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Safety means safety to experience whatever arises. When we feel secure enough, our natural capacity for love and connection begins to unfold naturally. Our defenses - whether spiritual materialism, perfectionism, or withdrawal - gradually soften. We begin to trust the raw process of life itself.

This understanding transforms our approach to spiritual practice. Rather than chasing particular states or insights, we focus on building a secure relationship with reality - learning to trust its fundamental nature.

Having a secure attachment to reality doesn't mean all our experiences are pleasant or desirable. But it means reality itself is, at its core, trustworthy. Even our deepest insecurities and fears aren't evidence that we are fundamentally unloved or unlovable. We are loved precisely in the midst of our most profound insecurities - this is what it means to stand naked before God.

This is what spiritual traditions have been pointing to all along. When mystics speak of "being held by God" or "resting in awareness," they're describing this fundamental security. When they talk about surrender, they're pointing to a trust in reality so deep that we can finally let go of our protective strategies and simply be.

Perhaps most crucially, this understanding helps us grasp why genuine transformation often appears as breakdown. When our system finally feels safe enough to release its protective strategies, everything we've built can crumble. What we once saw as our strength - our self-reliance, our spiritual attainments, our carefully constructed identity - reveals itself as an intricate defense against our true vulnerability.

This is why spiritual development cannot be forced or hurried. Just as you cannot command a child to feel secure, you cannot will yourself into secure attachment with reality. It unfolds gradually, through repeated experiences of safety and attunement. Sometimes this happens through meditation or prayer, sometimes through therapy or deep relationships, sometimes through forms of grace we may never fully understand.

The process holds an inherent paradox: we need to feel safe enough to face how profoundly unsafe we feel. We need secure attachment to heal our insecure attachment. This is where spiritual communities, teachers, and practices become our "transitional objects" - temporary secure bases from which we can gradually develop a more fundamental security with reality itself.

The implications of this understanding ripple outward: our spiritual struggles mirror our attachment patterns, healing emerges through relationship rather than force, safety precedes genuine transformation, apparent regression often signals progress, and true spirituality cannot be separated from our deepest emotional needs.

This brings us back to our beginning - the recognition that spirituality is, at its heart, about our relationship with reality itself. Whether we name it God, Buddha-nature, or simply Life, we are always in relationship with it. The quality of that relationship - secure or insecure, trusting or defensive - shapes every aspect of our experience.

When we grasp this truth, we can approach both our own development and that of others with deeper compassion and wisdom. We begin to understand that the path to greater spiritual security might lead us through periods of apparent insecurity - just as a child learning to walk must first release their familiar supports.

This reveals a surprising truth about both spiritual development and psychological growth: what appears as falling apart might actually be falling together. What feels like losing our religion might be faith deepening its roots. What seems like a crisis of connection might be an invitation into more authentic relationship with reality itself.

Consider how spiritual traditions so often speak of "the dark night of the soul" - periods of profound doubt and disconnection. Through the lens of attachment theory, these experiences reveal themselves in a new light. They aren't failures of faith but opportunities to develop a more secure attachment with reality - one spacious enough to hold both light and dark, connection and disconnection, certainty and doubt.

Spirituality is Secure Attachment with Reality, Daniel Thorson

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not to be a joyless pedantic communist but all those snarky tweets and writings trying to like, freudianize or psychoanalyze conservative slash fascist slash whatever rhetoric (because you know they use them interchangeably!) are always a little stupid to me. sure you can say it's the desire to see the world as simply as you did as a child or whatever but that is way down the list of "reasons why someone might suscribe to these ideologies" and it's under the much, much more pertinent point of "it materially economically benefits them in some way".

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In battle, that is!

If you like this stuff, please consider supporting me on Patreon, where you’ll find bonus content, tutorials and art references!

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Planning for a flight now consists of planning out how to document the legal violations the airline is inevitably going to commit.

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i saw this tweet yesterday and then today on the subway i saw a guy stumble on the subway and i laughed aloud at him by mistake while remembering it

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dont draw, creativity is for girls and fags, unless you're doing serious art, in which case men make contemplative serious art about the depths of their misery and important things and women just make cutesy unserious art about their feelings, unless you're transgender in which case trans men only make cutesy unserious art about their feelings (but they can be part of the Big Boys club if they're misogynist enough, they just need to remember their place as lesser men) and trans women make serious dark art about the depths of their misery (but its not as good as cis mens art and if she makes something with the barest whiff of optimism then she's a twee faker) and nonbinary people make art about mushrooms and frogs or whatever

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ok this is really fucking funny actually

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"please advise" is the professional email equivalent of "girl help"

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Israeli officials have obstructed a UN investigation into alleged sexual crimes committed by Hamas fighters during the 7 October 2023 Al-Aqsa Flood operation, fearing this would open the door to a probe into the rampant allegations of sexual violence against Palestinians inside Israeli torture camps.

According to a report by Israeli daily Haaretz, Tel Aviv rejected a request from Pramila Patten, the UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict, to investigate the allegations against Hamas after she established that a necessary condition would be access to Israeli detention centers to probe claims against Israeli soldiers.

"The clear concern is that Israel will be the one to be added to the blacklist of entities and countries that engage in sexual violence in conflicts, while the terrorist organization Hamas will actually remain off the list," Mia Schocken, director of the international department of the Israeli Women's Lobby told Haaretz.

Thursday's report comes mere days after Israeli prosecutor Moran Gaz confirmed during an interview with Yediot Ahronoth that no allegations of rape or sexual assault by Hamas on 7 October have been filed.

“In the end, we don’t have any complainants. What was presented in the media compared to what will eventually come together will be entirely different,” she said, adding that her office “approached women’s rights organizations and asked for cooperation. They told us that no one had approached them,” she stressed.

Multiple media outlets have debunked claims of “Hamas rape” on 7 October 2023. [...] since the start of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, human rights organizations have documented dozens of accounts of the rampant sexual violence inflicted on Palestinians inside Israeli detention centers.

In August, Israeli NGO B’Tselem published a report titled “Welcome to Hell,” containing testimonies from 55 Palestinians detailing incidents of torture, rape, violence, humiliation, starvation, and denial of adequate medical treatment. This report came days after the military police arrested eight Israeli prison guards on suspicion of raping a male Palestinian prisoner at the notorious Sde Teiman camp.

A doctor at the army detention facility at Sde Teiman, Professor Yoel Donchin, said that after seeing the Palestinian detainee who was gang raped, he “couldn’t believe an Israeli prison guard could do such a thing.”

Following the guards' arrest, Israeli settlers, far-right activists, and Knesset members started riots, breaking into Sde Teiman and the nearby Beit Leid army base in “defense” of the soldiers. Even after the rioters breached the entrances, no one was arrested or even identified by Israeli police.

[...] Channel 14 hosted one of the Sde Teiman guards accused of raping Palestinians on one of its programs. The soldier stated, “The military police treated us really nice... You see the support … With a hand on their heart, like, telling you ‘thank you’!”

Last July, the UN human rights office issued a report saying Palestinians detained in Israeli detention centers since 7 October face waterboarding, sleep deprivation, electric shocks, dog attacks, and other brutal acts of torture. 

“The testimonies gathered by my office and other entities indicate a range of appalling acts, such as waterboarding and the release of dogs on detainees, amongst other acts, in flagrant violation of international human rights law and international humanitarian law,” UN Human Rights Chief, Volker Türk, said in a statement.

Sde Teiman itself has been referred to as Israel’s Guantanamo. Dozens of prisoners at the facility have been killed, the New York Times reported last year.

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spiderman. opinions on rhode island

your mom rhode my island last night

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While I'm posting here and no longer under any obligation to rep the company, I might as well share this incredibly funny story from behind the scenes that I don't think ever got out: Due to the constant problems we had around "The Chaser" being also a name of a sex thing online (you would not BELIEVE the kind of confused fan mail I had to sort through), in 2019 we had very seriously planned to rebrand our online channels.

After a laborious process whittling down hundreds of potential names we settled on another alcohol related term, a popular Australian slang term for wine, as we thought that was in the spirit of "The Chaser" but also uniquely Australian.

Literally the only reason we didn't end up rebranding was the whole company fell into an omnishambles in 2020, and we were all too busy both figuratively and literally putting out fires to even think about doing a full company rebrand.

And that, my friends, is how The Chaser through sheer dumb luck, managed to avoid what would have gone down as possibly one of the worst company rebrands in the history of everything, when that same name came to mean something else VERY different a few years later:

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having a freeze response to stress is so funny in the context of normal adult stressors. millions of years of evolution are trying to tell me that the email will not find me if i stay very still and do nothing

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The Aquarium's first animal 🐈💙

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The way people demonize seagulls is actually unreal. Almost all of their natural habitat has been destroyed (almost all coastal areas have been developed, destroying natural sand dune ecosystems) and they're doing their best to adapt. They're literally just trying to survive. You're in their home. The vitriol some people have for these gorgeous sea birds just because they're not shy about snatching food if you're not cautious is insane