The Menu Is Not the Meal

The Human Condition by Rene Magritte, 1933

I often ponder what makes people feel better about themselves. It’s the marrow of my writing, the nature of effective healing, the flesh of my work. After years of chewing on this, I’ve come to an unexpected realization: our relentless pursuit of understanding might be the very thing keeping us from happiness—a cosmic joke wrapped in a riddle, laughing at our attempts to unravel it. A part of us knows that if we could just peel back our layers of delusion and simply let what’s natural take over, we’d start feeling better about, well, everything. But that’s not how the game is played, is it?

If it were simple, I wouldn’t have a job. I wouldn’t have ended up broke years ago, scraping the bottom of the barrel with bloodied fingernails, anxiously trying to understand why my life had shattered into a thousand shards of what-ifs and if-onlys. That desperate search for meaning forged an understanding that built on itself over the years like sediment on a river bottom, layers of pain and insight compressing into something solid enough to stand on. It’s that modest mount I’m standing on now that perhaps qualifies me to help others navigate their own zeniths and nadirs, moving through quick fixes on the knowledge menu to actually developing a palate for life’s complex flavors. 

This desperate search for understanding is deeply, painfully human.

Our consciousness, infinite in nature, is constrained by evolution’s pragmatic design. We are compelled to seek meaning and order, to categorize and explain, as if labeling the abyss will somehow make it less terrifying. It’s an evolutionary drive that’s both our greatest asset and our most perplexing limitation, often obscuring reality right in front of our eyes.

The relentless pursuit of understanding is a path I know well, a maze I’ve wandered until my feet blistered. There was a time when I was obsessed with frameworks—metamodernism, integral theory, attachment styles, you name it. As they say in AA, I collected them like a drowning man grasps at driftwood.

I legitimately thought these intellectual structures would change the world, or at least how I understood it. But as I delved more meaningfully into my spiritual practice, I realized that all these frameworks, while valuable, were often keeping me from inhabiting my direct experience. They kept me in my head, secluded from the visceral wonder of the senses. They were crutches, bandages over a wound that needed air to heal.

The map, no matter how detailed, is not the territory. It’s just another layer of abstraction between us and the raw, pulsing heart of existence.

We hunger for understanding, the most remote crust of bread in modernity’s mad banquet. This insatiable appetite, this conviction that comprehension will somehow make us whole, often leaves us hungrier than when we began. Our pursuit to understand, especially when it takes the shape of being an “online person,” becomes the very thing preventing us from doing so.

I think about what happens in therapy when it really clicks. You bare your soul, and someone listens—really listens—as if your words were the most important thing in the world. They empathize, yes, but the real magic isn’t in being heard. It’s in the new understanding that emerges within you, the stroke of genuine personal insight that so easily comes within a container of safety.

And what actually happens in that process? You have a new thought that references another thought, both as fictional as a child’s imaginary friend, yet it’s this better lie that allows for that profound sigh of relief. That “Ah, finally, I can breathe!” moment. I’ve felt it myself many times, both as a guide and as a wanderer lost in the neighborhood between my ears.

There’s that magic moment in therapy when you take that extra breath—occupy that square foot of space between thoughts—and realize: I’m already okay. I just need to remember how to remember that. In this fleeting clarity, your relationship woes, career dissatisfaction, and murky depression momentarily dissolve. As if they never existed. 

But here’s the existential bear trap that keeps snapping shut on our collective psyches: we’ve deluded ourselves into thinking that this relief—this godspace—is buried beneath some Borgesian stack of complex thoughts. In truth, it’s right there, always has been, hiding in plain sight, waiting for us to cease our frantic searching and simply... notice it. The “understanding” merely grants permission to do so.

The Vertigo of Eros by Roberto Matta, 1944. Matta’s paintings do not depict the world we perceive with our eyes. Instead, they are manifestations of the elusive realms within our psyche, exploring the boundaries between conscious thought and the subconscious mind.

This interplay between understanding and direct experience isn’t limited to therapy—it underpins our entire existence and all our meaning-making endeavors: the arts, sciences, heart, mind, and soul.

Consider language, the foundation of how we interpret the world... yet it’s all made up! It’s a grand illusion we’ve collectively agreed to, transmuting the ineffable into a cacophony of symbols and sounds. Which implies, not just in theory but in practical reality, that we can directly experience life without it.

I’ve caught myself countless times, so wrapped up in naming and knowing that I’ve forgotten to simply be. There I am, under a tree in Redwood Regional Park, and instead of basking in its shade or marveling at its beauty, I’m lost in thought about bark types and foliage, mentally cataloging “trees.” As if nature gives a damn about your distinction between the leaf and the sky it breathes.

This conundrum proves particularly treacherous on the spiritual path. Your ideas about the undefinable can, with cunning subtlety, distract you from the direct experience of life itself. Modern spirituality, in its endless quest for elevated “states” of consciousness, often devolves into just another form of chasing understanding. It becomes 99% refining your comprehension, 1% actually experiencing—like spending your life studying maps of paradise but never stepping into the garden.

When understanding becomes too polished, it renders itself a prison. And you, its prisoner.

In a sense, that’s all we are doing: constantly refining our mental models, hoping to grasp reality more clearly. And that needs to happen. But on the spiritual path, you can easily mistake that momentary satisfaction of “getting it” for the ineffable truth you’re actually seeking, which is far deeper than any feeling. It’s the source, the very ground of all feeling. The sensation of grasping a concept, then, is too often actually the experience of losing what you’ve truly sought.

I still find myself in this trap lately, this incessant need to understand rather than simply be, going down meta-dharmic rabbit holes on predictive processing and monistic idealism. We’re all doing it in our own way, aren’t we? Chasing wisdom terms and therapy-speak like they’re golden tickets to self-acceptance. Wounded parts, dysregulation, neurodivergence, imposter syndrome, post-rationalism, ontological design, systems thinking—we collect labels like Boy Scouts collecting merit badges. As if categorizing our quirks will suddenly make everything click—or excusable.

Don’t get me wrong. These frameworks can be useful. But sometimes I wonder if we’re just building elaborate cages of ‘self-awareness’. Each new understanding becomes another mirror in our Grand Hall of psychological smoke and mirrors. We peer into them, believing we see ourselves clearly, but end up lost in an infinite reflection of who we’ve decided we are.

It’s seductive, this idea that if we just understand ourselves enough, we’ll finally be okay. But what if understanding isn’t the Holy Grail we think it is? What if, in our quest to comprehend every nuance of our individual and collective psyches, we’re actually running from the simple, often uncomfortable act of existing?

So here we are, at the precipice of insight and confusion. Have I helped you understand anything? Or have I just added another layer of perplexity to your already modern, overstuffed mind? Perhaps the real question is: can you put this down and just exist for a moment, free from the need to understand?

As you retreat from these words into the raw experience of life, know this: the urge to understand will return. It always does. The irony is, real understanding doesn’t show up with fanfare. Instead, it often sneaks in quietly, creeping in on cat’s paws, bringing a full-body exhale that ushers you into the blissful palace of…. just fucking relax.

This understanding, should it deign to visit, isn’t a trophy for your ego or fodder for another murky intellectual essay. Only a fool-hearted thinkboi like me would try to explain it. It’s as if you’ve spent your life learning to read, only to discover that mastery means burning every book and forgetting the alphabet. It’s the joke at the heart of all seeking, the punchline that the universe has been setting up since the first neuron fired in primordial soup, shortly before the first conscious ape gazed up at the stars and asked, “Dude, why?”

The ceaseless quest for understanding is the foreplay; the climax is realizing you’ve been lugging your suitcases when you’re already home. The only sane response is laughter. Not god’s laughter, but your own manic monkey cackle at the absurdity of it all.