A Guy Known as "Snufflemuffin"
This is a photo of a man of German and French descent, with a short brown beard, short brown hair, and he's wearing glasses and a purple plaid button-up shirt. He's smiling and standing in a beautiful office space with wrap-around windows and tons of natural lighting.
Hi! My name is Ryan M. Weisgerber (pronounced “Vice-gehrbur”). Some people also know me as Snufflemuffin, and now you do too. I am a writer, illustrator, designer, and explorer of what’s possible when we don’t give up.
Do you know what completely blows my mind? Existing. Just the fact that anything is at all. I mean, we’re on a massive ball of rock that’s flying at 67,000 MPH through an incomprehensibly massive universe while surrounded by literally BILLIONS of other people who are in precisely the same situation. And if that wasn’t enough, we also have the power to believe whatever we want about any and everything that we encounter (even if we’re choosing to believe that’s not what's really going on and we're “just a realist”).
The power of our perceptions is so fascinating to me. We’re surrounded by billions of people, and still, we’re able to imagine that we’re all alone in this world. We’re in a universe whose size is beyond comprehension, yet we believe that the 0.0000000000000000001% of the whole that we’ve seen defines what’s really real and true and that it’s sometimes reasonable to kill or die to defend what we believe is true.
Huh. 🤔
It’s an amazing situation we find ourselves in, but omg is it also messy and confusing.
My life has definitely been a bit of a masterclass in messiness and confusion, but it’s those very experiences that have shown me that the messiness and confusion are what enable us to learn the lessons we clearly haven’t learned yet. Like, ya know, treating one another with respect, living with consistent intentions, and not exploiting everything around us because we believe that we (and people who look like us) are the center of the universe.
I always work to see a larger perspective and practice radical optimism, but that doesn’t mean I don’t see a lot in the world that hurts, alarms, and discourages me. However…
The best way to complain is to make things. - James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem
For me, the best response to the ugliness I’ve experienced and frequently encounter in the world is to create beauty. Hug the Universe is one of the ways I’m doing that (snufflemuffin.com, too). These projects are an exploration of what it means to be human, what it means to evolve intentionally, and how beauty can be distilled even from the ugliest of uglies.
Some of the things I’ve found to be the most interesting and valuable in my life are philosophy, science, consciousness research, and personal stories of challenge and growth. So that’s what you’ll find here. Always fueled by boundless curiosity and my desire to identify and understand what's really really real. Oh, and cute stuff, because YOLOATP.
I’d like to introduce you to a couple of people who have been invaluable parts of my life and this project.
Friends and Cohorts:
Sheila Ashdown: Editor & Potato Who Won't Quit
Shea is a lifelong seeker and learner. She has ghostwritten four books and edited dozens more, and is delighted to use her editorial acumen to help bring truthful, useful information to her fellow humans.
Eric Burlingame: Human Behavior Expert & Coherence Verification Pioneer
July 4, 1969 to November 12, 2017
Eric Burlingame was the most selfless, loving, intentional, and brilliant person I’ve ever known. He died very unexpectedly in 2017, and it’s taken a while to come to terms with the implications of his absence. He had huge plans for the work he was doing and books he was writing, and now… well, I don’t know.
I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to collaborate with Eric not only on the Hug The Universe series exploring the work of David R. Hawkins and an in-depth interview with Eric regarding his own work, but also to be a trusted resource for what he was building before his death. The world lost a true visionary with Eric's passing. I miss him a lot.
This was Eric’s bio that we featured on this site before his death:
Eric Burlingame is a human behavior expert, consciousness researcher, and author. He’s building a movement around the training and widespread use of Coherence Verification—a process of using the human body to reveal the astoundingly powerful quantum computations that the brain is doing naturally all day, every day.
At the heart of this technique is a biological phenomenon that everyone experiences—with or without their knowledge—and it can be used consciously to identify the essence of what we encounter. Everything that exists in the universe is a combination of energy and information, and the use of this technique enables us to identify and delineate the essence of what makes up you, me, that other person over there, and everything else in the universe. It's basically the most mind-blowing thing ever, IMO.
Learn more about Eric's work and research at www.inceptionpublishing.com