Il Fatto Quotidiano: “Mi sono sposato con Veronica solo per vincere Amici ed ereditare i soldi? Parlate ma non sapete un ca**o”: lo sfogo di Andres Muller contro gli haters

Andreas Muller, ballerino e coreografo, vincitore di Amici 16, ha affidato ai social un video-sfogo per rispondere ai numerosi haters che ogni giorno affollano con commenti non proprio carini i suoi profili. “Sono dichiaratamente omosessuale ma mi sono sposato con Veronica Peparini per vincere Amici, aprire il mio negozio, comprarci l’attico ed ereditare tutti i suoi soldi – esordisce Muller, ripetendo alcuni dei commenti odiosi ricevuti – Parlate ma non sapete un ca**o“.
Il ballerino quindi dice che “è arrivato il momento di dare spiegazioni”: “Ho vinto Amici grazie a Veronica? Penso non abbia questo potere, la mia vittoria è accaduta sotto gli occhi di tutti, se oggi mi si vuole accreditare il titolo di raccomandato, me lo accollo”.
“Io di Veronica mi sono innamorato perché mi piace, ci amiamo – dice ancora – Poi io capisco che siete abituati a coppie che nascono e scoppiano, ma se io mi sono innamorato della “vecchia” è una colpa? Con lei ho avuto le mie due figlie, Ginevra e Penelope che a detta vostra sono oscene”. Muller quindi difende le due piccole: “Io capisco criticare il personaggio, il talento, ma arrivare a parlar male di due bambine…siete rovinati“.
Quindi risponde a un’altra delle accuse: “Mi sono fatto aprire il negozio? Non è andata così, l’ho aperto con i miei soldi, di questo sono fiero e di certo non devo rendere conto a nessuno. Ho iniziato a lavorare a 15 anni e mi sono fatto il culo da solo. Il mio lavoro da ballerino mi ha portato a guadagnare soldi”.
“Avete una vita talmente vuota che dovete per forza screditare gli altri”, conclude Andreas rispondendo direttamente agli haters, augurando invece tutto il bene “a chi c’è sempre stato”.
L'articolo “Mi sono sposato con Veronica solo per vincere Amici ed ereditare i soldi? Parlate ma non sapete un ca**o”: lo sfogo di Andres Muller contro gli haters proviene da Il Fatto Quotidiano.

“I got married to Veronica just to win Friends and inherit the money? You guys talk but you don’t know a damn thing”: Andres Muller’s rant against the haters.

Andreas Muller, dancer and choreographer, winner of Amici 16, has given a video-confession to social media to respond to the numerous haters who daily flood his profiles with not-so-nice comments. “I am openly gay, but I married Veronica Peparini to win Amici, open my shop, buy the penthouse, and inherit all her money – Muller begins, repeating some of the hateful comments received – You talk, but you don't know a damn thing.”

The dancer then says that “it’s time to give explanations”: “Did I win Amici thanks to Veronica? I don’t think she has that power; my victory happened before everyone’s eyes. If today you want to credit me with the title of ‘recommended,’ you can take it.”

“I fell in love with Veronica because I like her, we love each other – he says again – Then I understand that you’re used to couples that are born and break up, but if I fell in love with the ‘old’ one, is that a fault? With her, I had my two daughters, Ginevra and Penelope, whom you apparently find obscene.” Muller then defends the two little ones: “I understand criticizing the character, the talent, but to speak badly of two children…you’re ruined.”

He then responds to another accusation: “Did she open the shop for me? It didn't go that way; I opened it with my own money, and I’m proud of it, and I certainly don’t have to account to anyone. I started working at 15 and I’ve made it myself. My work as a dancer has brought me to earn money.”

“You have such a empty life that you have to discredit others,” concludes Andreas, responding directly to the haters, wishing all the best “to those who have always been there.”

#Veronica #Friends #AndresMuller’s #AndreasMuller #Amici16 #VeronicaPeparini #Amici #Ginevra #Penelope #Muller #Andreas

https://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2026/01/10/mi-sono-sposato-con-veronica-solo-per-vincere-amici-ed-ereditare-i-soldi-parlate-ma-non-sapete-un-cao-lo-sfogo-di-andres-muller-contro-gli-haters/8251765/

No thing at all

Over the last few months I have written little. If I am honest, I should have to say that this has not been because I have had nothing to say, so much as that I had run out of words.

Over the long years of my Christian contemplative practice – from the age of thirty, maybe – I was able to draw on the deep well of Christian iconography, theology, the Bible itself, for words and images to tell myself about the journey I was on; words which I could readily share. Since then it has been more difficult, much more difficult. I am not a Buddhist. Despite my great respect for Buddhism’s 2,500 years of spiritual and psychological research and development, and my love for many Buddhist writers classical and contemporary, their words do not on the whole “do it for me” in the way that the Christian tradition so often has.

Nonetheless, despite a couple of abortive attempts to return to formal, organised religion, and despite nearly a year of trying to live out a kind of “churchless Christianity”, I could not with any intellectual honesty understand myself as a member of a Christian church any longer. The faith that is indistinguishable from community, from the gathered people (ekklēsia) that is the church, simply no longer functioned as a descriptor for where I found myself.

Increasingly, despite (or because of) my subsequent unwavering practice of broadly vipassana-based meditation, or a version of centering prayer, I felt lost, my heart clogged with the dust of broken words, dry and hollowed out. I had no idea who I was any more.

It came to the point where all I could do was cry out (to whom?) in the cold hours before dawn, that I was lost, so lost. No maps I knew showed this desert place, wherever it was, and besides, my compass no longer worked. In this condition, tired out, I fell asleep.

When I awoke, light poured through the window across the bed. I was light myself, empty and crystal clear. No, I was not. I, was not; except that there was a gossamer memory that knew itself as me, someone who had, effectively, died in the night. “All there is is oneness. The unknown. No-thing appearing as it appears. It is already whole. It is already complete. That which seems to be missing – wholeness – is not lost.” (Andreas Müller)

That phrase, no thing, was all that was left of language that morning. (It is a phrase that has been with me, resonant and entirely resistant to explanation, for many years.) I cannot possibly describe the freedom, the irresistible joy that was left where I had been.

Since, the joy and the freedom have not dimmed. The gossamer memory of me still seems to function perfectly well as a way to get around in the phenomenal world, but it is no longer convincing. It is as transparent as glass. I so love all that is, even if it is no thing. Especially as it is no thing.

What happened? I don’t know. Of course I don’t. What happened is not the kind of thing “I” could know. This seems like a clever answer, a smarty-pants way to get one up on my readers, and that’s not what I’m trying to do. I can say, though, that it is not “something” that “I” achieved. Müller again: “What remains is indescribable. It is indescribable simply because there is no one left who can describe it. There is no one left who experiences oneness (which, by the way, would then not be oneness anymore) and could possibly know how that is. Yes, there is no one left who knows how it is. That is freedom.”

So is this the fruit of meditation? The culmination of some kind of a process? Obviously not. And yet. Could it have happened without a couple of years’ steady practice of meditation, following nearly forty of Christian contemplation? Yes, obviously. People like Eckhart Tolle and Ramana Maharshi each had their illumination following moments of great stress or despair, not unlike, according to their own descriptions, the desert place where I had found myself that night. They do not seem to have spent long years meditating in preparation. Ramana hadn’t had time, anyway; he was only sixteen.

But perhaps, for me at least, practice made a place where it was possible. It just happened, that much is clear. For me, it seems to have happened while I was dreamlessly asleep. But maybe practice functioned like cultivating a field. Cultivation doesn’t make anything grow – you need seeds, and water, and warmth for that – but it does make a place where seeds can safely germinate. I don’t know. Something had to get me out there into that desert – something had to shear away the props that upheld the idea of a me who could get somewhere, even into a desert.

There is certainly nothing I could have done to force such a thing to happen (and from the point of view of “I” that would have felt not unlike some sort of suicide) and it doesn’t happen to or for “me” anyhow. It happens. What is beyond is no thing at all.

#AndreasMüller #awareness #contemplative #death #EckhartTolle #faith #practice #RamanaMaharshi

Atheism and metaphysics

Metaphysics can seem to be a rather slippery term. On the one hand it can be taken to be “the study of the most general features of reality, including existence, objects and their properties, possibility and necessity, space and time, change, causation, and the relation between matter and mind” (Wikipedia) but on the other, being the study of, in one sense, how things come to be, it is too easily conflated with religious creation myths, or with cosmologies intricately involved with religious doctrines of causality and phenomenology.

But “according to modern scientific knowledge, mental events and processes presuppose the existence and reality of material things. Thinking, for example, implies the existence of a bird or a mammal with a brain. Or a momentary event, such as the proverbial cat sitting on the mat, presupposes the real existence of the cat, the mat, the earth under the mat, as well as a real human observer of the event.” (Morris)

But for me, that which is intended by using the term “ground of being” (Tillich) is precisely that which can be known directly as “no-thing” in contemplation. I am not talking here of an idea, a common factor in a Huxley-like perennial philosophy, but of a repeated and very direct experience of what Quakers have referred to as “the light”, as described for instance by Emilia Fogelklou (she writes in the third person): “Without visions or the sound of speech or human mediation, in exceptionally wide-awake consciousness, she experienced the great releasing inward wonder. It was as if the ’empty shell’ burst. All the weight and agony, all the feeling of unreality dropped away. She perceived living goodness, joy, light like a clear, irradiating, uplifting, enfolding, unequivocal reality from deep inside.”

This kind of experience can of course not be described terribly clearly, nor can it be communicated directly, and any attempt is likely to fall into superlatives such as Fogelklou’s. But the experience is as real and direct as any sensory experience, perhaps more so, and it has a curious undeniable quality, a great lifting and healing of the heart. I use Tillich’s term for it not because I have any particular attraction for that as an idea, but because it seems to get closer than anything else I have read to the encounter itself. There is a visual analogue that sometimes occurs in meditation – and which can lead to the experience I am trying to describe – of the visual field itself, seen through closed eyes, extending suddenly through and beneath what ought to have been the observing mind, but which is no longer there.

Now, I have long enough experience in contemplative practice to know that experiences are not things to hang onto, still less to seek after, and I would not be happy if any words of mine sent anyone on a quest for experiential chimeras. Yet the experience itself, with all its indelible affect, has occurred so often over the years, since childhood, that I find myself referring to it over and over again, and it remains for me a kind of lodestone.

Are these metaphysical experiences, insights? Are they therefore somehow at variance with the fundamental insight of atheism that the idea of another, supernatural, layer to existence, within which the human self can somehow transcend, or survive, the electrochemical apparatus of the central nervous system, is illusory? I don’t think so. Daniel Dennett’s insight into human phenomenology as a “benign user illusion” coincides well with the Buddhist conception of things as empty of intrinsic existence (śūnyatā) – all of which seems to me to be a formal expression of what I have come to experience as “no-thing.” Andreas Müller:

All there is is oneness. The unknown. No-thing appearing as it appears. It is already whole. It is already complete. That which seems to be missing – wholeness – is not lost…

What remains is indescribable. It is indescribable simply because there is no one left who can describe it. There is no one left who experiences oneness (which, by the way, would then not be oneness anymore) and could possibly know how that is. Yes, there is no one left who knows how it is. That is freedom.

#AndreasMüller #atheism #awakening #BrianMorris #consciousness #contemplative #DanielDennett #EmiliaFogelklou #PaulTillich #philosophy #practice #religion #Wikipedia

Interrupting the skeuomorphs

Anyone who was involved with personal computers around 25 years ago will be all too familiar with skeuomorphs, those little pictures of familiar material things that were so often used as interface elements – ring-binder pages for calendar applications, or the little gleaming jewel-like forward and back buttons in a web browser like Netscape Navigator 9 or Internet Explorer 7. They’re still in use today – the virtual keyboard of your smart phone is a skeuomorph – there isn’t a keyboard there at all: it just looks, and works, like one.

It seems to me that our day-to-day experiences are not unlike existential skeuomorphs – they allow us to remember, to interrogate and interact with events, but they are no more than pictures of what actually happened. Of course, we couldn’t operate, couldn’t even usefully perceive anything, without them. Part of the phenomenological action of psychedelics is surely just that: the disabling of this delicate interface through which we encounter the world. No wonder a person on a bad trip feels they are going mad; temporarily (we hope) they are. The world may be an inconceivable web of fields and probabilities, but we perceive real tables and chairs, cats and boxes; they may be illusions, but they are benign (Dennett) and necessary illusions, as real as we are ourselves.

Only in the stillness of meditation – or a sudden unbidden illumination – can we, if only for a moment, allow a fully open awareness to catch a glimpse of what actually is.

All there is is oneness. The unknown. No-thing appearing as it appears. It is already whole. It is already complete. That which seems to be missing – wholeness – is not lost…

What remains is indescribable. It is indescribable simply because there is no one left who can describe it. There is no one left who experiences oneness (which, by the way, would then not be oneness anymore) and could possibly know how that is. Yes, there is no one left who knows how it is. That is freedom.

Andreas Müller, No-thing – ungraspable freedom

(I wrote at greater – if more subjective – length about this last year. It seemed to me today, though, that it was worth mentioning again in the context of these perceptions. I am not a neuroscientist, nor even a philosopher of mind; I am only someone who has occasionally encountered something that seems almost as if it might be the tangible fruit of such disciplines in direct experience.)

#AndreasMüller #awareness #consciousness #DanielDennett #philosophy #stillness

Altered states?

Whether the technique is narrative or not, the primary experience [what the senses, or the dreaming mind, actually perceive] has to be connected with and fitted into the rest of experience to be useful, probably even to be available, to the mind. This may hold even for mystical perception. All mystics say that what they have experienced in vision cannot be fitted into ordinary time and space, but they try – they have to try. The vision is ineffable, but the story begins, “In the middle of the road of our life . . .”

Dreams Must Explain Themselves: The Selected Non-Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin

This is a problem – if that is the right word for it – that I have run into myself. Direct contemplative experience is, by definition, an altered state of consciousness: it is not in itself accessible even to the rational mind. Andreas Müller explains:

All there is is oneness. The unknown. No-thing appearing as it appears. It is already whole. It is already complete. That which seems to be missing – wholeness – is not lost…

What remains is indescribable. It is indescribable simply because there is no one left who can describe it. There is no one left who experiences oneness (which, by the way, would then not be oneness anymore) and could possibly know how that is. Yes, there is no one left who knows how it is. That is freedom.

As Le Guin points out, if we want to talk about our experience, even to think about it, it must be recast into something approaching narrative. This has an odd effect; what happens is that something which occurred, subjectively speaking, outside time (i.e. without duration) has to be described – thought of, even – as though it had a beginning, a middle and an end. Even in poetry this is true, though that is perhaps rather less obvious!

There is no way around this, I think. Primary experience has to be experienced; it can’t be explained, or taught. What can be explained, and taught, is the practice that makes a place for the possible. Nothing we can do can cause these experiences; all we can do is try our best to remove obstacles to their occurring. (This, of course, is the great temptation of psychedelics: swallow 250 microgrammes of LSD, and something will happen, whether you like it or not. And God help you if you don’t.)

From a time-bound perspective, one may spend a long while in regular practice without any alteration in one’s state of consciousness, except perhaps a certain gradual progressive loss of identity and increasing confusion, which can be distressing and even scary. Illumination per se is something that occurs, if it occurs, outside the practitioner’s life-time (I use the hyphen advisedly) altogether. It has no narrative. Nothing can compel this occurrence, and in any case – and this is important – it is not something one can, or should, regard as a goal. The practice is the goal, in itself; nothing more nor less than that. It is the practice that reveals the open ground, the Tao – and this entirely without drama, without altered states of anything. But – practice, effective contemplative practice, is not a narrative process itself. Though you can set a timer for 20 minutes or half an hour, time is not something that applies to the practitioner’s subjective experience. Just sitting, the way we do, is outside of story, outside of “and then, and then…” There is no Jones; and anyway, along where? Just sit still.

#AndreasMüller #awakening #consciousness #contemplative #practice #UrsulaLeGuin

Entheogenic?

In our everyday dealings with the world around us, and with its inhabitants, both human and otherwise, we generally seem to make use of a practical mode of consciousness characterised, in my experience, by shortcuts and subroutines – usually referred to as “habits”. Half the time we’re not even really thinking about what we’re doing – which gives rise to the common but slightly disturbing experience of realising one’s just driven several miles on a regular route with no real conscious sense of the events of driving, or of the route itself. Where have we been?

Neuroscience offers the explanation of something called the “default mode network”:

It is best known for being active when a person is not focused on the outside world and the brain is at wakeful rest, such as during daydreaming and mind-wandering. It can also be active during detailed thoughts related to external task performance. Other times that the DMN is active include when the individual is thinking about others, thinking about themselves, remembering the past, and planning for the future.

(Wikipedia)

One might be tempted to rename it the woolgathering network.

Contemplative awareness, on one level at least, consists precisely in becoming aware of these changing brain-states, as opposed merely to knowing about them in theory.

Even just recognizing the impermanence of your mental states—deeply, not merely as an idea—can transform your life. Every mental state you have ever had has arisen and then passed away. This is a first-person fact—but it is, nonetheless, a fact that any human being can readily confirm. We don’t have to know any more about the brain or about the relationship between consciousness and the physical world to understand this truth about our own minds. The promise of spiritual life—indeed, the very thing that makes it “spiritual” in the sense I invoke throughout this book—is that there are truths about the mind that we are better off knowing. What we need to become happier and to make the world a better place is not more pious illusions but a clearer understanding of the way things are.

(Sam Harris, Waking Up: Searching for Spirituality without Religion)

But there is more, of course. Elsewhere on this blog I wrote:

Before I turned five, I contracted meningitis, and spent what would have been my first year of school slowly recovering. I spent some of the most peaceful and untroubled hours of my life lying on a rug by the old apple trees in the orchard at the back of our house, under the endless vault of the open sky, listening to distant aircraft passing high overhead, or on a flaking stone bench on the patio, watching the little velvety red mites scampering in the sunlight. Time was unlike anything I’d known before, an open ground of appearing, empty of thought, mostly, but fertile with becoming.

In those long months I had no name for this clear, undimensioned place, and I don’t suppose it would have occurred to me to ask anyone what, or where, it might be. I just was, and was where I was. In many ways, the years since have been a journey back.

But how does one make this kind of journey as an intentional, more or less healthy adult? Religion offers maps, of varying quality – The Cloud of Unknowing, any number of Buddhist and Vedantic texts, the writings of the Eastern Orthodox (Christian) monastic tradition, to name a few – but they come, as I wrote yesterday, with sticky remnants of their religious backgrounds clinging to both thought and practice.

Throughout history, in different cultures, people have made use of entheogens, drugs (including traditional psychedelics such as mescaline and psilocybin and DMT, as well as modern synthetics like LSD) intended precisely to achieve this kind of altered consciousness. But even the best-engineered pharmaceuticals are blunt instruments, and in my experience (I experimented with them myself in my twenties) can do at least as much harm as good. Besides, the traditional varieties are by no means immune to the sticky remnants of their own religious origins.

But the word entheogen is an interesting one. Roughly, it means something like, “giving rise to the god within” (éntheos genésthai). This is instructive, since although the scholars (Carl Ruck et al.) who coined the term were referring to the use of psychoactive drugs, maybe this useful word could be extended to cover many traditional, religious contemplative practices as well.

But as Sam Harris points out in one of the passages I quoted yesterday,

This is a difficult problem for me to address in the context of a book, because many readers will have no idea what I’m talking about when I describe certain spiritual experiences and might assume that the assertions I’m making must be accepted on faith. Religious readers present a different challenge: They may think they know exactly what I’m describing, but only insofar as it aligns with one or another religious doctrine. It seems to me that both these attitudes present impressive obstacles to understanding spirituality in the way that I intend.

Once again, Jiddu Krishnamurti’s term “choiceless awareness” is so useful here, along with the simple practice it entails. My childhood experience in the orchard was precisely that, as have been so many more momentary occasions in the long years since. Andreas Müller (I have quoted him on this blog before) has one of the best descriptions I know:

All there is is oneness. The unknown. No-thing appearing as it appears. It is already whole. It is already complete. That which seems to be missing – wholeness – is not lost…

What remains is indescribable. It is indescribable simply because there is no one left who can describe it. There is no one left who experiences oneness (which, by the way, would then not be oneness anymore) and could possibly know how that is. Yes, there is no one left who knows how it is. That is freedom.

#AndreasMüller #consciousness #contemplative #JidduKrishnamurti #practice #psychedelics #religion #SamHarris #Wikipedia

Heute Nacht: #Polarlichter über ganz Deutschland erwartet - Spektrum der #Wissenschaft

Heftige Ausbrüche auf der Sonne haben Mittwochnacht für Polarlichter bis weit in den Süden Deutschlands gesorgt. Auch in der Nacht zu Donnerstag wird das #Himmelsspektakel erwartet. Wer es beobachten will, sollte nach Norden blicken. Ein Smartphone kann helfen.

von #AndreasMüller
https://www.spektrum.de/news/heute-nacht-polarlichter-ueber-ganz-deutschland-erwartet/2295711

Heute haben die beiden designierten neuen Eigner den Aktienkaufvertrag zur Übernahme der Mehrheit der HanseYachts AG unterzeichnet. Sie gehen damit den nächsten Schritt zur Übernahme und erwarteten Zukunftssicherung der größten deutschen Serienbootwerft.
#AndreasMüller #HanjoRunde #HanseYachts

https://floatmagazin.de/leute/aktienverkauf-bei-hanse-yachts-unter-dach-und-fach/

Vier Tage nach Ankündigung des Verkaufs der größten deutschen Serienwerft gibt es Neuigkeiten. Ein Viertel der Belegschaft muss gehen.
#AndreasMüller #HanjoRunde #HanseYachts #HanseYachtsAG #IGMetall

https://floatmagazin.de/leute/stellenabbau-vor-dem-verkauf-von-hanse-yachts/