After trying Germany for 1.5 years I move back to Thailand where I lived for over 6 years before. This time we plan to build a house and maybe a small meditation retreat somewhere in the woods. I look forward to this new challenge.

I also look forward to live a more minimal life. When we came back to Germany we bought only what we needed, always with the idea of keeping things simple in mind. But I still feels that I own too many things.

My wife and me look forward to focus on doing things we truly love. We plan on having a workshop area where we can craft some things and when the meditation retreat takes shape we are looking forward to create a beautiful environment for people to practice mindfulness.

Besides that its great to save our money and put it into something that we can keep. A real place, a real home, our space. The area where we plan to move to also offers affordable land, so owning a decent sized plot is absolutely an option. This also means we can landscape and garden like crazy and our plan is to also grow our own organic vegetables with the help of some local farmers.

Finding the right plot, getting through the bureaucracy jungle and having good neighbors who do not plan to open a pig farm or karaoke bar will be the first challenges we face. After that, building a well designed house with good passive cooling comes next.

Before that I will spend some more time hiking and going on some meditation retreats. We kick this project off sometime in September this year.

Stunning place.

Listening to this, playing with words.

We try our best, but sometimes life gets in the way.
Some humans caught up in some human shit.

But what is is and what not not.
So it is only this that really is.

The present state is as real as it gets.
The desired state is as far as our mind takes us.

Being nothing in the greater play of things.
Going nowhere in time and space.

If you recall, we keep it all as a story.
It is what makes us us and floating away.

The time has never been more right,
to kickback and take in all there is.

Less politics more science. At least when it comes to decisions that affect many people. Link

The fear of death is fear of uncertainty but if there is no ego that can feel like it has lost something by being dead then there is no suffering being dead either. So the main fear of death comes from not wanting this life to stop, not wanting to be unable to do things.

So why do humans want to do things? It is to stimulate themselves with new experiences. So fearing death means also fearing the end of stimulation. From an evolutionary perspective intense feelings of being stimulated such as having sex, eating high sugar food or similar developed to sustain life and live long enough to reproduce. Our attachment to stimuli has a natural cause.

Money is perceived as one of the main keys to unlock new experiences and bring more stimuli to ones life. As creatures who crave stimulation the run for money is one way to temporarily satisfy those cravings. Another way is to lessen our attachment to stimuli while also making ourselves more sensitive to simple stimuli such as a beautiful quiet morning or simple natural food.

Thinking about it this way, doing meditation might be just a way to bring constant stimulation to ones life by developing a beginners mind that reacts to common experiences as if they were new and as a result giving us more intense experiences.

One way of practicing mindful eating for example is by focusing on the different flavors of food, how long they linger in your mouth and how they change while chewing. By paying attention we get a similar sensory experience to others who eat heavily flavored junk food. It is just that we train ourselves to be more sensitive to stimuli and therefore “get more out of it”.

This might be the reason why the combination of acceptance and awareness helps people to live more happy lives. They can easier let go of things and therefore deal better with anxiety and primal fears such as the fear of dying and also get more stimulation from paying more attention and being more receptive to stimuli. The focus on the present moment as the only “real” thing also helps to lessen anxiety.

Not worrying and being stimulated the whole time doesn’t sound like a bad deal. Nevertheless being in the moment, perceiving things as new and not being attached to anything is a sort of stimulation. All this comes for free and has a multitude of positive side effects.

A 5000 meter high mountain on Mars. Full size image / related news / giga pan.