A recent paper from MD Anderson Cancer Center showed that practitioners of Bengston Energy Healing Method, were able to use energy healing (called biofield therapy or BT) to significantly reduce pancreatic cancer cell replication and invasiveness in cell and mice models.¹

That is huge! What does it actually mean?

It means therapists trained in this energy healing method were able to successfully reduce cancer cell growth in a petri dish and in mice that were grafted with tumor cells. Incredibly, they achieved this without physically touching the cells or mice at all.

Here’s how they did it: trained energy healing practitioners cycled through mental images while holding their hands roughly 6 to 24 inches away from the target cells or animals with no physical contact involved.

According to the study, “the therapist rapidly cycles through images or symbols of future events they want to have or experience. Each event needs to be tangible enough to know when it has been achieved. The technique emphasizes speed, repetition, and nonattachment rather than belief or directed effort.”

Then there’s the controls. In the sham control (SC), lab members not trained in energy healing sit the same distance away from the target cells/mice, and mimic the hand gestures and movements they’ve seen. This controls for the presence of a person and the passage of time in the same laboratory conditions as the BT cells/animals.

They also have cells that were left completely untreated so they can compare the results to a baseline (incubator control or IC).

Subscribe now

The Results

Now there are a few things the researchers measured: how much the cancer cells replicated, what the mitochondria looked like in the cells, and cell invasiveness (remember cancer cells like to invade nearby tissues).

Keep in mind these experiments were not done in human beings, but rather in cancer cells in a dish, 3D cancer organoids, and in mice injected with tumor cells.

#1 Reduction in cell division

Researchers found a decrease in replication of different pancreatic cancer cell types. In some cases, the sham control also showed a reduction of cells, which is not ideal, but the biofield therapy consistently showed a larger reduction.

The sham procedure alone (a person sitting in front of the cells, going through the motions, no specific energy healing technique) reduced the cell signal compared to cells left completely undisturbed in the incubator. But, in most of these results, the biofield therapy (BT) then produces a further, additional reduction of cancer cell replication. This finding is not as compelling because the sham control does show an effect.

#2 Mitochondrial changes

Where the biofield therapy (a.k.a energy healing) shows a real significant difference is in the structure of the mitochondria. The mitochondria of the untreated and sham control cells had well-ordered, organized folds in the inner membrane. But in the biofield therapy condition, the mitochondria folds became disordered, and measured wider and shorter.

Take a look at the images for yourself.

Somehow, the energy healing that the therapists engaged in had an effect on the mitochondria of the cancer cells that none of the controls had.

#3 Cancer Cell Invasiveness

Not only that, but pancreatic cancer cells exposed to energy healing/ biofield therapy measured 55% less invasive than both of the controls. Only the biofield therapy was able to reduce invasiveness to a meaningful extent. The paper is linked here for anyone who wants to take a deeper look.

How is this possible?

The mechanism that would allow energy healing to change cancer cell behavior is completely undetermined and remains an open question. The researchers know what is happening in the cancer cells (changes to mitochondria, proteins, and cell membrane resting voltage) but they do not yet understand how someone at a distance is able to induce these changes to the cell.

Michael Levin is a researcher known for his studies in bioelectricity. He’s shown that cells and tissues use voltage patterns (not just genes) to encode information about anatomical structure.² He’s shown that manipulating these voltage gradients can:

• Induce a frog to grow an eye where there is not one (see image below)

• Regenerate a limb or even a partial head/brain in organisms (like planaria) that don’t normally do so

Where Levin’s research differs from this paper is that he works with bioelectric fields generated internally by cells/tissues themselves (via ion channels) that other cells detect and respond to. In this study, there would need to be an external field generated by the energy healer that is impacting the cells.

Maybe these energy healing therapies are somehow able to interact with the bioelectric fields present across cells and tissues.

What would need to be shown in order to definitively connect energy healing with bioelectric fields?

1. A detectable field, emitted by the practitioner, with defined physical characteristics. The pancreatic cancer paper didn’t measure any field at the practitioner’s hands or in the space between hands and dish.

2. A plausible receptor mechanism in the target cells. Cells have machinery that responds to physical fields including ion channels, magnetoreception (shown in birds) and photosensitive proteins that could respond to biophoton-level light. Either one of these existing systems, or a novel undiscovered one, would need to be the receiver.

3. A distant-dependent or dose-dependent relationship. If this energy healing is mediated by a field, we would expect there to be a relationship between how close someone is and the strength of the effect.

I think this is a fascinating start to some really interesting research. We know from a recent meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials looking at the effects of Reiki therapy that there is significant improvement in patient anxiety, stress, pain, and overall well-being when compared to controls.³ With further research, we may be able to figure out what is causing these positive outcomes and whether there is genuinely something to ‘energy healing’ after all.

Share

References

1. Yang, J., et al. (2025). Biofield therapy inhibits proliferation and metastasis of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma cells via FOXM1 downregulation. Cancer Medicine. https://doi.org/10.1002/cam4.71726

2. Levin, M. (2014). Molecular bioelectricity: How endogenous voltage potentials control cell behavior and instruct pattern regulation in vivo. Molecular Biology of the Cell, 25(24), 3835–3850. https://doi.org/10.1091/mbc.E13-12-0708

3. Liu, K., Qin, Z., Qin, Y., Li, Y., Liu, Q., Gao, F., Zhang, P., & Wang, W. (2025). Effects of Reiki therapy on quality of life: A meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. Systematic Reviews, 14, 72. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13643-025-02811-5

It seems like a silly question to ask. It’s more reasonable to ask whether a dog feels anything. Most owners would say yes, dogs feel happy, sad or scared.

What about a tree? Does a tree feel anything? A tree recognizes where nutrients lie and responds in intelligent ways to its environment, but does it feel things?

What about a single cell in our body? Or a fetus in the womb? The question I am trying to get at is: at what point does a living organism begin to experience something internally?

The commonly accepted answer is that once an organism has developed a nervous system, we can assume that it experiences sensation from the inside. We know, for example, that lobsters flinch when thrown into hot water; they have the pain receptors capable of sensing and reacting to pain. A lobster may not have consciousness in the traditional human sense, but it has an experience of some kind.

II. A baby’s development inside the womb

Take the process of a baby developing inside the womb. It begins with the egg and sperm making contact. Immediately following, an entire signalling cascade kicks off: the cell divides over and over again, while molecular signals tell one cell to start becoming a skin cell, another to become a brain cell, another to become a heart cell. The initial starting point of egg and sperm rapidly begins to take new shape, forming an embryo. Like a coordinated dance, these cells replicate and migrate with precision and accuracy, eventually giving rise to a living being with some kind of experience.

An example of this can be seen in the following timelapse of a salamander developing from an egg:

When researchers study an embryo’s development, they can track and determine some of the mechanisms involved: gene expression cascades and morphogenic gradients, all of which presumably follow thermodynamic self-organization.

That’s all well and fine, but these mechanistic answers seem to bypass a great mystery underlying the whole process: what is driving all of this? We are told the embryo is undergoing a self-organizing process. Each cell gets its signal and acts accordingly, like a robot in an assembly line. Yet somehow, through this coordinated orchestra of moving parts, a ball of cells transforms into a baby that begins experiencing itself and the world.

III. When does consciousness enter a baby?

If we say that your consciousness, your awareness, is created by the activity of neurons in the brain (physicalism/materialism), then at what point does consciousness arise in a baby? Is it when the brain starts forming or finishes?

American philosopher Thomas Nagel expresses doubt that something as complex as a living, reproducing organism (a baby, for example) could have arisen by physical means alone from an otherwise lifeless environment.

He argues that consciousness itself cannot be captured by physical explanations (neurons and signalling cascades, for example). No matter how much we study the physical and mechanical processes in the developing fetus, we have no idea what it is like to be a developing baby. We are unable to explain how these unconscious brain cells actually create the experience we have. So the next logical question is whether the brain creates it at all, or whether it just permits it.

Theoretical physicist David Bohm also believed scientists mistakenly prioritize the explicate order (product, form) over the implicate order (process, flux). Through limitations in our language, we separate the world into fragments, molecules and neurons, rather than seeing the continuous unbroken flow or processes underlying the whole.

Any complete understanding of the world must adequately explain the physical world, the mental world, and yes, the spiritual world. It is just as important to explain the physical mechanics of our solar system as it is to explain things that are beyond measurement like love, beauty, and meaning.

Perhaps there are as-of-yet-undiscovered laws of nature that govern how matter and energy organize themselves so that, eventually, consciousness must arise. Or perhaps consciousness is fundamental (irreducible) and exists less like an on/off switch and more like a gradient, with plants, animals, and insects all interfacing along different points on the spectrum of awareness.

I’m fascinated by these topics and will continue to research and explore them. Let me know your thoughts below!

Auri

Subscribe now

Share

I recently listened to Dean Radin’s interview on the Joe Rogan Experience and was fascinated to hear topics like remote viewing and telepathy being discussed with scientific seriousness on one of the largest media platforms in the world.

During the podcast, they discussed many topics surrounding consciousness, but I was particularly interested in their discussion of telepathic communication, and whether humans have the ability to impact physical systems with their minds.

These topics have been controversial and taboo in the scientific world for a variety of reasons, one reason being that these extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and independent replication. And even if the evidence does exist (which I’ll explore below), it would cause a massive paradigm shift within society, completely changing the way we view the world and ourselves. If telepathy is in fact real, what would that say about us?

Podcasts like these allow researchers to present their work and ideas in order to make these topics more accessible to everyday people.

In this article, I want to take a closer look at the telepathy research Dean Radin discusses in the podcast, and lay out a few of the experiments he references along with their findings.

But first we need to introduce two new terms:

The umbrella term for this field of research is parapsychology. This small but growing field is studied at various institutions including the Princeton (PEAR lab), University of Virginia (DOPS) and the Institute of Noetic Science (IONS) among others. Within the field of parapsychology, researchers study through controlled experiments, what is called psi phenomena. Anything from mind to mind communication (telepathy) or bending a spoon with your mind (psychokinesis) falls under the umbrella of psi.

Psi is defined as phenomena in which information is gained from a distance without the use of ordinary senses or in which influence is exerted on a physical system without known physical interaction.¹

What are some examples of psi in everyday life?

1. A twin feels a sudden sharp pain in her chest while at work. She later learns her sister, in another city, had a heart attack at that exact time.

2. A soldier in the field has an overwhelming feeling that he should not enter a building his unit is about to clear. He holds back. Seconds later an explosion goes off inside.

3. A man thinks of a friend he hasn’t spoken to in years. Minutes later, the friend calls out of the blue.

4. A woman dreams of her recently deceased grandmother, who tells her to look in the drawer of a desk in the basement. She wakes up, goes downstairs, opens the drawer, and finds a collection of journals she had no prior knowledge of.

   

In a research setting, experiments are set up to test whether psi is real. Dean Radin himself worked for US Naval Intelligence and in programs like Project Stargate which was utilized by US military and intelligence agencies from the 1970s to 1995 for intelligence gatherings. These programs sought to test whether phenomena like remote viewing was plausible. Remote viewing falls under the psi umbrella and is when a person is able to get information or impressions about a distant location, object, person or event using extra-sensory perception.

Examples of this include:

1. President Jimmy Carter publicly stated in a GQ interview that a remote viewer was used to locate a missing twin-engine plane that had crashed in the Central African republic. The remote viewer accurately described the location of the wreckage. The plane was later found there.

2. In 1973 a remote viewer at Stanford Research Institute described a ring around Jupiter before any spacecraft had reached the planet. Six years later Voyager 1 confirmed Jupiter has a ring system. The session notes were documented and distributed to scientists before the discovery.²

There are many other historical accounts of these types of phenomena, but anecdotal accounts only tell us so much. To really understand what’s happening here, we need to look at the research.

The Research

Autoganzfield Method (Telepathy)

The primary, reproducible finding within telepathy research comes from experiments using the Ganzfield protocol. This experimental setup dates back to the 1970s. Since then, the testing has become much more rigorous, aiming to determine whether mind-to-mind communication is real.

The setup is like this: you have two people, one sender and one receiver. They are sitting in separate rooms. The sender is assigned a randomly selected image or video clip from a computer. When the time starts, the sender tries to mentally beam that image over to the receiver. The receiver is sitting in a separate sensory deprivation room, with no light or sound coming in, describing out loud whatever mental images come to their mind.

After the allotted time passes, the receiver is shown four images on a computer and asked to choose which one the sender was looking at. If the receiver is randomly guessing, then statistically they will choose the correct image 1 in 4 times (a 25% hit rate). But across thousands of trials with dozens of independent researchers, the hit rate was found to be 31.4%, which is significantly higher than expected. 31.4% compared to the expected 25% might not seem like a lot, but when looking at the 4,754 sessions that were conducted, the odds against chance of achieving a 31.4% hit rate are 2.9 sextillion to 1, meaning it’s highly highly unlikely (virtually impossible) that the participants guessed correctly due to random chance. ^3-6 In any other field of research, this would constitute a serious finding.

A common rebuttal for this data is that the studies selectively include positive data, or sessions that work, while ignoring the ones that don’t, which would skew the results (called the file-drawer effect). However, there would need to be hundreds of thousands of failed experiments in order to offset the results seen from these over 4700 sessions.⁶ That’s how significant 31.4% is over this many trials.

The Body Reacts (Pre-sentiment experiments)

In the podcast, Joe asks Dean for some of the most compelling evidence he has seen over his career. One of his answers is the presentiment studies. There are over 40 of these studies where essentially the experimenters are trying to see whether the participant’s body reacts to emotional images before they actually see the images.⁷

The setup involves participants sitting calmly while a computer randomly selects and displays images, some of which are neutral, some which are emotionally arousing. Physiological responses like skin conductance, heart rate, and EEG brain activity are measured continuously.

Researchers found that the body responds to emotionally arousing images anywhere from 1-10 seconds before they appear on screen. The response is specific to emotional content, not just random fluctuation.

A 2012 meta-analysis in Frontiers in Psychology across multiple independent labs confirmed the effect and called it predictive anticipatory activity (PAA).^7-8 Somehow, the body reacts to emotional stimuli before the image is even presented.

What does it mean?

The standard scientific view says the brain generates consciousness the way the stomach produces stomach acid. If the brain produces consciousness, then the results from the Ganzfeld and presentiment studies are impossible because information cannot travel outside local neural pathways (how can someone send a mental image to another in a separate room across the hall?)

The results of this research suggest consciousness may be non-local, interfacing with the brain instead of being generated by it.

Ganzfeld and presentiment studies suggest that human minds may have access to information through some alternate means or medium. If our minds are non-local, therefore not trapped inside our skulls, it could explain why a receiver in a Ganzfeld room can pick up impressions from a sender down the hall, or why a person’s nervous system can react to a shocking image a few seconds before a computer even selects it.

These studies suggest our current map of reality is incomplete. That beneath our individual biology, our minds may be interconnected through some type of shared, non-local field of information. It’s sort of like the case with veridical perceptions and NDE, all you need is one white crow to prove that not all crows are black. Through these studies we have a few white crows that need explaining.

Science is full of paradigm shifts, that’s what it means to progress! Paradigm shifts shouldn’t be a reason why we don’t explore something.

But what do you think? Let me know your thoughts below!

Aurian

Subscribe now

References

1. Cardeña, E., Palmer, J., & Marcusson-Clavertz, D. (Eds.). (2015). Parapsychology: A handbook for the 21st century. McFarland & Company.

2. Sherman, H., & Swann, I. (1973). An experimental psychic probe of the planet Jupiter (Declassified CIA Document No. CIA-RDP96X00790R000100040010-3). Stanford Research Institute.

3. Tressoldi, P., & Storm, L. (2021). Stage 2 Registered Report: Anomalous perception in a Ganzfeld condition - A meta-analysis of more than 40 years investigation. F1000Research, 10(234), 1-18.

4. Radin, D. (2025). The Science of Magic: How the Mind Weaves the Fabric of Reality (pp. 101–111). Harmony

5. Society for Psychical Research. (n.d.). Ganzfeld ESP. Psi Encyclopedia. https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/articles/ganzfeld-esp/

6. Williams, B. J. (2011). Revisiting the Ganzfeld ESP debate: A basic review and assessment. Journal of Scientific Exploration, 25(4), 743–754.

7. Mossbridge, J., Tressoldi, P., & Utts, J. (2012). Predictive physiological anticipation preceding seemingly unpredictable stimuli: A meta-analysis. Frontiers in Psychology

8. Mossbridge, J. A., Tressoldi, P., Utts, J., Ives, J. A., Radin, D., & Jonas, W. B. (2014). Predicting the unpredictable: Critical analysis and practical implications of predictive anticipatory activity. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience,

Footnotes:

1. The effect size (r) for the ganzfeld experiments is more than double the effect size in the data showing aspirin prevented heart attacks.

2. The Ganzfield protocol recommends selecting participants that are creative or artistic, that engage in mental discipline practices like meditation, or who have had previous psi experience - these subjects tend to perform better. Randomly selecting participants yields a hit rate closer to 29% with odds against chance of 19 million to 1. However, when only looking at participants that were selected because they were in the creative arts or had previous telepathic experiences, the hit rate was 34.7% with an odds against change of 11 sextillion to 1.

   Share

Physicists often have the deepest and most complete understanding of the physical world. They study the most basic laws of nature including the underlying fundamental forces and particles that make this world up.

So you can imagine my surprise when I discovered what the most prominent physicists of the twentieth century had to say about consciousness and God. Here’s (some of)what they had to say:

Werner Heisenberg (Nobel Prize winner in Physics for pioneering the creation of quantum mechanics):

“The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.”

Max Planck (Nobel Prize winner in Physics, discovered Planck’s constant):

“As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.”

Nikola Tesla (pioneer of wireless communication and developer of AC power systems):

“My brain is only a receiver, in the Universe there is a core from which we obtain knowledge, strength and inspiration. I have not penetrated into the secrets of this core, but I know that it exists.”

“The gift of mental power comes from God, Divine Being, and if we concentrate our minds on that truth, we become in tune with this great power.”

David Bohm (developed Bohmian mechanics and laid the foundation for plasma physics):

“Consciousness is much more of the implicate order than is matter... Yet at a deeper level [matter and consciousness] are actually inseparable and interwoven, just as in the computer game the player and the screen are united by participation.”

These are not the beliefs I would have expected from some of the most impactful physicists in modern history. The pioneers of quantum mechanics were openly challenging the status quo which we are still being taught today: materialism.

Subscribe now

Materialism (Physicalism) is the assumption that everything in the world is made up of physical matter, including our own consciousness. All that exists, and all that we are, can be explained by material interactions that depend on physical processes. Materialism argues that the brain creates consciousness through complex physical activity between neurons.

However, modern neuroscience cannot explain how memories are stored, how you dream what you dream, or how the physical firing of unconscious neurons creates the conscious experience of being you. This gap has been extraordinarily difficult to bridge. Maybe Planck, Tesla, and Heisenberg have a point: we’re looking at it backwards. Consciousness exists before matter, beyond matter.

That’s a big difference.

Once we begin looking at the world in this way, everything changes. Maybe instead of the universe, life on earth, and consciousness evolving by random chance, there exists an awareness, an intelligence, a sort of conscious force that is the reason for the existence of everything.

Taking Heisenberg’s quote from earlier, we can see why so many scientists favor materialism, which often goes hand in hand with atheism. Science is commonly branded as atheistic because science and materialism are often assumed to be one in the same. When we are first introduced to science in school, it seems obvious that everything can be reduced to some physical process that can be measured, observed and studied. After all, why would you put your belief in an invisible God, when we can prove with science how the world works without the need for a mystical explanation at all?

As you get further into the mysteries of the natural world, however, the opposite realization occurs. You sense that consciousness cannot be explained in physical terms; nonlocality, entanglement, and the observer effect don’t fit into the mechanistic worldview either. Materialism reaches a dead end and the only thing left at the bottom of the glass is God.

This may be why 86% of Nobel Prize winning physicists identified as religious, with only 4.7% identifying as atheist or agnostic.¹

I was quite relieved to hear some of the greatest minds in physics speaking of this universe in this way, and I wondered why I never learned this in school.

I’ll leave you with this final quote from Planck:

“There can never be any real opposition between religion and science; for the one is the complement of the other. Every serious and reflective person realizes, I think, that the religious element in his nature must be recognized and cultivated if all the powers of the human soul are to act together in perfect balance and harmony. And indeed it was not by accident that the greatest thinkers of all ages were deeply religious souls”

What do you think? Let me know your comments down below.

Share

References/Further Reading:

1. Shalev, Baruch A. 100 Years of Nobel Prizes. 3rd ed. Los Angeles: Americas Group, 2005, pp. 57–61.

2. Segall, Matthew. “Why Natural Science Would Be Better Off Without Physicalist Metaphysics.” Footnotes to Plato, Substack, May 2026.

☿Footnotes²Plato☀☾

Why Natural Science Would Be Better Off Without Physicalist Metaphysics

I enjoyed my chat with James Faulk the other day. Here’s the video…

Read more

4 months ago · 31 likes · 17 comments · Matthew David Segall

A 2023 poll found that 83% of Americans believe they have a soul or spirit in addition to their physical body. For such a secular nation, that number is quite surprising! It suggests that most people sense something. Something that cannot be seen, measured, or fully explained, but is sensed nonetheless. This intuition is worth taking seriously.

What causes people to believe in something greater than themselves?

I found myself asking this question while researching theories of consciousness, and I kept finding myself bumping into another word: metaphysics. Metaphysics seems to be how things work beyond, or even before physics. It asks the most fundamental questions about reality. We humans have a mind, with thoughts, sensations and emotions and we live in this physical world and greater universe. The mystery is how these two things relate. The brain is a physical object. Thoughts, feelings and subjective experiences seem like something else entirely.

This is the mind-body problem. Answers to this problem seek to explain how thoughts, feelings, and subjective experiences relate to, or come from, the material world of neurons and biology.

There is an incessant stream of impressions flowing through our consciousness every day. The average human has over 6,000 thoughts in a single day – about six or seven every minute. Where do these thoughts come from? Do the neurons in your brain create each and every thought that pops into your head?

These are not questions we tend to think about in day to day life. Busy with the demands of daily life, it can be easy to shrug them off and continue chugging along. But I have always felt that these questions are among the most important ones we can ask.

“The question is not what you look at, but what you see.” -Henry David Thoreau

A map of the terrain

Metaphysics becomes a way to explain and understand this mind-body problem. Philosophers have thought about this problem for centuries and arrived at several distinct answers. What follows is not a complete survey but a working map of different belief systems surrounding these existential questions.

Materialism/Physicalism holds that only physical matter exists. The mind is produced by the brain and when the brain dies, your consciousness is gone with it. Everything operates through cause and effect – biology is explained by chemistry, chemistry by physics. This view is mechanistic and reductionistic, where complex things are understood by breaking them down into their parts. Its challenge is explaining why any of this physical activity feels like anything at all.

Dualism holds that mind and matter are two separate things that cannot be reduced to each other. The physical body and world exist in the physical realm but consciousness/mind exists in another realm. Death kills the physical body but the mind continues on in some shape or form. The challenge dualism faces is explaining how two such different substances manage to influence each other — how a thought moves an arm.

Idealism flips the materialist picture entirely. Mind comes first. Matter is what the mind produces. Since everything we know reaches us through experience, the mind must be more fundamental than the physical world it perceives. Its challenge is explaining why billions of separate minds all seem to share the same world.

Panpsychism proposes that consciousness is not a late-arriving accident but a basic feature of reality itself, present in some form even at the level of particles and atoms. It doesn’t emerge from matter — it was always there, growing more complex as matter organized itself into brains. Its challenge is explaining how countless micro-experiences combine into one unified sense of being you.

Neutral monism suggests there is one underlying stuff in the universe that is neither mind nor matter but gives rise to both. This foundational element is mysterious or unknowable, part of nature itself, or is potentially a divine substance.

Beyond categories

These categories give us a logical way of approaching the mind-body problem. But logic is only half the picture.

Contemplative traditions across cultures (Buddhism, Hinduism, Sufism etc) have long held that certain kinds of knowledge are not accessible through argument or analysis alone.

The other way of knowing is through experience. What we encounter with our own mindful awareness offers answers that philosophy alone cannot reach. Meditation, in particular, is a practice of quieting the conceptual mind–the part that labels and categorizes–and simply observing. Many people report that in states of stillness and open attention, something shifts. The questions are seen differently.

This suggests that the mystery of consciousness is not only an intellectual problem. It is an experiential one; something that can be sat with and explored from the inside, not just reasoned about from the outside.

“The way out is in.” -Thich Nhat Hanh

More like this:

Aurian

Which Came First: Consciousness or the Universe?

I. The Story…

Read more

6 months ago · 194 likes · 22 comments · Aurian

Aurian

The Divided Brain and Our Divided World

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift…

Read more

6 months ago · 10 likes · 1 comment · Aurian

This isn’t going to be another article on the problem with our screen time and phone addiction. It is, instead, about the deeper desires underlying our behaviors.

The behavior I am referring to: hours spent consuming content across all categories. Words like “rotting” and “doom-scrolling” describe our culture’s chosen pastime.

The real question is: what is driving us to the algorithm? What needs are being suppressed by distraction?

The Wrong Solution to an Unknown Problem

Multitasking, overstimulation, information overload. The philosopher Byung-Chul Han describes our age as one of tiredness. Not the tiredness of labour but of overstimulation.

The result is a temporary inability to sit with yourself, know yourself, develop ideas, and tolerate boredom. Cheap dopamine, they call it. Cheap dopamine to quell an existential restlessness.

This restlessness is a symptom of an inner desire - a desire to know who we are, and why we exist at all.

If you live in a world of war, extraction, game theory and the law of the jungle, then cheap dopamine is the quickest and easiest way to numb the weight of the world. Shopping, gambling, and consumption are not vices so much as poorly aimed medicine, treatments for a pain that has never been properly named.

Modern structures (work, education, media) are optimized for productivity and distraction, not depth or expansion. Modernity is filled up with a hyper-digital environment that clouds the mind with noise, adrenaline and despair.

The soul has a need for more - not more content, but more expansion, more depth, more meaning. Ordinary life, as it is currently structured, is not meeting that need.

Rumi and the Reed

Our solution comes from Rumi, the 13th century Sufi Persian poet, who wrote of this longing in the opening of his great work, The Mathnawi by telling it through the story of the reed.

The poem, structured into rhyming couplets, tells the story from the perspective of a reed cut from its reed-bed and made into a flute. The reed-flute tells its tale and laments its separation, creating music that causes man and woman to cry out in understanding.

This is how I imagine the reed sings (give it a listen): https://youtube.com/shorts/4F96Kg2t4Ks?si=S05kq2b6CWx87xy1

The wound that cuts the reed from its bed is what allows it to make music. The cut creates the flute, hollowed and empty, and the sounds that come from it carry a deep, unfolding pain of separation and a longing to return to where it came from, to be reunited.

The story Rumi is telling is really describing us. Like the reed, we have been cut from our source and carry an innate longing to know where we came from. This is the human condition. We find ourselves in existence and sing our sad songs, not realizing we are crying out into the unknown, asking why we are here at all.

The poem continues¹:

“In every company I uttered my wailful notes, I consorted with the unhappy and with them that rejoice.

Every one became my friend from his own opinion; none sought out my secrets from within me.”

The reeds’ message is universal: it resonates with those who are unhappy and with those who are rejoicing. Each person hears the music and imposes their own ideas, experience, and projections onto it. No one asks the reed what it actually means. No one seeks the secret from within the reed, from the source.

“My secret is not far from my plaint, but ear and eye lack the light (whereby it should be apprehended).”

The secret the reed is pointing to is not far, but our ears and eyes lack the ability to know it. This is part of Sufi wisdom. The truth is always present, always available. What varies is the receiver. The work of the spiritual path is not finding hidden knowledge but developing the organ of perception capable of receiving what is already there.

He continues:

“This noise of the reed is fire, it is not wind: whoso hath not this fire, may he be naught!”

What passes through the reed is not wind, it is fire. The music is not a transitory wind, but a fire, transforming, all consuming. The music of the reed doesn’t merely move you emotionally. It burns something in you. The soul recognizes itself. Rumi follows this by saying whoever lacks this fire - may he be nothing. This is not a curse, but an ontological statement. Without this fire you are not fully alive. Your existence is incomplete. You have not acknowledged this deeper part of your true nature.

Beneath the scroll

Beneath the scroll is a genuine hunger to know where we came from, and where we are going. The music coming from the flute ignites this pain, love and desire to be reunited with where we came. It is our soul’s yearning to know.

What actually satisfies us is the act of creating, depth, flow, and meaning. When you live in the world of stillness, birdsong, beauty, and love, only the act of engaging in creation and the present moment satisfy the hunger of a seeker.

The poem ends with this line:

“Dost thou know why the mirror of thy soul reflects nothing? Because the rust is not cleared from its face.”

The soul is a mirror- it is made to reflect the divine. This is its nature. The problem is not the absence of God but the accumulated rust of ego, habit, distraction, and attachment that obscures the surface. It is the perceived separation from the Source which causes our suffering.

We experience separation from the Source, but the tradition Rumi writes from tells us this separation is not ultimate reality. It only appears that way because the mirror is rusted over. The scroll is just another layer of rust. The spiritual path is the slow work of clearing the surface, and allowing oneself to clearly reflect the eternal beauty of this existence.

The divine is already there, waiting to be reflected.

Share

References:

1. Rumi, Jalālu’ddīn. The Mathnawī of Jalālu’ddīn Rūmī. Translated by Reynold A. Nicholson. Vols. I & II. London: Gibb Memorial Trust, 1925.

Subscribe now

He recalls, “Suddenly, I was thrown into this expansive, amazing feeling of freedom. From myself, from my problems. I saw that I was bigger than what I do. I was bigger than my body. I was everything and everyone. I was no longer a fragment of the universe, I was the universe.”

This experience is one shared by many and, in my opinion, is the core from which all religious and spiritual traditions arise. These direct, personal experiences have different names, yet point to the same thing.

The name for this type of experience varies. Sometimes it is called an awakening, mystical, or spiritual experience. Other times it is called a peak, numinous or transcendent experience. It often arises spontaneously, and is characterized by an altered state of consciousness or perception, where one feels incredible meaning, oneness, and a connection to some deeper truth. The tricky part is that these experiences are, by their very nature, ineffable.

Ineffable (adjective):

1. Too great, intense or profound to be expressed in words. Describes emotions, experiences, or qualities that are beyond verbal description. Examples: ineffable joy, ineffable beauty, ineffable sadness

The word originates from the Latin ineffabilis combining in- (not) and effabilis (capable of being spoken), meaning “not capable of being expressed.” It is often used to convey something that transcends language, such as a deep spiritual experience, overwhelming emotions, or sublime beauty.

These experiences, almost by definition, cannot be put into words. People who have had a mystical or spiritual experience understand how this word captures what they’ve felt. Language is limited. There are things that are felt that cannot always be captured with words.

In the Tao De Ching, Lao Tzu opens with the statement:

“The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao.”

Funny. The thing that can be named and put into words is not the eternal thing itself. When you attempt to name an experience like the one Jim Carrey had, you limit it. This experience that I am (humbly and ironically) attempting to describe, is an integral part of the human condition. I believe Jesus, the Buddha, Moses, the Prophet Muhammed, Jim Carrey, and even Joe who lives down the street have experienced some version of this.

These mystical experiences can arise from a wide variety of activities like meditation, creating art, sitting in nature, or achieving a flow-state.

This isn’t a particularly rare phenomena either. A PEW Research polling from 2023 titled “Spirituality Among Americans” found that 45% of U.S. adults have had a sudden or unexpected feeling of connection with something from beyond this world.

This report also found that 83% of the ~11,000 Americans surveyed believe that people have a soul or spirit in addition to their physical body. Are these people engaged in wishful thinking? Or have they experienced something that has led them to believe in a soul?

Researchers Andrew Newberg and David Yaden, taking inspiration from William James, have compiled the research studies examining spiritual experiences; what they’ve found is that these experiences are often profound and incredibly meaningful.³ Often, a person’s sense of time and space seem to change. The person tends to feel more positive emotions and a greater sense of meaning in life. They may experience a state of consciousness unlike anything they’ve felt before and commonly rank the experience among the most transformative moments of their lives. Common descriptions include “I felt at one with everything” or “I felt my sense of self temporarily fade.”

Subscribe now

On a neurological level, brain imaging studies demonstrate that these experiences are accompanied by distinct changes in brain activity, namely the default mode network (DMN). This is the network of brain activity that is running when your mind is wandering.

When you are sitting around, not focused on anything in particular, and thoughts are coming and going at random, the default mode network is active. A study of advanced meditators found decreased activity and connectivity of the default mode network during meditation. This same effect is seen when people experience flow-states, or when they take psychedelics. ^4-8

When the DMN quiets down, people consistently report:

• Loss of ego boundaries

• Sense of unity with everything

• Timelessness

• Deep meaning/insight

• Reduced self-consciousness

So what does this actually say about the nature of these experiences?

Although we can observe what happens in the brain during these experiences, it’s a separate question altogether whether there is an actual spiritual component.

These experiences highlight what makes consciousness so difficult to study. We can observe neural correlates and track brain activity, but we cannot quantify the ineffable. It’s impossible to determine whether these experiences point to something real just by looking at the brain.

The gap between what scientists can measure and what people actually experience may tell us something important: that there are aspects of reality we cannot yet measure, or perhaps should not try to reduce.

-Auri

References

1. Jim Carrey speaking on his experience

2. Pew Research Center. (2023, December 7). Spirituality among Americans. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2023/12/07/spirituality-among-americans/

3. Newberg, A. B., & Yaden, D. B. (2018). The varieties of spiritual experience: 21st century research and perspectives. Oxford University Press.

4. Brewer, J. A., Worhunsky, P. D., Gray, J. R., Tang, Y. Y., Weber, J., & Kober, H. (2011). Meditation experience is associated with differences in default mode network activity and connectivity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(50), 20254-20259.

5. Limb, C. J., & Braun, A. R. (2008). Neural substrates of spontaneous musical performance: An fMRI study of jazz improvisation. PLoS ONE, 3(2), e1679.

6. Barba et al. (2023) - Systematic review of DMN modulation

7. Newberg (2014) - Neuroscientific study of spiritual practices

8. Garrison KA, Zeffiro TA, Scheinost D, Constable RT, Brewer JA. Meditation leads to reduced default mode network activity beyond an active task. Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci. 2015 Sep;15(3):712-20. doi: 10.3758/s13415-015-0358-3. PMID: 25904238; PMCID: PMC4529365.

Share

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”

We are witnessing a profound time in Western society. As global conflicts escalate and impending AI advancements threaten societal stability, there can be a general sense of despair when envisioning the future.

When confronting this unease, it is easy to focus on the symptoms: ecological crises, wealth inequality, social/attention fragmentation. But these symptoms are not the causes. To understand our predicament, we must dig deeper.

Source:Tom Rippin

Imagine an iceberg. At the surface are the events we see happening around us on a daily basis. Below the waterline are the patterns and structures that give rise to those events. And at the very base, invisible but foundational, are the mental models and beliefs that shape everything above. To understand these mental models, we need to understand the brain itself.

We need to ask: Does the way we think influence the world we create?

Iain McGilchrist, a medical doctor turned philosopher, argues that it does. He provides a compelling argument that our culture overemphasizes left-hemispheric thinking and that this imbalance is the root cause of the chaos we see unfolding around us.^1,2

But what does that even mean, “left-hemispheric thinking”? And why would the dominance of one brain hemisphere over another determine how an entire civilization functions?

The answers begin with understanding the brain’s peculiar architecture.

A Brain Divided

Our brains contain some eighty billion neurons with trillions of connections between them. When we zoom out, we see that the human brain is physically split into two hemispheres. Two lobes, each with slightly different shapes and sizes, connected by a bundle of nerve fibers in the middle called a corpus callosum.

Source: Andreas Vesalius De humani corporis fabrica

This division is not arbitrary. All major vertebrate groups including mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish have a brain divided into left and right hemispheres.³ This basic bilateral organization is a deep evolutionary trait shared across vertebrates. This raises the question: why would we evolve to have two distinct hemispheres in the first place?

Beyond the Pop Psychology Myth

People are familiar with popular psychology trends categorizing ‘left-brained’ people as logical and ‘right-brained’ people as artistic. This idea was dismissed by scientists as it is an overly simplistic and inaccurate way of representing the brain. Logical thinking and creativity require both hemispheres and are patterns of neuron activity between larger brain areas. Iain McGilchrist insists that both hemispheres contribute to most cognitive tasks, but the way they contribute differs.

Other important researchers in the field consistently report that there are important functional differences between hemispheres.^4,5 Language and speech production, for example, is predominantly controlled by the left hemisphere, while the right hemisphere has greater control over attention in general. One way scientists study what each hemisphere does is by observing people with damage to one side of the brain, as in the case of strokes. When the right hemisphere is severely damaged, the person relies primarily on their left hemisphere for their conscious experience. When the left side is damaged, the right side takes over.

So what happens when the left or right hemisphere is damaged?

THE LEFT HEMISPHERE: The Interpreter, Controller and Know-It-All Narrator

In the 1960s, researchers began studying patients whose corpus callosum had been severed as a treatment for severe epilepsy. These split-brain patients offered a remarkable window into how each hemisphere operates independently. Because the corpus callosum is severed, the hemispheres cannot share information.

One of the most revealing experiments involved showing an image to only the right hemisphere while the left hemisphere remained unaware of what was shown.

Note: Each hemisphere primarily controls fine movements on the opposite side of the body, especially the hands and fingers. That’s why, in split-brain experiments, the left hand reflects right-hemisphere processing, and the right hand reflects left-hemisphere processing. Vision is also divided, but not by eye. Both eyes send information to both hemispheres. What matters is the visual field, not which eye is used. Information from the right visual field goes to the left hemisphere while information from the left visual field goes to the right hemisphere. This is how the researchers are able to test each side.

Gazzaniga conducted some of the first split brain studies and writes about it in his book Human:

“We showed a split-brain patient two pictures: a chicken claw was shown to his right visual field, so the left hemisphere saw only that, and a snow scene was shown to the left visual field, so the right hemisphere saw only that. He was then asked to choose from an array of pictures in front of him. From the array of pictures, the shovel was chosen with the left hand and the chicken with the right. When asked why he chose these items, the left hemisphere speech center replied, ‘Oh, that simple. The chicken claw goes with the chicken, and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed.’ Here, the left brain, observing the left hand’s response without knowing why it has picked that item, had to explain it. It will not say ‘I don’t know.’ Instead it interprets that response in a context consistent with what it knows, and all it knows is: chicken claw. It knows nothing about the snow scene, but it has to explain pointing to the shovel with the left hand. It has to find reasons for the behavior. We called this left-hemisphere process the interpreter.”⁶

This is the left hemisphere’s signature trait: it is an interpreter that creates narratives to explain the world, even when it lacks the full picture. And crucially, it refuses to admit when it is wrong. When contradicted by evidence, the left hemisphere doubles down, adjusting its story just enough to maintain internal consistency while ignoring what does not fit.

The left hemisphere attends to the world with narrow, focused attention. It sees parts, not the whole. In birds and fish, left hemisphere analogues favor detail-oriented functions. It categorizes: this tree, that person, this country. Its strengths lie in manipulation, tool-making, language, and logical reasoning. It handles the familiar and routine efficiently. The left hemisphere, according to McGilchrist, Gazzaniga and others, creates the running narrative of our actions, emotions, and thoughts. It keeps our story unified, coherent, and consistent, while at times sacrificing nuance and context.

THE RIGHT HEMISPHERE: The Master, The Poet and the The Big Picture

The right hemisphere, by contrast, attends to the world with broad, open awareness. It sees contexts, relationships, and wholes. To understand what this means, we look at what happens when the right hemisphere is damaged or isolated.

In the same split-brain experiments, researchers asked patients to draw simple objects. When asked to copy three-dimensional images, patients drawing with their left hand (right hemisphere) produced spatially coherent, holistic representations, while the same patients drawing with their right hand (left hemisphere) produced fragmented, flat drawings that failed to capture the integrated whole.^7-9

When Context Disappears

People with right hemisphere damage face a peculiar challenge: they lose the ability to understand context and metaphor. Show them a picture of a man with a lightbulb over his head, and they will describe it literally: “A man. A lightbulb. Floating.” They cannot grasp that the lightbulb represents an idea. The metaphorical meaning, which requires seeing the relationship between elements rather than just the elements themselves, becomes inaccessible when the right hemisphere is damaged.

Emotion becomes similarly fragmented. Patients with right hemisphere damage struggle to recognize emotional tone in speech (what linguists call “prosody”). They hear the words but miss the feeling behind them. Someone says “I’m fine” with a trembling voice and tears, and the patient hears only “fine.” The emotional context disappears when using mainly the left side of the brain.¹⁰

The Hemisphere That Updates

The right hemisphere directs attention to both sides of space, left and right, maintaining vigilance and environmental awareness. ¹¹ The left hemisphere, by contrast, mainly directs attention only to the right side of space, focusing narrowly on what it is actively manipulating.

In birds and fish, right hemisphere analogues favor broad awareness of the environment, watching for predators, noticing movement and change. The left focuses on the seed it’s pecking, the specific prey it’s catching. The right hemisphere maintains broad, vigilant attention to the environment as a whole, monitoring for novelty and change, while the left hemisphere deploys narrow, focused attention on specific targets for analysis and manipulation.

Table 1. The left hemisphere attends to the world with rigid, literal and focused perception while the right hemisphere interprets context, emotion and integrated reasoning. These differences appear in both clinical neuropsychology and neuroimaging/behavioral paradigms. ¹²

The Imbalance and Its Consequences

Both hemispheres are integral for normal functioning. The left gives us focus, precision, and the ability to manipulate the world. The right gives us broad attention, context, meaning, and connection.

The problem is not that we have two hemispheres. The problem is that one has come to dominate.

Western civilization has increasingly favored the left-hemispheres mode of attention, namely, verbal-analytical, explicit, narrow, fragmented, while undervaluing the right hemispheres mode of attending (broad, implicit, contextual). The problem is that the left hemisphere, by its very nature, believes it has the whole picture. It constructs narratives that seem complete and coherent, all while missing the broader context that only the right hemisphere can grasp.

This imbalance manifests everywhere. We see the world as fragmented: separate countries, isolated individuals, humans apart from nature. We reduce everything to measurable parts, trusting data over direct experience. Our systems prioritize economic models over human wellbeing and treat living systems as resources to exploit.

This is the root of the iceberg. The result of this type of thinking leads us to the environmental destruction that stems from seeing nature as separate and lifeless.¹² Social fragmentation and loneliness arise from viewing ourselves as isolated individuals rather than interconnected beings. This interconnectedness is not a metaphor. I like how Daniel Schmachtenberger puts it when talking about a tree in relation to a human being:

“I can say, ‘Ok well I am not that tree’, but what would I be without trees? I would not exist. There would be no atmosphere if there weren't plants photosynthesizing. So I fundamentally am not even a meaningful concept without plants.

“And then I start to run that and say, well what about soil microbiota? And it turns out that my life depends on the whole thing. As long as I have a sense of 'I' that is separate and maybe in rivalrous competition for some scarce status, resource, attention...then we have a fundamental basis for war."

Existential despair grows when life is reduced to material success and meaning is dismissed as illusion. Even the risks posed by AI reflect this imbalance: we are building intelligence in the left hemisphere’s image, optimizing without wisdom, focusing without context.

The deepest problem is that left-hemisphere dominance prevents us from recognizing that left-hemisphere dominance is even the problem. The interpreter spins a story that more of the same thinking will solve what ails us.

We can continue down the path of increasing fragmentation, abstraction, and control. Or we can remember what the left hemisphere has made us forget: that we are inherently living in an interconnected whole, and that wisdom requires seeing with both hemispheres, not just one.

Share

References:

1. McGilchrist, I. (2009). The master and his emissary: The divided brain and the making of the Western world. Yale University Press.

2. McGilchrist, I. (2021). The matter with things: Our brains, our delusions, and the unmaking of the world. Perspectiva Press.

3. Rogers LJ, Andrew RJ. Comparative Vertebrate Lateralization. Cambridge,UK: Cambridge University Press; 2002.

4. Ramachandran VS. Phantoms in the Brain: Human Nature and the Architecture of the Mind. London, UK: HarperCollins; 2005.

5. McGilchrist, I. (2010). Reciprocal organization of the cerebral hemispheres. Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience, 12(4), 503–515.

6. Gazzaniga, M. S. (2010). Human: The science behind what makes your brain unique. Ecco.https://doi.org/10.31887/DCNS.2010.12.4/imcgilchrist

7. Gazzaniga, M. S. (1967). The split brain in man. Scientific American, 217(2), 24-29. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican0867-24

8. MacKay, D. M., & MacKay, V. (1982). Explicit dialogue between left and right half-systems of split brains. Nature, 295(5848), 690-691. https://doi.org/10.1038/295690a0

9. Bogen, J. E., & Gazzaniga, M. S. (1965). Cerebral commissurotomy in man: Minor hemisphere dominance for certain visuospatial functions. Journal of Neurosurgery, 23(4), 394-399. https://doi.org/10.3171/jns.1965.23.4.0394

10. Molloy R, Brownell HH, Gardner H. Discourse comprehension by right hemisphere stroke patients: deficits of prediction and revision. In: Joanette Y, Brownell HH, eds. Discourse Ability and Brain Damage: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives. New York, NY: Springer-Verlag; 1990:113–130

11. Ten Brink, A. F., Van der Stigchel, S., Visser-Meily, J. M. A., & Nijboer, T. C. W. (2017). Differences between left- and right-sided neglect revisited: A large cohort study across multiple domains. Applied Neuropsychology: Adult, 24(6), 585–597. https://doi.org/10.1080/13803395.2016.1262333

12. PsychStory. (n.d.). Sperry split-brain research. PsychStory.
    https://www.psychstory.co.uk/neuroscience/sperry-split-brain-research

13. Schmachtenberger, Daniel. “Moving from Naive to Authentic Progress: A Vision for Betterment.” YouTube, uploaded by The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens,

If you are reading this, congratulations! You are conscious. You know that you exist. You experience the world through your own unique perspective (what we call subjective experience) and just like you, every person experiences their own version of consciousness.

Have you ever wondered where our consciousness comes from? I know that’s a big question but it is kind of fascinating that we have this awareness at all. In order to tackle this big question, we need to rewind, way back to the beginning of, well, everything.

Image Source: Pablo Carlos Budassi

According to the current scientific standard model, there was a Big Bang, which created everything we know, including all of the planets, stars, and galaxies. Billions of years later, the first life on our planet spontaneously forms. The theory goes that this cell evolves over three billion years, into more and more complex forms of life, eventually giving rise to human beings. The human brain continues to evolve, and over time, consciousness “emerges.”

Like magic, somehow, dead matter becomes aware. Somehow, we’re told, unconscious neurons in your brain create conscious experience; your thoughts, feelings, imaginations, and memories. The human being becomes aware of itself. Aware of its existence. How is this possible?

After a lot of research, I began to see that there are three problems with this story.

Firstly, if consciousness comes from the unconscious neurons in our brains, science should be able to explain how. Yet, despite decades of neuroscience research, we still can’t explain how subjective experience exists at all. This is what philosopher David Chalmers calls “the hard problem of consciousness.” We have yet to explain how a physical system such as the human brain gives rise to our sensations and emotions.

Second, it makes consciousness an anomaly—a spontaneous and random accident in an otherwise unconscious universe. If the default state of the universe is lifeless and insentient, then consciousness presents a profound evolutionary puzzle.

Third, it can’t account for phenomena at the edges of consciousness research, for example: near-death experiences, telepathic communication reports in children with non-speaking autism, Savant syndrome^1-2 etc. The conventional model has no framework for these experiences, so it simply dismisses them.

Yet these questions remain, and dismissing them doesn’t make them go away. And due to this gap in our understanding, new ideas are emerging, and a growing sentiment is brewing between physicists, neuroscientists, and philosophers.³ One that challenges the basic assumptions we’ve made about the universe.

What if consciousness didn’t emerge from matter? What if consciousness came first?

Which leads us to the following question:

If consciousness is a fundamental feature of the universe, where would we find evidence of it?

The answer might lie in the most unexpected place: the vacuum of empty space itself.

II. The Physics of “Empty” Space

In physics, there’s a concept that sounds like science fiction but is entirely real: the zero-point field. According to quantum field theory, space is not truly empty but is instead a dynamic sea of fluctuating fields. Even a vacuum, which should be empty of all things, is not actually empty.

Reality, at its core, is not a collection of fixed objects but a field of fluctuating energy. The quantum vacuum is not a vacuum at all. Even in the “emptiest” space imaginable, the zero-point field contains ripples in electromagnetic fields, with energy that never reaches zero even at absolute zero temperature. The emptiest place you can imagine is, at its foundation, alive with motion.

Source: DVDP for Quanta Magazine⁴

The proof came in 1948, when Dutch physicist Hendrik Casimir predicted something strange. Two uncharged metal plates were placed very close together in a vacuum. If the vacuum was indeed completely empty, the plates should not move or experience any forces. Surprisingly, researchers observed that the zero-point fluctuations of the electromagnetic field did create a measurable force pushing the plates together. This counterintuitive effect, now called the Casimir effect, was later confirmed experimentally. It provided direct evidence that the vacuum is not a complete void but instead filled with real, measurable energy.

This raises a deeper question: What is the nature of this energy field? And could it have anything to do with consciousness?

Cue Joachim Keppler, a German theoretical physicist with a PhD in quantum field theory, who has proposed something fascinating:

He states that the origin of all quantum phenomena lies in the zero-point field and that this omnipresent energy field is an essential ingredient of nature’s blueprint.

He argues that consciousness comes from the interaction between our brain and this field.⁵ The zero-point field is a kind of substrate from which consciousness arises. In his model, the brain does not create consciousness. Instead, it resonates with the zero-point field, tuning into a kind of consciousness that is already present in the fabric of space itself. This would suggest that our human consciousness is not created solely by neuronal activity, but rather involves tuning into this fundamental field.

His proposed mechanism⁵ works like this (simplified):

• The zero-point field exists everywhere

• Brain neurotransmitters (specifically glutamate) resonate with the dominant mode in the field

• This resonance creates amplification and quantum coherence in small processing units of neurons in the brain (cortical microcolumns)

• Quantum coherence produces synchronized neural activity

• Synchronized activity gives rise to conscious experience

III. The Conscious Void

If Keppler is right, consciousness would not emerge from dead matter. Consciousness would be woven into the quantum vacuum itself. In his model, the brain acts as a receiver, not a generator.

With this model, the zero-point field provides a testable, underlying mechanism for consciousness.

As one article puts it:

‘The main question is to what extent the “empty” background—the vacuums of reality—actually participate, resonate and welcome coherent interactions.” ⁶

Not the Big Bang, but the Conscious Void.

What do you think? Let me know your thoughts below.

-Aurian

Share

References

1. Weiler, M. (2025, October 20). Nonspeaking autism, “The Telepathy Tapes,” and who gets to be heard. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/beyond-the-ordinary/202510/nonspeaking-autism-the-telepathy-tapes-and-who-gets-to-be-heard

2. Treffert D. (2021) The Sudden Savant: A New Form of Extraordinary Abilities

3. The Manifesto for a Post-Materialist Science

4. Zero Point Energy Animation

5. Keppler J (2025) Macroscopic quantum effects in the brain: new insights into the fundamental principle underlying conscious processes. Front. Hum. Neurosci. 19:1676585. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2025.1676585

6. Woronko M (2026) ‘Liminal Resonance, with Joachim Keppler’

It’s a question we might not often think about.

If you consider yourself to be skeptical and scientifically-minded, you may believe once your brain dies, you die. And once you die, there is total and complete nonexistence. Nothing more, forever. If however, you are more spiritually-inclined, you may believe that even if your brain dies, some immaterial spirit or consciousness survives. That a soul exists even when the physical body does not.

Your belief surrounding death says a lot about your worldview. Underneath this question of consciousness beyond death lies even deeper ones: Is there some inherent meaning and purpose to my life? Does God exist? Is humanity here for a specific reason or is this all due to random chance?

If there’s anything that can help us answer these fundamental questions, it is the study of Near-Death Experiences (NDEs)—which, in a way, have taken center-stage in the debate between materialist science and spirituality.

Near Death Experiences

Near-Death Experiences (NDEs) happen to people who’ve either come extremely close to dying or who were clinically dead for a brief period before being brought back to life. These individuals experience a special state of consciousness, which can include several elements, such as an out-of-body experience, pleasant feelings, seeing a tunnel, glowing light, deceased relatives, reviewing their life, and consciously returning back into the body [1]. Records of NDEs go back as far as Ancient Greece and are found across cultures all over the world [2,3].

In essence, when a person is near-death, either from a cardiac arrest, brain injury, stroke, near-drowning, asphyxia, or another form of a life-threatening circumstance, in about 10-30% of cases, these people report having a deeply impactful experience of the “afterlife” that often eliminates their fear of death and ranks as one of the most transformative experiences of their life [1].

There are thousands of NDE cases reported and documented, and likely millions of unreported cases. A 1992 Gallup poll estimates that 13 million Americans may have experienced an NDE [4,5]. Across five independent studies looking at 562 cardiac arrest survivors, 10-20% reported NDEs [1].

What is particularly strange about these NDEs is:

1. The brain is usually in a state of little to no activity. Often, the blood flow to the brain has stopped and brain scans and EEGs show very little cortical activity during the time which the person is experiencing the NDE [6].

2. The similarities between peoples’ accounts of their NDEs are striking. People from completely different backgrounds, religious beliefs, cultures, races and ages describe similar experiences. The pattern typically unfolds in stages: first, they leave their body and observe it from above (out-of-body experience). Then, they move through a dark tunnel or passageway into a variety of vast open spaces. There, they encounter deceased family members or familiar spiritual beings. Many report emotions of pure joy, peace and love along with profound insights when reviewing their life. There is a sense of feeling connected to God or a light, before eventually returning to their body.

Experiencers often refer to the phenomena as “realer than real” and dissimilar to a dream state, where events are hazy and hard to remember [7]. People say things like, “I saw beautiful vibrant colors I’ve never seen before, beautiful sounds I’ve never heard before.” There are many personal accounts of people sharing their NDEs online and I encourage you to watch those videos to get a sense for the similarities between people’s experiences.

The Journey of an NDE

Harvard neurosurgeon Dr. Eben Alexander experienced an NDE that completely transformed his understanding of consciousness. In 2008, he contracted a severe bacterial brain infection. CT scans revealed devastating damage—his cortex was completely deformed and pus-filled fluid surrounded his brain. With only a 1% chance of survival, doctors placed him in a medically induced coma for seven days. Against all odds, Alexander miraculously recovered. In his book Proof of Heaven, he describes the profound experience he had while his brain was essentially non-functional.

“After an expanse of time had passed, though I can’t begin to guess how long, a light came slowly down from above, throwing off marvellous filaments of living silver and golden effulgence. It was a circular entity, emitting a beautiful, heavenly music that I called the Spinning Melody. There were clouds, like marshmallow puffs of pink and white. Behind them, the sky was a rich blue-black.”

Alexander then explains an encounter with a female guide:

“She was an extraordinarily beautiful woman who first appeared as I rode, as that speck of awareness, on the wing of that butterfly. I’d never seen this woman before. I didn’t know who she was. Yet her presence was enough to heal my heart, to make me whole in a way I’d never known was possible. Her face was unforgettable. When she looked at me, I felt such an abundance of emotion that, if nothing good had ever happened to me before, the whole of my life would have been worth living for that expression in her eyes alone. It was not romantic love. It was not friendship. It was far beyond all the different compartments of love we have on Earth. Without actually speaking, she let me know that I was loved and cared for beyond measure and that the universe was a vaster, better, and more beautiful place than I could ever have dreamed.”

Characteristics of a Near Death Experience by Dr. Raymond Moody

The Two Interpretations

How do we make sense of a near death experience? What does medical science have to say? There are perhaps two opposing interpretations of an NDE: the materialist and the spiritual interpretation. Near Death Experiences remain controversial in the scientific community. There’s also a third camp, in the middle, which I am partial to and have explained below.

A. The Materialist/Skeptical Interpretation:

The first camp believes that these NDEs are created by physiological processes in the brain in response to a life-threatening circumstance. The idea is that the person experiencing this phenomena has somewhat hallucinated these visions because of the state their brain was in. Therefore, they were not actually outside of their body or hanging out in a spiritual realm. This would be the view of most materialist scientists.

Materialism is the theory that reality can be explained through matter, energy and physical processes. This means that everything, including thoughts, feelings, and our minds can be explained in terms of matter and physical phenomena. Consciousness, under the theory of materialism, must therefore be explained by physical processes of neurons in your brain. According to materialism, our subjective experience, including near-death experiences, must be created by neurons in our brain. The mainstream scientific worldview is strongly aligned with the assumptions of materialism.

The materialist interpretation of NDEs is usually as follows:

• NDEs are hallucinations caused by:

  • Lack of oxygen (anoxia)

  • Dying brain activity (neurochemical surges)

  • Disruptions in the temporal-parietal junction of the brain which can disrupt body spatial perception, and induce out-of-body experiences

B. The Religious/Spiritual Interpretation:

The opposing view would be the spiritual interpretation of NDEs. These individuals might say NDEs are evidence that:

• consciousness survives bodily death

• humans have an immaterial soul/mind that exists separately from the body

• heaven/God/the “other side” exists

Although thousands of cases have been documented, definitive proof remains elusive for both interpretations. Skeptics argue these cases can be explained materialistically, while believers see them as proof of the soul’s survival. However, certain cases of NDEs have proven harder to explain away with purely materialist theories. This is where a third group of researchers enters the conversation.

C. The Middle Way

There are some individuals who don’t fit either camp. These are scientists and doctors who maintain an open-mindedness when looking at the NDE research. They might say: “We cannot definitively say consciousness is only in the brain OR that there is absolutely no life after death.”

They believe more research is needed, but the evidence is compelling. Dr. Bruce Greyson, who has studied thousands of NDE cases, carefully states that while he doesn’t have conclusive proof, the consistency of reports across cultures and centuries—combined with their distinctness from typical hallucinations—suggests these are genuine experiences of consciousness that can’t be easily dismissed as brain malfunction [8]. He suggests that in normal everyday life, the brain and mind are the same thing. If you drink, it affects your brain and affects your mind. But in exceptional circumstances, like near-death experiences, the mind can experience a far wider range of consciousness than normal.

Dr. Pim van Lommel, a Dutch cardiologist who conducted a landmark study of cardiac arrest survivors, maintains that “the fact that an NDE is accompanied by accelerated thought and access to greater than ever wisdom remains inexplicable. Current scientific knowledge also fails to explain how all these NDE elements can be experienced at a moment when, in many people, brain function has been seriously impaired. There appears to be an inverse relationship between the clarity of consciousness and the loss of brain function.” Through his research, Van Lommel has shown NDEs cannot be attributed to imagination, psychosis, or oxygen deprivation [1].

What makes these researchers particularly compelling is that some are former skeptics—including medical doctors and neuroscientists who experienced NDEs themselves. Dr. Eben Alexander, mentioned previously, was a Harvard-trained neurosurgeon, and a materialist who dismissed NDEs as hallucinations until he experienced one during a week-long coma caused by bacterial meningitis. Similarly, neuroscientist Dr. Christof Koch, who spent decades studying the neural basis of consciousness, had his assumptions challenged after having his own NDE. These weren’t spiritually-inclined individuals looking to confirm their beliefs—they were scientists whose worldviews were fundamentally altered by personal experiences they couldn’t explain away.

The central question these researchers grapple with is: What would constitute proof that NDEs are more than hallucinations?

The materialist explanation—that dying brains create vivid hallucinations—seems plausible until you examine a particular type of evidence that’s much harder to dismiss: veridical perception. This is where NDEs move from interesting phenomenology into territory that directly challenges our understanding of consciousness.

B. The Hard Evidence: Veridical Perceptions

Veridical perception, in NDE research, refers to when unconscious patients later report specific, verifiable details about events they had no normal way of witnessing. For example, if someone experiencing cardiac arrest in one hospital room later describes specific and corroborated events that happened in a different room during their resuscitation, this would constitute veridical evidence. Somehow, they gained information they shouldn’t have been able to know while unconscious and physically separated from those events.

Remarkably, peer-reviewed medical journals have documented cases of patients accurately describing events outside their room during cardiac arrest, recounting specific conversations, or reporting details they had no conventional means of perceiving [9,10,11].

Here’s an anecdote shared by Dr. Moody:

“This surgeon in Italy, for instance, told me that he was doing an elective operation on a fairly young man in good health. The patient had a cardiac arrest and the doctor was unable to resuscitate him. All of a sudden, the doors of the operating room were flung open and there was this woman.

She said, ‘I was out in the waiting room and my husband came to me. He told me to tell you that he’s not dead.’ The doctor resumed the resuscitation and the patient’s heart started beating again. The first thing the patient said was, ‘I was up above my body and I kept trying to tell you I wasn’t dead, but you couldn’t hear me. So I told my wife.’”

There are many reports of instances like this in hospitals, but even just one instance is significant enough to warrant legitimate attention and study.

The One White Crow Principle

The One White Crow Principle, stated by William James roughly translates to the idea that all you need is one white crow to prove that not all crows are black.

In the case of NDEs, it would mean that just ONE verified case of veridical perception could suggest consciousness can exist outside of the body.

Some questions raised here are:

When does anecdotal evidence become real veridical evidence? Is there a difference between one person’s story and 10,000 similar stories? At what point does the sheer volume of consistent reports demand more scientific attention?

If NDEs are confirmed to be real, meaning we can prove through veridical evidence that a person is able to accurately report what happened in a separate room while they were unconscious, then this would result in a radical paradigm shift in our current scientific worldview. It would suggest consciousness is not solely a product of brain activity, and therefore the survival of consciousness after bodily death may be possible.

The Question Remains Open

We don’t have definitive proof either way but we have compelling evidence that deserves serious investigation. The veridical perceptions cannot be easily dismissed. Perhaps the answer isn’t either/or but something more complex altogether.

And so we return to our original question: does the brain create God, or does God create the brain?

Let me know what you think in the comments.

• P.S. I plan on diving further into these topics so stick around if you are interested in learning more.

• I made a video on this topic and will link it here

References

[1]. Van Lommel, MD. 2022 THE CONTINUITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS. A concept based on scientific research on near-death experiences during cardiac arrest

[2] Plato’s Republic, Book 10, sections 614-621. Myth of Er.

[3] “Anecdotes de Médecine,” by Pierre-Jean du Monchaux

[4] Near Death Experience Research Foundation

[5] Epoch Times How Common Are Near-Death Experiences? NDEs by the Numbers

[6] Parnia S. AWAreness during REsuscitation - II: A multi-center study of consciousness and awareness in cardiac arrest

[7] Long, J. Evidence of the Afterlife

[8]. Greyson, Bruce. After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond. St. Martin’s Essentials, 2021.

[9]. Rivas, T., & Smit, R. H. (2013). “Brief Report: A Near-Death Experience with Veridical Perception Described by a Famous Heart Surgeon and Confirmed by his Assistant Surgeon.” Journal of Near-Death Studies, Spring 2013.

[10].Cook, E. W., Greyson, B., & Stevenson, I. (1998). “Do any near-death experiences provide evidence for the survival of human personality after death? Relevant features and illustrative case reports.” Journal of Scientific Exploration, 12(3), 377-406.

[11]. Tressoldi, P. (2022). Veridical near-death experiences: A systematic review. PsyArXiv Preprints.

The Meditation Revolution

Meditation is everywhere these days—people meditate to improve their mood, observe their thoughts, and lower stress. The average person might squeeze in 5, 10, or maybe 20 minutes a day to sit quietly and focus on their breath. But did you know there are people in the world who meditate for hours on end—sometimes 8 hours a day, 7 days a week?

Imagine having that kind of focus and discipline. What happens in the mind of someone who can meditate so deeply for so long? And what does their brain look like in those moments? Scientists are starting to explore these very questions, studying what happens in the brain when highly experienced meditators enter advanced states of meditation.

The Journey from Monkey Mind to Mastery

If you've ever tried meditation yourself, you probably know how it goes: you sit down, maybe put on a guided video, close your eyes, and start to focus on your breathing. And then... your mind takes off. One minute you're thinking about what you ate for lunch, the next you're replaying an awkward conversation from earlier, and eventually you remember—oh right, I'm supposed to be meditating.

With practice, you may learn to put gentle attention to the entirety of your inhale and the entirety of your exhale. You may feel peace as the body softens. If you stick with it, little by little you begin to watch the thoughts that come in. Instead of getting carried away by them, you realize you are the observer of your mind. With attention and presence, that restless "monkey mind" starts to lose its grip, and a calmer, clearer awareness takes its place.

In our modern world, with social media and its infinite stream of 30-second videos, the practice of sitting quietly with nothing to distract us but our own mind can be daunting. Most people are accustomed to constant noise, stimulation, and entertainment from the moment they wake until the moment they sleep. But even 2 minutes of meditation can help reset your mood and regulate your breathing.

Advanced Practitioners: The Meditation Masters

Now imagine what happens when someone trains that awareness not for minutes, but for years. The researchers I'm discussing scan the brains of advanced meditators who have over 25,000 hours of practice within the Theravada Buddhist tradition. These individuals enter deeply absorptive meditative states—similar to a "flow state," but turned inward. Through intense concentration, they move through different stages of meditation, gaining insight about themselves, their perceptions, and the nature of reality itself.

These insights, often called "stages of insight," gradually lead toward what's traditionally known as awakening, enlightenment, or nirvana. What's especially fascinating is that these states aren't just felt—they can be measured. Some studies have found brain activity during these states that surpasses even drug-induced or ecstatic experiences in terms of dopamine release and other neural markers.

The Harvard Experiment: Mapping the Meditating Brain

Researchers at Harvard are now asking: what exactly is happening in the brain during these profound meditative states? How does brain activity shift as meditators move through different stages of insight? Using tools like 7T fMRI and EEG, they're mapping both the spatial and temporal patterns of brain activity—essentially watching how different areas of the brain light up, quiet down, or connect in new ways as meditation deepens.

In their groundbreaking study, researchers scanned the brain of an advanced meditator—someone who meditated for 1-2 hours daily for over 25 years and who completed a year of 14+ hours per day of meditation. This individual practices a specific type of meditation where, as he goes deeper into meditation, different stages are reached. This ancient practice and these stages have been well-documented in Buddhist literature.

The Methodology

The experiment involved placing the advanced meditator in a high-resolution brain scanner (7T MRI) during:

• Active meditation sessions

• Non-meditative tasks as a control condition

When neuroscientists use fMRI to scan the brain, they're measuring something called the BOLD signal—changes in blood oxygen levels in different areas of the brain, which reflects local brain activity. If there's significant activity in region X of the brain, you'll see an increase in blood oxygen levels in that region. This scanner reveals which parts of the brain are active and how they communicate with other parts.

Understanding the Brain's Networks

To understand these findings, imagine your brain as a city with different neighborhoods (brain regions) connected by roads (functional connections). Different parts of the brain handle different functions—our visual cortex in the back processes vision, while our prefrontal cortex in the front manages higher-order thinking. But it's the connections between brain areas that enable all the complex activities our brain performs simultaneously, like thinking, breathing, or problem-solving.

The default mode network (DMN), for instance, refers to brain activity when a person is sitting without focused tasks—essentially when your mind is wandering.

In a stressed or distracted brain, some roads are clogged and others are broken, making it difficult for neighborhoods to stay synchronized. Traffic builds and communication becomes delayed. Meditation, researchers found, is like repairing, widening, and upgrading those roads, allowing neighborhoods to communicate better, faster, and more smoothly. The result? A calmer, clearer, more connected mind.

Key Findings: The Brain's Meditation Symphony

Areas of Increasing Activity

The brain regions that showed steady increases in local synchrony (ReHo) as meditation progressed were those involved in attention, self-awareness, and emotion regulation, particularly the cingulate cortex. During deep meditation, these regions become more locally synchronized, reflecting:

• Heightened internal focus

• Increased body awareness

• Enhanced emotional regulation

• Deeper self-referential processing (particularly early in meditation before deeper detachment occurs)

Areas of Decreasing Activity

Conversely, some brain areas showed decreasing local synchrony as meditation progressed. This decrease might reflect:

• A quieting of executive control and self-monitoring as the mind enters a more effortless, absorbed state

• Reduced emotional reactivity and diminished awareness of body sensations

• Decreased autobiographical and self-narrative thinking

• A shift away from cognitive control toward spontaneous, non-conceptual awareness.

The Dynamic Dance of Deep Meditation

The research revealed that advanced meditation follows a complex pattern:

Early stages: There's likely a gradual increase in internal focus, visual imagery, emotional regulation, and self-awareness, while simultaneously dampening cognitive control, emotional reactivity, and autobiographical thought.

Deepening phases: Areas responsible for attention and self-awareness peak and then quiet down, making room for absorptive, non-conceptual states. A state of being where you are not focused on ideas, concepts, abstract thought. You are absorbed in the present moment in a unique state of awareness.

Oscillating patterns: The brain moves through different phases of focus, absorption, and release, suggesting that advanced meditation isn't a static state but rather a dynamic process.

Consciousness Revealed Through Ancient Practice

This groundbreaking research represents a remarkable convergence of ancient wisdom and cutting-edge neuroscience, offering insights into the nature of consciousness itself. By mapping the neural correlates of advanced meditative states, scientists are beginning to understand how sustained meditation practice literally rewires the brain, creating more efficient networks of communication and unprecedented states of awareness.

Perhaps most intriguingly, this research suggests that the ultimate states of human consciousness may not require pharmaceutical intervention or technological enhancement—they may be accessible through the simple, ancient practice of turning attention inward and quieting the mind. The meditating brain doesn't just relax or quiet down; it orchestrates a sophisticated reorganization of neural activity that creates entirely new ways of experiencing reality.

As we continue to map these inner landscapes, we're not just learning about meditation—we're discovering the unbounded nature of human consciousness itself. In an age of constant distraction and digital overwhelm, these findings remind us that some of humanity's most profound technologies for transformation have been sitting quietly within us all along, waiting to be rediscovered through the patient cultivation of awareness.

The implications extend far beyond neuroscience labs and meditation cushions. This research opens new avenues for understanding mental health, peak performance, and human potential. It suggests that the journey inward, practiced over years and decades, may be one of the most sophisticated forms of brain training ever developed—a technology of consciousness that transforms not just how we think, but the very nature of what we experience as reality itself.

References:

[1] Sacchet et al. 2025. Advanced concentrative absorption meditation reorganizes functional connectivity gradients of the brain: 7T MRI and phenomenology case study of jhana meditation