Johnson, David. "The Anti-Guru: U.G. Krishnamurti and the End of Seeking." The Observing I (September 15, 2026) ["Self-improvement is a funny old thing because, on the face of it, it makes perfect sense. There are obviously things we can change about ourselves. If you keep losing your temper with people, maybe work on that. If you sleep four hours a night, live on caffeine and wonder why you feel dreadful, there are probably a few clues lying around. But it can creep. You fix one thing, notice another, read a book, learn a new term, start monitoring a few habits, and before you know it you’ve become both the employee and the deeply disappointed manager of your own personality. That’s the bit that interests me about U.G. Krishnamurti. Not because I think we should all stop trying to change. That gets silly very quickly. But because U.G. spent most of his life trying to become enlightened and eventually decided that the whole business of trying to become something was the problem. Which, after decades of spiritual practice, is quite an awkward conclusion to arrive at."]
---. "The Malignant Malfunction: Thomas Ligotti and the Horror of Consciousness." The Observing I (October 6, 2026) ["This week on The Observing I, we kick off our four-part October series by looking at horror. But we aren't dealing with haunted rectories, vampires, or slashers lurking in the bushes. Traditional horror has always felt slightly tame to me because it assumes the danger is somewhere out in the garden. It allows you to lock the front door, leave the hall light on, and pretend that the fortress is secure. Unless it’s one of those Japanese horrors where they come out of the television at you or appear in your bed. The philosophical pessimism of the American writer Thomas Ligotti and the Norwegian mountaineer Peter Wessel Zapffe begins from a much colder realization: the call is coming from inside the house.The horror is the three pounds of wet tissue sitting behind your own eyes."]
---. "Mikhail Bakhtin and the Unfinished Self." The Observing (February 10, 2026) ["There are two kinds of voices living inside you. The authoritative word arrives with credentials, with institutional backing, with the collected wisdom of everyone who came before you and decided how things should be. It does not negotiate. It announces itself and waits for you to comply. Your parents spoke it. Your religion spoke it. Your culture spoke it. And you absorbed it so completely that by the time you were old enough to question it, you could not tell where the voice ended and you began. The internally persuasive word is different. It emerges from dialogue. From the messy, uncertain process of testing ideas against experience. It is the thought that keeps coming back even when you try to ignore it. The question that will not let you sleep. The feeling that something is wrong even though you cannot articulate what or why. The internally persuasive word does not give you answers. It gives you better questions. You change through dialogue. Through conversation where neither person walks away the same. Where words move between you and transform in transit and come back different than they left. But most people never make it past the authoritative word. Because the internally persuasive word is uncomfortable. It says maybe everything you were told was wrong. Maybe the life you built is not the life you want. Maybe the person you have been performing is not the person you are."]
---. "No Exit, No Problem: Pema Chödrön’s Inner Frontier." The Observing I (June 6, 2026) ["When things fall apart, the first temptation is to rebuild the story. Pema asks what happens if we stay with the wreckage for one breath longer."]
---. "Not Yet: The Philosophy of Ernst Bloch." The Observing #143 (March 17, 2026) ["Not yet. Ernst Bloch was born in a factory town on the Rhine in 1885 and spent the next ninety-two years refusing to accept that the present tense was the final word on anything. He built an entire philosophy out of the gap between what is and what should be. He called it the not-yet. The Nazis called it incompatible. The East Germans called it a deviation. The students of 1968 called it exactly what they were looking for. This episode is about what happens when a man bets everything on a future he can’t prove, gets exiled, fired, suppressed, and walled out for doing it, and keeps betting anyway. It’s about hope as a philosophical structure rather than a feeling. It’s about the Vor-Schein, the pre-appearance, the light that the future casts backward into the present before it arrives. And it’s about the knock you hear at 3am when the rest of your brain has the good sense to be quiet, and what Bloch would tell you to do with it."]
---. "René Girard and the Trouble with Other People’s Desires." The Observing I (September 29, 2026) ["We convince ourselves that once we have a mortgage and a career, our desires belong strictly to us. You picked your work because of your own ambitions. You bought that particular coat because you appreciate the tailoring. You like the bitter coffee and the minimalist flat because you are an authentic, self-authored adult making independent choices. It’s a comforting story. We spend an extraordinary amount of money keeping it on its feet. But have you ever stopped to wonder where your current ambitions actually came from? The uncomfortable reality is that human desire is remarkably unoriginal. It rarely invents anything from scratch. A French thinker named René Girard spent fifty years suggesting that this isn’t just an embarrassing psychological quirk. He thought it was the entire engine of civilization, and the hidden root of why we make each other miserable."]
---. "Terence McKenna and the Problem of Enchantment." The Observing I (April 21, 2026) ["There are certain figures who stay with us not because they were entirely right, but because they gave language to something we were already feeling. Terence McKenna was one of those figures. He continues to exist in the cultural imagination because he seemed to speak directly to a part of the human being that modern life does not know what to do with. The part that resists reduction. The part that feels, often quietly, that the ordinary story we are given about reality is somehow too small. Too flat. Too dead. The part that suspects consciousness is stranger than we are told, that meaning is deeper than utility, and that the world may still contain forms of mystery that our institutions have forgotten how to name. He didn’t speak like an academic, but he didn’t speak like a conventional spiritual teacher either. He sounded like someone standing at the edge of the known world and sending back his field notes. About mushrooms. About language. About time. About shamanism. About the collapse of modernity. About the possibility that consciousness was not a side effect of matter, but something far more central and participatory than our dominant culture was willing to admit. And whether you agreed with him or not, there was something undeniably alive in that voice."]
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