Category: States of Mind

Control Systems: The Nervous System and Beyond

The control system is the core of any organism’s ability to coordinate sensory input and motor output. In animals, this is embodied by the nervous system, ranging from simple nerve nets in jellyfish to the highly evolved brains of mammals. In machines, the control system can take the form of a simple microcontroller or a complex computer running algorithms that process sensor data and control actuators.

Operating Systems and Learning: Programs Loaded After Birth

Beyond basic hardware, both organisms and machines rely on “software” to function effectively.

For machines, this means operating systems and programs loaded into memory—code that dictates how the machine interacts with its environment and performs tasks.

For living organisms, this corresponds to learning and cultural transmission. Lion cubs, for example, learn hunting techniques from their mothers, while humans acquire language, social norms, and specialized skills through education and experience. These learned behaviors and cultural “programs” are not present at birth; they are “installed” as the organism interacts with its environment.

The BIOS: Innate Instructions for Survival

At the most fundamental level, all living organisms are born with innate instructions that govern survival and reproduction. This is analogous to the BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) in computers, which is pre-installed and essential for basic operation before any other software is loaded.

In biological terms, these instructions are encoded in DNA and expressed as instincts and reflexes—automatic responses that allow an organism to feed, avoid danger, and reproduce, even without prior experience. The BIOS in machines serves a similar function, providing foundational routines necessary for initialization and basic hardware interaction.

Fusion in the Three Dantians: Bypassing My BIOS

When I experienced the yin–yang fusion in the Dantians, my perception of certain fundamental concepts—concepts I had always taken for granted—changed dramatically.

In the Lower Dantian (LDT), the duality of male–female “uncollapsed,” merging into a single entity for which the concept of sex was irrelevant.

In the Middle Dantian (MDT), the uncollapsed dualities related to spatial perception—far and near, in and out. Space, as I had always understood it, lost its meaning.

In the Upper Dantian (UDT), the duality of me–other dissolved. The sense of an isolated “I” facing an external “Other” gave way to a profound feeling of oneness.

Like any human being, I received my “operating system” and initial programs as soon as I could process language—from religious conditioning to mathematics—constantly updated by daily experience to dictate behavior, with thoughts as the interface.

When meditation enabled me to be conscious without thoughts, it felt as though my post-birth operating system and programming had been removed. Yet the BIOS—the deepest layer of survival code—remained.

A Hypothesis: Consciousness and Its Core Directives

I began to entertain a hypothesis: suppose we are all fragments of a shared consciousness that, for some reason, embodies itself in living organisms—descending from a realm where consciousness is collective, timeless, and unbound by fragile physical form. This is, of course, speculative, but it provided a useful framework for thinking about what followed. What would be the basic instructions for survival in such a case?

The first directive would likely be the distinction between “you” and “other.” This would be essential if you were a mouse facing a cat, or a human facing a tiger.

Next, there would be an understanding of three-dimensional space—concepts like near and far, in and out—crucial for navigating the world, finding food or mates, and avoiding predators.

Finally, there must be an instruction tied to reproduction: the concept of sex, ensuring continuation of the species.

With these simple directives, any organism—using its particular hardware of sensors and actuators—would have reasonable chances of survival and reproduction.

Under this hypothesis, being conscious without thoughts was like bypassing my operating system, while the fusion of yin and yang in the three Dantians felt akin to temporarily bypassing these three BIOS directives.

But one fundamental instruction still remains. To survive, the most basic directive appears to be: “You are.”

The Final Duality: Being vs. Nonbeing

So basic is this directive that, even after witnessing the fusion of the opposites—male and female, in and out, me and other—the dualities inherent in “I am” remain stubbornly intact: being vs. not being, Self vs. nothingness.

How could there be a reality where being and nonbeing are one and the same?

Perhaps this touches on the nature of Time vs. Eternity—and after all, even Einstein called time an illusion.

Yet how could there be a reality not experienced by “my Self,” the interface that has functioned so well since birth? At this moment, that remains inconceivable to me.

The final duality of Being versus Non-being remains the last encrypted line of code. Yet, having succeeded in bypassing the biological BIOS at other levels, I remain hopeful that even this fundamental instruction can eventually be integrated into a more luminous reality.

Unfamiliar Territory

Dual practice has taken me into unfamiliar territory, altering my perception of my body and, more importantly, of my identity.

The physical sensation commonly referred to as qi often appears as if a subtle substance were entering through specific points in the body, then flowing along channels, and eventually expanding until it fills the entire perceptual field. As this happens, the ordinary sense of bodily boundaries begins to dissolve. The distinction between inside and outside, near and far, becomes less clear. The experience resembles what I imagine the state of a disembodied consciousness might be like.

Yet the most striking effect is not the sensation itself, but the way it anchors attention. The flow is so absorbing that the usual stream of thought can come to a complete stop. When this happens, the structure we normally identify as “myself” begins to fade.

When the Narrative Self Falls Silent

The narrative self — the ongoing story constructed by the brain, closely associated with what neuroscience calls the default mode network — temporarily disappears. That narrative normally connects memories of the past with projections into the future, maintaining the sense of a continuous personal identity. When the process falls silent, what remains is simply awareness observing itself.

In that state, stripped of narrative and largely detached from bodily representation, consciousness appears strangely connected with everything else. The fundamental duality of self versus other begins to look less like an intrinsic feature of reality and more like a functional construct — a mechanism shaped by evolution to help the organism survive in a complex environment.

The Scientific Interpretation

From a rational and scientific perspective, the most straightforward explanation is that dual practice induces altered states of consciousness. In those states perception is reorganized in ways that feel profound but ultimately reflect nothing more than changes in neural dynamics. Seen this way, the experience would be comparable to the mental “journeys” produced by psychedelic substances: interesting, perhaps even meaningful, but essentially illusions generated by the brain.

Under that interpretation, such states are best confined to the context of practice. Taking them literally while interacting with the world could easily become maladaptive.

A Persistent Question

And yet, once I return to ordinary awareness, I cannot completely dismiss the possibility that something else might be involved.

One aspect in particular seems difficult to ignore: the distinction between the narrative self and the awareness that observes it. For most of my life I assumed that the narrative voice in my head was “me.” But closer inspection suggests otherwise. The observing awareness appears to remain constant while the narrative continually changes.

The Narrative Self as a Cognitive Tool

Curiously, recent developments in artificial intelligence offer an unexpected illustration of this distinction. It is now possible to construct systems that generate a convincing narrative self — systems that can pass variants of the Turing test and engage in complex conversation. They do so through layers of artificial neural networks that transform language and knowledge into high-dimensional vectors, processing those representations through billions of weighted connections to produce coherent responses.

From a functional perspective, the process is mechanical. It resembles, at least in broad terms, the way biological neural networks might produce the stream of thoughts that we experience as our inner narrative. If that analogy holds, the narrative self may be less like an essence and more like a tool — a highly sophisticated cognitive instrument that evolution has given us, much as it gave us hands or eyes.

Useful, even indispensable for navigating the world — but perhaps not identical with what we fundamentally are.

The Observer Behind the Story

What feels closer to an essence is the bare awareness that has been present throughout my life, silently observing events from within. When attention turns toward that awareness itself, it seems strangely unaffected by the passage of time. It appears prior to the stories that the mind constructs about the past and the future.

And when, in certain moments of practice, that awareness seems to merge with a wider field of experience — as if it were part of something larger — it becomes difficult not to wonder whether the experience might point to something real.

Perhaps it is only a temporary neurochemical state, a surge of endorphins and neurotransmitters reorganizing perception in unusual ways. That explanation is entirely plausible.

But it is also possible — just possible — that such states reveal a latent potential of consciousness, hinting at forms of experience that our ordinary cognitive framework rarely allows.

A Space for Speculation

At this point speculation inevitably begins. Or, stated more charitably, one starts forming tentative hypotheses.

After all, despite the extraordinary progress of science, our understanding of some fundamental aspects of reality remains limited. We still do not know what consciousness ultimately is. Our grasp of matter and time, although extraordinarily precise mathematically, does not yet explain their underlying nature.

An Uncomfortable Possibility

If we acknowledge that ignorance with some humility, then the possibility — long explored in mystical traditions across cultures — that consciousness might extend beyond the narrow framework of individual identity cannot be entirely ruled out.

I find myself inclined to consider that possibility, even if cautiously. Not the anthropomorphic God of institutional religion, modeled after earthly rulers, but something closer to what mystics have described in very different languages: the God of Teresa of Ávila, the Dao of Daoism, or the Brahman of Indian philosophy.

Accepting such a possibility would place me, somewhat reluctantly, among believers — a position that has never felt entirely comfortable to me. For most of my life I associated belief with intellectual laziness, with the human tendency to replace uncertainty with comforting narratives.

Perhaps the mind is rarely as consistent as it likes to imagine. Even someone deeply shaped by skepticism can find himself wishing that certain possibilities might be true. Recognizing the narrative self as a cognitive tool allowed me to hold my stories lightly, leaving space for the silent observer that remains when the story ends.

Psychophysical Effects of Energetic Practice

The systematic practice of working with qi — stripped of cultural symbolism and observed as a psychophysical phenomenon — produces clear perceptual transformations. It changes the relationship to the body, to thought, and to the sense of identity. There is no need to invoke mysterious energies to describe this: sustained attention is sufficient to alter neurophysiological patterns and, with them, the way experience is integrated.

These effects are reproducible enough to be taken seriously. They do not require metaphysical assumptions to be acknowledged as real experiences.

Attenuation of Narrative Processing

In certain states, discursive thought attenuates significantly. Bodily sensation can become diffuse or even recede from the foreground. What remains is a form of presence without narrative content. There is no story, no project, no internal commentary. Only experiential continuity.

From the inside, this can feel more fundamental than the ordinary self. The narrative identity that normally organizes experience becomes less central, sometimes temporarily absent.

This shift alone can be deeply transformative. And this is where the temptation appears.

The Interpretive Expansion

At this point, a predictable cognitive move tends to occur.
If there can be consciousness without thought,
if there can be presence without clearly defined bodily sensation,
could that consciousness persist after death?

The human mind tends to extend meaningful states beyond their immediate frame. If something feels more basic than the narrative self, it becomes tempting to imagine that it might also be more durable than the self. In classical terms: that what dissolves is narrative identity, but not consciousness itself.

From there, familiar hypotheses arise:
Is that “presence” what traditions call God?
Is individual consciousness a local expression of a universal consciousness?
Would death be a reintegration into that common ground?

Intellectually, these questions are understandable. Empirically, we have no basis to affirm them.

Distinguishing Phenomenon from Ontology

The fact that a subjective state is experienced as expansive, stable, or impersonal does not imply that it exists independently of the organism that generates it. Contemporary neuroscience provides sufficient models to explain how a reduction in narrative activity can produce a lived sense of unity or presence without self. None of those models require postulating post-mortem survival.

This does not invalidate the experience. It only delimits its interpretive scope. A state can be subjectively powerful and still remain biologically instantiated.

What the Practice Actually Demonstrates

The most honest stance, from a scientific attitude, is to recognize two things simultaneously:

1. The transformative experience is real as lived phenomenon.
2. The metaphysical conclusions the mind constructs from it are speculative.

The practice does not demonstrate that consciousness survives.
It does not demonstrate that a universal mind exists.
It does not demonstrate that “heaven” or “God” correspond to an objective ontological state.

What it does demonstrate — in a practical sense — is that the identity we feared losing was not as solid as it seemed. Through the attenuation of narrative processing, I encountered a state that, while perhaps not eternal, feels markedly less contracted. As identification with the self loosens, the fear of disappearing correspondingly diminishes.

Sufficient Transformation

Perhaps that is transformation enough.

It does not turn death into an illusion.
It does not turn presence into an eternal entity.
But it does make life less contracted.

At the boundary between experience and speculation, the most stable posture is neither to affirm nor to deny, but to describe precisely what occurs and accept what we do not know.

That may not be a metaphysical revelation.

But, seen with sobriety, it is already quite a lot.

First Flashes

When I managed to keep thoughts at bay, I began to glimpse something different—brief flashes that slowly shifted my perception. These glimpses were like lightning in the dark: brief illuminations of a reality I hadn’t known, previews of what was to come. My first insights were always confirmed by later experiences, as the intensity and quality of the feeling deepened.

This was my perception in 2015, only three years after my epiphany in August 2012.

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On Dilution and Death

The first departure from ordinary experience was a sense of dilution—long before I felt the energy flowing out of my body—and of connection with something much larger. The feeling was like dying, yet instead of fear it brought a quiet hope. Death was no longer perceived as an end, but as a new beginning—like going back home.

“Imagine that you are in total darkness. Then, for a moment, there is a faint light—and back to the dark again. You try to reconstruct in your mind what you barely perceived. This is what I will try to do now. Not easy, because what I dimly saw, through the windshield and the rearview mirror, looked very much like Death.

For us, tantric sex means spending ten, fifteen, twenty minutes being traversed by this energy. And I mean it—we both feel the same thing. It feels like a vast and eternal wave of bliss, not the ‘simultaneous orgasm’ where two private experiences happen to coincide. We clearly experience the same flow, with its highs and lows.

This is a huge departure from any normal experience. Our minds, our whole beings, are connected. And this communion has deep consequences. We dissolve into each other. And we feel dissolved into something immense—like two drops of water merging into one, and then thrown into a river.

In those moments, when I can drink from that fountain without being pulled toward physical release, I glimpse the real nature of my thirst—the drive we call sex. What I was seeking in the arms of my lovers was this: dissolving into the other, breaking free from the prison of my ego. And through the other, dissolving into… God? If I were Saint Teresa, my cultural lens would surely point to that as the logical answer. As an atheist, I don’t know what to think. This dissolution feels like death—but under that light, the word loses its sting. It feels more like going home. So what I wanted through sex was dying—going home.”

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On the Self

Being aware without thoughts, even for a short time, made me realize that what I had always understood as “me” was only a bundle of thoughts—memories and desires. My real self was this awareness, silently watching thoughts arise and fade away. The idea—perhaps just wishful thinking—that this “deep self” was the one going back home slowly began to take shape.

“But who’s going home? Again, I’ll try to describe another dim and strange perception.

Tantric sex with a partner requires some attention to the body—movement, balance, physical awareness. But when I lie back and I’m alone with this energy, the mind truly stops, or nearly so. It has to, or the energy will not flow. In that silence, thoughts are perceived very differently. Our hands and feet are useful tools, but we don’t see them as our ‘self.’ With a still, or nearly still mind, I perceive my thoughts the same way—as tools, but not as me. And that changes everything.

I dimly perceive that this thing I’ve always called ‘me’ is nothing more than a bundle of thoughts, memories and desires. Yet now they feel like a house I once lived in—a space full of memories, most of them good, but no longer home. The melancholy of those empty rooms is mixed with the excitement of moving on.

That’s how I feel when I look at that old ‘me’ that no longer feels like me. What I really am is that which moves to a new home. The old self must be left behind; it can’t be carried forward. It cannot survive death—that’s impossible. But then, what is this new ‘me,’ and where is it going? Even considering the possibility of transcending death is a Copernican shift for someone like me—an atheist.”

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On God

If the real self was free of desire, what could we expect from God—if there was one? A god enslaved by his own desires? I was still deeply skeptical about the very existence of anything we could call “God.” But if such a being existed, it would surely give its grace as the sun gives its light: expecting nothing, asking nothing, shining for all who choose to join it.

“After all, the trees are not worshipping the Sun—they simply stay away from the dark. And the Sun gives life to the trees by burning herself, but not because she receives any worship. What else could she do? She is the Sun!

So I don’t see myself praying or worshipping any god. But I’ll try to find a little place under this Sun—she who gives without asking—where I can lay my towel.”