It's 20:42 and I'm back at home. I've grown tired of registering the day, so instead I will explore the train of thought I was having as I was coming back from smoking my relaxant outside.

AI is to language what the calculator was for mathematics. Where writing words is arithmetic, prompting AI is algebra. AI frees us from the difficult task of putting into precise words what we are thinking, and instead be able to broaden our thinking.

However, every technology comes with a dark side: its promise is as great as it's possible peril. You might think the world of words is the real world, it's part of it, but not all life happens within the realm of words. We must be careful not to equate thinking with existing, because thought is part of a larger consciousness.

Do you need to think in order to be able to feel? Not usually. Are you pleased because of what you think? Not often. Are you aroused because of what you think? Is imagination thinking?

...

On Mar 11, 2026, at 11:04, Cursos Hospitaleros <[redacted]@caminosantiago.org> wrote:

Mark, se me acaba de quedar un hueco libre en el curso que hacemos este fin de semana en La Virgen del Camino, León.

Es un sitio especial ya que lo hacemos en el albergue de peregrinos que allí tenemos.

¿Puedes venir a este? Tú me dices. Yolanda

Hola Yolanda,

Lamento no haberme comunicado antes. He cambiado de proveedor de dominio (@method.ac) y esto he estado incomunicado por unos días. Usualmente me encontrareis muy responsivo por correo.

También lamento no poder ir al curso en León puesto que tengo compromisos importantes este fin de semana (hubiese sido espectacular!), pero por favor avisadme de cualquier disponibilidad en fin de semana, a menudo estoy disponible de último minuto.

Agradezco mucho su labor que tan importante es para revivir el verdadero espíritu del camino.

Un saludo, Mark

...

I feel like calling it quits. I need to make the bed. Washed the sheets yesterday. Need to check if it dried on the rack. I'm not hungry but I will, in a while. There's only vegan food left. Do do go go all the things that are necessary for modern existence takes us away from real existence.

But what is real existence? I would not know, I am hopelessly dull. I look at myself in the mirror and I know I'm not really living. I am most definitely asleep, to wake up would mean to walk into real existence. It is not defined because it does not belong to the realm of words, though some people may call this spiritual bypassing (fair enough).

...

I forgot to turn on the heating and I'm shivering. I contract my muscles while remaining lying on the couch, and it becomes a trembling. I'm not comfortable. I just noticed my body. My neck is strained. Let's go to the bench.

Amazing. The bench is wonderful. I'll turn on the heating. The jacket is more effective. I'm back.

Last night I was listening to the embodiment podcast. Don't listen to it, the host is unbearable. In this interview with a tantra teacher, she mentioned the origins of the latin word sensual. Let's ask Claude:

Latin sensuālis, which derives from sensus — meaning "feeling, perception, sense." The Latin sensus itself comes from the verb sentīre, meaning "to feel, to perceive."

In its original Latin usage, sensuālis had a broader and more neutral meaning than it often carries in modern English. It referred to anything pertaining to the senses or sensory perception in general — sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell — without the specifically sexual or pleasure-oriented connotation it frequently has today.

The narrowing of "sensual" toward bodily pleasure and especially erotic overtones happened gradually in English, particularly from the late medieval period onward, partly influenced by Christian theological distinctions between the "sensual" (of the body/flesh) and the "spiritual" (of the soul). In medieval Latin philosophical and theological writing, sensuālis was often contrasted with intellectuālis or spirituālis, marking the divide between lower bodily perception and higher rational or spiritual faculties.

So at its root, it simply meant "of or relating to the senses" — much closer to what we now mean by "sensory."

What are some well cited research academic papers on sensuality?

(Claude gave a list of things from which I read Cezanne's Doubt. I enjoyed the read but I should have chosen deliberately from the menu instead of tasting the first thing. Cezanne seemed to live in the world of sensation, both in the good and the bad. He was exceedingly sensitive and would rage if touched, even if old and infirm. Yet, he wanted to capture pure form without the mind reconstructing what it is seeing, and he took this as his life purpose, at the same time doubting himself to the point of breakdown.

Claude mentioned "Edmund Husserl's work on embodiment, particularly in Ideas II, is the deeper root". Ideas II ah this feels like finding the key to a secret door: nobody interested in embodiment will pick up a tome with this name. I speculate that Husserl's intention was that nobody in the contemporary embodiment scene cited him, because he knew they would be all clowns and grifters, so he picked "Ideas II" as the title of his embodiment work. Let's read.

I read part of the foreword and the first page. It's readable and I'm surprised I can follow at some parts, others I think I would have to ask for clarification. All good.

21:59 and it's time to go do all those things I wrote I would do. Goodnite.