After
So how is your meditation going?
The constant background self-reflection of our mind … I haven’t figured it out. If we meet one day for a tea (I live in Neukölln … there is a great tea culture and if you want we can also find a Baklava), I will be most interested in your take on life as I truly believe life is about sharing each other’s journey and that listening is as important as speaking oneself.
When reading background material for this project, I realized how little I knew and that the things I believed to “know” were often highly uncertain. For example, there is an ocean of interpretations and discussions around the philosophical “mind-body problem” – people formally trained in philosophy and logical thinking can grasp this debate with much more substance than me.
How can ethics be taught well?
My state of thinking is that you don’t really “teach” ethics. In my view ethics and applied philosophy in general should provide pragmatic decision making support – if a mental map resonantes with people and brings them forward in their daily life, the discipline has delivered.
Maybe all a philosophy book can aim for is to make some small positive impulses in the big stream of reality – if you get lucky. Only some ideas will resonate in readers and the same ideas will resonate differently between readers as individual mind-body entities on unique life paths.
For the last 8.5 years since starting this project, I spent a large part of my time reading and thinking about consciousness – but your life perspective is as right as mine. I think we all already know what’s right in our life in the long run … I think we feel it.
But given that life is complex, I guess sometimes a bit of structured self-reflection brings us benefits … in moderation(!) – I did this wrong for a long time.
Which topics have we visited on our expedition into consciousness?
Chapter 1:
In Germany we meditated on language.
From a neuroscience perspective, language is a “reality-placeholder” system. Lick your hand … the placeholder word “h‑a‑n‑d” in your cognition is the concept – but only the real thing gets wet from your saliva, only the real thing feels your tongue being warm.
This brings severe limitations regarding our ability to conceptualize reality. And the limitations of language and our language-based cognition become particularly clear when we direct our consciousness attention to objects like “language itself” or “our consciousness”. It’s kind of circular.
But language is also a powerful tool as it forms the narrative of our life story. And given that we live anyways … we may as well think a bit with language and see what happens.
Ludwig Wittgenstein argued that we run hopelessly against the “boundaries of language” and the “walls of our cage” when we talk ethics – I don’t really share his pessimism. While things may be fuzzy to describe at our boundary of language, I believe we benefit enormously from trying and I think this is particularly true regarding our own consciousness.
Sure, language is just a small part of our reality and it has severe limitations. But language is also a self-reflection tool and using it the best way we can seems constructive … even though we probably never reach certainty on how our reality ultimately works.
Chapter 2:
In Poland we meditated on humans as biological mind-body systems.
The boundaries of language we all run against exist in a dynamic biological context – your body and my body. Zooming in a notch we can replace “body” with “cell pile” … that’s what we all are, right?
And who knows about quantum mechanics! I don’t, I’m just a cyclist.
And about free will? You tell me!
Whatever world concepts and individual theories of self we cultivate inside us, I guess the Buddha made a universal point when he reflected that “as the second mark of existence, impermanence pervades all compounded phenomena” – our biological hardware and cognitive software change all the time as does our surrounding reality which we co-shape.
And you know what … I find this truly amazing. I mean we can do so much stuff with our biological body, it’s kind of cool. Just think of neuroplasticity, our lifelong ability to physically grow specific brain parts through their targeted activation … this power is inside us biologically.
Breathing in, breathing out.
Chapter 3:
In Czech Republic we meditated on values.
As a biological mind-body bundle in flux we could think about anything – so why values?
In my view, a focus on values is pragmatic and punchy in our everyday life.
Yes the world is incredibly complex and there are many things we just don’t know … but simply reflecting on the values we want to live by and then executing accordingly is pretty straightforward and provides a life navigation answer that works and makes us authentic.
Where is the sweet spot between “thinking about” our values and taking action?
One thing seems certain: when we never take action we are just thinking about our values lifelong while in fact doing nothing to really manifest “helpfulness” or “generosity” or “trust” … or whatever else we may daydream about. Values manifest more in our deeds than in our words.
Values manifest through action … but some value reflection could be helpful if our goal is to align our values with our actions. But when we start to analyze our values, when we start to observe our cognition and our reality in general – what can we know for sure?
Many theories of brain functioning and models explaining human behavior have been proposed but so far no dominant personality development theory has emerged. Perhaps because we are all individuals?
Skeptics have pointed out that we can’t know anything for sure. In response, René Descartes argued that even when we think fundamentally skeptical by doubting the certainty of all knowledge, there is one thing doubtful thinking logically proves: “I am thinking, therefore I exist“.
We exist as a logical consequence of the fact that we think. All further consciousness self-reflexion builds on the foundation of the existential realization that we exist – that’s safe!
And what also seems certain is that we only make a single life journey in our current biological body and that our biological lifetime is limited – two good reasons to make our life count. To live it according to our individual values so we leave a life trace we are proud of.
Back in the days as an ethics professor I thought initially I would write a book on ethics with a focus on values. That book would have been (only) what is now “Chapter 3: Czech Republic — Values” … in retrospect I’m glad I went for consciousness.
Chapter 4:
In Slovakia we meditated on emotions.
The exact development of the human brain is still debated. But basically after the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago, the formation of our earth 4.6 billion years ago, the beginning of life on earth 4 billion years ago, the appearance of multi-cell organisms 0.5‑1 billion years ago – after all this prelude the evolving species on earth first learned to “feel emotions” and later to “think words”.
This evolutionary path is still visible in our brain structure. According to common brain models, our current biological human brain has three main parts. First, our “reptilian brain” at the core responsible for vital body functions (e.g. breathing). Second, our “limbic brain” responsible for emotions. Third, our “neocortex” responsible for language, abstract thinking, and imagination.
Thus from an evolutionary point of view, we humans are feeling creatures which later also learned to think – and not at all just thinkers. What does this imply?
It puts our problem of “running into language” into a fundamentally new perspective. Yes, we are a cell pile that “thinks”. And yes, we are a cell pile that can undertake complex intellectual exercises such as “articulating values” or “thinking about ethics” or “reflecting on consciousness”.
But the bottom line remains that we had already been a life form feeling emotions long before we developed complex abstract language-systems enabling us to “think in words”. Thus despite all the cognitive power of today’s human brain, the emotional part of our existence remains central in our consciousness – in general, and even more when we we go deep and think about “our values” or even our “own consciousness” itself … we feel that.
In his book “Descartes’ Error” the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio explains:
“that feelings are a powerful influence on reason, that the brain systems required by the former are enmeshed in those needed by the latter, and that such specific systems are interwoven with those which regulate the body.”
While Descartes had thought about the mind separately, modern neuroscience shows a deep integration of our feelings, thinking, and body. For your and my self-exploration of our consciousness this means we must perceive ourselves as a combination of integrated systems – including, but not limited to, our cognition doing “the thinking” while we feel ourself and reality.
On the one hand, emotions seem simple. If the warm buzz in our solar plexus and belly region feels right, don’t analyze and carry on with your life in that direction.
On the other hand, emotions seem complex. Cover emotions, layers, childhood, relationships … and the possibility of all experiences being connected on our life path from cradle to grave. Kind of a hard nut to analyze and understand “in words”.
From an evolutionary perspective, our feelings brought our species many benefits, for example faster reaction, human-to-human communication, and a ton more. But in the grand scheme of things there is also wisdom development … it may be feeling our emotions which teaches us things that really matter – feelings can be considered as the gateway to our soul.
Joseph Campbell, who wrote extensively on comparative mythology and religion, described the idea this way:
“Heaven and hell are within us, and all the gods are within us.”
Chapter 5:
In Hungary we meditated on blockades.
Here is the thing with our natural feeling compass: it sometimes gets stuck a little bit when we have blockades.
In my perception of the human existence that’s fundamentally normal for all of us and ok. I believe the game of life you and I and we all play is to navigate our life path with navigation tools having boundaries and imperfections – both cognitive and emotional.
Anger, hate, resentment, disappointment, shame, sadness, and fear – we all have such emotions and for a good reason. But sometimes we block those teachers when they demand inner growth.
Happiness, trust, love, meaning, belonging, fulfillment, and purpose – we all have such emotions too even so sometimes we don’t feel them when blockades are in the way.
Emotional acceptance is what we all need to live true to ourselves … but subconsciously we run away from it. After having worked for decades as a psychoanalyst Carl Jung concluded:
“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls.”
Chapter 6:
In Slovenia we meditated on integration.
Do you know how your consciousness works?
To me it seems that our emotions float around our consciousness like multidimensional clouds interwoven in many layers of complex dependencies. And somehow our emotions also seem to be able to move freely across realm and time.
So if we have blockades, either because of a chronic emotion-mind disconnection or because something traumatic happened that we suppressed, what can help?
First, I think it’s healthy and constructive to accept that all our emotions and blockades exist for a good reason. When life tests us with emotions we suppressed, this is exactly the point in our life where we grow. It’s a natural process, it’s how our human existence works … but you already know that.
Second, I think given that our emotions float around our consciousness like multidimensional clouds, we probably shouldn’t try to grasp them with our linear-analytical cognition. All those nice little words in our mind constructing causalities among emotions and other analytical objects can be in the way to truly feeling our emotions – to let them arise inside us without our interference.
I believe we all can freely choose to be intimidated by our blockades, or we accept them with a sporty attitude. Think about how powerful you are given this choice – yes sounds cheesy and has been said a million times before but it’s definitely true.
And every time we accept and integrate a previously unprocessed emotion, we somehow become more experienced and stronger.
Our life is a series of emotional training opportunities-to-grow if we choose this attitude and then execute accordingly … I’m pretty sure you already know that too.
Chapter 7:
In Croatia we meditated on the “now”.
Reflecting on the raw nature of language as the tool with which we generally think (Chapter 1), the mind-body problem (Chapter 2+3), our emotions (Chapter 4+5+6) – we can see all that better when we are more present in the now.
Chapters 1-7 would have been a round book in terms of topics covered – what else is there that really matters for consciousness explorers? The rest is detail.
Across the entire book I thought regarding the topic order development … well let’s say I aimed to develop 24 consciousness-related topics with the intention that they roughly build on each other without being too mechanical or stiff.
In a nutshell, I thought …
- Chapter 1-7 set the stage by covering base elements for consciousness exploration
- Chapter 8-24 expand the self-reflection by discussing selected topics to go deeper
I’m just a cyclist who had a lot of sun burning on his head – in Delhi my bike computer said that since Berlin I spend 1000 hours in the saddle. But I can confidently say that despite all this thinking time on the philosophical side I have nothing new to say.
So instead of summarizing Chapters 8-24 in this conclusion, I prefer to give the stage to people who thought about the human consciousness for their entire life.
People who went far deeper on their expedition into consciousness than me – orders of magnitude deeper and orders of magnitude more systematic. People who came back with clarity of mind and heart.
Ken Wilber is a philosopher, author and teacher whose work I respect. He devoted his life to consciousness exploration and sees human consciousness through the lens of an “integral theory of everything” – a big challenge for which he successfully delivered a pragmatic, logically robust, and comprehensive approach.
“What if we took literally everything that all the various cultures have to tell us about human potential—about spiritual growth, psychological growth, social growth—and put it all on the table? (…) You can think of the Integral approach as a sort of operating system for your reality.”
Of course such frameworks are always a matter of taste … for me it resonated.
Taking a closer look reveals that Ken Wilber is fully aware that all framework element are in the end only pointers towards the real reality which we navigate with our mental maps. For example, he compares his scale of consciousness development stages to common other approaches, emphasizing the shared goal, and generally leaves much room for the individual to modify and expand the integral framework as people see fit.
And regarding ethical judgements, he emphasizes that his integral approach is:
“a neutral framework; it does not tell you what to think, or force any particular ideologies on you, or coerce your awareness in any fashion”
How can ethics be taught well? Like that!
“States”, “Types”, “Lines of Development” … I think the decisive question is if such mental maps resonante inside us when we practice them (perhaps years?) – if they help us to grasp and navigate our reality better, the mental maps have delivered.
Ken Wilber’s integral theory is an example of a deeply structured self-reflection tool, a new perspective on life and general existence – in my view a punchy one to impact our daily life positively.
However, there is a risk involved in thinking about our consciousness – the risk is that we can be “stuck in thinking and theory” while our life keeps ticking away. Yes integrated … but I think it’s fair to say that an overthinking-risk generally exists.
And a related risk stemming from “thinking, structuring, and analyzing” is that we may see less.
The Zen monk Shunryū Suzuki put it this way:
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”
Who knows, perhaps everything has its time and sometimes in our life “systematic self-reflection” and other times “just being without thoughts” is right/healthy/constructive … ?
The Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh (also called “Thầy”) taught that living fully in the now is what’s truly important in our life, not words or concepts trying to describe parts of our consciousness journey:
“Many of us have spent our whole lives learning, questioning, and searching. But even on the path of enlightenment, if all we do is study, we’re wasting our time and that of our teacher. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t study; study and practice help each other. But what’s important is not the goal we’re seeking – even if that goal is enlightenment – but living each moment of our daily life truly and fully.”
“Living each moment of our daily life truly and fully” – how does that feel?
Perhaps our breathing is what we should be focussing on … not all that thinking. Because when we focus our consciousness attention on our breathing, our feelings get more space.
A breathing perspective I admire in many ways is “The First 8 Exercises of Mindful Breathing | Thich Nhat Hanh (short teaching video)“:
#browser testing
https://youtube.com/watch?v=O_iDaIAPrGo%3Fsi%3DQhEurbzQiYKHUpVi
Thầy speaks of the energy of mindfulness we constantly generate as a “powerful source of energy to help you” (20:24) – I would call it our reality-bending force.
I think Thầy’s perspective on our breathing is something people can benefit from across cultures, countries and religions … processing and integrating our emotions is probably the most healthy thing we all can do.
Exercises 1-4 don’t touch yet our feelings – they are focused on first checking in into our breathing and body. Here I made a good experience practicing initially only to notice my inbreath while focusing on nothing during my outbreath, and adding outbreath-awareness later.
Beside checking into our breathing and body before giving attention to our emotions (exercises 1-4) … then first generating joy and happiness (exercise 5-6) before handling our pain (exercise 7-8) – that’s really smart, right?
I mean first recharging our positive emotions before handling the painful ones … perhaps that’s the way to make real progress in life.
“Joy” vs. “happiness” – what’s the difference? I can’t grasp it clearly in English or German … “Glück” and “Freude” also seem quite similar.
A self-constructed mental map I added here was to conceptualize “joy” as something more related to my current life situation (e.g. where I am, what I see), and “happiness” as something more related to things in general (e.g. I’m always a part of earth’s biological life system).
Mindful breathing seems to not only improve our breathing itself – our thoughts and emotions also somehow clear up.
And Thầy’s explanation of our mind consisting of our “conscious mind” and “store” – I find this mental map very pragmatic in my daily life to better grasp different elements floating around my consciousness.
The “art of suffering” and “art of happiness” as he frames it … it’s beautiful and deep advice on living life well.
Throughout his life Thầy emphasized the importance of human community:
“A most important part of sangha [community] building is to flow with the sangha as one river, and not behave as a drop of water outside of the river.”
Living with an awareness of being a part of the human community – it’s a powerful base to shape our life and to bend our reality in a way we like.
Because all the expeditions into consciousness of the world only create egoism if we stay in the space of our personal self-reflection even if we manage to create a lot of compassion and love and affection for ourself, our individual journey … yes important, but we are definitely just a drop.
Perhaps that’s already too much damn thinking again. Perhaps we should leave the philosophy entirely behind and just focus on our breathing and nothing else.
Another breathing perspective I like in many ways is the approach of Wim Hof – focused and impactful:
#browser testing
https://www.youtube.com/embed/tybOi4hjZFQ?si=oj2PBbp9fGMfU5FD
I have done this one exercise daily over some months after several friends reported positive effects. As a consciousness explorer I find the “holding breath periods” (exhaled and inhaled) particularly interesting to better grasp different elements floating around my consciousness … it’s calming, and after the exercise my breathing flows more freely and I feel energized.
Wim Hof’s breathing exercise has the best “positive-benefit to time-invest” ratio I have seen regarding the many exercises and things one can do to live daily life a bit better … perhaps this is because it’s body-focused? I’m unsure what’s going on physiologically (more oxygen? some sort of recalibration?) … but I simply feel better every time I practice it and throughout the day.
In Thầy’s exercise the breathing is more “passively observed” vs. in Wim Hof’s exercise the breathing is more “actively controlled” – in my experience these two exercises bring some similar but also very different benefits.
Wim Hof uses few words, but deep ones and carefully chosen:
“Be in this moment. Let the body do what the body is capable of doing (…) Feel. Become aware of your body (…) Become aware of the blood running through your veins, your heart beating. Feel.”
I’m not saying anybody should necessarily look into Ken Wilber’s integral theory, or practice the breathing exercises by Thầy/Wim Hof … perhaps investing your limited lifetime in a million other things is what’s right for you.
I’m pretty sure that we all can go deep in our consciousness with or without mental maps – “mental map depth” is probably different from “mental deepness” as a consciousness state.
All other parameters being equal, if a consciousness explorer wants to go deep then practicing only breathing and never reading/writing/thinking a single word is probably better than the other way round … so this whole project may have been a waste of time.
But then again realizing a mistake has value too and I guess what’s “right” is always individual and changes over our life journey. I would do it all again, the cycling, the writing, the going deeper inside myself … I haven’t really figured out something new but I definitely had a damn good time out there on the road.
Integral theories, breathing exercises … what else could be interesting for consciousness explorers?
Food, nutrition perhaps … physically we all are what we eat and what we eat may have effects on our consciousness.
Reproduction, human evolution perhaps … what’s in our DNA and what is learned?
Or maybe sports … in my experience sports and philosophy mix well, but then again philosophy mixes well with everything from online gaming to breastfeeding – we can ask “Who am I?” whatever we do.
Perhaps it’s better to end this book with some reflections that are more general … things that possible generalize across people.
But I think one always needs to be careful when extrapolating own experiences to others … I’m just a cyclist who had a lot of sun burning on his head. And you, my fellow human sister or brother reading this, you are different from me.
I think you already carry everything you need inside yourself. I think I have nothing to add that you don’t already know.
Perhaps you believe in one of the large mono-theistic religions, or in a poly-theistic religion like Hinduism, or maybe you believe in an atheistic world concept – if there is one thing I realized on this bike tour it’s that our world is much more diverse than I thought before … and I find this truly beautiful.
Whatever we individually believe in, I think reality flows through us just fine without the need for us to ever be hectic – we exist, and how we exist bends reality … existentially that’s safe.
Despite the great diversity among humans I believe there are also things everyone has in common. On my bike tour I saw something in all 24 countries, something consistent across the many diverse people I met. When you look into people’s eyes … I’m sure you know what I mean.
But the good we all carry inside us is just one thing we share – I’m pretty sure everybody also carries pain and all that … one way or another. And I think that’s ok.
This “facing our true self” thing – when is time for that in our busy lives?
I think living deeper is something that grows automatically when we just observe it. But I don’t believe that we should only be passive along our journey. Yes dissolving the question and letting arise and all that … but I think we all are also warriors – you too, dear reader.
Existentially seen, we constantly face our true self as reality flows through us – the only question is “how”. Personally, I think darkness is handled well with a kiss while brutally slaughtering it down.
But kind of smart … have you ever observed how martial art fighters use the opponent’s energy?
Never hesitating, never in a rush.
For me the good news is that now, as this Silk Road publication is coming to closure, I have much more free time to be social … this project was more than a hobby.
During my bike tour I wild-camped most of the time over 10 months. But while camping in nature is amazing(!!) and I would do it all a million times again – on this tour I also learned to appreciate more the value of being social.
On a deeper level, during my tour I began to wonder about the reciprocal importance of us for each other … and I thought: “Perhaps we learn to most about ourselves by contrasting ourself with others, not by looking into a mirror where we only see what we already know?”
And this “we create each other in our respective consciousness” thing (you <-> me … <-> humanity) – from an existential point of view, I haven’t figured out what that really means for how our reality functions. Perhaps you have an idea?
It’s summer 2024 … a pretty good time to write the last words. I think I will spend time in nature but also with family … you know the things that count. Not because of any particular philosophical reason … I simply follow what feels right.
I guess I will also go to a club soon, dancing.
Sometimes when I’m raving in a crowd, I have this intense feeling of being connected with my fellow ravers … like we are all one combined cell pile making love with the music.
I kind of like it.
Jörg Firnkorn | Berlin, 7 September 2024