With publication of the German language version of the 7th Sermon, the main part, the hard part, of this project has been complete since January. I then published a video recording of myself reading the Sieben Säkulare Sutras in their entirety…

…as a complement to the English language video from last August.

My personal health situation continues to be terminal. I am on a hilariously overpowered highly experimental chemotherapy that despite its (for my type of brain cancer) literally unprecedented intensity has turned out to, very unexpectedly, permit major neurosurgery to be performed during not after. This should postpone my death by several years.

Of course I will spend those doing more Sermons things. I hope to cast (I don’t say recite) the Sermons live at the Church of Interbeing and wherever else will have them, and for that purpose I’m writing songs that shall go between them, Six Secular Songs, because the number of people I hope to enrich with this work is far greater than the number of people who are undaunted by the prospect of doing nothing but meditation for two hours straight. I would also like there to be better audio or video recordings than mine, and to produce good print versions, and to offer it all on the podcast apps, and generally see the thing flower into more and more delightful offerings.

This quarter, I got very bad news.

• I learned about my cancer and started treatment for it.
• The treatment has been grueling.
• And it will get worse once the chemotherapy starts, but that still beats dying next year.

I also got very good news:

• I’m getting massive amounts of help with that, from healthcare and friends and family. German heathcare is good, but I seriously cannot (and need not) imagine how anybody, given only that, would deal with this the very bad news above.
• I completed the German translation of the fourth Sermon.
• My theory of consciousness got published in the place I was hoping for…
  • …and it didn’t receive too much serious criticism. If it is wrong or incomplete, which remains likely, it is at least not obviously wrong.
  • Of course there are people who object to physicalism on principle. Those didn’t like my attack on their favorite reason why they don’t need to accept that everything is nature; but I think they’re just wrong and I have better things to do than metaphysics.
  • I even got invited for an interview about that theory at one of my favorite podcasts, by Eneasz Brodski, who I’ve been a rabid fan of for a long time.
• I translated Kipling’s “If” into German.
• Although my health and treatments (and painkillers against the side-effects of the treatments) slow me down a lot, I worked on the German translation of the fifth Sermon. It now stands at 33 of 80 stanzas completed.
  • I’ll translate the sixth and seventh next, obviously.
  • But it is really time to seriously think about what poetry writing or poetry translation I will do afterwards. Nothing to announce yet, but I do have a plan and I enjoy that.
• I got to read, to a large-ish audience at a famous regular literature event, in German, an abbreviated summary of the first five Sermons, modified in order to not make the meditation aspect too obvious. Everyone seemed to like it, a few came to me afterwards outright ecstatic. This new version of the text should serve me well at future occasions where I might get to read out loud to an audience that brings less time and no inclination to meditate.
• I wrote another thing, in prose not in poetry, but also very meaningful to me. It should be published in a week or two. The writing helped a lot against the pain and fear, and what I wrote might help others too.

Still, the cancer is holding me back. That is also why this quarterly report is delayed. But the most important thing (completion of the seventh Sermon) and also the first video of the entire thing, was already in my extracurricular mid-quarter report so I guess it’s fine.

On the 2nd of July, while driving a car, I lost consciousness and drove into a tree at 100 kilometers an hour. The reason seems to have been I had my first real seizure. These are more widely known as epileptic fits, but in my case the reason is not epilepsy, but a pretty big brain tumor.

I mentioned before that was going to do the scary part: to spell out my explanation of consciousness, which needs to be part of the 7th Sermon, in prose first, in order to see whether it actually makes sense, by making it explicit and exposing it to the critical attention of others. I’ve been incubating this idea since one particular moment of insight hit me back in (I think) 2011 as I was walking home from my job at the time as a research associate in an EEG lab, through a sunlit summer park. From the moment the Sermons were conceived as a concept, in early summer 2012, I knew this had to be part of the 7th Sermon. But for 12 years it was just a bunch of ideas in my head that I thought and meditated about.

I had a very strong feeling it was right, which was in tension with my understanding that it rationally didn’t deserve that, because it amounts to a claim to have solved the hard problem of consciousness, unsolved for decades despite concerted efforts of very many very smart people. This quarter, I wrote it all out, and failed to find such a flaw myself. And several friends far more educated in philosophy than I am, who I solicited feedback from, didn’t find it either.

After the unscheduled mid-quarter progress report, some more work got done, though not as much as in the first half of the quarter. Both the writing of the seventh sermon and the translation of the fourth have proceeded incrementally. I have finished, though not yet published, the third song with my friend Idris and my brother Thomas. And I have recorded, with my father Martin, the first one…

The first quarter of 2024 is only half done, but there is enough progress to warrant a report.

Work on the seventh sermon has progressed satisfactorily. The single thread to be spun through the many Big Ideas is becoming clear. While much of the narrative that needs to become stanzas is quite complex, I currently feel I’m probably up to the task. The draft currently stands at 33 stanzas, with a few more removed since the last progress report. I’m increasingly optimistic I might finish it before the end of this year, if the vicissitudes of life permit it. This means I’m nearing completion of the entire set of seven!