Shouldn’t I do something more constructive in my life than cycling for pleasure where other people flee war, hunger, frost, poverty, and danger-to-life?

But then again perhaps everything has it’s time. For years I had worked as a sustainability and ethics researcher. And after the bike tour I would again do something directly productive for society – I didn’t have a plan for what I would do after my return.

I had decided to not set an end date or location for my tour – I wanted to take decisions one day after another, listening into my feelings, making space to find some answers inside.

What I had planned was reaching Istanbul and then cycle a route south of the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. You can take cool northern routes to East Asia too but for me a southern route variant had the attraction of more mountains.

After Central Asia my planning horizon ended. I was aware from there you can generally cycle northeast (Kazakhstan, Russia, Mongolia), east (China), or southeast (Pakistan, India, Nepal) – but for the moment my only blurred goal was reaching East Asia cycling overland.

I didn’t spend much money – as a cycle tourer your transportation is free and your accommodation is also free when you wildcamp. Over the entire tour, I wildcamped or got invited by locals in about 7 of 10 places I slept. When I paid for accommodation, I stayed at campsites, hostels, or whatever cheapest option was available.

In the first tour half, I leaned towards wildcamping and slept in paid accommodation only in exceptional circumstances (e.g. bike problem, safety concern, mountain hut, injury, border crossing town).

In the second tour half, I stayed a bit more in paid places as I realized the many benefits of making more human connections on the tour (e.g. exchanging route tips with other travelers, connecting with locals in family-homestays).

Beside traveling and sleeping (which are basically free), costs for eating are also minimal when you self-cook most meals. With 1 liter of gasoline you can cook for about week (less in cold conditions when you make more tea) and how much can you possibly spent buying rice/lentils and some vegetables? Averaging over the entire tour I would estimate I spend about 12 Euro/day on running living costs – excluding one-time costs (e.g. visa fees, spare parts).

Traveling on a small budget eased my moral concerns but still one voice in my mind said “you are on a self-focused bike trip” while another said “it’s ok that at this time in your life you cycle”. Which voice was right?

I listened into my feelings and found a warm “this tour feels right” – at this time in my life, I was riding.

I didn’t see any refugees in North Macedonia but I thought about them a lot and imagined their journeys. How many of them have lost family members? How many come traumatized, raped, injured, or homeless?

Perhaps humanity is what our meditation attention should be calibrated on. Perhaps the answer was simple.

Sure we live our life embedded in a fascinating universe and we can ask ourselves existential questions. But we also live our life on earth embedded in a network called humanity – and we live today.

How can ethics be taught well?

I’m just a cyclist but in my world concept the number of human civilizations on earth is one – we are one big human family. And the world belongs to us on an existential level – we create our reality together in our consciousness, and we are able to jointly change our reality with our consciousness attention.

This logic applies generally: when we decide to calibrate our consciousness attention to whatever other direction we like to focus on, the next version of our reality adapts accordingly. And we shape our reality not only by choosing the direction of our consciousness attention, but also by choosing the underlying emotional flavor of our attention.

Let’s look at the example of refugees. If it feels right, we can decide to change our consciousness attention towards paying more attention to humanity and see refugees as individual humans like you and me.

And if it feels right, we can choose an underlying emotional attention flavor of compassion.

When we make such exemplary attention adaptations in our consciousness – then one time step later the world will have developed a notch more humanity- and compassion-focused, relative to the world’s previous trajectory.

“Does that logic hold?” you may ask. Good question, why should our chosen consciousness attention have the power to change the world?

A philosophical answer could begin with “if we understand reality as something emerging in our consciousness …” – but here we would quickly get lost in definitions and underlying assumptions around existential philosophy.

A feeling-based answer is easier, or better a question: how does the idea feel that your chosen consciousness attention shapes the reality around you?

But where do we start and where do we stop? It’s easy to moralize and say things like “we should pay more attention to humanity“, “we should pay more attention to nature“, or to generally come up with a long list of well-meant attention directions across all topics we jointly discuss in humanity’s current zeitgeist.

Your consciousness is yours alone! Everyone has individual values and opinions on things, and that’s perfectly fine – you are existentially free inside yourself to “stop” your consciousness attention from going anywhere if you don’t feel like it.

Perhaps the more pragmatic question is “Where do we start?”. The attention inside our consciousness doesn’t need so much “making” and “choosing” and “controlling” – that reflex is a natural part of our consciousness, but it’s just one part.

On the other side is our letting-go. And for this, all we need to do is sensing into our consciousness without expecting, analyzing, or judging … so we can feel our true self.

Let’s assume for a moment that we have a reality-bending force in our consciousness. What do we do with it?

I would say our attention calibration evolves naturally. We were all already born with an attention-calibration stream constantly running in the background of our consciousness – the force to shape your reality is already inside you.

What if we decide to use the reality-bending force inside us more consciously?

Human consciousness journeys are probably too diverse for anything like “steps” or “techniques”, but with this disclaimer in mind perhaps the following ideas help some people to get a better grip on their force.

First, we need to develop our general ability to feel our force before being able to use it in a more conscious way.

Again thinking backwards, I would say what we need to achieve as context factors are probably things like “meditative stability” (our mind stops racing), “consciousness clarity” (perceiving clearly), “consciousness tranquility” (being truly calm), and perhaps above all achieving “inner freedom” (integrating our deepest fears) – the more we achieve being in a consciousness state like that, the more we can feel and use our force.

Second, after we have developed our ability to feel and use our natural reality-bending force, we can start to use it more consciously.

I don’t believe consciousness journey’s ever follow such simplified steps – our “force awareness” and “force usage” seem to be interwoven in many ways in real life.

Human connections – how much do they give our life meaning?

All our fellow human brothers and sisters live in the same human condition like us – they have a consciousness and they co-shape our collective reality through their chosen consciousness attention.

Perhaps a part of life’s meaning can be found in having compassion for others, remembering that we are all existentially the same. ​

Thinkers about conscious exploration sometimes warn that when we meditate and go deeper inside we will only find our own egoism as long as we don’t love other people and the world around us. Some thinkers even frame transcendence as something that can only be reached by giving compassion.