#coffee talks

4.18.2026

Life has been hectic recently. I decided to go back to school at 25, and then a year and a half from graduating I changed my major. Now I’m even considering joining a graduate program. Working full time and finishing school hasn’t been easy but somehow I feel more free than I have in a long time.

Anything about God or the nature of existence is always fascinating for me to see/hear because I believe in the Taoist or Buddhist way of thinking more than anything else. Just because of being born and raised Christian and never really resonating with anything of what I was told or taught because I knew deep inside it was wrong.

Well, maybe not all wrong but definitely missing the bigger picture to how nature or reality or existence is.

And I always say what Lucy said here about the nature of God being in all of us and we tend to ignore or forget that being so caught up in cultural beliefs and religious dogma and all of that. We exclude ourselves from the conversation on God in the same way physicists exclude consciousness from the conversation on the nature of existence. We just don’t want to deal with ourselves whenever we talk about higher power or about what it is that drives reality or the Universe…

It’s just a thing we do and some may say that’s for the better so we don’t get a big head and think of ourselves as more than what we are. But at the same time, it can be a detriment because then we think of ourselves as less than what we are and it goes the other way, which can still be dangerous and even destructive. But yeah, Lucy’s right: we’re all part of the same nature, the same “stuff” that everything else is in the environment, so why do we exclude ourselves from the conversation on God in religion or the nature of existence in science?

It’s one and the same. Of course it is. Everything is. We - as human beings - have great difficulty with that and it’s in philosophy classes where we learn to accept that because we don’t ever accept it in every day real life of navigating ourselves and in the environment around us because we don’t think of it as being one and the same.

LUCY LAWLESS: “I’m doing a philosophy course just because it was one of the oldest philosophical schools of thought. I just want to see where some of the origins of human belief first started.”

RENEE O’CONNOR: “Not religious belief so much?”

LUCY LAWLESS: “Well, it doesn’t really have dogma attached. It’s like… this really great yoga teacher said the other day, ‘Ethics are for the confused’. A person who’s not confused has no need of ethics and it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a good person but incredibly evil people don’t need ethics because they’re not confused. They’re going to do whatever they do to good or evil effect. They’re going to do what they do. They’re not confused. The same with very holy people. They don’t need a list of rules to go by because they have an internal moral compass which says oh this is wrong and this is right. You just know on the inside. And the thinking is that God - we do believe in God - but we don’t think of it as this big mean old guy who sits up there zapping homosexuals and Jews because God is Way beyond form. These are all forms and attachments and when you realize that form and time - we know this from mathematics - that time doesn’t really exist and form doesn’t really exist because even when you get down to atomic particles - what’s an atom? It’s mostly space. None of this really exists and they’ve been saying this for 4,000 years in the Vedas and everything. So only now is Western philosophy coming back to that point of realizing that the only thing common here is like the stuff between the atoms is what we all are. We’re all made of that stuff. We all are it right now and therefore we are all part of this ‘God’ we all talk about.”

[ID: a digital painting of Mikey from RotTMNT sitting at his desk, eating ramen. he’s surrounded by pizza boxes, papers and fairy lights, bathing him in orange light. End ID.]

Aqua by linalushka