Philosophy

A living framework for meaning

I’ve spent years trying to name what I believe, how my creative work and life interweave, and what compass I’m using when I make choices. Dogma never fit. Neither did nihilism. So instead of declaring truths, I’ve stayed close to a handful of recurring questions: What is real? How do I know what I know? What matters? What is a human being?

I’ve always been drawn to Jung’s resistance to fixed systems. His “working hypothesis” — that the psyche is real — was a place to begin observing, not a theory to settle into. In the same way, this isn’t a manifesto. It’s an evolving sketchbook of principles

I don’t claim to be an expert but rather a lifelong learner. I’m sharing these thoughts publicly in the hope that they might help someone else, and to hold myself accountable for living this philosophy in practice.

Unity

Common Ground

I keep noticing how science and spirituality keep circling the same truths from opposite sides. It’s easy to cast them as rivals—the measurable versus the mysterious—but the closer you look, the more their patterns start to overlap.

Newton said every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Karma says what you send out returns. Both describe energy in motion—nothing lost, only transformed. Physics or ethics, it’s the same idea: everything connects, nothing stands alone.

Even our creation stories share this rhythm. Adam formed from divine breath. The universe born from a singularity. Brahman, the source unfolding into the world. Different languages, one intuition: everything begins from the same field.

After centuries of tension between faith and reason, they seem to be meeting again. Quantum entanglement—particles linked across impossible distances—feels like science rediscovering what mystics have always said: relationship is the fabric of reality. One uses equations, the other metaphor; both describe the same dance.

I used to think I had to pick a side. Now I see they share a motive—wonder, and the search for coherence.

Everything connects beneath the surface. Nothing acts alone. Reciprocity isn’t moral bookkeeping—it’s the natural echo of cause and effect. Look closely enough, and science and spirit stop arguing. They start harmonizing.

Being, Perception, and Ego

Being is not ownership—it is participation. To exist is to be one ripple in an infinite consciousness that holds oceans, mountains, stars, and every life that has ever been. All of it rises and dissolves within a boundless, multidimensional field of awareness. You are not outside of this field. You are one with it, as is everything you have ever known.

Imagine this consciousness as a sponge—its porous mass containing every possible form, every thought, every movement of energy. What we call “self” is one bubble among countless others, each a narrow aperture of perception within the whole.

The body is not the essence of life. It is an instrument of senses, tuned to a tiny spectrum of what is. Through it we form a “perceptual bubble”—a private world of color, sound, and touch. But we are not the vessel itself. We are the awareness passing through it. The belief that we are only bodies, that the world is exactly as we see it, is a shared illusion. To step outside of it is often dismissed as madness, but perhaps it is another kind of vision.

Ego is the habit that binds us to this illusion. It names, claims, and divides: “mine,” “for me,” “about me.” Yet what it claims was never private. Seas, trees, sky, and stone are universal. Everything belongs to everything. To live without ego is to see this directly: that what you are is not a bounded object but a pulse in the vast collective mind, a single note in the endless chord of Being.

Consider the difference: to see yourself as one fragile bubble, hemmed in by the small circle of your senses; or to see yourself as the sponge itself—already connected to every pore, every opening, every part. In the first view you are limited. In the second, you are infinite.

Look at your hand. Do not call it yours. See it as the raw fabric of the universe momentarily arranged in flesh. Your mind is not attached to it except by the story ego tells. Release that story and you will glimpse pure consciousness. The hand is no more yours than Saturn’s rings are your bracelets.

Your mind is not a sealed container. It is as much a constellation of molecules out there among the stars as it is behind your eyes. What you call “life” is only a sequence of sensory impressions ego has claimed as personal property. Let go of that claim and you will see: the mind is universal, the world constructed, and what we call reality is a shimmering illusion.

I am one with everything. Everything is one with me.

Tension

Necessary Oppositions

As someone who lives by a strong moral compass, I have long admired polemicists like Christopher Hitchens who articulated their thoughts with beauty, even in opposition. Hitchens’ Letters to a Young Contrarian helped me realize the importance of not only naming what we love but identifying those things for which we never wish to stand.

Noise without Meaning — I stand against the culture of performative attention: the machinery that trades depth for clicks and erodes our capacity for focus. It rewards reaction over reflection, spectacle over substance. My work (and my sanity) depend on guarding attention as something sacred.

Affect without Ethics — I reject empty virtue and selective morality. I distrust anyone who performs empathy while practicing exploitation. I view vows and oaths as sacred and unbreakable. Ethics aren’t slogans; they’re consistency under pressure. Integrity, quiet and persistent, is the only lasting form of credibility.

Certainty as Shelter — I resist dogma and answers that claim to be final. We grow by correcting our mistakes. Fixed systems—religious, political, academic, or otherwise—pretend to solve what can only be lived. I prefer questioning to conclusion, paradox to purity, and the freedom of not knowing. That freedom allows for lifelong learning.

These oppositions form a compass: attention over noise, honesty over display, curiosity over certainty. They keep my work—and my life—honest.

Practice

What Is Real?

When I strip back the noise—literal and otherwise—I don’t find one fixed reality, but a layered field. There’s the physical world I inhabit: waveforms, frequencies, vinyl hiss, the low-end thump of a kick drum. There’s the symbolic: memory, myth, dream—images that can feel more “true” than any waveform.

Beneath both is a kind of substrate—the quiet, high-resolution void Ryoji Ikeda gestures toward when he reduces sound and light to sine waves and data. Minimalism draws me for this reason: by removing, you might reveal.

Matter and spirit aren’t separate here. They move and they oscillate. Grain and silence shape each other. A decaying reverb tail and a blank page feel equally real. Reality is the interplay—perception, pattern, symbol, sensation.

What Is My Myth?

My myth isn’t my biography—it’s the deeper story I live by. I call it the Quiet Fire myth because I like coming up with names for stuff.

It sounds absurd to put it this way, but: a boy from the Mornington Peninsula with Urquhart roots, descended from T.E. Lawrence. A kid who lost his hair at twenty and found refuge in both noise and silence. A husband learning to care, live, and love in the dailiness of it all.

Like most myths, it has a shape: alienation (dropping out of secondary school), growth (finding kinship in Jung, Sakamoto, Rimbaud, Hemingway), departure (leaving Australia and adolescence), descent (isolation, Maya’s illness, depression), initiation (finding my voice as a mastering engineer), and return (offering something made from the raw material).

The myth gives coherence to disruption. Chaos becomes arc.

How Do I Know What I Know?

I trust what I can hear and test—A/B comparisons, frequency curves, the calibration built from years of chasing translation. I also trust intuition: recurring dreams, patterns in my journals. My work—both sonic and philosophical—has become a kind of neuroaesthetic phenomenology: studying how perception, emotion, and meaning intertwine.

My INTJ mind craves clarity. My love of poetry thrives on ambiguity. I used to see that as conflict; now I see it as tension that keeps me honest.

Rimbaud urged poets to “make oneself a seer” through derangement of the senses; Christopher Hitchens insisted on confrontation with fact. My method lives in the space between: embrace paradox, but test it. Doubt, pattern recognition, intuition, confrontation—they’re all tools in the kit.

What Matters?

Wabi-sabi guides me: beauty in things imperfect, impermanent, incomplete.

I hear it in Burial’s fog. I see it in Pollock’s splatter. I feel it in the scratch of an old LP. Clean perfection feels sterile; texture moves me.

Christopher Hitchens taught me growth requires confrontation. Avoidance stalls everything. And love? Love is not softness. It’s precision. Radical attention. Van Gogh wrote, “there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.” I believe that in mastering, in marriage, in friendship.

Mastery matters—not as control, but care. I rerun songs, re-read poems, not to perfect them, but to be with them.

What Is a Human Being?

You can’t talk about human nature without personal history. Mine includes neurodivergence, grief, lineage.

Humans are wounded pattern-makers. We carry trauma, inherit stories, build from both. “I is someone else,” Rimbaud said. Hemingway wrote we become strong at the broken places. Both feel true.

My sensitivities and rigidity come from neurodivergence; my reverence from family legacy. I used to see them as obstacles. Now they’re texture. A human is not a fixed identity, but a dynamic composition—ancestral, archetypal, intentional.

How Should I Live?

Philosophy matters only if it shapes behavior.

For me, that means staying true to my values, cultivating peace, making work that feels alive, choosing depth over breadth, keeping my circle close.

Routine grounds me; stagnation scares me. So I vary: a new sound, a different shirt, a week of Meshuggah followed by a week of Chihei Hatakeyama. Variation resets things.

I’m learning to care for my body—light movement, breathwork, slowing down. If I value imperfection, I have to let rough edges stay. If love matters, I have to stop and listen.

Naming and Evolving the Framework

Whatever this is called, the name isn’t the point. What matters is returning to it. Jung never pinned the psyche down; he kept it alive. I want this document to do the same—something I can annotate, argue with, revise.

Closing Note

This isn’t a philosophy of “the world,” but a way of positioning myself within it.

It reminds me that loving attention is an art. That beauty hides in the cracked. That facing evidence sharpens clarity. That the psyche deserves reverence.

It helps me see mastering as care, marriage as art, my own wounds as openings. And if it evolves, I hope it stays as fire does: rooted and alive. Quiet, but warm.

After all, “what matters most is how well you walk through the fire.”

This isn’t an end point but a working record. Principles change shape, but the current beneath them remains the same.

Ten Principles

1. Attention is love.
   To notice fully—without agenda—is a rare and supreme devotion.

2. Coherence over consistency.
   Better to be whole than predictable.

3. The psyche is real.
   Inner life isn’t metaphor; it’s terrain worth mapping, tending, trusting.

4. Restraint is a creative force.
   Limits aren’t restrictions—they’re the frame.

5. Memory is a medium.
   We reshape the past each time we return to it.

6. Silence has weight.
   It’s not just between sounds—it is a sound.

7. Imperfection is beautiful.
   Cracks and wounds are where the soul shows through.

8. Myth holds psychological truth.
   Even if it never happened, it can still be real.

9. Art metabolizes experience.
   Not just expression, but transformation—the unspoken into form.

10. Care over control.
    Mastering, like living, is about presence, not power.

Last updated: October 2025