No Map, No Guru, No Escape

Every week, I write a Week in Review to help you find your way through what I’ve published. This week called for something different. I wrote nine pieces, far more than most people could reasonably read during a busy week, and I began to see a journey running through them. So I’ve turned this Week in Review into a weekend minicourse you can take at your own pace.

The journey begins with my attempts to speak Spanish in Costa Rica and moves through Zen, religious crisis, the limits of Western thought, and the unsettling question of what happens when we make another person our guide to living. You can read any piece on its own, but together they trace three movements: finding your feet, examining the maps you have inherited, and learning to live without handing your life to someone else.

The question running through it all is one I keep returning to:

What becomes possible when we stop trying to escape the conditions of being human and begin participating in the life we have?

I would begin with ** Beginnerhood: Becoming a Beginner Again in Costa Rica**. Living in a place where I am still learning the language has made me newly aware of how much I rely on fluency to feel competent. Beginnerhood exposes you. It also asks whether you can stay present while you are uncertain, dependent on others, and unable to perform the version of yourself you know best.

From there, read ** Conversations at the Edge (Part One): D. T. Suzuki: Living an Unmediated Life**. Suzuki enters this week’s conversation because he presses against our habit of standing back from life to explain it. What does it mean to encounter reality before we turn it into a system? I am drawn to that question, though I do not think any tradition or teacher can answer it on our behalf.

Then turn to ** What If This IS It? The Spiritual Practice of Inhabiting the Life Already Happening**. The question sounds simple until it reaches the parts of us still waiting for a more convincing life to begin. If this ordinary, unfinished existence is the place where we love, grieve, notice, choose, and belong, what have we been overlooking while we wait for something else?

These first three pieces belong together. One begins with the discomfort of being a beginner. Another asks what stands between us and direct experience. The third brings us back to the day in front of us.

Some readers will want to start here. ** The Spiritual Crisis Emergency Kit: How to Find Your Feet When Your Religious World Falls Apart** is for the person whose old assurances have stopped working and who needs something more immediate than a theory of reconstruction. When a religious world collapses, even ordinary decisions can feel charged with danger. This piece is an attempt to help you get your bearings while the larger questions remain open.

** There Is No Cure for Being Human: The Six Existential Realities We Spend Our Lives Trying to Escape** widens the lens. Religious crisis is one form of exposure, but no worldview can remove uncertainty, loss, mortality, or the other conditions we meet simply by being alive. We can spend enormous energy looking for a way around them. What might change if we brought that energy to how we live with them?

If you would rather hear some of these questions unfold aloud, the ** Ask Jim Anything** conversation makes a good pause between readings. We talked, without a script, about religion, deconstruction, God, nihilism, existential health, and language. A live conversation has room for questions to remain difficult. I hope this one offers companionship in the thinking as much as any conclusion.

The final three pieces ask us to look closely at where our answers come from.

** Existential Health Has a Western Problem: One Corner of the World Cannot Define the Human** examines the limits of the intellectual inheritance I often draw upon. If existential health is to become a field concerned with human life, it must allow people and traditions beyond the West to challenge its starting assumptions. Inviting more voices into an unchanged framework will not be enough.

** Kill Jim Palmer: The Dangerous Comfort of Someone Who Has the Answers** brings the question of authority uncomfortably close to home. I have spent years writing about the harm done when institutions or leaders ask people to distrust themselves. I have to ask what happens when readers begin treating

Finally, read ** The Last Worldview: Stop Trying to Make It Fit**. Leaving one comprehensive system can awaken a hunger for another. The desire makes sense: a complete map promises relief from the strain of living with unanswered questions. This piece asks what it costs us when preserving the map becomes more important than attending to what we can actually see.

Nine pieces are a lot. You could read one from each section, follow the whole path over two days, or begin with the title that names what you are living right now. There is no assignment to complete.

What ties this week’s writing together is a concern for the person underneath all our efforts to become certain. The beginner far from home. The person whose faith has come apart. The reader looking for a teacher. The writer who must remember he is still learning. Each of us needs language, community, and the wisdom of others. Each of us also has a life that no one else can inhabit for us.

If you make time for these pieces this weekend, I hope you come away with more room to notice that life. That would be a worthwhile place to begin.

While I was writing these pieces, ** The Practice of Being Alive: Modern Humans in Search of Ground** continued moving toward publication. I have the proof in hand, which is a strange and moving thing after spending so long with this book as a set of questions, drafts, and conversations. I’m hoping to share pre-order details soon.

The book asks what it takes to inhabit our lives more fully in a time when many of the structures that once gave people a sense of ground no longer hold. You will hear its questions running through this week’s writing, especially in “What If This IS It?” and “There Is No Cure for Being Human.” I’ll share more as the publication details come together.

Last week, I published ** The Existential Reformation**, a set of twelve theses about the changes I believe our moment asks of us the church and the religious world. A friend of mine, professor at Northeastern Seminary, read and sent me an email, which included, “You can't just drop a bomb like that and walk away.” She’s right.

In the ** Ask Jim Anything recording**, I talk about how my relationship with religion has changed over the past thirty years. I was an adherent, then, as I deconstructed the religion I had inherited, an antagonist. Over time, my questions led me into the philosophy, psychology, anthropology, and sociology of religion. I find myself now a genuine student of religion, interested in understanding both what it has made possible in human life and the harm it can do.

Lately, I’ve been asking how religion belongs in the conversation about existential health. In a ** recent article** I shared my thinking behind the name, Center for Non-Religious Spirituality, which I founded in 2019. Perhaps my understanding of religion is best expressed in the article:

I’m currently assembling a team of progressive religious leaders and scholars to discuss what an “existential reformation” might entail. I’ll be writing more about this next week.

“You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.”

• Friedrich Nietzsche

I used to think that if I kept studying, writing, and asking better questions, the unsettled parts of my life would eventually grow quiet. Some have. Others have become places from which new work has emerged. I still find that difficult to trust while I’m in the middle of it.

Perhaps that is why Nietzsche’s line stays with me. I hear in it a refusal to judge a life only by how settled it appears. Something may be taking shape in the questions we have yet to answer. I want to remain close enough to those questions to find out.

This week’s writing is freely available because I want these questions to reach people who need them, regardless of what they can afford. But the work behind it takes time, research, and sustained attention. I am writing books and essays, developing practitioner training, and helping build Existential Health into a field that can serve people far beyond this publication.

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