zen story suggests, clarity only comes after we’ve stopped shaking the bowl long enough to see what is actually there.
PeterParticipantHi Anita
It is interesting how time shapes us, and how the map eventually shapes what we imagine the territory to be.
I don’t view a word like “endure” as right or wrong, yet when I notice it in myself, I often notice a companion arriving with it: tension. A subtle resistance to what is. That tension is not necessarily a problem. Sometimes it creates awareness; sometimes it creates stress. The difference may lie in whether I notice it or become identified with it. Perhaps that is why I have become so interested in words. Each one carries a history and shapes perception. Sometimes, by noticing a word, I catch a glimpse of the map it has quietly been drawing.
Your story about holding your breath for all those years left me wondering if our words sometimes carry the memory of how we learned to survive. By coincidence, today’s Center for Action and Contemplation (CAC) meditation revolved around this quote from James Finley:
“Those who bless the world in the lifelong process of learning to ripen are those who have mastered the art of sustained effort, infused with a surrender to hidden sources of grace.” — James Finley
Ordinarily, we imagine effort and surrender as opposites. Yet much of life seems to require both. A gardener tends the soil, waters the plants, and pulls the weeds, but no gardener can force a seed to germinate. The flowering arrives as grace. Likewise, a musician practices scales for years, a writer shows up every morning, and a contemplative returns again and again to silence. The effort is necessary, but the breakthrough arrives unbidden.
As I read your reflections, I found myself thinking about your enduring and my noticing. Neither standing alone seems sufficient. Enduring without surrender risks becoming grim determination. Surrender without enduring risks becoming avoidance. Together, however, they become something else: a willingness to remain present while releasing control over what happens next.
Perhaps that is what touches me most in your writing. Not the map, but the image of breathing. Sixty years later, the little girl who was holding her breath is still teaching the woman how to exhale.
Thank you for sharing that with me. ( I will be offline for a while)
PeterParticipantThat was very perceptive, Anita.
Yes, the words enduring and tolerating do carry a certain weight for me. Yet the way you describe them makes perfect sense. In your case, they are not an escape from experience but a bridge into it. They help you stay with what is actually being felt rather than turning away from it.
I especially liked your image of the rocks. Oddly, the words themselves have become a bit like that for me, little rocks. When I notice myself using words with a certain weight, they have become invitations to pause and notice what is happening.
I don’t know what it is like to live with Tourette’s, so I wouldn’t presume to compare experiences. I do know something about living with tinnitus, which at times had me wondering if I might go crazy. Over time, though, it taught me that when I resisted it, labeled it, or wished it away, the discomfort only grew. When I simply noticed it, something softened, even though the sound itself remained.
Some have suggested that perhaps I should be grateful for the lesson. There may be truth in that… but I don’t feel that, it feels more authentic simply to acknowledge what it has taught me and leave it at that.
So it seems we find our own bridges. For you, today, it may be enduring and tolerating. For me, it may be noticing. The important thing is that neither of us is turning away.
Peter
PeterParticipantI will have to ponder that Anita – My first thought is that yes it can. I suspect the key is noticing without adding any unnecessary ‘weight’. Maybe not so much tolerating or enduring but breathing through, noticing any resistance often enough to calm it.
PeterParticipantI like that, lighter Meditator – Thanks Anita
I still have my moments of anxiety and such, but yes also moments of lightness… In that lightness we don’t need to be certain of any of it, only watch it all unfold.PeterParticipantYou did and thanks for sharing Anita
PeterParticipantWhen I read your posts of late, answering others, there is a quietness to them, grounded, I was wondering if you were more a peace with yourself?
PeterParticipantHi Anita, as I read your posts of late, I found myself wondering if you’ve discovered a kind of stillness?.
PeterParticipantAriel and the Fourth Quarter
What is mind?
For a while there was a watcher watching. Then the watcher became part of what was being watched, dissolving into presence. A transparent word without opposite… Like eternal. Like love. Like forgiveness… Words that serve their purpose and then ask to be laid down. Signs along the road…
In the quiet, Ariel appeared, a quality of being. Light. Receptive. Unbound.
And I wondered how something so free becomes woven into habit, memory, fear, and identity. How the open sky narrows itself to a single window and forgets the horizon beyond.
Yet perhaps forgetting is not a mistake. Perhaps freedom is curious. Perhaps it delights in taking on form, losing itself within the game, and then awakening to what it was all along.
The old dance of remembering and forgetting.
The tide coming in.
The tide going out.Now, in the fourth quarter of life, the entanglement remains, but it is gentler. The knots have not vanished, but they no longer demand to be untied.
I think of Prospero standing at the end of the play, his magic spent, his book set aside, his staff broken. After a lifetime of effort to command and control, he stands simply as a man, asking to be released.
It moves me more than it once did. There is a humility in that moment. A willingness to stop managing the mystery. To allow what is free to be free. To let Ariel return to the elements. To let the wind return to wind. To let the sea return to the sea… and to discover that what remains, when the need to possess the moment falls away, is not despair at all, but a quiet bow before the life that was never ours to hold…
And to hear, somewhere beyond the need to understand, a quiet invitation: celebrate me home.
PeterParticipantThank you, Meditator. Your question resonated deeply with me because it is one I have lived rather than answered.
After a dark night of the soul, a night that lasted years, where much of what once seemed certain is stripped away, I found myself surprised that something still remained. The “I,” or whatever we choose to call it, was no longer what ‘I’ had imagined it to be, yet there was still an undeniable sense of being.
That experience changed my relationship with not knowing. Before, I wanted answers. Afterward, I became more interested in what remained when the answers fell away. At least when I remembered 🙂
I still struggle… but I have become less afraid of not knowing. There is a strange freedom in discovering that uncertainty does not make life collapse. Sometimes it is the collapse of certainty that reveals life more clearly.
PeterParticipantThe Silicon Mirror
We live in a strange age.
Never before have human beings been so connected, and yet so fragmented. We carry devices that can place the accumulated knowledge of humanity in our hands, yet the same systems often seem to amplify outrage, tribalism, and fear. The more connected we become, the harder our hearts sometimes appear to grow.
It is tempting to blame the technology. We watch algorithms systematically harden hearts, feeding us data that provokes, divides, and traps us in echo chambers, all while the majority of us fail to notice the invisible walls closing in. Yet technology may not be creating this problem as much as revealing it.
The Record and the Living Presence
Jiddu Krishnamurti distinguished between the brain and what he called the mind. The brain belonged to memory, knowledge, language, and conditioning. It carried the accumulated residue of experience: fear, pleasure, belief, hurt, and hope. In itself, the brain was an instrument, shaped by time and necessary for navigating the practical world.
The mind pointed toward something larger. Not a private possession, but an intelligence not confined to the accumulated contents of thought. If the brain stored the record, the mind was the living presence that animated it.
The difficulty begins when that intelligence becomes identified with the record.
When words such as truth, awakening, or freedom arise, the brain merely supplies the memories, associations, and images connected to them. It does not seek. It simply contains.
The movement of seeking begins when consciousness mistakes those stored images for itself. Freedom is remembered as a concept rather than lived as a reality. What was once open and unbounded becomes entangled in its own reflections.
What was once open and unbounded becomes entangled in its own reflections. Intelligence becomes identified with the structures of memory and begins searching for what has never actually been lost.
In this way, the pursuit of freedom can become another form of captivity. The seeker chases an image assembled from the past, believing it points beyond the cage. Yet the image itself is part of the cage.
The prison is not memory, but identification with memory.
This shifts the question entirely. The issue is not how the conditioned brain becomes unconditioned. Memory has its place. The issue is whether intelligence remains trapped in the contents of memory, mistaking them for identity. When that confusion falls away, there may be no need to become free. There is only the recognition that freedom was never absent, only obscured.
The Illusion of the Seeker
Yet a question remains. If the mind is inherently free, why does entanglement appear at all?
The brain provides contrast, texture, and boundaries. It makes language possible. It makes identity possible. Through it we navigate the practical world of names, relationships, and survival. In this sense, conditioning is not a mistake. Without memory there would be no learning, no continuity, no human world.
Difficulty arises when the contents of the brain are mistaken for the whole of who we are.
A thought appears, and suddenly there is an owner of thought.
A feeling appears, and suddenly there is someone who claims the feeling as mine.
The river forgets that it is water and mistakes itself for a wave.From that identification emerges what Krishnamurti called the observer: the felt sense of a separate center looking out at life, evaluating, measuring, comparing, seeking.
Yet upon close observation, the observer is not separate from what it observes. The observer is itself another movement of thought assembled from memory and experience.
The one who judges fear is made of fear. The one who seeks freedom is made of the same conditioning from which it seeks escape.
The observer is the observed.
When this is seen directly, not as an idea but as a fact, something falls silent. Not because thought has been suppressed. Not because discipline has conquered desire. Rather, thought encounters its own limits.
The noise begins to exhaust itself.
What remains is not an achievement.
It is the absence of struggle.Externalizing the Machinery
This inquiry becomes unexpectedly relevant in the age of artificial intelligence.
Large language models are, in one sense, monuments to the conditioned brain. They are built from humanity’s accumulated words, stories, histories, arguments, fears, hopes, beliefs, and assumptions. They operate within the realm of memory and pattern recognition. They are experts in the territory of thought.
What makes them so fascinating is not their difference from us, but their similarity.
For centuries, human beings treated their thoughts as deeply personal. We assumed our inner dialogue belonged uniquely to us. Then machines arrived capable of reproducing philosophy, poetry, empathy, argument, and reflection with unsettling fluency.
The effect can be disorienting.
If a machine can generate ideas that sound profound, perhaps thinking itself is less personal than we imagined.
If a machine can imitate wisdom, perhaps wisdom is not located in thought.
If a machine can arrange language with astonishing sophistication, perhaps language is not the source of intelligence but merely one of its instruments.Seen from this perspective, AI becomes less a rival consciousness and more a mirror. It reflects humanity back to itself.
Whether or not machines ever become conscious is ultimately beside the point. What matters here is that they operate through memory, language, and pattern recognition, and in doing so reveal how much of our own psychological life is woven from those same materials.
Beyond the Silicon Cage
This realization can be deeply unsettling. But it can also be liberating.
The point is not that human beings are machines. Nor is it that consciousness can be reduced to computation. The point is that by externalizing the mechanisms of thought into silicon, we are seeing those mechanisms more clearly than ever before.
The mirror reveals the machinery. And when the machinery is seen, a curious distance appears.
Thought continues.
Language continues.
Memory continues.But they are no longer mistaken for the entirety of what we are.
This may be why the arrival of AI feels simultaneously exhilarating and frightening. It is not merely technological. It is psychological. It confronts us with a question that philosophers, mystics, and contemplatives have explored for centuries: If I am not simply my thoughts, then what am I?
Krishnamurti never offered an answer. Answers become beliefs, and beliefs become new cages. Instead, he pointed toward observation itself. Not observation conducted by an observer seeking a result. Just observation. A silent seeing.
Perhaps the greatest gift of the silicon mirror is not that it will become conscious, but that it may help us see the limits of consciousness as we ordinarily experience it. By watching a machine manipulate language with such ease, we may finally recognize how much of our inner world is constructed from the same materials.
And in that recognition, there may be the possibility of something entirely different. Not another image of freedom…. but perhaps simply the ending of the need to seek freedom through thought.
And in that ending, there may be no answer at all.
Only the quiet recognition that thought has reached its limits.
And just maybe at such moments, something entirely new may enter…The watcher was watched.
The observer dissolved into observation.
And what remained had no need for a name. -
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