For as long as human beings have gathered in groups, we have found ways to carve our communities into hierarchies. We divide by wealth, by lineage, by power, and by credentials. In our modern culture, those with great wealth are routinely assumed to be smarter, with billionaires elevated as the wisest arbiters of how the rest of us should live. Many people measure their personal worth by their family ancestry; my own family lineage over the last few generations has been very broken, and I don't feel much connection to it.
Yet when we lean on these ancient ways of categorizing human value, I can’t help feeling that we are still operating from the caveman days—relying on primitive tribal survival mechanisms rather than evolving. All of these divisions are driven by greed, fear, and the urge to feel superior.
As much as I am concerned about how society assigns worth, dignity, and authority to a privileged few, I am equally concerned about the flip side: how we arbitrarily assign a lack of worth, a lack of dignity, and a lack of authority to everyone else. My fundamental well-wish is that we find a way to live with peace, love, understanding, and respect for all human beings—and that we extend that circle of care to the animals, the plants, and the earth itself.
I write these reflections not to give advice to others, but to investigate the ways my own mind interacts with these social habits, how they show up in spiritual practice, and what it takes for me to remain grounded in my authentic self.
For many decades, I worked in the television and broadcast engineering industry. In video engineering, there is a specialized instrument called a vectorscope, which is used to measure and display color in a video signal.
The fascinating thing about this technology is that all human beings—regardless of race, ethnicity, or skin tone—fall along the exact same line on the vectorscope. While people have different skin tones and varying levels of lightness and darkness, when it comes to the actual color phase, we are all generally identical. The instrument doesn't recognize status, heritage, or social divisions. Underneath the surface, we all register on the very same spectrum.
Yet in our daily lives, we constantly invent reasons to forget this common ground. We retreat into virtual spaces and digital exchanges where people become disembodied abstractions. When we relate to someone one-on-one, face-to-face, looking into their eyes and feeling their presence, we can actually connect with their humanity. We feel each other’s feelings. But as we drift away from direct human contact, our tribal divisions grow louder.
There is, of course, a realistic flip side to credentialism. Everybody has an opinion, but not everybody is qualified to speak to everything. Expertise and rigorous study matter; education has brought humanity an enormous distance, and most of that progress is positive and essential to our evolution. We need facts.
At the same time, education does not immunize anyone against bias. Specialization has often been used throughout history as a weapon to maintain power. Specialized language was deliberately employed to keep common people at a distance, and historically, it was used to justify the forced re-indoctrination of indigenous peoples, systematically destroying their native languages and cultures under the guise of "civilizing" them.
Even in spiritual circles, intellectual pedigree offers no guarantee of wisdom. Years ago, I followed a highly regarded spiritual teacher whose books and lectures I appreciated. But during one talk, he let out his personal opinion that people of one political persuasion were more spiritually fit than another. The moment he said that, I lost all faith in him. A genuine spiritual perspective cannot divide people along political lines or assign greater spiritual value to one group over another.
In my career in corporate tech environments, the culture carried a subtle, dehumanizing undercurrent. While I met some executives who were genuinely people-oriented, the overarching corporate atmosphere imposed relentless pressure to be the smartest person in the room, to always be correct, and never to make mistakes. If you did stumble, the atmosphere was punitive. Early on, I worked with a doctor who was intensely and critically judgmental toward me, which contributed significantly to a period in my life marked by severe panic and anxiety.
Very early in my career, I came to understand my responsibility as an engineer differently. My job was not to pretend I already knew all the answers, but to do the patient, honest work of finding the right answers. When something was broken or incorrect, my task was simply to find a way to fix it without ego or drama.
One of my teachers speaks of "warrior knowledge" versus "book knowledge." Warrior knowledge is what we might call lived life experience—wisdom earned through struggle, direct contact, grit, and navigating actual circumstances.
I want to emphasize the profound positiveness of life experience as an education in its own right. We live in a culture that tends to define education almost entirely through classrooms, textbooks, and conferred degrees. But lived experience is not a consolation prize; it is a vital, primary school.
For most of my career, especially in the decades before I became desk-bound doing design work at a computer, my work was entirely hands-on. I was in the field with tools, wiring, equipment racks, and live systems. And one of the enduring truths I’ve learned about computers, technology, and human beings is that real understanding only comes through direct, tactile interaction with them. You learn what works and what doesn't work not by memorizing theories, but by getting your hands dirty, encountering the friction of the real world, and seeing how things actually behave under pressure.
That education is never finished. Even today, technology is constantly expanding and mutating at a staggering pace. There are days when it feels impossible to keep up—there is simply too much of it coming out all at once. Some of this new technology I can grasp, or I am starting to grasp through patient interaction. Some of it I cannot keep up with at all. I’m not necessarily afraid of the new technology, but I have to be completely honest: it can feel overwhelming at times.
Navigating that technological overwhelm takes me right back to the lessons of hands-on experience. It teaches me to drop the illusion that I have to master everything. It reminds me to stay curious, to learn by touching what is in front of me, and to accept my limitations without shame.
I’m not sure how anyone could grade or rank life experience against book learning, nor do I see why we would even try. Both have their place. But reflecting on my own upbringing—navigating street survival realities as a child before college allowed me to step into a different world—I feel deeply grateful for what that early environment taught me. It gave me a more accepting, pragmatic view of human beings instead of a rigid, punitive one.
There are all kinds of people in this world, and every one of them has inherent value. My only real boundary is when folks harm other people, especially intentionally. Ignorance is no excuse for cruelty, but for most of us, making mistakes through direct experience is simply how we learn. There is nothing wrong with trying to speak properly, educate ourselves, or do the right thing; but if someone lacks formal schooling, that does not make them inferior in any way. Their life experience is an education of its own.
Yet there is a real danger here that I have to continually guard against: experience can color our perspective. If we aren't mindful, decades of navigating difficulties can curdle into cynicism. We can easily become jaded about life, assuming that because we've seen certain patterns before, we already know how people will act or how things will turn out. But becoming jaded is itself a heavy kind of karma that we take on for ourselves. It contracts the heart, breeds suspicion, and paints today’s fresh reality with the dark brush of yesterday’s scars. We have to be actively guarded about that tendency. True experience shouldn't calcify us into know-it-alls or cynics; it should teach us how to hold our knowledge lightly, keeping our hearts open and receptive to the present moment.
In exploring the limits of intellectualism, I want to be very clear: I have immense respect for education, science, and the spiritual traditions of the past.
Sometimes modern society falls into another kind of elitism—discounting anything that comes from ancient times simply because it isn't new. I am deeply grateful to have been introduced to classical Buddhist terminology. Those ancient concepts are not useless jargon; they are precise maps developed over centuries to help us understand our minds. Education and science have carried us forward, and basing our understanding on observable facts is essential. For the most part, "seeing is believing" is a solid principle.
Yet science cannot measure everything. I have been blessed in my life to experience things that I cannot fully explain, and that science cannot explain either. Having a closed mind in either direction—rejecting science through dogma, or rejecting direct spiritual experience through rigid materialism—closes the door to truth.
What can be frustrating is reading educated commentators dissect Buddhist suttas or psychological studies on mindfulness when it is obvious they have never actually sat on a meditation cushion. They analyze mindfulness purely through the way they think about things, rather than the way things are—a phrase Ajahn Sumedho often returns to.
You can run brain scans and write academic papers on the clinical effects of meditation, but you cannot truly know what awareness is until you sit and observe your own mind. Lately, there are articles claiming that meditation harms people. But in reality, meditation isn't what harms them; it simply shines an honest light on the mental state and unresolved material they were already carrying. Handled with patience and care, that very same light is what helps us untie the knot.
There is also a delicate balance regarding effort. In spiritual practice, whenever I make an aggressive effort to grab hold of peace or force an outcome, I end up pushing it away. Right effort is a fine line: an alert willingness to be present, without grasping.
When I watch my own mind throughout the day, I have to admit that when people speak, my mind often catches itself judging them for their correctness. I am usually not trying to correct them out loud, but inside, I notice my mind evaluating their statements against how I see things.
In Buddhism, this habit connects directly to Māna (conceit or comparison), which is a root expression of Sakkāya-Diṭṭhi (personality view, or identity clinging). The measuring mind is constantly asking: Is this right? Is that better? How does this make me look?
I don't believe intellectualism necessarily stems from deep hidden trembling or vulnerability; rather, it often comes from being self-conscious—thinking mostly about ourselves, wanting to look competent, or comparing ourselves to others. When I get caught in that self-conscious loop, I lose touch with authenticity.
For me, being authentic is paramount. Being authentic doesn't mean asserting superiority over anyone, nor does it mean slumping into feelings of inferiority. When I am my authentic self, I am comfortable in my own skin. I don't have to put on a show, and that is where peace lives.
I saw the artificial nature of social status most clearly when I hit my personal bottom in April 2000, in Napa.
In the wake of that collapse, one of the books that truly helped me find my footing and connected me with Buddhism was the Dalai Lama’s The Four Noble Truths. It offered a clear, non-dogmatic framework for understanding suffering and the path out of it.
When I entered recovery rooms, I discovered something extraordinary: a room filled with people who would normally never cross paths in daily life. The wealthy and the impoverished, the formally educated and those who worked with their hands, all sat side by side with a shared vulnerability and a common purpose. Degrees, bank accounts, and family backgrounds didn't matter in that room. The only thing that mattered was honesty and the willingness to heal.
That spirit mirrors what the Buddha did twenty-six centuries ago when he fundamentally rejected the caste system of ancient India. He welcomed royalty, scholars, merchants, barbers, and outcast dung-sweepers into the exact same Sangha, recognizing that the human heart has the exact same capacity for liberation regardless of worldly status.
Even though I have had the benefit of an education, I often feel that my personal vocabulary is limited. Frequently, I struggle to find the exact word I want to say.
For a long time, that felt like a shortcoming. Today, I understand that it isn't a problem at all. In spiritual life, the deepest truths have no words assigned to them. It is impossible to fully describe the undescribable.
Words are only pointers; they are never the thing itself:
My description of a flower is not the flower.
My thoughts and memories about my mother are not my mother.
My description of myself or another person is never the living reality of who they are.
There is immense relief in setting down the burden of having to be educated, clever, or always right.
As a former AV Engineer, I learned that finding the right answer is a collaborative, quiet effort of observation, not an ego contest. And as a human being, I am learning that when I stop solely measuring people—and stop using my own knowledge as armor—I can simply meet others on equal ground, heart to heart, on the single spectrum we all share.