Scrambling my things together (large backpack, tent, two small bags from General Semantics conferences – let’s better not go down that rabbit hole just yet, but … soon!), I asked the train staff about my breakfast. It had been promised for 6:00am, which had given rise to me rising early. Now the clock showed 7:35, and the arrival in Linz for my change of trains was scheduled for 7:43. The train staff apologized (bless his heart!) and said he’d bring me a to-go package.
I chatted briefly with the woman in the cabin above me. Her long dark hair framed her beautiful facial features in a slightly mystical appearance, and I wondered how our lives would change if I were to stay on the train until Vienna and converse more with her. What if I were to share my feelings about Ayreon and experiences of the journey with her? And what would she tell me about the her life, her happiness and grief, her contentment and longing, the challenges confronted and treasures found along her own journey?
We’ll never know.
I received my breakfast package and left the train just in time. Hot coffee spilled through the lid and over my hand. I didn’t mind. I stretched my back. Sleeping in the tent had felt surprisingly better despite the rain and chilling winds. While the mini cabin on the train had given me an equally uneasy sleep, there is another key difference. In the modernized context of polished surfaces and touch panels, where the climatised air blows into your face as though it were mid-summer, you simply won’t be replenished by the smell of wet grass and soil. You cannot crawl out of your tent on all fours, stretch and yawn into the rising morning sun, let your eyes glance across the landscape, smile understandingly at fellow tents and tent-dwellers, feel the strange joy of knowing “we’re in this together!”, and make any funny noises of your choosing that half curse, half praise the crazy adventure.
(You also cannot celebrate the art of making and tasting coffee with your new-found Mexican friends … But more on that later.)
Nonetheless, let me give the ÖBB (Austrian railway company) a huge shout-out for maintaining, expanding and modernizing large parts of the night-train network in Europe. I love night-trains. Even if I “regret” having chosen them the next morning, I am deeply grateful for the service. I love all trains! And my heart aches for all the train networks being run down upon privatization. Please everyone, keep the train networks in good shape, make people and the planet happy. Train travel means slow travel. To me it means expanding horizons. Looking out the window, seeing the landscape pass by, reflecting on life. There is no train ride without at least one small epiphany or beautiful thought that drops a tear from each eye. Typically there are several such moments, and sometimes the human-to-human encounters are priceless too. I might as well be talking with the lovely young lady across the table instead of typing this!
On that note, slipping back to the present – we’re currently delaying for a few minutes in Hinterstoder. Yes, I am in Austria again, for Hinterstoder is a name that you wouldn’t easily find anywhere abroad!
And we’re moving again. The journey from Linz to Graz takes me across the beautiful mountains, winding an iron-clad path betwixt forests and rocks, mist and clouds, streamlets gradually mingling waters and swelling in size to eventually become majestic rivers.
Right now I am listening for the first time ever to the classic Queensrÿche album “Operation: Mindcrime”. What on Earth took me so long? Thanks to Monika and also to Jonatan, Andre and Lilia for suggesting it to me. The music is amazing! The singer reminds me a bit of the early works of Crimson Glory, some of which I had listened to on my train rides at the beginning of this journey. When it has some “substance” to it, Music can have a tremendous impact on me. Which reminds me of the purpose and “official” thematic focus of this blog series … Ayreon. I say “official” because you never know where the journey wants to take you. In the end it isn’t really about Ayreon. Ayreon, like Ithaca, is giving us the lovely journey.
This blog series will be an experiment – hopefully not “The Final Experiment”, but the first of many. I intend to write more in a “raw” and unedited style, without editing much. I might do some minor polishing for typos and mistakes, add links and context and a few pictures. If you like it, feel free to comment. Given that I practically never promote this blog, perhaps not many humans will ever read your entries, but trust me: I surely will. :-)
We’re leaving Selzthal now. Queensrÿche sings “I Don’t Believe In Love” (“… I never have, I never will …“). I totally love that catchy track and – nope, I totally do believe in love. :-) This album is really great. I’ll listen again and follow the lyrics and story more intently. And in the coming days we’ll get started with Day 1 (Thursday, 11th September 2025) and follow day-by-day up to the present. I can’t wait to write this. It will be risky because I will lay bare some very dearly and deeply treasured emotions. Yet the price of not sharing is greater, and the life-spark deep within clearly says that I cannot afford it. Wherever it truly comes from, and whatever its true nature, I’ll trust and follow. For, pray tell me: what else is there to do?
It feels hard to convey to you what the music, the storylines, and the live shows of Ayreon truly mean to me. So I shall attempt to do just that: express that which seemingly cannot be fully expressed. I am going to weave diary-style memories, existential reflections, deeply heartfelt emotions, some contemplative insights … you know, the usual suspects. :-)
For context: I am currently on a night train, in the morning, with red eyes from the inconvenient sleeping arrangement of a small almost-Japanese-style sleeper capsule, conveniently listening to the 34-minute track “First Light” by the progressive rock band Shadow Gallery (to be fair and accurate, the song contains 5 minutes of utter silence starting around the 23′ mark, which yet makes it no less epic and beautiful). The accumulated lack of sleep – and the fact that the train personnel must have forgotten about bringing me breakfast with at least some semblance of coffee – doesn’t make for a particularly good arrangement to scratch my memories together into coherent articulations. But then, what better time could there be?
Let’s let this one be raw and unpolished, and discover the always-already-inherent beauty in it.
My thoughts trail off to a group of three Mexicans whom I have first met just two days ago – hard to believe it hasn’t been longer! – on the Ayreon campsite in Tilburg, who turned out to be my campsite tent neighbours. And to the other campsite tent neighbour from the Netherlands, who had gifted me with more than just lending me his hammer to drive my tent hooks into the soil. And to my other campsite almost-neighbours, a Polish-German family of a mother and two daughters who had enjoyed this musical trip to Tilburg a.k.a. “Ayreon City” together. And back to the coffee and breakfast that never comes, and my approaching stop in Linz. Oh my goodness, I need to pack up!
My first ever podcast interview (episode 12 of “Die Zukunftsweberei” by Ingrid and Christoph) went online today. Wheee! Not yet having listened to the final product, I still remember the wonderfully welcoming atmosphere of our interview two weeks ago – and that I surely talked a lot. :-)
And surely there’s still sooo much that I didn’t share. I wish I had said more about the Mindful Researchers, about my wonderful colleagues and fellow “gardeners”, the joys and challenges of building this community of practice. About the joys and mishaps of treading on unorthodox life-paths, of social entrepreneurship-ish endeavours, love and friendships, mystical journeys, meditation retreats, mythopoetic men’s work, encounters with(in) nature, experiences with(in) community, illuminated days & dark nights, existential questions, inexhaustible learnings. Yet I’m glad I did share my passion for precious practices such as Way of Council and Systemic Konsensing, and a zest for life itself.
And … OMG I’m feeling naked! Especially because there’s a link to this blog in the shownotes of the podcast episode. Now the cat is out of the bag (although I doubt that many listeners will land here, but if you do, be welcome to leave a comment or send a message :-)). For the last hour or so I thought of composing some kind of “explanation” because here I reveal so much more of my personal sides and tastes – and of course the travel diaries. But wasn’t their purpose to share stories, to spark connections?
More to trust the process you have, my young Padawan!
Dear reader / listener, may you enjoy. And many thanks again, dear Ingrid and Christoph!
My roommate Mikkel lets me in on the ‘sacred secret’ purpose of his journey to Berlin: he just had one of his thighs adorned by a resident tattoo artist. The result looks impressive. A very specific purpose, I think. How specific is my purpose? I am here for the Emerge Gathering, for reconnection with J and W, and for a trip to Hamburg to co-create Mindful Researchers things with Annika. And there is more. There is something I want to lean into, something I want to give myself to, and it is more specific now than it was in June. It has to do with energies and transitions, with developing a certain sensitivity to different worlds and a growing awareness of their inherent inseparability. I know that my journey here supports this revelation. I know it is purposeful. Yet can I be more specific than that?
Trust the bridge across the river Spree.
I check out from the hostel and stow my luggage in an empty storage room. On a long morning walk across the river Spree I am taking in first fresh glimpses of this vibrant metropolis called Berlin. The Coffee Lab café offers three tiny tables inside and some larger tables and benches outside. I am taking a seat inside near the glass front, inhale the scent of freshly ground and brewed coffee, and start journaling while observing the comings and goings around me.
Sometimes I fantasize that I might be a 'bringer of revenue': I sat down with a salmon bagel and a double cappuccino, and a legion of customers has since trickled in: two young blonde Berliners engaging in lively conversation to my left; a short-haired brunette in a rose-brown-ish coat that reminds me of the Dude's morning robe, now sitting outside and sipping coffee while reading a tome about women's rights; a tall blonde-haired dude with an epic beard; a dark-skinned lady in a red jacket with several bright-skinned folks, now standing outside with their liquid takeaway loot; a guy with a grey cap checking things on his phone. (...)
A wasp comes greeting me at the table in this tiny coffee shop. (...) what I truly care about is connection, not the particular form of connection. I want to hold this affection lightly, without need to give it any label or story. Love flows on its own terms, spontaneously, "a braided and networked process that is fundamentally unpredictable, embedded in situatedness / interrelationality / mutuality / non-explicit reciprocity / adaptivity ..." to paraphrase qualities that Roshi Joan Halifax elucidated vis-à-vis compassion; it is fundamentally enactive. I anticipate that the 'enactive view' is the most profound cognitive update in my life since my spiritual heart-awakening. The unfolding and enfolding of meaning holds the frame, like a 'non-view', to give context to all views. Knowing everything to be enactive, how can one hold views as if they were absolutes?
– Journal entry on Thursday, 7th October 2021
I pause and think back to an image from Dune showing several moons. How would life on Earth be affected if two moons were circling around it, even at different revolution frequencies, causing quite distinct tidal patterns? Yet surely such more complex cycles would also have stabilizing effects. Cycles lead to iteration, to renewal, to establishing patterns of life, to the flourishing of life. While the cappuccino is beginning to affect me, I make a highly unsuccessful attempt to weave a thousand thought-threads into one tapestry.
Life finds ways to accommodate to circumstances. On a planet with a different gravitational field, different composition of elements, different sets of moons and suns, it finds its own ways. Cyclical processes support its flourishing: tides, day-night cycles, seasons, eccentricities of orbit around the central star. Too much variation too quickly can be detrimental. But on our planet, the 24h-cycle seems rapid too. It helps to have several cyclic processes at once, another 'braided and networked process', on different scales of time and space and amplitude. One of our biggest mistakes as humans has been our ignorance and denial of these cycles. Any system that has fundamentally grown based on regenerativity needs supporting conditions to maintain such regenerativity. A logged forest cannot easily regenerate. Extracting too much, converting it all into different forms – coal and oil and gas into energy, wood into ships and houses and paper – is by design a one-way street. The ideology of capitalism demands such short-term gains though; it has no value-system that accommodates for the long term, nor for the genuine care for the flourishing and diversity of life.
I've read an article by George Monbiot this morning, and I agree with his assessment: you cannot tame and temper capitalism – it seeks profit. It is its own 'paperclip maximizer'. Regulations only incentivize the exploitation of loopholes, and they invoke an army of libertarians. No, it is the value system itself! Streets and cars can never solve the 'problem of transportation'; a 'green economy', a 'green deal', a 'sustainable form of capitalism' can never solve the problem of perverse incentives. It is a band-aid, perhaps necessary to stop the blood loss, yet it can only be a precursor to a deeper healing transformation. And we must take care to not have it shield off our view, lest it conceals the heart of the matter.
– Journal entry on Thursday, 7th October 2021
I chat with the barista and learn that this gentle young man intends to leave this family-owned café and enroll in a military or police academy. Then, heading back to the hostel to retrieve my luggage, walking along the river and crossing underneath a bridge, I catch a first glimpse of the living conditions of the homeless in this city. This is someone’s home. No shelter from cold winds, nor from unwanted attention. A seed of realization is planted in my mind that will take its own time to trickle in and merge with further experience.
Trust the kids.
The luggage weighs heavily on my shoulders. I pause at a bench facing the river. Gazing at the cars, trucks and humans passing by at a distance, a dawning insight has me pick up the journal again. I’m seeing something, an intuition that both traverses and transcends time, yet the verbal expression on paper is one of intellectual grasping, spiraling in on an elusive moment of redemption.
Sitting and resting in half-shade across the Mühlendamm-Schleuse, pondering the undeniable aesthetics of Teilhardian visions for the evolution of mankind. I've seen the 'flaw' in it with a felt-sense of certainty, not too long ago. Was that conditioned by the cognitive frame I've held, or inhabited, at the time? How could I claim for it to reflect absolute truth? And now I'm seeing the aesthetic value, akin to that of a symphony, of exquisite art, of profound scientific discovery, of spaceflight, of genetic engineering. Engineering. Engine. Mechanics. It exploits the mechanistic lawfulness of our universe, our cosmos. It exploits. Lawfulness. Law. Regularity. Plausible undeniability. Who can deny this? Who can stand in its way? Yet begging the question of emergent strategy: what is life? What gives meaning? Are we meant to send life to other planets? Are we meant to let them unfold on their own terms? Our quest for survival and flourishing does not 'prove' justification of our attempts to colonize. "Because we can" is not enough. Did we consider Wolf? Did we consider Life? Did we consider Spirit? Do we consider Source?
– Journal entry on Thursday, 7th October 2021
Trust love.
Ever so slightly missing the mark, I let go of pen and paper. The walk leads past Checkpoint Charlie and Berlin Anhalter Bahnhof where I am briefly sensing the intergenerational and cross-cultural import of their associated histories, the ever-morphing impact that keeps on flowing through our shared presence. I cross Gleisdreieckpark and watch humans of all ages play, skate, walk, realizing that parks too shape our histories. With the physical discomfort of heavy weight on my shoulders, beginning dehydration, and a certain cautionary closed-mindedness, I am still feeling somewhat alienated in this city. A couple more hours and this too will pass. And are there not little signs of love everywhere? How long will it take me to notice?
Irina welcomes me into her cozy Airbnb apartment which is located in the heart of a red-light district, as I will only realize later, being of slow wits in select regards. Irina is curious about the Emerge Gathering and I make a feeble attempt to explain what it is about – changemakers and visionaries of all kinds coming together to tackle our sensemaking / meaning crisis with a kind of metamodern-spiritual philosophy and practice? We share our professional interests and personal journeys, she tells me about Azerbaijan, I mention CERN and the Mindful Researchers. Our conversation quickly deepens and zones in on themes of spirituality. Given our immediate resonance and Irina’s strong curiosity, I find joy in sharing my spiritual journey with her; yet a stirring in my belly literally prevents me from speaking about some of the more recent experiences. Does the serpent protect herself? Even so, we are at zero risk for running short of topics. Only my rising hunger commands us to pause.
Trust polar bear.
I walk towards Nollendorfplatz, admire the graffiti artworks, and pull out my phone to search for hints on nearby restaurants. The almighty algorithms propose Bethe Ethiopia as the #1 choice, literally just around the corner. Ethiopia, of all possibilities! I follow the universal nudge and am generously rewarded with the most delicious food: Yetsom Beyaynetu and thyme tea, followed by Brilli Teji (homemade honey-wine) and a yummy dessert made of sesame, almonds and dates. The amiable chef of this lovely family restaurant, a bellied man with a hearty smile and sparkling eyes, teaches me some Amharic and enthusiastically proposes that I’m a natural when it comes to holding the Brilli Teji flask with my fingers and thumb. Of course, the body remembers! I smile as a crow instantly confirms my strange thought: sometimes you do a thing for the first time and yet remember that you’ve always known it.
Back at the apartment, still slightly affected by the Brilli Teji, I partake in a co-creative Zoom-meeting-dance practice with Annika, Mary, and Marieke, in which we sense into co-creating a Mindful Researchers event. Then I don my favorite black Anneke van Giersbergen T-shirt, and Irina and I have a short farewell conversation as I am getting ready to meet J while she too is preparing to leave. Before we part ways, I show her Mark Matousek’s book “Writing to Awaken” that I’ve lately been working with.
Trust this Ethiopian dessert.
J meets me at the Metropol and we hang out for a couple of hours at the nearby Hafen bar. With J being a director and writer, it is only natural that we land on the theme of storytelling. I tell him about my newly re-awakened joy of writing and my intention to blog about this journey. J shares some trade secrets about dramaturgy, proposing that in a good story the characters come first and the plot evolves from their inner and outer conflicts. What is the ‘research question’ that drives the story and the protagonist? What is an appropriate type of character to walk in the protagonist’s shoes? What is their perceived ‘want’? What is their actual deeper ‘need’? What’s up with the tension or polarity between these two, the ‘want’ and the ‘need’? I feel intrigued and challenged. Have I not sufficiently thought this through? Should I?
We carry on talking about life, love, relationships, heartbreak, healing, music, our coming-of-age years, psychedelic experiences, and recent elections in Graz. During his bio break I ‘secretly’ give in to my new drug of choice: Anneke van Giersbergen’s mesmerizing “Jest Oldu” cover version of Karsu’s cover version of Mustafa Sandal’s ballad. (The grande finale always reminds me of Anneke’s incredible vocal performance with Damian Wilson in Maiden UniteD‘s acoustic cover version of “To Tame A Land” at the Wacken Open Air 2011 – just imagine this song mixed with this vocal energy – and I should mention that said Maiden uniteD concert in Wacken ended with this epic cover of “The Evil That Men Do”, melting the iron hearts of even the most moshpit-hardened and wall-of-death-approved metalheads; and I don’t know what gives me greater chills: their duet or the lyrics?)
In the end I ask J whether ‘coming out’ is a multi-layered process, and he confirms this, saying that in his experience there are three possible stages or areas for coming out: an ‘inner’ (personal) realization, an ‘outer’ (public) declaration, and an ‘inter’ (relational) enaction. I sense that this has something to do with my journey and writing here, too.
Trust the … uhm … king!
On the way back to the apartment, I experience my life’s greatest density ever of being invited to sexy times via fifty shades of “Hast Du Lust?” – I automatically rush past all offers as if speed mattered, soon wondering whether there is also a way for me to relate more fully to these wonderful beings, hearts and souls in passing. After all, one can affirm “no” and still embrace this one human family in this one web of life. Can I learn this? What else is there to learn?
This travel diary is a sort of continuation of my previous diary from June 2021, but also tells its own story. I’ll use present tense right away. The ‘outer purpose’ of this journey is a trip to Berlin for the Emerge Gathering 2021, with extra days to meet my friends J and W, followed by a couple of days in Hamburg to co-create with Annika for & around the Mindful Researchers initiative and to spend deep time in Nature. As for the ‘inner purpose’ … we’ll get to that later.
From the postcard book “Everything is Connected”.
As for the pictures, just click to enlarge!
Yesterday, in preparation for this journey, I fetch a presumably larger backpack from my brother, then rush to a Mindful Researchers meeting, then rush to the Royal English Cinema (now called “KIZ Royal”) where my friend Klaus awaits me with a huge bag of fresh popcorn. Klaus and I first met in September 1997 as neighbors in a queue, awaiting our turns to become registered as freshman students at Graz University of Technology. Being of highly compatible geekiness, nerdiness, and sense of humor, we quickly became friends. About 24 years later we are in a queue again – this time awaiting our turns to get tickets for the new “Dune” movie. We enjoy the impressive blockbuster and are caught by surprise when it ends abruptly in the middle of the story (oh, it comes in two parts!). For me this is enough of a teaser to listen anew into the amazing Dune audiobook (narrated by Simon Vance and others) upon returning home.
Our status after six iterations.
Arrakis. Dune. Desert planet.
This morning I open an envelope from Annika. We’ve been sending a postcard back and forth for about six times, always adding a little bit, sometimes including gingerbread or feathers. I’m showing the result here with Annika’s permission; too bad we have already run out of space, although we might just add further layers to it and give future archaeologists something to puzzle over!
This time I choose not to pack ALL THE THINGS, yet I still cannot resist preparing a more than generous pile of favourite T-shirts. The new backpack turns out to be not quite as large as I thought, calling for radical reduction. No second pair of shoes, no second hoodie, no second towel. Travel lightly. Pack food. Do the dishes. (Damn those dishes!) Run out of time. Get yourself onto the bike. Ride to the train station. Lock the bike. Hop onto the train three minutes before departure. Find your reserved seat. Sit back and enjoy the 11 hours and 40 minutes ride.
Arrakis. Dune. Desert planet.
My recently finished (audio-)books since my 42nd birthday are, in reverse order:
To be honest, I find that T-shirt rather dystopic.
adrienne maree brown – “Emergent Strategy”
Gigi Coyle – “Kaleidoscope: Finding my way around”
Richard Powers – “The Overstory”
Jeremy Lent – “The Web of Meaning”
Jeremy Lent – “The Patterning Instinct”
Robin Wall Kimmerer – “Braiding Sweetgrass”
Darlene Lancer – “Conquering Shame and Codependency”
Hermann Hesse – “The Glass Bead Game”
Michael Nußbaumer – “Weltübergang”
Robert Wright – “Why Buddhism Is True”
Pete Walker – “Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving”
I am also halfway through Hanzi Freinacht’s “The Listening Society” in preparation of the Emerge Gathering 2021. Now listening to Frank Herbert’s “Dune” gives things a slightly different twist and evokes rather peculiar trains of thought – or rather, a rapid succession of gestalts that I cannot quite translate into words:
I'm on the train to Berlin. Yesterday night I watched "Dune" with Klaus. (...) I recall that the audiobook also gripped me. It is fiction, yet also resembling facets of our reality ... and I understood something about rivalrous dynamics, technological advances that can be exploited for dominance, and scarcity of vital resources. Power. Empowerment. Creation. Control. Shadow and light. Prophecy. Narrative. Myth. I understood in some sense; I 'see' the field, yet concrete extractions of conclusions remain elusive.
I also understand, or choose to understand, all of this in the light of enaction. We enact these worlds, also the technological world. The 'war on sensemaking' is a competiton for frames of enaction. Cognitive frames. Can AI and simulations offer coherent extrapolations of our futures? Oh, but whosoever controls the AI, whosoever feeds it with key parameters and basic foundational laws, may control the fates of humanity! Then it is a race for sensemaking, for the most compelling narrative – religion on steroids. I see a dark utopia of neo-cybernetic weavings, a sublime blindness to unintended consequences. (...)
We all need the same courage.
– Journal entry on Wednesday, 6th October 2021
These words represent some of the most salient bits and pieces of translation of a quite fast-paced embodied cognitive process – a non-verbal ‘stream of consciousness’ – that matches, mingles, and remixes the arising gestalts, from most basic to most complex. This process feels somewhat like multi-sensory ‘images’ blending into each other, sometimes slow & smooth and sometimes more like a stroboscope, offering new meaning to the observer in every moment. And it feels like it’s unfolding in several ‘planes’, not just the rational-cognitive plane. I have no certainty for what that really means. I just know it is nothing to be troubled about, although it sometimes brings me to my knees when I allow it to have its way with me …
This tastes way better than it looks.
Upon crossing the border to the Czech Republic (yet unrelated to the geographic fact), I am faced with the challenge to find a workaround to replace the forgotten fork. I do have a carrot. I do have teeth. What are our teeth for? Bingo! Gnawing a carrot-fork into existence dramatically boosts the ability to enjoy the prepared food (delicious red cabbage cooked with hemmelige ingredienser and chestnuts, plus boiled potatoes).
One carrot-fork to rule them all.
The beet soup challenge is a lot trickier – this carrot is clearly too slim for me to gnaw a proper carrot-spoon. I drink the soup sans veggies, then apply the carrot-fork to push and pull the veggies; surely crows would have done a more elegant job with twigs and beaks. Anyway, yum! The best part comes last: praise be upon the edible carrot-fork.
We’re picking up 15 minutes delay. An Ouroboros 2021 session with Claire Petitmengin pulls my attention. Annika is among the live participants, and I wonder if she is again taking her signature “colorful notes” – like a graphic recording, but more organic if you ask me – meriting a badge of honour: Annika the artist-researcher. The session title, “The Gesture of Awareness – an account of its structural dynamics”, promises a fascinating conversation. At this point, I don’t know yet how deeply it will influence the rest of my journey. In the following I share some written notes:
What prevents us from being aware? (What a fascinating question!)
- Phenomenology: the 'natural attitude',
- Elicitation Interview: the pre-reflective nature of experience?,
- Buddhism: avidyā (Sanskrit) / avijjā (Pāli) = ignorance.
How can we learn to become aware of what eludes us? "How can I aim for something that I don't know that I know, while I don't know that I don't know it?"
Thre are gestures of becoming aware, gestures that prevent one from becoming aware, and skillful triggers for the gestures of becoming aware: these can be ...
(1) triggered by external or existential events,
(2) learned by self-imposed discipline (e.g. meditation training),
(3) induced by a therapist, meditation teacher, or interviewer.
A key step is the 'conversion' (or redirection?) of attention from the 'exterior' to the 'interior' world, from "what" to "how" (asking how it emerges) – imposing a temporarily enhanced duality.
A subsequent key step is 'letting go': essentially a shifting from 'looking for' to 'letting come' (which erases the previously enhanced duality of interior/exterior!). This gesture is followed by a 'gap' moment of silence or stillness (note: like a 'delayed reaction' in General Semantics?).
Skillful practices to release a subject's the tension towards the object, in order to loosen the subject-object duality: do not sustain the phenomenon under investigation, leave it "without support". Thus the tension unravels and subtilizes by itself.
A question: "How does a generic experiential structure emerge?" (and what 'is' this structure?)
A comment in the livestream chat: "First rule of the époché: you do not talk about époché". :-)
It becomes readily apparent in the session how difficult it is for us to speak about these fundamentally experiential aspects of experience itself, as if trying to “eff the ineffable”. Even so, ain’t that a wonderful companion to the surgically precise metacognitive and perceptual observations of Paul Atreides and Lady Jessica in “Dune”?
Arrakis. Dune. Desert planet.
By the way, here’s an interesting link: Frank Herbert, the author of the “Dune” books, was influenced by the “trans-disciplinary meta-discipline” of General Semantics. When I asked Claire Petitmengin after a Mind & Life conference in Boston in 2014, she confirmed (if I remember correctly) that she too had been inspired by General Semantics some decades ago; though when sharing it with her supervisor and mentor Francisco Varela at the time, he had remained rather unimpressed by it. I wonder if this had something to do with the oftentimes ‘hyper-intellectual’ presentation of General Semantics, pushing what is actually supposed to be a practical discipline into the realm of our intellects and thereby tempting us to neglect the actual practice. This is a common pattern that I know too well from personal experience, and we will soon encounter it again along this journey.
Sunset à la Czech Republic.
I still wonder if General Semantics holds potential for academia in general and for contemplative research in particular. From 2014 to 2016, I shared several conference presentations and posters on the similarities (and differences) between Neurophenomenology, Buddhism and General Semantics in theory-and-practice. Then I dropped the subject as my focus shifted to the topic of collaboration and the Contemplative Scientific Collaboration project. Might there be a time to revive these old ideas, now that more people have seemingly independently been putting the spotlight of their curiosity onto connections between Buddhism and General Semantics? And might there be a unique contribution to these connections, yet to be explored further, via Neurophenomenology and the ‘enactive view’?
Back to the journey. Night has fallen as we are crossing the border to Germany. I attend parts of a “New Republic of the Heart” (NRotH) community session. This is a quite ‘radical’ – yet profoundly peaceful – social experiment, initiated by Terry Patten. I’ve been dipping my toes into this community since last Summer, around the time when I stepped out of Leap Forward after four intense years. I’ve limited my engagement in the NRotH to a weekly dyad call with another Wolfgang who has since become a dear friend. And occasionally I’m checking into these community calls.
I begin to see a pattern of engaging with social experiments and (intentional) communities. The origins are for me perhaps to be found way back in 1997 with KaraNet. More recently I’ve been engaging very intensely with Leap Forward, rather softly with the New Republic of the Heart, and again intensely (yet quite differently) with the Mindful Researchers. Of these three, the Mindful Researchers community really feels like ‘my heart-child’, a garden that has been growing many gardeners. On this journey I’ll meet people from two of these three communities.
Mmmmmh, Berlin. Currywurst, anyone?
Finally we reach Berlin main station and I take the M5 to Strausberger Platz. What a relief to take off the FFP2 mask and inhale deeply, even if it is the fragrance of streets! Yet walking the dimly lit roads of Berlin at night makes me feel a bit like an alien. What am I doing here, again?
Arriving at the “Singer 109” hostel, doning my mask again, checking in, climbing the stairs to the second floor, coming across legions of youngsters. Entering a simple but stylish room with 2×2 bunk beds, one of each is occupied by Mikkel from Denmark and myself. Shower. Sleep. Dreams.
Trees and rivers have spoken. The disenfranchised carriers of society have spoken. Is the age of corporate arrogance coming to an end? I feel repelled by most of ‘politics’, except for a politics of the heart. I want humans to ‘lead’ us whose primary business is the flourishing of life, the awakening of the heart, and the freedom of mankind.
This is not an easy task. It is more challenging than economic growth and stability, more daunting than attaining financial prosperity. For the economy we’ve got rules, well established by societies worldwide, subscribed to by the vast majority.
Could we perform the same feat with our care for life, with deep listening, with learning how to live in a true local and global community? I trust that we can – are we willing to pay the ‘price’? What is that price?
(I wrote this into my journal on November 2, 2012 on the plane from San Diego to Chicago at the end of my “first real journey”. Minor editing and headlines for better clarity. If any part of it resonates with you, feel free to send me comments, ideas, critique, encouragement. Thanks!)
The Consciousness Wager
Could it be just randomness by which this fascinating course of events has come about? For sure I cannot answer this through the lens of my experience which suggests to me a thrilling story far beyond chance. I can however place a wager and say: if all is determined by randomness or immutable laws and I am merely a bystander who enjoys the illusion of subjective experience, then it does not matter if I believe in the illusion of free will.
It is a wonderful thing that people contribute to this question by exploring and explaining the world as a mechanical system governed by strict laws of nature. I wish that, as for all ideas, such an idea is never censored.
I wish also that this will never be the only idea, such that the other half of the wager will remain accessible to us: that by other principles, which we may never be able to measure with absolute certainty, we actually have a choice, an infinite amount of choices, which shape the evolution of our cosmos by that which we can only faintly describe as consciousness.
Universal World-view and Integral Science
This question has nothing to do with the idea of being “right” or “wrong”, but it is a question that asks us to surrender, that invites us to subscribe to another world-view which encompasses both positions, and indeed all positions. I call this the universal world-view. And while it may resemble a post-modern philosophy that sounds like “everything is true, everything leads to the same”, it is not quite the same thing. It is an integral view that goes beyond the integral vision of Ken Wilber (or so I believe, verification pending), one that invites all the viewpoints and philosophies to partake in it.
I believe that what we need is an ego-neutral integral method of inquiry which allows to emphasize the assumptions that underlie each viewpoint, and that even allows to state openly the extent to which one’s ego shapes the course of reasoning. A science without masks, perhaps with a different name, perhaps a new paradigm, an extension of the scientific method as we know it.
Clusters, Domains, Boxes and Membranes
What if we look at viewpoints in terms of clusters through this integral lens? For instance, there is a cluster of viewpoints described by the term “science”, based upon the “scientific method” and all that arose from it, which can be subdivided in infinite ways; if we pick “hard science” and a school of thought that appears internally consistent, and if we look at the extreme case of such a view that refutes all other views as “unscientific”, then even such a view is part of the integral big picture, arises from it, arises from assumptions that are part of it.
Again, it is good to have such rigid approaches with their razor-sharp reasoning, for inside their box we may find solutions to bigger problems, if we only dare open it and look inside with an open mind. Their internal consistency may provide a self-correcting nature that keeps their ever-advancing discipline in shape.
For any such box we can turn the whole idea upside down, and what is outside becomes the inside, and what is inside becomes the outside. Taken further, all that is left is domains of thought separated by arbitrary membranes.
And this example was just the meta-domain of science, but the idea extends to other domains of our human experience and inquiry. We may as well pick the cluster of viewpoints described by the term “spirituality” and apply the analogous ideas of boxes, inside-outside, membranes and masks. We may pick any such cluster, any such domain, any such viewpoint – which has its assumptions and allows its own realizations.
A Dance of Viewpoints
Furthermore we can observe that as our viewpoints fluctuate and evolve from moment to moment if put under the lens of discernment, the whole system looks more like a dance of viewpoints and never rests in a static state; and for those who can assume several viewpoints, or even hold several viewpoints at the same time, the idea of “viewpoints” becomes obsolete and superseded by the notion of “view-domains” or dynamic meta-views, which allow not only to inquire from a completely new meta-angle (as if between several fixed viewpoints a new point were born, like a transition from discrete natural numbers to discrete rational numbers), but also to zoom in and select any discrete viewpoint contained in it; thus it extends beyond the post-modern confines.
The ultimate integration of viewpoints – all those that are accessible at any given point! – would lead to a unified, integral meta-view, which can perhaps be described as a “collective consciousness”, a “universal consciousness”. It may not be accessible for one individual human being, just as the achievements of the hive may never be accessible by any single ant alone. But as we allow for a connection between our viewpoints, and as we develop the capacity to understand and integrate other viewpoints, we may reach such a state together.
Ethics for the Multiverse
And here a sense of ethics plays a role: will we use this capacity as in our past for “one group versus another”, I against you, us against them, … in the egocentric, ethnocentric or worldcentric sense? I believe that we must integrate(!) all stages up to worldcentric at the very least, as follows indeed by the whole idea of a fully integrated world-view, which would otherwise be limited by our choice of inclusion and exclusion. The Gaia myth may be a valid and useful pointer to show the direction towards this sub-goal.
And then, again as a consequence of this very idea, we must take it further to a universal (or cosmocentric) world-view. In this way we may one day become the responsible creators of life, evolutionaries of consciousness, participants in a universal community of lifeforms, skilled solution-finders on a scale which exceeds our imagination of today and of generations to come.
(I wrote this in August 2013 and kept it as an unpublished draft, feeling too shy to be “seen”. Here goes, with tiny edits!)
I like to think of some experiences as life-changing. They all are, in fact. Some of them stand out, and you know that they had a specific large impact on your life, because you were there, you felt the change, perhaps a seed of change, and they align you with your old and new dreams.
I know, for instance, that I wouldn’t be writing this if I hadn’t met Sara at OHM2013. Sara does spoken word poetry (and teaching, and more). Imagine a camp-like tent village full of hackers, scientists, engineers, whistleblowers, policy makers, artists, agents, geeks and nerds, parents and kids. Imagine that place hosting a conference with talks and workshops, DIY tents, retro zones, and imagine that somewhere in between a young woman with sparkling eyes passes the flame of inspiration on and on among these human beings, with poetry and passion.
Listening becomes second nature. “Laying down a path in walking” – continuous deep practice in ‘seeing’ the ‘world’ and enacting relationships, cultivating, familiarizing ourselves – with our mental continua, our perceptions, biases, situated experiences. Guided by love, spontaneous compassion, circles within circles, the enactive ‘view’ as a ‘non-view’ that is free of reference-points and autopoietically co-arises with our living and ‘worlding’, becoming the groundless ground.
Extending this gesture to all ‘beings’ near and far – a practice beyond denominations, beyond categorizations. Easier to remember, easier to notice, easier to imbue with life when we are not rushing to meet preconceived notions of ‘productivity’, ‘utility’, or exclusive ‘rightness’. These notions have their place and carry their own limitations. They too arise from the groundless ground, to which they too must return. And so even these words and expressions are only pointers that may guide us back to the source from which they have arisen.
Then the mystical gaze of the heart settles into stillness. And the green and golden leaves on the cherry tree before me are gently swaying in the breeze.
