There is a very successful product on the self improvement market. It promises mindfulness, mental clarity, emotional resilience, work-life balance, authentic purpose, and a renewed ability to be present in the moment without being consumed by anxiety. It goes by different names every decade—mindfulness, full awareness, practical spirituality, inner intelligence, corporate awakening—but the content beneath the packaging remains the same: you, only better, calmer, and more centered, with access to states of consciousness that make you a more effective and higher-quality human being.

This product works well as a wellness product: it has evidence to support it and measurable results—it reduces cortisol, improves focus, increases subjective satisfaction, and makes people genuinely more pleasant to be around. The problem arises when it is sold as awakening, as realization, as that which Zen masters, Sufis, Advaita practitioners, and Dzogchen masters—among other traditions—spent their lives pointing toward. Then it ceases to be a cheaper version of the same product and becomes an entirely different proposition.

The commercial product improves the “operator.” What non-dual traditions point to is the realization that no such “operator” exists in the way it seemed to exist. These are two structurally incompatible propositions: one presupposes a self that can be refined, expanded, improved, and made more self-aware; the other reveals that this self, when examined closely enough, lacks the substance it seemed to possess. The “operator” you came to perfect is a construct, a character. Seeing the construct as a construct changes everything, in a way that no course catalog advertises.

The confusion persists because the path to non-dual perception often involves genuinely positive states: greater calm in regular meditation, less reactivity when working with fixations, and greater presence in relationships when listening becomes pure. These effects are real and valuable, and the common mistake is to mistake the effect for the destination. The silence that arises in meditation is not the pure Consciousness that the traditions point to. It is a quieter mental state, occurring within the Consciousness that has always been here. Confusing the two is the natural tendency of a mind trained to seek improvement, which continues to do so even when the context calls for something entirely different.

The spiritual market thrives on this confusion, rarely out of bad faith: the confusion is often genuine among some teachers, who have had real experiences of opening up and interpreted them as an expanded self rather than the absence of a separate self to expand. The difference is subtle in experience and enormous in its implications. An even more expanded “you” is still you. Non-dual perception dissolves the assumption that there was a separate self to begin with.

Try a simple and revealing test, even if it isn’t definitive. Ask yourself what you expect to remain afterward, whatever the practice may be. If the answer includes you—even a lighter, more present, more fulfilled you—you’re buying Product A. It’s a good product, functional, with a guaranteed market. Product B offers permanence to no one; no one stays to receive permanence. It is the most honest offer that has ever existed and also the least marketable; the traditions that insist on it have endured for millennia because honesty, in sufficient measure, sustains a commitment that no comfort can match.

You don’t need to want Product B; you just need to know which of the two you’re buying. Anyone who enters a wellness practice seeking less anxiety and leaves with greater emotional balance has done exactly what they set out to do. Anyone who enters seeking fulfillment and leaves with a more “refined” self has become trapped in a confusion that produces an increasingly elegant dissatisfaction. A “refined” self always wants more refinement, because that is what the ego does.

Most people, once they understand what non-dual traditions actually offer, consciously choose Product A. It’s a legitimate choice. What becomes a problem is consuming Product A using the vocabulary of Product B, convinced that they’re awakening, without realizing that the result is merely a better-dressed ego.

Realization comes when someone realizes that there was never anyone waiting for it.

Thank you for reading The Psychonaut!

No author owns what they write; they are merely the translator of the silence that precedes it. Writing was the way I found to explore who we are when the mind grows still. Each text is born from this silent movement of consciousness trying to recognize itself in form. Sometimes words emerge; other times, only the space between them. I don’t write to explain anything; I write to remember. Fiction, science, and everyday life are merely pretexts. What speaks from behind is the same silence that reads.

I keep everything here free and easily accessible, with no strings attached. If you find it useful, the best way to support this project—besides subscribing—is through a restack, a recommendation, or by sharing the post—it makes a huge difference.

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In 1941, T.S. Eliot wrote, in The Dry Salvages 1, that you aren’t the same person who left that station, nor the one who’ll disembark at the final destination. Heraclitus of Ephesus 2 claimed that a man never bathes in the same river twice. The reason is twofold: the river is no longer the same, because the water that passed doesn’t return, and the man isn’t the same either, because the previous instant already changed him in some way he probably didn’t notice. Two thinkers, radically different eras and contexts, pointing at the same fact we keep ignoring with impressive competence.

Cellular regeneration happens continuously in the human body, not every seven years, as science once assumed. But that’s just the tip of a much bigger iceberg: what we call “I” is an uninterrupted flow of experiences, from the most automatic to the most conscious, and it presumes a continuity that goes beyond body and mind. Gurdjieff called these apparatuses “machines.” Bernardo Kastrup 3 prefers the image of whirlpools: vortices that emerge from the same water and, for a while, seem to have a life of their own. The water, though, is one.

Breathing happens. The heart beats. The stomach digests. None of these processes depends on intention, planning, or effort, and any deliberate interference in some of them ends in collapse.

Sight happens, the heart beats, until one day it doesn’t beat anymore. None of that goes through any decision of ours.

When I look with any honesty at what I actually control, the list is much shorter than my ego would like to admit. There’s a doing that happens without a doer, an observation without an observer, this isn’t metaphor, it’s simply what direct experience reveals when we stop trying to overlay concepts and rationalizations onto it.

What’s curious is what we do with this perception when it shows up. Instead of letting the recognition of the flow dissolve the illusion of a fixed, separate center, we reverse the movement: we reinforce the boundary, stiffen the identity, and start operating as if this imagined “I” were not only real but sovereign. The notion of separation, and I insist it’s a notion, not a reality, produces consequences we know well: we feel above animals, above nature, above the planet, and naturally, above other human beings. Especially those humans who, by some convenient criterion, we’ve decided aren’t quite as equal to us. Impossible not to think of Orwell 4 here. The belief that there’s an isolated, sovereign “I” underlies everything we produce that’s most destructive, from the hierarchies that justify exploitation to the wars we call necessary.

I keep thinking about when this self-deception reached its current scale. A hypothesis that’s followed me for years: it happened the moment our nomadic ancestors found a place good enough to stay. By putting down roots, they also put down property, and with it came fences, boundaries, borders. The logic of “mine” and “yours” became the seed of all subsequent separation. Another equally plausible possibility: separation took hold when figures like Buddha, Jesus, Lao Tzu, Rumi, and others who lived without the illusion of a separate self had their words hijacked by those who presented themselves as intermediaries of the divine, turning teachings about the dissolution of the ego into instruments of control and hierarchy.

The two processes probably reinforced each other. The result is plain to see.

The collective ego operates by the same logic as the individual ego: the greater the threat to its fiction, the more rigid the boundary it raises. Trump and the crowd around him, the ayatollahs, Orbán, and the recent wave of “leaders” riding this same tide aren’t anomalies, they’re symptoms. They reflect the political crystallization of a much older, much more intimate belief: that there’s an “us” that needs defending from a “them,” that identity only holds together through exclusion, that security only exists behind walls, literal or symbolic. Fascism isn’t born of ideology, it’s born of fear, and fear is born of the illusion of separation taken to its institutional limit.

Hannah Arendt observed, in Eichmann in Jerusalem, from 1963, that totalitarianism thrives where people lose the capacity to think, to put themselves in another’s place, to inhabit any perspective beyond their own. What she called the “banality of evil” is, seen from another angle, the banality of separation: the inability to perceive that the other isn’t an existential threat, but the same water forming a different whirlpool. What Heraclitus saw in the river, we refuse to see in each other.

We reap what we sow, quite faithfully. For centuries, we planted the conviction that we’re separate entities competing for scarce resources in a hostile world. Contemplative philosophy pointed in another direction, but modernity pushed it to the margins, treated as boutique spirituality while civilization built itself on the exact opposite. Now we’ve reached the point where the cost of this belief becomes impossible to ignore: borders, walls, denialism, climate collapse treated as a matter of opinion. Separation became foreign policy.

I’m just not sure if we need a shock to snap out of this, or if the shock is already happening and we’re still on the train, reading the newspaper, not noticing that we aren’t the same people who boarded.

Thank you for reading The Psychonaut!

No author owns what they write; they are merely the translator of the silence that precedes it. Writing was the way I found to explore who we are when the mind grows still. Each text is born from this silent movement of consciousness trying to recognize itself in form. Sometimes words emerge; other times, only the space between them. I don’t write to explain anything; I write to remember. Fiction, science, and everyday life are merely pretexts. What speaks from behind is the same silence that reads.

I keep everything here free and easily accessible, with no strings attached. If you find it useful, the best way to support this project—besides subscribing—is through a restack, a recommendation, or by sharing the post—it makes a huge difference.

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Prior to Thought is now available for pre-order on Kindle. A print edition is coming too, for those who believe books should have a spine, in both senses of the word ;).

A year ago I published this book in Portuguese, written on a typewriter, without an outline, in the same state it describes. The irony never got old. A book about what happens when thinking gets out of the way, produced in the one condition that reliably made thinking get out of the way. No delete key, no browser tabs, no algorithm suggesting I take a break and watch something.

The book treats flow as what it actually is: a state of consciousness that surfaces when the noise stops. The productivity framework version, the five-step peak performance system, exists. There are excellent books in that genre. This is not one of them.

What I cover here is what Ayrton Senna was describing when he said he was two seconds faster than everyone at Monaco and had no rational explanation for it.
What Lolo Jones lost the moment she thought about improving her stride mid-race and clipped the next hurdle. The neurological state in which the inner critic is not suppressed, it simply is not running.

The book also covers what happens when a group of people enters this state together. The Formula 1 pit stop. The surgical team that operates as a single organism. The jazz ensemble where five musicians become one thing moving in the jam session. Collective flow is a documented neurological state, and most organizations have never seen it because they keep optimizing the wrong variable.

Prior to Thought arrives on Kindle June 30. Print edition also available for the analog readers among you.
Pre-order now → https://a.co/d/0e7eSnQe

Antes do Pensar br edition

Almost a year ago, Antes do Pensar came out in Brazil. I had written it on a typewriter, one chapter at a time, without an outline, without a plan for what it was going to become. Each session started from the same place: a blank page, a typewriter of my own age, and the deliberate absence of everything else. I did not know then how fitting that would turn out to be. A book about the state that happens when thinking gets out of the way, written in the one condition that reliably made thinking get out of the way.

What I did know was the question at the center of it, that shoul not be “how do you reach flow,” the way most books on the subject are framed. That question always seemed to me to start from the wrong place, as if flow were a destination you navigate toward rather than a condition that surfaces when you stop obstructing it. The question I kept returning to was simpler and harder: what is already present before the thinking begins?

That question is what Prior to Thought is about. And in a few days, to mark the first anniversary of the Portuguese edition, it arrives in English.

The book opens with consciousness, because flow without it is just a performance metric. There is the consciousness that perceives the world linearly, that says “I am here, doing this, now.” And there is a deeper dimension, what I call Consciousness with a capital C, the silent presence that holds everything without reacting to any of it. When we enter the state of flow, these two dimensions meet. The sense of separation between the person and the action dissolves, and what remains is pure, unobstructed presence.

Bernardo Kastrup gives this the most precise image I have encountered: personal identity as a whirlpool in a river. The whirlpool appears distinct, has a recognizable shape, seems separate from the water around it. It never was. The whirlpool and the river are the same thing in two different expressions. Flow is the momentary experience of that truth.

This is also why I spend considerable time in the book on what flow is not. It is not a productivity hack. It is not a neurochemical trick for optimizing output. The corporate world has been enthusiastic about instrumentalizing flow for exactly the results it cannot produce that way. The moment you try to manufacture non-separation, you guarantee more separation. The pressure logic that drives most high-performance cultures is the same logic that prevents the state from emerging.

The neuroscience matters here, and I cover it in some detail. When you enter flow, the prefrontal cortex, the region responsible for self-monitoring, judgment and the running commentary the mind keeps about itself, significantly reduces its activity. This is transient hypofrontality. The inner critic does not get suppressed. It simply is not running. What Senna experienced at Monaco in 1988, two seconds faster than everyone with no rational explanation, what Michael Jordan had in the first half of a game where he shrugged at his coach as if to say “I cannot explain this either,” what Lolo Jones lost the moment she thought about improving her stride and clipped the next hurdle: the same neurological state. The inner critic went quiet and something deeper took over.

The practical question is not how to force this. Forcing it is one of the most reliable ways to prevent it. The real question is what conditions stop fighting it.

The book offers those conditions without turning them into a system. Rituals rather than habits. The balance between challenge and skill that Csikszentmihalyi identified as the threshold where flow becomes accessible. The role of conscious breathing in shifting from sympathetic to parasympathetic dominance. The difference between a scattered mind and genuine presence, which turns out to matter more than almost anything else we spend our attention on.

The second half of the book moves into collective flow, which I think is where the real frontier is. Individual flow is remarkable. Collective flow, the state in which a group begins to operate as a single organism, is something else entirely. The Formula 1 pit stop record is 1.80 seconds. Fourteen people, four tires, no verbal communication during the stop itself. What makes that possible is not practice alone. It is what happens when individual mental models switch off and the group finds a shared rhythm beneath them.

Google’s Project Aristotle studied 180 teams for two years and found that the strongest predictor of high performance had nothing to do with technical skill or individual talent. It had everything to do with psychological safety: the belief that the environment is safe for taking interpersonal risk. Amy Edmondson had named this a decade before the Google study confirmed it. It is the neurological prerequisite for collective flow. Without it, the state cannot emerge. With it, the results look like what surgical teams describe as “operating as a single organism,” what Navy SEAL units call “the switch,” what jazz musicians experience when the improvisation stops being five people playing and becomes one thing moving.

Most organizations never get there because they mistake coordination for synchrony. They are not the same thing. Coordination is planned. Synchrony arises.

The book ends where it begins, with consciousness, with the question of what exists before thought. The closing pages draw the line between flow and non-duality explicitly. Both involve the temporary dissolution of the sense of separation between observer and observed. Both require the same inner condition: the analytical mind quiet enough for presence to fill the space it vacates. The Zen archer who releases the arrow without thinking “aim better” is not performing a technique. He has stopped performing altogether. What remains is the bow, the arrow, the target and the space between them as a single undivided movement.

That is the experience I have been trying to point at for twenty years in my work with leaders and teams. Prior to Thought is the most complete attempt I have made to name it.

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Uma observação para os leitores brasileiros: esta edição de O Psiconauta, foi escrita para os leitores da seção *The Psychonaut* que carrega meus ensaios em inglês. Estou enviando-a a todos os assinantes porque muitos de vocês têm conexões e contatos internacionais que leem nesse idioma.

O link para pré-venda funciona em todo o mundo. A edição em português de “Antes do Pensar” continua disponível no mesmo link da Amazon tanto no Kindle como em papel.

Obrigado por um ano de leitura juntos.

Edgar Morin devoted decades to constructing—with the rigor of someone who takes the matter seriously—an argument that any five-year-old intuitively feels before learning to dismiss it: that you and the world are not separate entities that meet from time to time. He called this “complex thinking”; he could have called it something else—the name was never the point.

There is a sentence in The Method that has stayed with me ever since I came across it: “The human being is at once physical, biological, psychic, cultural, social, and historical.” Read quickly, it seems like an academic list. Read carefully, it breaks down the wall. Morin is saying that you are the universe examining itself, that the line between the cosmos and the human is a conceptual artifice with no correspondence in reality, that the separation we feel between ourselves and nature is a functional construct we take for granted. He spent eighty years building the academic proof of what reveals itself on a quiet afternoon, and what interests me most in the entire work is precisely this point of arrival.

Morin had a concept he called “reconnecting”: intelligence that separates, specializes, and compartmentalizes loses the ability to see the whole. For him, the central pathology of modern thought was precisely this: the amputation of the perception of totality in the name of analytical efficiency. The well-made mind, his ideal, was one that could reconnect what had been artificially divided. But reconnecting presupposes that there was a connection before. And he knew that. The entire architecture of complex thought rests on this intuition: separation is the secondary event, not the primary one.

Most of us have lived for decades believing the opposite—that we are autonomous individuals who occasionally connect with the external world, that nature and consciousness belong to distinct orders of existence, and that life is the relationship between these two entities. Morin dedicated his life to showing that this description is a functional illusion and a cognitive trap. The cosmos did not produce human beings as one produces an artifact separate from the factory. Life emerged from matter, consciousness emerged from life, and in each emergence a novelty appeared without the previous one disappearing. We are stardust that has developed the capacity to ask ourselves what we are. There is no rupture in this chain.

What Morin did not say, at least not in those terms, is that this perception can be direct. That it does not require the six volumes of “The Method”, sociology, systemic biology, or epistemological constructionism. He arrived at it through decades of intellectual work; others arrive through the body, through silence, through the dissolution of the persona that believes it is in control, and the territory where everyone lands is the same.

What has moved me since last week, more than the death of a great thinker, is the image of a man who, at 104, still remained, in his wife’s words, attentive to the world, to others, and to the great human challenges. Attentive and present until the end, without the comfort of a closed system. This is the stance of one who knows that life is not a problem to be solved, but a phenomenon to be inhabited. And inhabiting requires presence.

Morin described himself as an “optimist of despair”: the graver the risk, the greater the possibility that a way out will emerge. Complex thought taken to the limit and, at the same time, non-duality without needing the term. The contradiction can be inhabited. The paradox is not a logical error; it is the most honest description of reality. To stop evading what is already here is the only thing that recognition demands.

Morin is gone. The absence of boundaries is not.

“Yeah, well, you know, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.”

- The Big Lebowski

No author owns what they write; they are merely the translator of the silence that precedes it. Writing was the way I found to explore who we are when the mind grows still.

Each text is born from this silent movement of consciousness trying to recognize itself in form. Sometimes words emerge; other times, only the space between them.

I don’t write to explain anything; I write to remember. Fiction, science, and everyday life are merely pretexts.

What speaks from behind is the same silence that reads.

I keep everything here free and easily accessible, with no strings attached. If you find it useful, the best way to support it—besides subscribing—is through a restack or by recommending and sharing the post—this makes a huge difference.

I think a lot. So do you — just pay attention. It’s inevitable.

Sometimes I catch myself trying to quiet the mind, unfocusing, often without success. It’s a continuous torrent of ideas, memories, possibilities, regrets, hopes and fears. All empty. All with zero credibility, even though for nearly fifty years I took all of it with impressive seriousness.

One day I stopped taking seriously everything my head produced. It wasn’t exactly a decision. It was more like exhaustion from decades of accumulated thoughts about thoughts, plans about plans, worries piled on top of worries that never materialized. You know this pattern: the mind grabs whatever is in front of it, an unanswered email, yesterday’s conversation, an end-of-month bill, and turns it into a complete script of catastrophe or salvation, all before the matter in question has even decided its outcome. That specific kind of thinking, the one that philosophizes, anticipates, judges and gets nowhere, can be dropped at any moment. As long as you understand where it comes from.

To understand where your thoughts come from, try this right now: look for the exact place from which your next thought will emerge. Stay still for a moment and observe. What did you find? Probably nothing. Silence before the word. A borderless space that precedes any mental content. It’s the same experience as trying to grab your own hand with itself. The instrument and the object are the same thing, and the attempt dissolves before it begins.

Another way to do this is to try to identify the thinker, that character I spent many years believing was installed behind my eyes, between my ears, inside my head, from where most Westerners think they see and understand the world. Some traditions insist it lives in the heart or solar plexus. Each school has a map, but the territory is empty.

Thoughts arise and dissolve on their own, the same way a rain cloud forms in the sky and disappears, indifferent to everything. The difference is that we look at the sky and see the sky with a cloud inside it, while we look at the mind and think we are the cloud. I’ve been seeing the sky for a while now. The thoughts pass through, including the horrible ones, the ones I spent decades accepting as a definition of myself. They all pass. The background does not.

There’s an exercise I like to propose: imagine your mind is a movie screen. The film changes, characters come and go, drama settles and resolves, and you watch all of this certain that you are the spectator, the one observing from outside, separate from the story. But pay attention to that spectator for a moment. Try to locate them. Where exactly are they sitting? You’ll realize they are also a character, that the seat is part of the film, that the entire cinema, the screen, the light, the dark, the sound, is happening inside the same field you call yourself.

I look at that field and see what was here all along: the exact moment I’m in, without the layer of mental commentary that for decades covered everything I saw. And even when a bad thought arises, it passes through the field without altering the field. The screen doesn’t hold the scenes.

Before the next thought, everything was already here.

“Yeah, well, you know, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.”

The Dude— The Big Lebowski

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I am often struck by the shortsightedness of some people when it comes to their own lives, whether successful or unsuccessful by the standards contemporary societies insist on valuing. I am referring to the arrogance of those who proclaim, for anyone willing to listen, that they are entirely self-made, that success is the exclusive result of their own effort and dedication.

The opposite reasoning circulates with equal force: all the bad luck accumulated by those who were not fortunate enough to be born into privilege is blamed on the world or on others. Circumstances shape everyone, some with more advantages, others with fewer, and rarely does anyone stop to look at this directly.

The other day, I watched a video about meritocracy that dismantled the notion that everyone has the same twenty-four hours and that this alone explains why some succeed and others do not. What nonsense to believe that. It portrayed an obstacle race where some participants began several meters ahead, with fewer barriers to overcome. The arrogance of certain successful people - watch a few videos of Silicon Valley tech bros and you will see what I mean - borders on absurdity.

Think of Elon Musk, who likes to present himself as the genius who built everything from nothing. What rarely appears in the narrative is that he grew up in a wealthy family in South Africa, that his father owned an emerald mine, and that he arrived in the United States with enough money to study and take risks. Talent exists, no doubt. The springboard existed too, and it was made of gold.

No one accomplishes anything entirely alone. We are born dependent on care for years, far longer than most species. A human child takes nearly two decades to achieve any real autonomy and, even then, depends on an invisible network of support: public or private schools, safe or unsafe neighborhoods, access to healthcare, nutrition, affection. Some arrive in the world already carrying every possible disadvantage, while others avoid most of them without even noticing. The lottery happens before birth, when we emerge in a particular country, family, or postal code.

The video I mentioned, which has circulated for years and which you can test for yourself, captures this brutally. You place several people at a starting line and begin asking questions. Did your parents go to college? Take two steps forward. Did you never have to worry about your next meal as a child? Two steps forward. Did you grow up with both parents present? Two steps forward. Did you have access to tutoring, academic support, internet at home? Two steps forward. By the time the race begins, some are already near the finish line, and yet those left behind are still told the problem is a lack of effort.

This has a name: privilege. Privilege is not an insult; it is simply the honest description of an advantage you did not ask for and likely did not choose. Being born in Brazil like I am, is already a privilege compared to being born in Yemen or the Central African Republic, between Cameroon and South Sudan, where life expectancy barely surpasses fifty-five years and war, drought, and famine are not distant headlines but everyday reality. Being born in São Paulo is already a privilege compared to being born in certain regions of Maranhão, in the northside, where infant mortality still carries numbers that should shame any government.

If you have read this far, you are already among the privileged. You are reading this text on the screen of a phone, tablet, or computer, with enough time to reflect on philosophy and meritocracy - which alone places you in a relatively small fraction of humanity. According to data from the World Bank, hundreds of millions of people still live in extreme poverty, and billions remain below higher-income thresholds. We are not in Gaza, in Ukraine, or in some forgotten country where children die from diseases we eliminated decades ago with a simple vaccine.

Compassion here carries weight: it is the capacity to feel with another person without having lived the same experience, the recognition that if you had been born in the wrong place, to the wrong parents, in the wrong country, you would be entirely different. With that comes gratitude, which is something altogether different from guilt or pity.

Gratitude is an act of lucidity, seeing clearly what you received that was never guaranteed. It is not the performative gratitude of motivational posts.

It is the silence of someone who looks at their own life and recognizes the extent of what was given before any personal effort ever began.

But there is a deeper layer still, and it emerges when you take the question seriously: if circumstances shape us all, if the language in which you think came from outside you, if the values you carry were deposited in you before you had any voice in the matter, if the way you process risk, ambition, and affection was molded by forces preceding any conscious choice, then where, exactly, does the “I” that claims merit begin?

When you sit with this question sincerely, without rushing to answer, what you find is continuity rather than a clear border between yourself and what formed you. What you call “your” life carries what the world was before you existed: your parents’ choices, historical accidents, geography, the body you received without asking. The separation between you and your circumstances is real enough to function in daily life and subtle enough to dissolve under close examination.

Gratitude, seen from this angle, takes on another dimension. You realize that what you call “your” life was never entirely yours, that you are — to some degree the ego always resists admitting — an expression of the whole that composed you. Compassion for others ceases to be virtue or moral effort and becomes direct recognition: what separates you from someone born with less is thinner than the narrative of individual merit can sustain. And it never will.

You and the circumstances that shaped you were never separate enough for the credit to belong only to you.

“Yeah, well, you know, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.”

The Dude

Recently, some of the questions people are asking AI have come into focus, in growing volumes, and they are worth noting for what they reveal about an ongoing absence we still can’t quite explain: “Why do I feel empty?” Alongside it come others of similar weight: “How do I know if someone loves me?”, “How do I make friends as an adult?”, “How do I become the person I want to be?” These are questions that, not long ago, circulated among friends, in letters, in therapy sessions, or in the quiet of the night with someone trusted. Now they arrive in a text box. And the box responds, available at three in the morning, without judgment and without delay.

I understand the appeal. There is a certain comfort, genuine, in receiving an answer that sounds reasonable for something that hurts. The response that comes from outside with such fluency that it resembles empathy and understanding touches the one who asks, and it is worth observing what that is. A real convenience.

Decades ago, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi documented what most people feel but few can articulate: the quality of subjective experience depends on the degree to which attention is genuinely invested in what one is doing. When attention is fully present, time disappears and effort feels effortless. The flow state. When it jumps from stimulus to stimulus without ever truly landing, the experience diminishes. The person is there, but lives with the persistent sense that life is happening somewhere else.

What screens have done over the past fifteen years, and what AI is now accelerating, is the industrialization of that fragmentation. Instant response trains attention to expect immediate gratification and to avoid the discomfort that precedes any real understanding, the discomfort of not knowing yet, the suspension of meaning before it appears. This interval, which is precisely where original thought lives, has been systematically eliminated as if it were a bug, when it may be the most essential function of the conscious mind.

“Why do I feel empty?” is a question that requires, to be answered with any honesty, that the one asking remain with the emptiness long enough to perceive what it contains. AI cannot do that.

It can describe emptiness with clinical precision and offer well-researched perspectives, but it cannot create the silence necessary for the answer to arise from within. The answer about one’s own emptiness only exists from within, because this is structurally true: no one has access to your subjective experience except you.

The concrete risk, verifiable in the behavior of anyone willing to observe honestly, is that delegation becomes a habit before it is even recognized as delegation. A person begins by asking for dinner recipes and ends by asking for guidance on what to feel in difficult situations. The capacity to tolerate one’s own question without an immediate answer narrows, until asking inward feels slower and less reliable than asking outward. The mind learns that the answer is in the text box. And stops looking where the answer actually lives.

Sam Altman, Open AI CEO, has overtly said that he sees a future in which intelligence will be distributed as a public service, metered and accessible by subscription. He may be right about the business model, but there is a serious ambiguity in the use of the word intelligence there, because intelligence in the sense that matters for a life lived with presence, the ability to perceive what is happening in me now and to distinguish what I truly want from what I have been conditioned to want, that kind of intelligence is not something you subscribe to on a “Pro” plan.

What is at stake here, without dramatizing it, is the muscle of presence, which strengthens with use and atrophies when it is not engaged, exactly like any other muscle. Each time attention truly lands on something difficult and remains there without escaping to the next stimulus, something takes shape. Each time a difficult question receives a quick external answer before it can mature internally, something dissolves. The sum of these micro-choices over time is the quality of the relationship a person has with themselves.

The answer to one’s own emptiness only exists where the question hurts.

“Yeah, well, you know, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.”

— The Dude

Thank you for reading The Psychonaut!

No author owns what they write, only translates the silence that precedes it. Writing became the way I found to investigate what we are when the mind quiets. Each text emerges from this silent movement of consciousness trying to recognize itself in form. Sometimes words appear, other times only the space between them. I don’t write to explain anything, I write to remember. Fiction, science, and the everyday are just pretexts. What speaks behind it is the same silence that reads.

The mind has a lot to say.

Almost nothing matters.

A few years ago, I learned a trick that I’ve practiced ever since: treating thoughts as if they were irrelevant. I’m talking about those ruminations about a past that no longer exists, chewing over negative situations or regrets. Or the fertile imagination projected into the future, which also doesn’t exist. Completely useless.

I don’t always manage to apply this—only when I’m attentive and focused. But when it happens, whatever was invading the mind simply passes, light and fleeting, not deserving the weight we give it, because it truly has none.

The key is not believing the thought. Not getting carried away by it into a chain of little stories and scenes that keep repeating in the head—stories we tell ourselves with surprising conviction.

The problem is that we’ve always confused thoughts—the mind, that little inner voice, usually critical—with who we are. And we’re certain of it, as if it were an obvious, unquestionable fact. That certainty began forming early on, in early childhood, around the age of two, when any baby starts learning to speak and name things. In naming, we become the subject, and everything around becomes the object. That separation is our prison. Because of it, we spend our entire lives trying to fix and differentiate ourselves, living in a permanent state of comparison, usually with a less-than-favorable evaluation of ourselves in relation to what we think we should be—a finish line we’ve invented based on what we were “trained” to pursue, a success that exists nowhere. Meanwhile, life is happening in every instant, and in the next, I may no longer be here. That part we always sweep under the rug…

This mental blah-blah-blah has a curious trait: it is extremely repetitive and, most of the time, absolutely useless. The same themes, the same characters, the same scenes on loop, with small variations that lead nowhere.

The noise is there, constant, and we get so used to it that we begin to mistake the noise for our own voice—for who we are.

We don’t need to force the mind into silence. Anyone who’s tried knows it works more or less like trying not to think of a pink elephant. The more you try, the more it appears. What truly changes is the relationship with thought: noticing that it’s passing, without boarding it. Observing without following. This gesture, which seems simple and is sometimes the hardest thing in the world, creates a space between the thought and the one who perceives it. In that space lies presence.

The common mistake is to think that presence and mindfulness require meditation, posture, a mat, incense, an app, or at least half an hour with no commitments. Nonsense. Presence can happen while you wash dishes, listen to someone speak, wait for the elevator, or drive along a stretch of road you know by heart. In any of these moments, there is the possibility of noticing what is here, now, without the overlay of mental narrative. The soap foaming in the palm of your hand. The tone of the voice of the person in front of you. The light coming through the window in a way that will never repeat exactly the same again. Details that, for most of us, go unnoticed. I’ve been using contemplative photography to see the details that get lost in the automatism of everyday life. I’ll speak more about that soon.

The difference between being present and being on autopilot is the difference between living what is happening and internally processing something that has already happened or has yet to happen. A study conducted by Killingsworth and Gilbert at Harvard revealed that we spend, on average, 50% of our time with the mind wandering, disconnected from what is actually in front of us. Half of life, essentially, spent in conversations with an imaginary interlocutor about scenes that no longer exist or don’t yet exist.

If our attention settles on what is here, even for a few seconds, something shifts. The ruminating thought loses strength because attention has moved elsewhere—to the real, to the concrete, to what is actually happening.

Try it now, without any special intention. Choose anything concrete around you: a sound, the contact of your feet on the ground, the temperature of the air entering your nose, the weight of your body on the chair, the brushing of fabric against your skin. Stay there for a few seconds. The mind will comment, will recall urgent things, will have an opinion about what you’re doing. Thank the dedication of that machine. That which perceives all of this was already here before the thought.

Thought passes. That which observes remains.

“Yeah, well, you know, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.”

— The Big Lebowski

You can find my other essays translated to English, here:

The Psychonaut

The launch of Artemis II brought back the emotion of that day, July 21, 1969, when I was seven years old. Now, after a long time, the first crewed flight to orbit the Moon is on. The ten-day mission will carry four astronauts, testing life support systems, navigation, and manual piloting capabilities before returning to Earth. They won’t land yet, but it’s a beginning. Last February marks 53 years since we last set foot on that place. From what we’re told, we will do so again next year, with Artemis III.

I grew up in a time of few conflicts, or at least that’s how it seemed.

I was born in 1962, and in the 1980s I started working. I was a witness to the greatest change humanity has undergone within my memory. The first had been at age seven, as I mentioned above.

The second, which struck us all, was September 11, 2001. Of course, before that I had already been affected by the Vietnam War, by Bosnia, by earthquakes, floods, and natural tragedies that swept the planet, but all of that carried a certain distance. September 11 was different. It was the first open fracture of the 21st century, something the generation before mine could scarcely have imagined. And more recently, the pandemic.

My point here is simple. Throughout history, countless tragedies and conflicts have shaped our lives, and without our noticing, they have offered us clues about our true nature. At some point, I began to consider that a different way was possible. Life could not be reduced to this.

Still a teenager, I began searching for answers. I joined study groups, circles of inquiry; I explored traditions such as Zen, Tao, Gurdjieff’s Fourth Way; I drew close to Hawaiian shamanism and the indigenous peoples of North America. I read, studied, practiced, went deeper - without ever forming a definitive bond with any of these lineages. I always knew, in a quiet place within me, that this was something no one could do for me. I learned, questioned, inquired, practiced. More than forty years of it. Until one day, something clicked.

What fell away was the illusion of separation. The clear, effortless perception that there had never been a “self” separate from everything else. The Consciousness that perceives these words, that hears the noise from the street, that feels the weight of the body in the chair — that Consciousness is not inside me, I am inside it. It has no address, no edges, it belongs to no one, because it is the very field in which everything appears, including the sensation of being someone.

The curious thing is that contemporary science is arriving at exactly this place, from the outside in. Donald Hoffman, cognitive scientist at MIT and professor at the University of California, spent decades demonstrating that our senses did not evolve to perceive reality - they evolved to keep us alive. What we see is not the world; it is a useful interface. The brain does not generate Consciousness; it filters it, reduces it, translates it into an operational version that allows us to cross the street without being run over.

Bernardo Kastrup a Brazilian-born Dutch philosopher and computer scientist who worked at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, takes this further with a lucidity that unsettles the academic establishment: matter does not produce Consciousness, Consciousness is what manifests as matter. The physical world is the outside of an universal mental process. Each of us is a temporary whirlpool in a river with no banks.

Does it sound like Eastern philosophy? Agreed. Except now it comes with equations, peer-reviewed articles, and considerable discomfort for those who still believe the brain manufactures the mind the way the pancreas manufactures insulin.

Every tradition I studied pointed toward this, each in its own language, and it took me decades to notice the obvious: there was never any distance between me and what I was seeking. The search itself was the only obstacle.

This perception, when it matures on a collective scale, will be the next and definitive shift in the human condition. Greater than the moon, greater than any war. The recognition that separation never existed. If it happens.

Today, I use the mind the way one uses a tool: analytically, on demand, when practical matters arise and call for some action. Like downloads. Beyond that, the mode is idle, available, with full attention on the present moment, on what surrounds me, registering each instant, each experience, grateful to be here. No gratitude journal, no meditation as a technique for quieting a mind that has already grown quiet on its own, because when the mind realizes that only what is here exists, it quiets itself.

Everything else is a projection: an idealized future that does not exist, or an imprecise memory insisting on generating sadness, anger, resentment. Imagination hijacks attention toward places that are not real.

Irrelevant.

Try, for even a short while, treating any thought as irrelevant, unimportant. See what happens, then tell me.

Who became sad? Who became angry? The ego. The mind.

Take one step back and observe this body/mind “unit” from a perspective that does not belong to it. Something is there, watching the thoughts and feelings that spring from those projections, from that imagination, from that always imprecise memory.

That something is you.

- The Big Lebowski

I heard a Zen story the other day that compelled me to write this essay. It was about a monk who decided to retreat to a cave in China, where he would live out the rest of his days. He was an artist, and for years his only activity, besides meditation, was painting a tiger on one of the cave walls. The work was so meticulous, so perfect, that when he finally completed it and stood before it in contemplation, he felt fear.

The story made me reflect on how, sometimes, we create our own illusions, our own expectations — and how they can frighten us when they become real, or seem to.

Cut to today. After many years, I felt fear again. Not the fear of a painted tiger, but the fear that rises when we confront the fragility of life, the wearing down of the body, the relentless passage of time.

I have always enjoyed enviable health. In nearly 64 years, very few medical episodes have marked my path. The most serious, if I can even call it that, was surgery to remove my gallbladder — laparoscopic, three small holes in the abdomen. I walked in and out of the hospital the same day, as if nothing had happened.

Over the years, a bout of shingles hit me shortly after my father’s death. Perhaps that explains it: the low immunity born of my tendency to relativize pain and suffering, to avoid confronting them head-on. I remember a phrase my father used to say: “I don’t want a wake.” At the time, I clung to that idea as a way to accelerate grief and minimize my own suffering. But the bill arrived months later, when the shingles appeared. What resists, persists — as some barroom philosopher once said.

After that, a few bouts of the flu, one possible Covid (I’m not certain — the test was inconclusive), and nothing more. Until then, my health seemed an impregnable fortress. But this week, visiting the ophthalmologist, I received the news that I will soon need cataract surgery. My mother, who turned 90 on February 10th, never needed glasses — only recently, for reading. I thought I had inherited her luck in that regard. But the reality is that for some time now I have been noticing difficulty reading.

I write my texts originally on a typewriter, then transfer them to a digital file, which I edit on the computer. Each time I go through this process, the sharpness of the letters seems to slip away — as if all those characters were slowly fusing into one another.

The fear that came over me is not about the surgery itself. From what people tell me, it is a nearly routine procedure these days.

My struggle is with accepting the natural deterioration of the body, the gradual diminishment of vitality and physical strength. Mentally, I feel I still have agility — that my mind holds its own against time. But the body is not so forgiving. It signals, little by little, that the flow of life cannot be ignored. And that is where fear tries to settle in: in the acceptance that other signals will come, that aging is an inexorable process.

Every day I practice trying not to paint the tiger. That is, not to build unrealistic expectations, not to imagine ideal scenarios and then cling to them as if they were the only truth. Everyone speaks of hope — that things will unfold in a way that gives us enough time to avoid despair. But hope, that troublesome little word, which is nothing more than fear in disguise, is merely the other side of the same illusory coin. Whoever lives without hope also lives without fear.

The Danish writer Isak Dinesen has a crystalline phrase: the secret lies in dealing with the situation without hope and without despair. Accepting what life presents, because at bottom there is no alternative. We are not absolute agents of our destiny, but part of a greater Consciousness — which sages and philosophers across millennia have held to be perfect in its imperfection.

And so I demand of myself that I stop painting tigers. Not to create illusions that, in the end, only exist to frighten me. Life is what it is, and fear, however much it tries to disguise itself as hope or despair, is simply a sign that we are alive — that we still care, that we are still here, facing the natural flow of things.

And so I go on, trying not to paint tigers, but no longer afraid to face the ones already there, ready to remind me to pay attention to what is real: the beauty of being alive now, in this very (and only) moment.

There is a division that precedes all others. It predates politics, religion, economics, and conflict between nations or neighbors. A separation so fundamental that we carry it as if it were the very structure of reality, believing that the world has always been this way and that there is no other way to exist. It is the inevitable and atavistic division between subject and object, between the “I” that observes and the “world” that is observed, between what is inside and what is outside. Everything we call a human problem, when you dig deep enough, has its roots in this misconception.

A young child is not born with this division already in place. Research in developmental psychology suggests this, but anyone who has ever sat in silence with a baby just a few months old knows it intuitively: the one who looks has not yet completely separated the act of looking from the object being looked at. The world and the being who perceives the world still share a permeability, a continuity that has not yet been severed by language and concept. Then the knife comes in. Gradually, the process of socialization, of naming things, of identity construction, erects a kind of membrane between the “self” and the rest. When this membrane is established, the problem begins, because a separated subject is a fearful subject.

Fear is the logical and inevitable consequence of separation. If there is an isolated “self,” delimited and with defined boundaries, then that self can be threatened, diminished, destroyed. It must defend itself, expand, accumulate, and compare itself to others. It must win, or at least not lose. Competition is not a human trait; it is arithmetic: where there are two separate entities, a hierarchy is possible, and where a hierarchy is possible, there is anxiety.

Look closely enough at any conflict, and you will find this mechanism at work. War between countries is the amplified version of what happens between two people in an argument, which is the amplified version of what happens within a single mind when it resists what is happening. The structure is always the same: an “I” that perceives itself as separate and threatened, reacting to preserve its boundary. The content and scale change, but the mechanism is identical. Imperialism, racism, misogyny, tribalism of every kind - all of these are technologies of separation, ways of making the boundary between the “self” and the “other” sharper and more justified, and therefore more permanent.

What non-duality observes (and this is evident in Vedanta, Buddhism, Taoism, Zen, certain interpretations of Christian and Islamic mysticism, and philosophy) is the realization that this separation is a construct, not a discovery; curiously, this understanding is also beginning to emerge in quantum physics and the cognitive sciences. The subject did not find itself as something distinct from the world. The subject was fabricated, slowly, by layers of thought, language, and repeated experience, until the fabrication seemed as solid as the furniture in the room. Bernardo Kastrup 1 describes individual consciousness as a whirlpool in a river: it has form, it has its own movement, it can be identified and named, but there is no moment when it ceased to be water. The separation is functional, not ontological. Useful for navigating the world, catastrophic when taken as absolute truth.

That is precisely where the misconception lies. It is not the existence of an individual perspective, a localized point of view, or a particular subjective experience that is real (and worth living to the fullest). The misconception lies precisely in believing that this perspective is an independent entity, a “self” that exists on its own, separate from the consciousness that permeates it and the world that constitutes it. When this happens, the whirlpool forgets it is a river and wastes all its energy trying to sustain itself, trying to grow, trying not to dissolve, in a struggle that is, by definition, endless.

Most human suffering has this texture. Chronic anxiety, the feeling of inadequacy, the compulsion for external validation, the difficulty of being present without the mind constructing protective narratives, the addiction to busyness (ah, the glamour of saying “I’m so busy”...) to avoid feeling the terrifying emptiness—all of this is the experience of a person who believes they are separate and needs to sustain themselves within that separation. The problem lies in the structure that organizes each person’s specific contents, that imaginary center around which everything orbits and which, when you look directly at it, has the consistency of a shadow.

The most direct question there is, the one that non-dual traditions ask in different ways, is simply: who is this “I”? Or what is this “I”? These are not abstract philosophical questions; it is a real investigative technique, performed now, in this very moment. When you look for the observer, what do you find? There are thoughts, sensations, perceptions, images, sounds, the weight of the body on the chair, the breath that continues on its own. But the “I” that should be coordinating all of this, the central subject that grammar presupposes in every sentence, that one, when you look directly at it, slips away, dissolves, always one step behind the gaze. The observer and the observed have never been as separate as everyday experience suggests.

I write about this here on The Psychonaut because I believe, with the conviction that comes from repeated observation, that this recognition is the only thing that changes anything at its root. Political reforms, technological advances, cultural changes, all of these have value, but nothing will reach the source as long as the separate subject continues to operate as an unquestionable premise. The ecological crisis is the relationship of the subject to nature treated as an object of use. The political crisis is the relationship between subjects who recognize no shared substance. The mental health crisis is the cost of maintaining a separate identity in a world that, at no fundamental level, sustains that separation. I am not proposing dissolution, passivity, or indifference to the world. I am not a nihilist. I am merely pointing out that there is a way of existing in which the individual perspective remains alive and functional, but the existential terror that comes from absolute separation begins to lose its power.

When the whirlpool remembers that it is a river, it does not stop spinning; it continues to move, continues to have form, continues to be identifiable. It just stops fighting against the water. The subject is the problem that resolves itself when you stop looking for someone to solve it.

“Yeah, well, you know, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.” - The Big Lebowski

Between what happens and what we say about what happens, there is a brief, almost invisible interval. That is where the machine usually takes command. This essay lives in that interval.

Beyond the familiar tendency to organize and live our lives around the prevention of discomfort and the construction of zones of safety — in search of lasting comfort — there is a subtle movement shaping how we think, speak, and explain ourselves. It appears in everyday language, in the almost automatic structuring of sentences, in a short and socially neutral word that rarely attracts attention. This three-letter word is “but.” When it appears, something in us contracts. Try to notice.

“But” works like a reflex, an automatic reaction of what Gurdjieff called the machine. The machine comments, adjusts, reorganizes. It operates through repetition, memory, and conditioning, sustaining the continuity of the character with remarkable efficiency. “But” is a central gear in this functioning, always ready to maintain internal coherence while preserving the feeling of “logic and clarity,” things our mind/ego appreciates.

When I say, for example, “I’m excited about next year, but…,” the experience has already been interrupted. It appeared whole for a moment and was then reorganized to fit a narrative familiar to us.

This becomes evident in ordinary situations. Someone close says something that touches a sensitive point — simple, direct, without accusation. The body reacts before the next sentence exists. There is a slight tightening, a short silence, a moment in which everything is still open. Soon after, the “but” appears. The response comes polite, articulated, apparently conscious. The conversation continues; both remain seated at the same table, and yet something has moved away. There was no conflict, only an adjustment — the encounter replaced by “management.”

No one argued, no one raised their voice, no one openly disagreed. From a social and psychological point of view, everything went well. The conversation remained civilized, mature, functional. That is precisely why the gesture goes unnoticed.

The moment “but” enters, listening ceases to be whole and becomes strategic. The response no longer arises from the impact of what was heard, but from the need to maintain balance, image, emotional control, narrative coherence. The other is still physically present, yet no longer truly met — they are being managed. What occurred was an internal adjustment.

This is why something in us withdraws even without conflict. Encounters ask for risk, silence, presence without editing. Management asks for efficiency, adjustment, continuity. When one enters, the other leaves.

The gesture repeats in even smaller scenes. A fatigue appears in the middle of the day. The body asks for a pause. Thought recognizes it for a second and immediately adds a “but not now,” “but just a little longer,” or something similar. Nothing dramatic happens. The day continues functioning and so does the body, yet something has again been placed in parentheses by habit. The machine knows how to keep going.

This movement shifts our attention toward something recognized, touched, perceived — and quickly transferred to a more familiar, manageable territory. The sentence advances, reasoning proceeds, the conversation continues, while the living point dissolves somewhere within the dialogue. “But” restores a comfortable distance, sufficient so nothing has to be fully met.

At the base of this functioning, of this “logic,” lies a silent assumption, rarely examined: that there is a center in charge of administering experience. A “self” located somewhere, organizing what appears, deciding intensities and impacts, regulating duration and sequence. From this assumption, life becomes a process to be managed. In the nondual view, this separation appears as a perceptual habit sustained mainly by language and memory — I write this not as a claim, but from experience.

“But” sustains this habit. It always appears after the event, as a late attempt at reorganization. The experience has already passed through. “But” arrives to rearrange the scene, soften impacts, redistribute meaning — a later commentary trying to occupy the original position.

When this assumption of centrality and separation relaxes through some direct, lived clarity and understanding, the need for this kind of intervention diminishes. Language no longer requires conscious correction. The gesture loses strength for lack of function. What becomes evident is inclusion, a natural consequence of a less fragmented perception.

Relationships could then carry less accumulated tension, conflicts would stop gaining additional layers of explanation, decisions would no longer require prolonged internal debate for legitimacy. Life would continue with its usual challenges, and the automatic resistance to them would lose intensity. Much of the weight is not in what happens, but in the constant attempt to reorganize what happens so it aligns with a previously desired image — unconsciously, or consciously too.

This does not mean we must monitor our words or replace linguistic constructions, because that would only shift the same mechanism to another level. The important point is to notice the reflex when it occurs, recognize the gesture in action, and not interfere. The machine continues operating, as it always has. What needs to dissolve is the belief that it occupies the center.

Gratitude has become too light a word for the weight of the life we live. Repeated, decorated, performed, it circulates easily precisely because it no longer requires presence nor any confrontation with the contingency of being here. Perhaps for that reason it needs to be returned to the only place where it still makes sense — outside discourse, outside the display window, close to what we prefer to avoid. This essay does not propose another gesture nor an exercise to be practiced. It points to the moment in which gratitude stops being language and becomes evidence, when attention touches the present with the same lucidity that death tends to impose.

The word gratitude feels tired, worn out from being exhibited, repeated, embellished, diluted into friendly versions that demand neither presence nor real contact with the experience of being alive. It appears as an email signature, a photo caption, the automatic closing of a conversation, sometimes accompanied by a namastê, a “gratitude-and-light,” a rehearsed smile that seems to fulfill a social function more than express something actually lived. In this format, gratitude has become a shop-window object, part of the catalog of boutique spirituality — the kind that fits neatly in a profile bio, does not embarrass, does not unsettle, does not come close to the discomfort that sustains life as it is.

There is nothing wrong with the word itself, nor with the act of thanking. The wear begins when the word turns into mechanical habit, into surface language, a kind of varnish covering hurry, privilege, and distraction. Gratitude is talked about a lot, but little is lived from it. The word circulates easily precisely because it asks for nothing beyond agreement; it does not summon attention nor alter how time is occupied or how we look at another person.

It was from this long-standing unease that, one day while listening to an audio by Sam Harris, a question appeared almost inevitably, without effort and without the intention of a quick answer: what could gratitude possibly have to do with death?

He spoke of gratitude as a minimal, almost obvious attitude in the face of the inequality and suffering of so many of our fellow human beings. The number is too large to be comfortable. More than a billion people in the world right now, while this text is being read, are going through extreme situations — wars they did not choose, forced displacement, hunger, precarious access to water and sanitation, serious illness, the absence of a roof, of safety, of predictability. It is not a distant or abstract scenario. It is difficult to imagine that, if the exchange were possible, if that billion could choose to be exactly where you are at this moment, reading these lines, the choice would not be made without a moment’s hesitation.

The sequence seems too obvious to question: to be born, grow up, work, die. Death remains outside the daily frame, treated as a distant event, inconvenient and impolite to remember amid so much toxic positivity. Perhaps for that very reason, gratitude has become so light, so ornamental.

Death, seen up close, without romanticizing and without performative fear, has a curious effect. It reorganizes perception, reminding us directly that nothing here is guaranteed, that continuity is a comfortable assumption but not a fact of reality. At any moment we may no longer be here — or those we love may not. Understand this not as a threat, but as a simple fact of living. When this is truly seen and felt, not merely thought, something changes in the way the present is experienced.

If it were possible to return after death to this exact moment — to this body, this environment, this apparently ordinary interval of the day — gratitude as a word or gesture would not need to be activated. It would be evident. The simple fact of being here, breathing, reading, looking around, would already be more than enough. Look now at what is happening as you read: the place, the body supported, the surrounding sounds, the time available to read these lines. There is nothing special about it, and precisely for that reason everything is special.

The deepest gratitude does not arise from lists, journals, reminders, or repeated affirmations in the morning or before sleep. It happens when attention remains in the present without ruminating about the past or anticipating an imagined future. When the present is seen as the only possible place of experience, without distraction and without additional narrative, thanking ceases to be an obligation, a moral or spiritual posture, and becomes a silent recognition of our own human condition.

When I look at what I am doing now, who I am now, where I am now, the only honest response that appears does not take the form of a speech. It feels more like an inner nod, a simple clarity. I could be in Gaza, in Ukraine, in Iran, in Africa, in Minnesota.

And you could too.

I rewatched Arrival (Denis Villeneuve, 2016) almost ten years later, and the experience unfolded in a completely different way. There was no surprise in the story — the film was the same, even though some might say that its interpretation changes over time. But no, this time it was I who had changed. And profoundly so. Especially in the way I felt what the film proposes.

My attention, as I revisited the story, was no longer concentrated in that usual point behind the eyes, where we tend to organize life as if someone were in there running the show. The gaze felt more diffuse, lower, supported by the whole body, with the breath accompanying the images. The film was not simply being watched; it was resonating in a place that had now become available.

Perhaps that is why Arrival awakens an emotion so difficult for me to explain (it is one of my three favorite movies ever) and, at the same time, so easy to recognize. The emotion does not arise from the narrative, the suspense, or attachment to the characters. It emerges before the story takes shape — a direct, almost physical recognition of something that was already there. The remarkable director Denis Villeneuve does not force understanding, does not lead the viewer by the hand, does not resolve anything. He creates a space in which certain mental structures begin to relax on their own, especially the one that sustains our relationship with time and language.

What I saw and felt this time

In the film, language ceases to be merely an instrument for exchanging information and begins to reveal its deeper role: organizing experience, giving continuity to memory, sustaining the sense of identity and our understanding of the world. The reference to the “Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis,” or linguistic relativity, is a fundamental point in the film’s argument.

As for time, when seen from this perspective, it appears as a functional arrangement — useful for operating in the world — that notion of line and continuity. Yet it is insufficient to explain what is alive now. The emotional impact comes from this subtle shift, when perception recognizes that life does not happen in sequence; it was narrated that way so the character could remain coherent.

This recognition does not usually appear as a clear idea. It arrives more like a feeling — a gentle pressure in the chest, a pause in the inner hurry, a kind of emotion without a defined object. It is the same quality of presence that shows up when we listen to instrumental music, watch someone sleeping deeply, or follow a sunset without the need to comment on it or post it on Instagram. Arrival sustains this state through long silences and cinematography that favors space and interval, refusing to over-explain. The gaze slows down and, with it, thought loses the impulse to step forward with explanations and interpretations.

Rewatching the film, it became difficult to ignore the contrast between this silent field and the kinds of issues that usually capture us as a humanity: fear of the other, struggles for control, urgency to predict scenarios, incessant attempts to secure safety in a territory that has never offered guarantees.

While these concerns repeat themselves, the film points to something much simpler and, for that very reason, rarely considered — the suggestion that Consciousness is not located inside the body nor confined to the mind, created by neural activations. It is the wider field in which bodies, minds, stories, and expectations appear and disappear, without effort and without a fixed center.

What makes Arrival so moving is that it does not soften this realization, nor does it protect the identity we believe ourselves to be. The experience of the linguist portrayed by Amy Adams makes it clear that understanding time does not eliminate pain, that seeing farther does not prevent loss, that loving means welcoming the entire experience with everything it carries — and it carries a lot. The emotional weight arises precisely at this point, when the fantasy of control loses its support and life presents itself as it is, whole, with no possible editing. Remaining there requires more honesty than strength.

It is deeply human to notice that the Consciousness watching the film is of the same nature as the Consciousness sustaining every form that appears on the screen — whether the characters, the two heptapod beings (Abbott and Costello 😉), or the silence between one scene and another. When this perception touches, even briefly, experience is no longer organized in terms of inside and/or outside. The film is not in front of someone on a screen; it happens in the same field where thoughts, sensations, and emotions arise.

Perhaps Arrival provokes so much reflection — and even some discomfort — because, as it shifts our relationship with time, language, and identity, something very intimate begins to lose its contours. This does not happen abruptly or spectacularly, but with the naturalness of something that has always sustained experience and that, for a moment, ceases to be taken as a character.

The question I asked myself and repeat here

In that silent moment that remains after the credits, when there is no longer a story to follow nor meaning to interpret, what exactly continues looking?

The time we live in exposes the limits of a perception centered on a separate “self,” and conflicts, polarization, excessive consumption, and inequality appear as expressions of the same basic confusion about who looks, who decides, and from where life is being conducted.

Observe a typical corporate meeting. Artificial personalities sit around a table, each defending imaginary territories, protecting constructed egos, performing importance for other performers. Everyone knows that the meeting could be an email, that the decisions are irrelevant, that the project will eventually be sidelined by the hype of the moment. But the ritual continues because each separate "I" needs to justify its individual existence.

Corporate architecture - glass towers, marble lobbies, closed offices - physically materialises our belief in separation. Each cubicle is a cell in the prison we have built by believing that we are isolated fragments fighting for survival. Reports, meetings, positions, organisational charts, all this keeps alive the fiction that we are these fragments, when in reality we express the same Consciousness.

Today's tiredness doesn't come from physical effort, but from sustaining artificial identities. It's exhausting to live ten or twelve hours a day as if your "professional self" were real, as if tasks had intrinsic meaning, as if you had to defend a territory that never existed.

Companies are going through a process similar to the secularisation of religions: we've abandoned faith in rituals, but we're still attached to the beliefs that sustained them. We no longer believe that meetings and reports matter, but we still insist that we are isolated individuals competing for survival.

As David Graeber observed in his book "Bullshit Jobs", we have evolved into entire ecosystems of mutual absurdity. But the root of this pathology doesn't lie in economic structures - it lies in the fundamental belief that we are beings separate from each other and from reality.

Some are beginning to see this. They are the corporate heretics, those who fulfil their roles without being confused with them, who use the system's resources to create something genuine and who recognise colleagues not as rivals, but as expressions of the same Consciousness. Few, very few still, but they are starting to appear.

These pioneers have discovered that when you stop defending a separate "I", the stage work becomes less exhausting. No more energy is wasted maintaining imaginary borders or protecting territories that were never real.When this realisation sets in, the theatre loses momentum, because no more energy is spent protecting imaginary borders.

All attempts to reform the system while maintaining the premise of separation are doomed. Benefits, home office, purpose speeches - everything is still based on the same illusion: that we are isolated individuals who need to be motivated and managed.

NO STAGING IN THE THEATRE OF WORK

The only real transformation begins when we see that we are not people competing, but a single Consciousness experiencing itself in different forms.

At that moment, competition loses its meaning, hierarchy becomes absurd and collaboration happens effortlessly. Companies made up of people who experience this clarity wouldn't need sophisticated protocols, because the very basis of the dysfunction has disappeared.

Corporate theatre only exists as long as we believe in the characters. When we recognise that we are the Consciousness that plays all the roles, the staging dissolves and the work can finally stop being a meaningless burden.

ALL ATTEMPTS TO REFORM THE SYSTEM WHILE MAINTAINING THE PREMISE OF SEPARATION ARE DOOMED TO FAILURE.

Deep down, it's fear that keeps the theatre going - fear of losing power, of no longer being influential, of no longer being recognised, of being seen as irrelevant. Fear acts as the invisible cement of separation, imprisoning leaders and professionals in fragile roles that need to be defended at every turn.

While fear occupies spaces, vital energy is wasted on maintaining characters that never really existed. Seeing this mechanism clearly doesn't mean denying work or leadership, but rather freeing them from the need for masks, allowing them to be lived from another place, without the constant defence of an illusion.

The real challenge is not to lead others, but to have the courage to unmask your own fear.

Leadership is an idea, not an individual.

If I were to write about a memory—one that left a formless but persistent mark—it would not be to construct a narrative of self-knowledge or to teach anything. It would simply be to bear witness to a moment when everything that sustained my idea of reality fell apart, not in chaos or collapse, but in an enveloping silence.

There was no external scene. Nothing happened in the eyes of others. But inside, what I called “me” ceased to make sense, dissolved abruptly. The central reference disappeared. Body, identity, thought, everything was suspended, as if the backdrop had been pulled away and what remained was not emptiness, but what had always been there, but had never been noticed, sometimes, very rarely, sensed.

For a while, I tried to repeat the experience, I wanted to return to that place. I hadn't understood that there is no “returning” to what never went away. The more I sought it, the further I moved away. The search is the restlessness of the ego. Presence, when perceived, does not respond to this command.

Later on, I began to recognize a pattern. It did not come as an answer, a result, or a reward. It appeared when the structure of the “I” failed in the face of fear, exhaustion, an extreme situation, a real surrender. It was not expansion, it was dissolution, and along with it, a raw, sharp, impersonal, and precise lucidity.

It is not about being connected to the whole because there is no separation. The idea of a self here and something greater out there is just an idea, an inference. What exists is a continuous functioning of which we are a part, but which does not begin in us nor end in us. Life does not happen “for” us. Life lives through us.

Somehow, we know this, we recognize it immediately when distractions cease. It is not a memory, it is not a concept, it is not a belief. It is closer than our own body. Quieter than thought. A stable, immovable, intact background, even when everything around it moves. Imagine the bottom of the sea, which is not shaken by the current on the surface. Or the rock in the middle of the river, motionless, even when all the force of the water passes over it.

This presence does not need to be cultivated, nor does it need to be explained. It already is. What covers it is not ignorance, but the constant noise of identity, of the “I” we think we are, trying to assert itself all the time. We are not separate from the whole, but we are also not connected. We are temporary expressions of something that has no form or time. What changes is attention. When it shifts from the character to that which sustains everything, recognition happens quickly, rawly, and unquestionably.

It is quite common to confuse this with altered states or “mystical” experiences. Many people seek shortcuts, gurus, substances, practices, techniques. Some tools open space, others distort. Recreational drugs increase noise, giving a false sense of expanded consciousness. It is not. It is alteration. Earth medicines and power plants can open gaps, but what really breaks the structure is not the substance, it is the collapse of control. It is when the self loses control and something deeper takes over, not as an agent, but as the basis of everything.

Consciousness is not a state to be sought or achieved. Consciousness, with a capital C, is everything. It embraces everything. Including the feeling you get when reading these words. From somewhere, where, in theory, your attention resides.

The word “conscious” can also refer to the simple fact of being awake, attentive. But I am not talking about that state here. I am talking about a Presence that is perceived in the surroundings. That is heard, that is felt on the skin, outside and inside. A place that is not accommodated behind the eyes or between the ears, as we imagine when thinking and directing our lives. Consciousness already IS.

Consciousness is not a special experience. It is what makes all experiences possible. It is what remains when the effort ceases and when the “I” that wants to understand, feel, evolve, disappears. What remains is not emptiness. It is what has always been here: motionless, silent, nameless. The bottom of the sea, the rock in the river. The point is simple, but uncomfortable: as long as the “I” is in charge, trying to understand, control, or lead, that other place remains inaccessible. But it is not because it is far away, but because the movement of seeking is already an obstacle.

Being present, wholly, without defense, without narrative, without expectation, is perhaps the only real gesture. And perhaps it is not even a gesture, but simply a withdrawal from excess, an emptying of effort. A cut in the flow of the self.

When the “you” ceases to occupy the center, what emerges is not a grandiose vision. It is the obvious that has always been here, but that the ego does not allow us to see.

“Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man.”

―Jeff Lebowski (The Dude)

I wake up again with a heavy feeling in my chest. I'm not sure what time it is or where I am. It's like that when I wake up abruptly, as if a dream had turned into a nightmare in the blink of an eye. I grope around, looking for the time on my cell phone: 3am.

I lay my head back on the pillow and fragments of the dream begin to pop up, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that is never complete. Once again I find myself barefoot, vulnerable, walking through unknown terrain, aimless and unprotected. Scenes that have been repeated over the last few months, as if my mind were trying to tell me something that I still can't decipher. But I don't look for interpretations and I don't try to decode the symbols. I've never given much thought to dreams anyway and I'm not going to start today.

As the involuntary protagonist of these dreams, I dive in and live the scenes without realising that I'm suspended in another dimension. During the dream, the illusion is just as real as the reality I'm experiencing now. Waking up brings relief, but also a peculiar unease: where does the dream end and reality begin? In the first few moments after opening my eyes, everything seems to be part of a single experience. There's no clear distinction between what was a dream and what was waking up. Gradually, the scenery around me reveals itself: the room, the bed, the silence of the early morning. And then I localise myself, as if I were once again inhabiting a body that had been forgotten.

But then I start another dream - that of waking Consciousness. In it, and because of my confused and ethereal awakening, I clearly realise that there is no separation between me and my surroundings. The external world and the internal world are not two, but one. I sail peacefully in this expansive Presence that embraces everything, that permeates every atom, every thought, every breath. In this state, the pressure for results at work or the search for a ‘better’ version of myself dissolve, they are what they always were, illusions. There is no finish line to cross, because I am already the fullest expression of myself. There's nothing to look for outside that isn't already part of me. This realisation brings lightness, even when I know I need to play the social game in this sleeping world. And we all do.

I work, I relate, I fulfil obligations, but without falling into the illusion of separation and independence. I know deep down that everything is interconnected, that every action, every word, every thought reverberates throughout the whole. This awareness doesn't exempt me from participating in the world, from its joys and tragedies, inducing me to feel nihilistic towards life; on the contrary, it allows me to live with a new perspective. No longer as an isolated, independent individual struggling for survival or recognition, but as a unique expression of a single Consciousness that manifests itself in the unique experiences of more than 8 billion forms.

The heaviness in my chest that I feel when I wake up is then transformed. It doesn't disappear, but is integrated into a broader understanding. It is no longer a nuisance, but a subtle reminder of the impermanence and fluidity of all things. And so, even in the densest and most tense hours, I focus my attention on non-duality, knowing that, in the end, everything is part of the same Awakened Presence that I caught a glimpse of a few years ago. And I've never stopped pointing it out every chance I get. The dream and the waking, the self and the other, the inside and the outside - everything is part of the same Consciousness, which had no beginning and will have no end. In this understanding, I find a peace that I've been searching for since my childhood and adolescence. But almost 50 years have passed to be here, now, present and aware.

The realisation of non-duality brings a profound and subtle transformation to my interpersonal relationships, as if a veil that once separated people is lifted, revealing a more essential and true connection. However, this change generally doesn't occur abruptly or dramatically, but rather as a gradual understanding, which gradually creeps into each interaction with my surroundings.

Before, my relationships were marked by a sense of distance, as if the other person and I were isolated islands, separated by an ocean of misunderstood differences and mutual expectations. I always felt a constant search for validation, for recognition, for love. Every encounter was, to a certain extent, an attempt to fill a void that I believed existed within me: ‘Maybe it's now, with this person, or in this situation?’

But with the realisation of non-duality, this emptiness revealed itself as an illusion. It's not there, because there was never any separation. The other is not someone distant from me, but an extension of the same Consciousness that dwells in me and in everything that exists. It's like opening a door that leads inwards.

This doesn't mean that my relationships will become perfect or conflict-free. On the contrary, challenges continue to arise, as we are all immersed in a world of apparent dualities, where differences and misunderstandings are inevitable, especially in times of polarization such as we are experiencing.

The difference lies in the way these challenges are perceived and faced. I no longer see the other person as an opponent, someone who is against me, a competitor (so common in corporate relationships), but as a mirror that reflects aspects of myself that still need to be understood and integrated. Each conflict becomes an opportunity for self-knowledge and the expansion of consciousness.

Empathy, previously limited by mental and emotional barriers, by my history, beliefs and values, flows more naturally and spontaneously. When I realise that the other person is myself in another form, compassion arises effortlessly. Without rigid judgements or unrealistic expectations. Each person is seen in their entirety, with their lights and shadows, and this allows for a deeper and more genuine acceptance. Not that I ignore hostile or harmful behaviour, or become passive in the face of attitudes that cause harm, whatever it may be, but the way I deal with it becomes more sensitive and less reactive. Very different from how I've always acted (sometimes I still do, but less often when I direct my attention to my heart and try to see the world from there, a gesture I learnt from some of the Dzogchen sages).

My relationships have also become lighter, less loaded with need and dependency. When I realise that nothing is missing in me, that I am already complete in my essence, I stop looking to others for what I believe I don't have.

However, this new perspective also brings challenges. Taking part in the social game in a world that still operates under the illusion of separation can be challenging. I often find myself in situations where conventional expectations of relationships conflict with my deeper understanding. How do I act when the other person is still trapped in patterns of dependency, control or manipulation? How do I maintain authenticity without hurting or alienating those who are still searching for their true nature? These are questions that keep coming up, and the answers are not always clear.

What I have learnt, however, is that non-duality is not an excuse for isolation or indifference. On the contrary, it invites me to be whole, to be fully present in every relationship, to engage with the world in a loving and compassionate way, without losing sight of the deeper truth that unites us.

Inner Frontier" is a transformative journey that invites leaders, entrepreneurs, professionals and the curious to explore the depths of human consciousness and discover the unity that permeates all experiences. Readers are guided along a path of self-discovery, where the separation between the self and the world dissolves, revealing the essence of non-duality.

It's as if we were watching a river from the bank. This is how we imagine life flowing past us with all its events, people, objects and consequences. We keep ourselves separated by a mistaken notion that we are the subject and everything around us are mere objects (some people also include people in this).

This margin represents our identification with the ego, an apparently safe and controlled position. From there, we name and judge what we see: ‘this is good’, ‘that is bad’, ‘I like that’, ‘that upsets me’. We create a false sense of control, as if we could manage the flow of the river from its banks.

But the river is not something separate from us. The flowing waters are our own consciousness, carrying all the phenomena of existence. Thoughts are like floating leaves, emotions are the ripples on the surface, experiences are the different volumes and speeds of the current.

When there is the fundamental insight, we realise that we were never really on the bank. We are the river itself, on our way to the sea - the water, the movement, the deep currents and the shimmering surface, in the form of a whirlpool, which lasts as long as it lasts and then dissolves. There is no observer separate from the observed. What we call ‘I’ is simply the conscious flow of all experiences.

The margin is just a mental concept, an illusion of separation. When we ‘dive’ back into the river, we recognise our true nature: we are the flow of consciousness itself. There's no one experiencing it - there's just the experience happening in itself, like the river that simply flows without the need for a streamer.

This metaphor also shows us why it's so difficult to maintain this understanding: our conditioning constantly pulls us back to the illusion of the shore, to the false security of separation. But once we recognise our true nature as the river, even if we sometimes momentarily return to the shore, we know that it is only a limited perspective of who we truly are.

The river has no beginning and no end, no inside and no outside - just like the consciousness that we are. Everything that arises - thoughts, sensations, emotions, perceptions - are just different expressions of the same continuous and indivisible flow of existence.

When I understand that the river is me, with everything that happens to me, I realise that I'm not just an observer - I'm an inseparable part of the experience. I am THE experience itself.

My first glimpse of this reality (perhaps my second) brought an overwhelming sensation: my physical body dissolved while perception expanded infinitely into a vast white space. In an instant, I felt my point of view shift from perceiving this phenomenon to observing it from within itself, until I finally realised a fusion into a kind of absolute unity. A single thing. Over time, it has been more natural to return to this state, when I let go of the limited viewpoint of the mind and ego to flow into this all-encompassing gaze. Sensory experiences - seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching - converge into a single integrated perception, as does a shift from the rational mind to something more sensory, intuitive. Words limit the description of this concept, but in a way, the state of flow, when experienced, is exactly that.

The gravity of the ordinary mind constantly pulls us back, but when I recognise this, I leave the shore and dive back into the river of consciousness, where there is no separate ‘who’ experiencing the sensations. What exists is just the experiencing itself: looking, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching happening simultaneously, as in the Titãs song - ‘all at the same time now’.

A deep sense of familiarity emerges when the point of view shifts to the gaze of awakened Consciousness. The first time was extraordinary - I clearly felt an emotion of ‘coming home’, a relief that is very difficult to explain and which remained even (and especially) in the face of challenging or threatening situations, whether physical or social. It was a glimpse, fleeting, but I felt it was there.

This account viscerally expresses my experience from the glimpse of what I understand to be our real identity. The initial impact of the simplicity and obviousness of this ‘understanding’ made me realise why the greatest secrets are hidden in plain sight.

Perhaps that's why this fundamental reality is so neglected - because of its very simplicity. The spiritual ‘supermarket’ thrives full of sellers and buyers, endlessly negotiating in search of something outside of themselves. Something that, ironically, has no path, no trick and no recipe to be won, because it has always been free and accessible. It has always been here.

This very accessibility, ironically, means that this ‘something’ is disregarded and even despised by some of us (although there is no real ‘other’, but dual language is inevitable) who are numbed by our individual programming and conditioning, stemming from our upbringing over time, with the ego always eager to prove an illusory superiority, which has a name: Spiritual materialism.

Inner Frontier" is a transformative journey that invites leaders, entrepreneurs, professionals and the curious to explore the depths of human consciousness and discover the unity that permeates all experiences. Readers are guided along a path of self-discovery, where the separation between the self and the world dissolves, revealing the essence of non-duality.

In these days between contemplation and work - the beginning of the year takes a while to get going - I found myself thinking about what a few moments of pure idleness mean, or on the contrary, pure flow. I used to be guiltier about this, but today I realise that it's just one of the ways in which we are conditioned to continue playing the game we call ‘society’.

Time, this fascinating construct that we've been trying to understand since our first ancestors appeared, manifests itself in different ways in different cultures. The ancient Greeks distinguished between chronos - linear, measurable time - and kairos - the opportune moment, the qualitative time of divine opportunity. In Asian countries such as China and Japan, where traditional writing flows in vertical columns from right to left, time is naturally visualised in that direction.

In the West, following the Greco-Roman pattern that influenced Latin writing, the flow of time is conceived from left to right. This difference is not just aesthetic - it deeply reflects how each culture processes and records its history, calendars and literature.

Curiously, some people, including myself, mentally visualise time flowing from right to left, even though we live in cultures where the convention is the opposite. This phenomenon, studied by cognitive psychologists, suggests that our perception of time may have deeper roots than our cultural upbringing. Are these remnants of other experiences, other times and places that inhabit my unconscious? Carl Jung, with his theory of the collective unconscious, suggests so.

The truth is that time is deeply subjective. Einstein revolutionised physics by demonstrating mathematically that time is not absolute, but relative to the observer. When we refer to the past or imagine the future, we always do so in the present. The past exists only as a memory - neurons firing in specific patterns in our brains - and the future as an imagined possibility, neural projections based on past experiences. Both are mere fantasies, since we know that even memories are unreliable. What we actually have is a succession of ‘nows’, micro-moments, which intertwine to form what we call experience. These micro-moments have been researched in what is known as the ‘Planck Time (here).

This experience takes place within a single, absolute Consciousness, a concept present in various ancient philosophical traditions. In Advaita Vedanta, one of the six classical schools of Indian philosophy dating from around 788-820 AD, this idea is central. According to this perspective, we are all manifestations of this same Consciousness, participating in a collective dream.

Our bodies and minds are like temporary ‘spacesuits’, instruments through which Consciousness observes itself, creating experiences to enjoy earthly materiality.

Following this line of thought, birth and death are only transformations of the ‘spacesuit’, not of the conscious essence that we are. In the Hindu tradition, this concept is expressed through Atman (the individual self) which eventually merges with Brahman (the universal consciousness) to continue the cosmic dream. This concept finds interesting parallels in modern quantum physics, especially in the theory of non-locality (of Consciousness) and quantum entanglement, where particles separated by great distances maintain an instantaneous connection inexplicable by the standards of classical physics.

Many spiritual traditions, from Tibetan Buddhism with its teachings on Bardo (intermediate states of consciousness) to Sufi mystics, use the metaphor of the dream within the dream. The Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi (369-286 BC) already questioned whether he was a man dreaming of being a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming of being a man. When we dream at night and remember the dream when we wake up, we realise that that experience, although ethereal and fleeting, seemed as real as our everyday reality.

Non-dual philosophy, present both in the East and in Western thinkers such as Plotinus (204-270 AD) - who was based on the idea that there is a unique, indivisible and transcendent ‘One’ that is prior to all existence - and in modern thinkers such as Francis Lucille, Rupert Spira, Stephen Bodian or the late Alan Watts, Douglas Harding, Jean Klein, Peter Brown, among others, goes further, suggesting that our ‘waking’ reality is also a dream - the dream of universal Consciousness.

Just as in a nocturnal dream where everything seems real until we wake up, we live in a bigger, more elaborate, denser dream. The only difference is that we haven't fully awoken from this bigger dream. Modern neuroscientists have discovered that brain patterns during REM dreaming are remarkably similar to waking patterns, giving some scientific ‘support’ to this old metaphor. We continue to dream the dream of Consciousness, experiencing materiality through these temporary bodies, on this universal stage we call Earth.

These perspectives have always intrigued me and for some time now I've been wondering: is our perception of time just another layer of this cosmic dream? A necessary construction so that we can tactilely and physically live a material experience, but not necessarily an absolute truth?

While chronos represents the quantitative time that we measure with clocks and calendars, kairos would symbolise those significant moments that seem to go far beyond our common notion of time - the moments of insight, the mystical experiences, the moments of deep spiritual realisation, the connection with Consciousness, with Presence.

It is precisely these ‘kairological’ moments that make it possible to glimpse the deeper nature of reality, suggesting that our conventional understanding of time and our own identity may be just the tip of a much deeper and more mysterious iceberg.