My 97-year-old mentor, Fred Bisci, shared this with me. I have been sitting with it ever since. I think you should too.
Nothing comes from nothing.
That means the universe could not have appeared if there was not already something for it to appear into. Which means something always existed. Which means there was never actually a beginning. Which means every mind that has ever tried to think its way to the edge of existence, including yours, including mine, hits a wall.
That wall is not a failure. It is the shape of the mind itself. We cannot contemplate the very beginning. We do not have the equipment for it. This is not a problem to solve. This is a fact to sit inside of. So sit inside of it.
You do not need to understand infinity to meditate on it. Understanding it was never the point. The point is to give your nervous system something vast enough to rest against. Something so large that your anxiety, your grudges, your fear of what people think of you, all of it becomes briefly, mercifully small.
Breathe into the infinite. It does not require your comprehension.
Your Clearest Self
You do not need philosophy to regulate yourself. You do not need to understand a single teaching, ancient or modern, to access what I think of as your clearest self.
Your clearest self is not a mystical destination. It is simply the best version of your character available to you right now. It is the you that shows up when you are not reacting. When you are not defending. When you are not replaying the old story about who wronged you and why.
That self is compassionate. It is not impulsive. It loves in a way that is not performative. The kind of love that genuinely wants to see people free from suffering. All people. Including the ones you resent. Including the ones who have hurt you. Including, and this is the hard one, the ones you feel completely justified in writing off forever.
That is not weakness. That is the oldest and most difficult kind of strength there is.
One of the great teachings carried through thousands of years and hundreds of cultures is simply this: live in a way that reduces suffering wherever you can. Not because you are perfect. Not because you will always succeed. But because the intention itself changes you.
Ask yourself right now: where can I cause less harm today?
Sit with that. Then let yourself laugh. Because you are a human being trying to be good in a world that makes it very complicated, and if you look at it from the right angle, that is genuinely funny.
Let Go. Or Don't. Keep Meditating Either Way.
Now let go of your insecurities. Or don't. They will still be there next session. That is fine. That is why this is called a practice and not a performance.
What you can do, maybe not today and maybe not for a while, is start to see your neurosis clearly. The loops you run. The stories you repeat. The fears dressed up as personality traits. When you can actually watch them running in real time, like bad software you keep forgetting to delete, something shifts.
You laugh.
Not a polite laugh. A real one. The laugh of someone who has caught themselves doing the same thing for the fortieth year in a row and finally finds it more absurd than tragic.
That laugh is medicine.
The best meditators I have ever seen are not the ones who look the most serene. They are the ones genuinely learning to relax, using their intelligence to go inward instead of spinning it outward. At some point the intelligence quiets too. And then there is just less and less to understand. That is not emptiness. That is spaciousness. They feel completely different. Sometimes you just sit and be.
You take in every sense. You feel the weight of your own body. You hear the traffic. You notice the strange fact that you are alive and aware and here, and you see the mystery sitting inside all of it.
Then you ask the questions that have no answers. Who am I? What am I doing here? And then you laugh.
Keep laughing. Keep meditating. They are closer to the same thing than most people realize.
Above photo, from left to right: Marcus Antebi (Founder of Good Sugar), Fred Bisci, Teresa Lourenco Antebi, Alma Bisci, and Eddie Stern.