Within Reason - #147 What is PURE Consciousness? - Thomas Metzinger

Episode Date: March 18, 2026

Get Huel today with this exclusive offer for New Customers of 15% OFF with code alexoconnor at https://huel.com/alexoconnor (Minimum $50 purchase).For early, ad-free access to videos, and to support the channel, subscribe to my Substack: https://www.alexoconnor.com.Thomas Metzinger is a German philosopher and Professor Emeritus of theoretical philosophy at the University of Mainz. His primary research areas include philosophy of mind, philosophy of neuroscience, and applied ethics, particularly focusing on neurotechnology, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence.Get The Elephant and the Blind: The Experience of Pure Consciousness: Philosophy, Science, and 500+ Experiential ReportsTIMESTAMPS0:00 - The Minimal Phenomenal Experience Project11:34 - Is MPE New Age Meditation?17:07 - Collecting Reports of Pure Consciousness25:48 - Lucid Deep Sleep - Thomas’ Experience32:19 - Does Consciousness Require Complexity?39:29 - The Power of Meditation45:32 - Is Meditation Always a Positive Experience?53:13 - Is a MPE Actually an Experience?01:11:21 - Your Brain is Not Telling You the Truth01:20:08 - Analysing Minimal Conscious Experiences01:27:26 - Is Meditative Enlightenment Unethical?01:32:37 - Western Ignorance of Eastern Tradition01:40:13 - “Coming Home”01:44:29 - The Political Implications of MPE01:52:40 - Should Ketamine Be Legalised?

Thomas Metson go, welcome to the show. Thanks for inviting me. What is the minimal, phenomenal experience project? Well, I could give you a slightly longer history of it. That starts with a paper in 2009 in trends in cognitive sciences, where we did these experiments, where we tried to have subjects identify themselves, with an avatar, seeing their own body from behind.

And then we asked ourselves the question, if that illusion works, the whole body illusion. I'm sure many of your viewers have heard of it. There's a popular science book called The Ego Tunnel where I describe all this. The question was, what is actually the thing that jumps from the physical body into the virtual body if the illusion works? What's that sense of selfie identification? and that led to the question, what is minimal phenomenal selfhood? So we wrote this paper where we defined the simplest sense of conscious self-experience,

which is basically location in space, location in time, and a perceptual, only sensory perspectival model of reality, for instance, centered on the eyes. interestingly our research showed that agency, mental agency, guiding your attention or bodily agency, are not necessary conditions for this simplest form of self-hood. Okay, after this was over, in my group we always discussed what else can you subtract from minimal phenomenal self-hood?

What could you take away without having a cessation of conscious experience? without fainting. That led to the concept of MPE, minimal phenomenal experience, which actually not I have invented, but my research assistant at the time, Jennifer Wind, who is now at Monash University in Melbourne.

And then I had an idea. So this big book, I guess, which you will ask me questions about the elephant and the blind, this is not meditation research. I am not a meditation researcher. The project is actually something else. The project is to test a type of scientific explanation

that has never been tried on the problem of consciousness. So most scientists, neuroscientists in the consciousness community, they think there's just one classical Hamel Oppenheim reductive explanation scheme, and that's how scientific explanations work. but there's more there. And there's just in the opening end note, end note one in the elephant, I have explained what a minimal model explanation is

where you try to understand a phenomenon by subtracting everything that is not essential or not necessary, which is in itself problematic. Maybe there is no essence to consciousness. And then the question was, okay, if we want to start, an interdisciplinary research project with the guiding question, what is the simplest form of

conscious experience in neurotypical human beings? What would be the candidate, the number one candidate? And for me, it was obvious that it would be the experience of pure awareness and meditation as an entry point. But the final story might be completely different. this might turn out to be false. Maybe we have little blips in non-REM sleep that we never remember. Or maybe future computational models tell us, no, no, no, no. The simplest form of phenomenality is actually something else. But then over the last four or five years,

I've used this pure awareness experience as an entry point into the question. Yeah, I mean, my listeners might be familiar with this question to the extent that when I've tried to figure out along with everyone else what consciousness might be, I think the first thing we need to do is clear up a confusion that when I say, if you were looking for consciousness in another person or an animal, what kind of stuff would you look for? And people say, oh, I'd look for emotion. I'd look for sensitivity to pain. I'd look for things like that. And you kind of have to ask the question, but if I took you as a conscious person and I took away, say, your eyesight, you'd still be conscious. What if I took away your sentience? So you can't feel pain, but you're still aware. You're still conscious. And then I ask people like, what if I took away your memory? What if like every instant was like the first time you'd ever been aware? Already, we've got to a, if you try to think what that would be like, it's really difficult. But it still seems to make sense to say that it would be conscious. Absolutely. So, it's a, so. instantly we're starting to strip away these things which are often confused for what consciousness is, when they're actually just some of the things that consciousness does. And so the question then becomes,

when you strip all of the non-necessary stuff away, what are you left with? And I suppose one problem with this is that if you strip, in order to sort of experience this minimal conscious state, you need to strip away so many of those things, where do we turn to look for like, you know, where to research this kind of experience? Very good. Very good. Very good. You're getting right to the core of the problem. I mean, first of all, we don't have conceptual criteria for minimality, but all the things you've just mentioned are actually the functional profile of phenomenal processing,

memory and so forth. And then if there was a state, for instance, many of the subjects in my psychometric studies in the qualitative analysis say it's even time less There is no temporal experience in pure awareness. That is something that is counterintuitive in the sense that you cannot simulate it. You cannot imagine it. Maybe it suits you ideologically, then you believe that.

But the problem is we don't really know what we're talking about. When we say, what would pure phenomenality without without any behavior, without any behavior, behavioral markers be. I mean, it could have a sufficient neurocorrelate. There could be a physical side to it, but we don't know what that is. And that is why this is so interesting. How to approach this, how to approach something of which millennia of spiritual practitioners have said it's ineffable,

where people say it can. cannot be remembered, as you mentioned, memory. It's just moment from moment, from timeless moment to moment, if you follow the descriptions. How do you get at that? And now there are a number of very smart young people who are actually trying to get at it. Many of them have the advantage of having been committed practitioners of meditation themselves. Some of them know what an ego dissolution is because they have ample experience. experience with psychedelics.

Sure. But still, I mean, we are both philosophers, Alex. I mean, the epistemology of reports of this type is, of course, a major problem. Yes. So I have presented a lot of reports from 57 countries, from way over 1,000 meditators and analyzed them. But why should anybody believe these people? So the number one problem is what I have termed theory contamination.

Most of them have some belief system. They're Buddhists or they're Christian mystics. They're Sufis. Most of them are, I think your podcast is called Within Reason. That's right, yeah. Most of them are not exactly within reason. but they have these interesting states of consciousness. Yeah.

So how do we, that's the problem. How do we deal in an intellectually honest way with these reports over the centuries and this interesting phenomenology? Because another extreme would be just play the stupid analytical philosopher who always says this is all meaningless full of conceptual. contradictions. Yeah. If you want to, I think,

Rafael Milier, I can give you an example of what I think is the main problem. So I have, for 30 years, I've developed a theory about the human self-model and the brain, the self-model theory. And there's one layer in our self-model,

which is the autobiographical self-model. You can attend to it, you can report about autobiographical memories you've had. Now, if people come along and say, as many psychonauts or meditators say, I have experienced a full ego dissolution, a state without MPS, a state without even minimal phenomenal selfhood.

Every normal philosopher will immediately see that this is a kind of, kind of a fallacy, like a performative fallacy or something, how should you be able to report about a conscious experience where you were not there and report it as a part of your own life? Yeah, right. Something is conceptually wrong there, you know,

and will raise all alarm bells, proper philosophers from the university. So one question is, If there was something like MPE, or if there was something like... That's minimal, phenomenal experience, as opposed to self-experience. Yeah. If there was a prospectival experience, I talk of a zero-person perspective, like phenomenology that is not a first-person state.

How should we, how should anybody remember this? Yeah. Maybe you have had this a lot. maybe you're enlightened or is helpless multiple times you have episodes and you just why should you be able to tell us i've yeah i mean i've never experienced an ego death to my shame of course you you can't that's tautologically true but but you're right but the people do report this and so okay so here's the weird thing is that we've got this conceptually really difficult thing. And yet, even the most sort of hard-line, sort of skeptical-type person,

we'll probably look at these people and they'll go, look, that's all nonsense. But of course, I don't deny that they, like, you know, they experienced something. I don't deny that they had some kind of illusory, you know, experience. They were on drugs, blah, blah, blah. But that was probably explained by something else. But even for that person, when they say, well, I know, I'm sure that they felt like they experienced something. The question is, what is the thing that they experienced. Having said that, when we start talking about like, you know, meditation, reporting and loss of the self and zero person perspective type stuff, people's alarm bells might start

going. This is a bit sort of new agey, a bit wishy-washy, a bit kind of like Deepak Chopra, you know. So maybe you can just say a few words to console anybody who might think that we're kind of beginning to go down that route. Well, we have to be as sober and as critical as we can, but we also, I think the English word would be to feign ignorance, to play as if you're dumb. And of course, a lot of academic philosophy in disregarding

altered states of consciousness has done this over decades, not taking something serious that might be theoretically very relevant just because the reports are somehow murky or don't live up to the standards of analytical philosophers of mind. If you're really interested in the growth of knowledge, in epistemic gain, you have to go there and you have to make your hands dirty because I'm absolutely sure there is something very relevant there,

there's something absolutely theoretically relevant there, else I wouldn't do this. But then, I mean, we have had subjects, participants in our studies, who deliberately say, I don't want to fill in this survey, this questionnaire, this, who just walk away with a very, you know, with a smile and say, it's good that you do this, but it's pointless to cognitively, intellectually, theoretically approach this. You miss everything. Oh, so these aren't people who are going like, oh, this is all nonsense. These are people who are going, this cannot be captured in analytical or questionnaire form. Yeah, for instance, in Buddhism there is this beautiful term of noble silence. And there are people who choose noble silence.

And often I have the feeling, I'm a long-term practitioner. I have meditated twice a day for 49 years now, into India and all the usual crows. up and I have the feeling I could ruin something also in my own life and maybe I have to stop this kind of research because it contaminates my practice and there are very sensitive people who would be interesting subjects and participants and say no no it's fine you can be philosophers you can be scientists do that but you will always miss what is really relevant about all this. So you have these people, right?

But of course, I mean, there are neurocorrelates. There are people who are doing the most interesting research. Let me just give you an example. Christopher Timmerman from UCLA here in London. I created two prices, two 20,000 euro prices for the neuroscience of pure awareness and computational phenomenology of pure. awareness. And he won the 2025 prize by getting somebody who was 17 years on retreat.

And everybody who has been 10 days on retreat knows what that mean, into London, and then shoot them behind Alpha Centauri with 5 Mitoxid EMT in two different dosages, and let them compare their pure awareness experience with this molecule that some people think is the ultimate psychedelic and then make a fine-grade phenomenological comparison. That is all very interesting. That's progress.

And people try lots of interesting things. So I think there will be something that is always ineffable that you can't touch but a lot of progress can still be made. And maybe in an ideal world, we could even crack the problem of consciousness through a minimal model explanation, through some mathematical model

that is conceptually much more precise than natural language descriptions could ever be, but actually tells us what a full absorption episode of pure awareness would be that is an episode where there's nothing else, but the content of awareness is awareness itself. And then you have your philosophic can of worms again. Yeah. Well, the question, it's become increasingly obvious to me. We just spoke about this before we started rolling. My relatively recent interest in consciousness, trying to understand what it's all about. It's become obvious to me that people are.

are often just talking about the wrong thing. Yes. You know, I was recently on a panel where there was some neuroscientists and they had me there for some reason, which I found to be complementary but also quite bizarre. But I think they wanted the sort of non-scientist's perspective because, and they were asking about consciousness and whether you can see consciousness in the brain.

And one by one, these scientists, they started talking about neural activity. They started talking about, you know, instances of psychosis and how interestingly, you know, the brain activity can be different if somebody is having a hallucination versus really seeing something, even though they feel the same. That's really interesting. One of them even said, well, we, and El Seth, my friend said we could kind of like shelve the

question of like the experience and talk about the brain science. And I kind of want to say, there's nothing wrong with that. Like, if you want to talk about those things, then excellent, awesome, it's going to take us very far. But we're here to talk about consciousness. And if you want to know what consciousness is, you have to strip away all of those things and get to the thing that everybody at the beginning of this panel agreed that consciousness is, which is the sort of what it's like to be. It's the phenomenological aspect of it. And so,

in sort of pursuit of finding that like nugget of foundational pure consciousness in this complex abyss of emotions and memories and self-heard and stuff, we're trying to seek that nugget. We start with a bunch of people who claim that they've experienced some something a bit like that, and you've taken, what, like, a thousand of them and given them all this kind of questionnaire? What was that questionnaire like? What kind of things were you asking them about? We'll get back to the show in just a moment, but first, if you're anything like me, then getting the right kind of food in your diet can be a little bit difficult. And when I'm struggling to get the right kinds of vitamins and minerals and things in my diet, it's today's

sponsor, Huell, that comes to the rescue. That's H-U-E-L. This black edition is a complete meal, 400 calories, 35 grams of vegan protein, 26 vitamins and minerals. It's high protein, low sugar, and low cost coming in at only a few dollars per meal. This one's the chocolate flavor, which is my favorite, but it also comes in iced latte like this one. It comes in strawberry banana, it comes in chocolate peanut butter, all kinds of flavors. So there'll be something to your taste. And if you go to huel.com forward slash Alex O'Connor and use the code Alex O'Connor at checkout. As a new customer, you'll also get 15% off your first purchase. So use my link, let them know that I sent you. And with that said, let's get back to the show.

Well, it's online. The optimized version is online. There's also a free paper with a psychometric study we did. We developed with pilot studies with advanced meditators mostly in Switzerland, and a number of phenomenological items, like were you still aware that you were meditating? And already in the pilot studies, I, as a long-term practitioner, I learned new things. I'd never thought about. So, for instance, people said,

yeah, it has a quality of soundness, like the last piece of a puzzle and everything becomes super coherent or consistent. I had never thought of this, but it's actually true. Another person said something we didn't have in our set of phenomenological items, which was density. So the idea is the phenomenology of awareness itself, the knowingness itself as not tied to a knowing self,

not tied to what I call an epistemic agent model, and in my theory, that is ultra-smooth. In philosophy there was this discussion ages ago that qualia are ultra-smooth, that they have no graininess, and that for that reason, it might not be possible to reduce them

to anything physical or functional, which always consists of relations. So, yeah, and then I found it in the reports, and we saw, yes, actually many people say the quality of awareness, itself has a field-like quality, like the continuum of real numbers. Between every two numbers, there's another number. It's like a complete dense space. And so we worked ourselves into a first version of 92 items. And now there's an improved version and asked people from 57 countries.

And I have never done anything like this. And I tell you, among us philosophers, I learned so much. Did you, for instance, know that if you have 100 people who honestly try to fill out a questionnaire, only 38.4% of them actually managed to do this? Because people start skipping questions and do all kinds of cring stuff. I didn't know that. And there are all these concepts, 6%, for instance, of our participants, would get out of the survey at the beginning. And long-term meditators would say pure awareness. I don't know what that is. One plus one equals more of the greatest stories.

Hulu on Disney Plus. Stories about survivors. The most dangerous planet. Family. Retribution. Murder. Prophecy. Beer and propane.

How are we doing? Blake Panthers. The ultimate soldier. Chicago, all right? The best of the best stories now with even more from Hulu. Amazing. Have it all with D.U. on Disney Plus. In communities across Canada,

hourly Amazon employees earn an average of over $24.50 an hour. Employees also have the opportunity to grow their skills and their paycheck by enrolling in free skills training programs for in-demand fields, like software development and information technology. Learn more at aboutamazon.ca. They feel like they couldn't answer the question. The first email I got after this was online, was an arrogant email from an abbot of a large Japanese Zen monastery.

And it was like a little boy, what are you talking about? Yeah, yeah. We don't know pure awareness, but we know 27 other things. Yeah. What are you doing? You know, and then you get all these experts and ideologues. That's so interesting that it seems like the pushback that you're describing, I would have thought that a project like this,

you would get pushback from like reductionist scientists who were like, shouldn't be looking into that. That's nonsense. But it sounds like you're kind of getting pushed back from the other side, from people who are like, you know, we're like, we don't think that the scientific method or whatever it is that we're doing here can capture this. Yeah, but the thing is large numbers, would you say in English average out? If you have large numbers and proper statistics and mathematics, then certain factors pop out. Yeah. And certain clusters. give you an idea of what clusters of phenomenal experience might be.

So also maybe I should say one should distinguish different types. So I have distinguished between MPE states that would be a state of pure awareness that can be in an entirely, as we say, dual mindfulness mode. There's still a meditator sitting on a cushion, and that meditator has a pure awareness experience and will report it as its own, his or her own experience afterwards. Then there are full absorption episodes where the only reportable content of experience is nothingness or awareness itself or bare wakefulness, something like that. But then you also have MPE modes where people have longer periods,

where MPE in mindful living where the pure awareness state goes along with perceptions with the body moving around in the world even while talking to people and one of the things I would really like to do I'll give you an example of

something I would have never believed there are these reports for centuries that awareness can be sustained in certain monks or long-term practitioners during non-REM sleep, during dreamless deep sleep, that there can be an experience.

Some people call this witnessing sleep. Some people call it wake sleep. No dream imagery, no lucid dreaming, nothing, but just awareness. That I would like to show in a lab, and I haven't been able to. And I only do this because as a very young man, I once was on a long 10-week meditation retreat, and I had this. I know it's a real phenomenon.

And if I hadn't had this, I would say these are all crackpots. And you remembered it afterwards? Yeah, but you just said the right thing afterwards. Yeah. So in the morning when I came to and woke up, not during that whole night, not during the night. not during the night. There was no thought of, that's weird, I'm aware,

or what is this? I'm not sleeping. In the morning, I suddenly thought, what was there? The lights were on all the time. That was then, I don't know if it was autobiographical memory,

but that was the cognitive self, saying it again during that period, there was nobody saying, I should sleep? What is this? Yeah, you said the light was on. Like, how would, when you did wake up, how did you sort of describe even just to yourself?

Yeah, I didn't. What just happened? I didn't wake up because I was already awake in a certain sense. Right. It's just that then the whole content embodiment, the chattering mind came on. So I sat up on the edge of my bed and thought, that was weird. Now I'm awake.

Yeah. So I think for a science, That would be, I call this a triple triangulation. My dream would be to have somebody who has stable witnessing sleep. I don't know anybody to get them into a sleep laboratory. And first, just the proof of concept study show that consciousness during dreamless deep sleep is a possibility, demonstrate that. Then find, you know, in 2000, I have edited this book, Neurocorrelates of Consciousness. then I would want to know

what the minimally sufficient neural correlate of awareness in dreamless deep sleep. Which you mean what's the sort of brain activity, the neural correlates, the neuronal activity that goes along with that experience? Yeah, not any.

The smallest... The minimal amount. The smallest sufficient set. Yeah. And then if we had that in an ideal world, I would like to have a computational model, a mathematical description of how the information flows in that neural correlate.

it have that and then have a full absorption state that some meditator reaches out of the waking state, have the correlates of that, and have a computational model of that. And then compare them. And then compare. And the idea is if we could do that, we would be much closer to a solution to the problem of consciousness than we've ever been before. Well, if you're out there, a person who consistently experiences, you know, I guess it's also called what, like lucid, like lucid non, like lucid deep sleep or something like that way. But I'm interested in this because you said, I didn't know that you had experienced this. Well, you know, whether, whether you experienced it or not.

But the way you said, you know, that was weird. maybe you're sort of in that camp of people who say it can't be put into words but what is that what is the thing that and you said that while you're experiencing it you didn't cognize it you were just experiencing it but what is it when you then did wake up was it like oh you know I saw a bright white light or was it like oh I you know I heard a set like what how would you best put it into words what it is and maybe if you can't I could I could um form natural language concepts like self-knowing

primordial wakefulness. That's a natural language concept. Doesn't help much. Of course, I have my own speculative pet theories. And many meditators may find them shocking. But I think that actually the pure awareness experience has a lot to do with what is called

the ascending reticular activation system in the brainstem. So it's not, although most consciousness researchers, those people on your panel, they all think it's something in the cortex. But I think there is something much more basal, namely that what wakes you up in the morning, that raw activation from the brainstem and unspecific nucleo in the talemus,

that so to speak open that space of knowing, that epistemic space that we call waking consciousness. And normally, we don't look there. But my wildly speculative theory is that the most difficult signal source, the cortex constantly has to explain away, is not what comes through the sensory surfaces, through the eyes or ears, but it's actually, I think, the biophysically strongest,

signal is this raw activation from the brain stem and the brain has to do something to explain to itself what is happening and that model that predicts or explains away sudden wakefulness that is actually that background consciousness that's the consciousness ultimately that's a form of content itself but that is when all the stuff you talked about in the beginning is stripped away. That doesn't mean that the model that model set isn't itself physically in the cortex.

But the signal source or that which is represented could actually be the raw activation mechanism itself and there are some pointers. I mean, if you look at Tibetan Buddhists, many of the spiritual traditions, they say

very deflationary things. They say things like restful alertness or ever-fresh wakefulness, like constantly renewed, recurrent, or primordial wakefulness, which cannot be described. And one possibility is that the ultimate scientific story is actually something that is so simple that most people may not like it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It could happen.

It wouldn't surprise me. I think whatever the nature of the thing that we're talking about, is, I think it's simple rather than complex. And I'm not a neuroscientist, but it seems to me that if I had to place a bet on where we've been going wrong and not making progress and understanding consciousness is specifically the assumption that consciousness requires complexity. And, I mean, I don't think that's true just because sort of almost meditatively when I start thinking about removing those aspects, if I close my eyes and then keep sort of taking away those sense, the thing that I'm left with seems to me like it would be simple.

But I'm not sure. I'm not sure how a neuroscientist would explain that. But do you agree? Like if I said to you, most people believe that consciousness requires complexity. The consciousness is an example of essentially the most complex thing that we've discovered in the universe. Do you think that's true?

Well, we have to distinguish the phenomenology that is accessible to beings like us. The mathematical story, the computational model may have a lot to do with surfing the edges of uncertainty or something like that and may have something to do with complexity and complexity reduction and the boundary criticality and keywords like that. So we must always keep this apart. how will our theory may be very complex, but the phenomenon itself, phenomenologically, may be super simple. Gotcha. And let me say two things, because what you said was so interesting, if you talk to people who are not philosophers like us or not scientists, but meditators, I often say, and many agree, the problem with pure awareness,

is that we are so complicated and it is so simple. Famous traditions say it is not even something that has to be achieved by meditation. It is just something that has to be recognized. It is there right now. I know you have been guilty of panpsychism. There's a certain way, as a certain sense in which that, after which you are permeates everything. And I wanted to ask you a second question.

So many people think, is pure awareness things, this is something mystical and wild, and I've never had it? But I think everybody knows it. Also non-meditators. And here's one or two examples. So sometimes maybe you've taken an afternoon nap

and you went much deeper than you wanted to and you woke up and you were seriously disoriented. You didn't know maybe for 500 many seconds or maybe even for two whole seconds. You didn't know who you were

and where you were and what time it was. These wide awake this is pure awareness. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I had that experience this morning when my when my editor knocked on the door and woke me up and I was like,

and I forgot, I was like, I feel like, it wasn't quite, it wasn't quite that. Because I feel like sometimes when I wake up to an alarm and I haven't had quite enough sleep as I, you know, it's never good to wake up to an alarm. You should strive to wake up before it, you know. But when you do, sometimes I've woken up and the reason it happens is because I've got something important on and that's why I've set an alarm. And it'll take me a second to sort of be like, what is it? what is it today?

I've got, there's something, there's something, oh yeah, that's right. You know, my, my editor is here or something. So I don't know if, I mean, this morning, I didn't, I might have sort of been aware that there was something, but you're right, at that moment of sort of like, people often say, you know, give me a minute to come to. Come to. From where? Yeah, so it's super simple.

You know, I don't know if psychiatrists do that in England, in Germany, they would ask about the patient. Is the patient oriented to place? is the patient oriented to time and is the patient oriented to person that is can he or she say who she is and there are situations where we are wide awake and we aren't i'll give you a second example there's always one day in the year when you sleep as good you sleep really really well and often you get up early, even a quarter to five,

because you're so well-rested. And if you then don't make two mistakes, you don't look into your phone and you don't talk to anybody. But imagine you just walked out to the terrace in this super well-rested, well-slept, wide-wakes day, and sat there with the first cup of coffee or tea

and the birds were singing. And then there was one thought arising and disappearing. And then there was another thought arising and disappearing. There's something in between. That is it? Everybody knows this. Children who are in flow states when they are not disturbed and play. If they're left alone and nobody molests them,

they sometimes the quality of awareness itself becomes explicit. And so I don't think you have to meditate at all to experience this. I think everybody knows it. Yeah, and people often talk about creative flow states as well. If you are a musician, freestyle rappers talk about this. You know, people who make up rhymes on the spot because you're thinking about it, you're like, what rhymes with microphone, you know, hip, hippodrome, but then you really get into the music and the words just sort of start coming.

A bit like when you're speaking, you don't really think of every word that you're saying and they just, they just sort of flow out. And they say, you know, people say things like, oh, I sort of got lost in it, you know, as if you sort of, it's almost like waking up from a dream afterwards, you're like, well, you know, what was that? I just sort of became consumed by this thing. Yeah. Yeah. Again, it feels like we're getting a clue here as to the kind of thing we might be talking about where, you know, time and awareness of self kind of at least full to the background for a moment such that even when you come to and you're like, no, no, no, I am a self and the self was there. I didn't, I wasn't like aware of it for five minutes when I was when I was in

that in that flow state. I guess that's the kind of thing we're talking about. I did want to ask you just because I'm interested, you say you meditate twice a day, every day for how many years? almost 49. And how long do you typically meditate for? You know, it's a long life, it varies. Now it's like 45, 40 minutes twice, but after a certain time, this starts, you know,

the distinction to what you do during the life. This starts to blur a little bit. Things will also happen. The good thing is when you don't meditate, but the system has learned this and you just silently, I like to be in nature all by myself a lot, just silently sit in the forest on a bench.

And if you don't ruin everything by meditating, sometimes something happens by itself, you know, so it changes over a lifetime, but I wanted to connect to something you just said. One of the simple things, you know, the most prominent meditation, meditation technique in the West right now is Vipassana, where people just non-judgmentally observe their own thoughts as they arise and disappear. Just be aware of them, don't judge them,

don't suppress them, but don't also follow them. And one thing that teaches you is you don't know what your next thought will be. I mean, this rapper is inside me. The rapper is called the default mode network. Yes. You know, and it spits up this stuff. The first thought that interrupts the silence is always a complete surprise. Yeah. It's like being ambushed for the, and then the brain, that's at least my theory,

has to explain away that surprise. And it does this by creating a cognitive agent. by, yeah, I had a thought. You know, I remembered something. Yeah. And then it creates a little self-model of an entity that actually was in control all the time and did that. Yeah. And I remembered that.

But that's a confabulation. Yeah. When if you pay attention. And for some people, it can be difficult to meditate. I mean, I've never seriously given it a try. And I think that's to my shame and to my fault. But if people are in a boat of being like, no, I don't feel like, I feel like I'm having my thoughts. I don't know what you mean.

I would say, pay attention the next time you're speaking in your native language. Like when I'm saying these words, I'm not, if I'm trying to speak, you know, French or German, I might think about every word, you know. I'm being a ein or a man, something like that, you know, I'll think about it. But in my, in my language, you know, I'm just like, the words are just coming out. I didn't know that I was about to say. I didn't know. I'm roughly aware of the thing I'm trying to say, and then the words just flow. And when I pay attention to what it was like a second ago for these words to just appear,

they are as mysterious to me as the words that appear in my consciousness when you speak. I don't know what you're about to say next. Very good observation. But I also don't know what I'm about to say next. And if you just pay attention while you're speaking, I'm doing it now. That's why I'm going on. I'm trying to really feel what it's like for these words to just appear. it's only retrospectively that I'll say, you know, yeah, I said those words, but I didn't plan on it.

What does the first person pronoun I refer to in these cases? It refers to a certain what I call partition of the phenomenal self-model you have of yourself, but that's, of course, as our common friend Arniel would say, it's virtual. It's itself a control hallucination, that selfiness. And it was, you know, super efficient. parsimonious for the organism in which it happens. It had an evolutionary advantage. It made the emergence of large societies possible.

Because if I have a model of myself as mostly living within reason, and I recognize you as somebody who probably also mostly lives within reason, we can, how do you say, mutually acknowledge each other as persons. personhood emerges, you know, rational subjects. And that made an explosion possible that wasn't possible in animal societies. So it's like a scaffold for a lot of cultural stuff that comes later. So it's not something bad in that sense. It was very useful, but it also created a lot of suffering.

That's the downside of it. But, yeah, the close. Also, you look just by guiding attention. Or, as your very own carfrest might say, by precision deployment, you can penetrate into the construction process and your model of reality changes. You see that it's not like we're all talking in everyday discourse. I had this thought. It's more like the thought had you.

I know that's so in a way. Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. Yeah. I don't think I have ever reached like an experiential state of like, um, of like just intuitively realizing that, of just knowing that like on the whole. And that's what I think people are referring to when they, when they really reach these deep states of meditation or high doses of psychedelics. And they really just feel intuitively the truth of what's being said there.

But it's a common thread throughout all kinds of traditions. I am interested. If you stopped meditating, if you just were never allowed to meditate again for the rest of your life, how do you think your life would change? Maybe it would get much better. It was because I was forced to end a silly pursuit. I mean, one problem is you see it all over in spiritual movements.

the human self model adapts. And so somebody for some reason decides to meditate. And then they develop a practitioner person personality. They are disciplined. They have had glimpses of something. And they thought that was relevant. And they have seen things other people haven't seen. And if it gets really, really bad, they may begin to teach.

I don't know. And then you suddenly have sexual abuse. fuse in monastery. You know, that's, you know, in religious, spiritual movement, that's how it happens. That is not the answer I was expecting, I must say. What would you rather like to? Well, no, I think that's interesting,

but I think most, I was expecting, you know, to say, if I couldn't meditate, you know, my life would fall apart and I'd be, you know, anxious and unsettled all the time and whatnot. No, in the elephant, there is a small chapter called meditation, and non-meditation. And of course, ultimately, the problem is that idiot

that sits on the cushion and wants to achieve something because they have read books or heard crazy stuff from some new age freak. That is, I mean, you can come and you can become clear, but then there's still this entity

that is reward-seeking in a certain sense. or which also has maybe sometimes, maybe every few times, a few days had a beautiful meditation experience and says, oh, I want, that I want, that feels just right. And I want to have it again.

Of course, this has to all be seen too. And many of the deeper traditions, of course, say at the end, if you've looked into this for a few years, don't meditate. So they say things like non-distracted non-meditation is the real thing.

Whatever that is. Yeah. You know? Yeah, that is interesting because, I mean, I don't know much about the science of meditation, but I have heard people reference the fact that sometimes, like,

an obsession with meditation or attempting meditation can actually be kind of a negative experience depending on the context or who's doing it or what their reasons are or what it brings to their sort of psychological attention. It's not for all people. I mean, it's much more sustainable and much more safer than psychedelics. Right.

But I have sat on a cushion and cried, and I've had psychological crises. It's not for everybody. I remember a paper that if you're a narcissist, regular meditation practice actually makes that worse. It's not good for everything. So one has to be careful,

but maybe there's a kind of a realization that meditation is actually something that is going on all the time that is happening, namely a state of observation without an observer that is normally automatically contracted

into you, contracted into that first person perspective, but which can be deconstructed, decontracted, but it's already there. Yeah. So it's, I think there's stages. Yeah. You have to dabble in this for a few years and then maybe you will realize, I'll tell you an example, typical example.

So I'm this neurotic control freak, right? An experience I've had hundreds of times is I would sit and meditate. And then a bell rings. It's over. The time is over. And then it gets

really nice. The moment I have this prediction, the meditation period is over now. Then something very nice happens. Hard to describe. May go on for a few minutes.

Which shows me that there was something else all the time. You know. So waiting for that bell. No, no, no, no, no. Trying to bring attention. Oh, yeah. Like to the present moment or something.

Yeah, right. This automatism. Yeah. Kind of resistance also. Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. And I suppose, I mean, people keep telling me that I need to meditate and meditate more.

No, but if you, why should you? if you don't feel naturally drawn to it, why should you do that because other people say it? Yeah, I don't know. Well, I suppose people, when I talk about consciousness and my interest in, you know, minimal, phenomenal experience and stuff, people might say to me, well, like, you know, if you really want to know, here's how you find out. But then again, I feel like that's echoing this kind of, you've got this goal that you want to achieve by sitting down and being quiet for a while. almost like I've got my pen and paper next to me ready that when I have it I can pick it up and write down, you know, my...

And boast about it. Yeah, yeah, exactly, right? Exactly. So, you know, I don't know. I feel like it would be useful to try. But yeah, I think you have to be careful about motivation. What is that called? There's a term for it. Discourse competence.

I don't know if that exists in English, so that you can also participate in conversations about meditation. Discourse competence. I'm not sure. That's a phrase in the UK, but it ought be, because that's a useful concept, yeah. This is bizarre nonsense. I mean, the real question is, can you suffer less? Is there something that in real life, with all the real problems you have,

would make you suffer a little bit less, or enable you to be a little more compassionate than you normally are? or not. And it might not. I don't know. There may be people for whom extreme sports or a really good diet might do the same job, you know, if they wanted it. What? Because we're suffering people.

We're suffering beings. I mean, that's the origin of it, to understand the roots of suffering and not to talk about it or form organizations or have teachers. but to understand the deeper, the fine structure of your own suffering, why do I do this to myself? How do I always do this to myself? And not theoretically, not in psychotherapy, not with talking to somebody, but maybe seeing this. And you've written about how, by the way,

we've been talking about this book, The Elephant and the Blind, which is this grouping together of different reports from this survey and a sort of discussion on the various themes that they bring out. And you sort of continually quote people and then sort of group them together into sort of rough themes. And it's called the elephant and the blind after that famous sort of story of the blind people all being sent to feel an elephant and one of them feels the foot and one feels the trunk and one fills the tail. And they all have a totally different idea of what an elephant is. and they're sort of grasping at one small part of a much larger, larger entity,

and maybe something like that's going on, you know, experientially with these meditators. They're kind of, some people are getting at one thing, some people are getting in another, and you need to zoom out and look at the big picture. And the way to do that is by looking at these people who've had these minimal, phenomenal experiences, but there is some consideration given to the view that some people have that this minimal, this MPE, minimal, phenomenal experience is not really an experience. Being kind of devoid of content, it's maybe sort of something else. Like, can you say something about those people who think it doesn't really count as an experience?

Yes, that's very interesting and a bit difficult. So I'm an old-fashioned guy. So in the self-model theory, I have asked in obviously selfless systems like you and me, what would happen to happen on a representation level in the brain that the system have a robust experience of being someone? Now, one could ask if there, what kind of representational content, phenomenal content, would make the large majority of people say this is a contentless experience because that's what most people say. Pure awareness is contentless.

Maybe it's reflexive, it's awareness knowing itself, but there is no content. So the question is, I think that is a content. I'm the party pooper there, the old-fashioned philosopher. I think it is actually something that is a form of representational content. But then we have some reports of apparently also advanced people who say that the whole thing is that this is not an experience. And I must say I take them very seriously and one day I have the feeling I understand what they mean

and another day I think, no, I don't understand what they mean. Maybe there, because that's what you were interested in at the beginning of our conversation. Is there something? I'll just tell you my speculative theory. I'll tell you, you know global workspace theory? No. The first model of consciousness, Bernard Barr's, cognitive theory of consciousness in 1988, was the idea the content of consciousness is the content of a global workspace.

that makes information globally available by broadcasting it to concept formation, to the motor system. Everything that is in that global workspace is my situation right now is the content of consciousness. Now, that's a functional analysis of consciousness. It doesn't work.

And I think my idea is one has to add one thing. Neuror nervous systems like ours, we are embodied epistemic spaces. They open epistemic spaces, but when that epistemic space has a model of itself, if a model of the space emerges in the space,

that's when you get consciousness. And that has nothing to do with content. All the colors and sounds and anil, the interceptive self-model and all that. So I think there is a way that this whole model right now actually knows itself

impersonally. And that is not an experience in the sense that it is a content of the model, but there is maybe a quality you can tune into like a self-knowingness of the whole situation,

which you normally just think this is the world and the self-knowingness is transparent as G.E. Moore would have said in 1903 you look through it, but you can make it opaque that there is a global reflexivity in it or something like that

the space as a whole represents itself somehow, becomes self-similar. And that creates phenomenality. It's super simple, but it has nothing to do with the content that is active in that space. And that's crazy speculative, right?

The idea, but maybe that is something some meditators become aware of, is that the awareness of it all, the knowingness of it all, is actually reflexive. There's a global reflexive quality in it all, but that isn't an experience. That's what makes it all conscious. Is this intelligible? Is it just bizarre?

No, no. I'm trying to think how to say. It's like, I think it makes sense, but it's really hard to get like a grasp. I think I'm quite like a visual thinker. Like when you were describing, you know, a sort of self-reflexive awareness, I'm almost like picturing this, this amorphous. sort of glass jar of sorts. And it's difficult to get the right sort of imagery in my head.

But yeah, it might not be that it's an experience itself. It's like the thing which experiences kind of happen to. But let us go to good British philosophy then, as we are here in English. G. E. Moore, the predecessor of Ludwig Wittgenstein, on the chair. he said something, all those Buddhists aren't aware of. And he had a visual metaphor. He said, consciousness is that element

what is common to an experience of, say, blue and green. What is that? Yeah. And then he said two words, two English words, diaphanousness or transparency. He said, it is normally transparent so that we have the feeling we are directly in contact with the content.

But, and then he says, and something amazing, he says, if you look properly, there is something to be seen in the transparency. Just think of a window pane, and you're just looking out in the garden, you see the garden, but you can sometimes see the window pane and the garden simultaneously.

And the wild thing is in that original paper, He even says, it is as if you had before yourself a mere emptiness. And it's, he has these visual metaphors, transparency and deiafannousness. And then the question is, what would happen if that became opaque, if it lost its transparency? And my prediction is everything you now experience as this room, and ourselves would suddenly be experienced like a thought or as virtual. Yeah. When you say transparency, you're talking about the fact that like, you know, when I look at my hand or something, it's like I just see the hand, right?

And I want to sort of intellectually recognize that I'm actually sort of perceiving this like dashboard. There's a world that's sort of going in through my senses and my brain is sort of constructing an image and redness and yellowness and not. really like in the world, it's like my brain. But I feel as though actually, no, I'm just like this clear window into the world. And that's this transparency. When I look at yellow, I'm just seeing yellow. But for that to become translucent means that you now also see the mechanism by which you're seeing that yellow. Yes, translucency is another fantastic word. And it's in the title of one of the chapters actually there. Yes. So when, say, people, People like Anil or Carfresten or so speak of a controlled online hallucination or something like this.

What is left unexplained is this total naive realism. I mean, why is this so real? Why do I have the feeling it's not a hallucination? Why, it's part of my phenomenology that there's an immediacy of contact. It's not mediated. you are unaware of the medium in which you all this. And consciousness is that medium.

Yeah. And in that sense, it's not an experience. Yeah. Right? And I think meditation can opacify the medium. That's very confusing to people who are not philosophers. Like make it untransparent, make you certainly become aware. that all of this happens in some kind of medium.

Another angle one could go, you know, in English it's so nice, the Latin precursor to consciousness is conscientia. And in English you have these both of these words consciousness and conscience, the moral consciousness, higher order moral representation. and an idea many thinkers have had over centuries long before us is that there's a first order process of knowing you see the objects you hear and then there is a knowing with the conscientia

there's an accompanying accompanying process of knowing with that knowing and that generates an additional quality like if it becomes becomes experienced, it's, it permeates everything with knowingness. Normally you just think, oh, there's this microphone here and there's these shoes. You are a naive realist. But I think that naive realist, have you had situations and do you know situations in your

own life where that translucency you've just mentioned, what has actually happened? Well, I'm not sure, because it depends on exactly what you mean. Like I feel like I, whenever I sort of try to pay attention to it, I begin to, maybe once or twice. I've really like been able to feel like I understand what it means that I don't have direct access to the world. Like I've really... When was that? How did that happen? Just as like an intellectual exercise, you know, I speak to philosophers who were trying to give me some imagery.

Because again, I'm quite an imagistic thinker. So, you know, the metaphor recently that it was actually Bernardo Castro, who sort of, first thrust this particular image into my mind of the pilot in the cockpit, you know, and how you've got this representational dashboard of the air pressure and the velocity and the, you know, the altitude and stuff. But that what you're looking at is a representation. You're not looking at air pressure. You're not looking at altitude. You're looking at a mathematical representation on a screen. And that when I see the physical world, when I see, extension and weight and, you know, velocity and things like that, I'm actually seeing a representation

of something else. You only ever know the world. Exactly. And that's, this is, you know, this is Emmanuel Kant. This is, this is nothing new. But that particular imagery was really helpful. And then I was thinking about that and I can't explain it, but I really felt like I just, I suddenly felt as though I was like, it was almost like that scene from the matrix when Neo like becomes the zeros and ones, like, and the world just suddenly becomes like, this green series of numbers, I suddenly just sort of felt like I was this sort of amorphous entity moving through a world that was like bumping up against things and that it was sort of being translated into this image, right? And that's not to say, that wasn't like an experience

where I was like, whoa, like I've experienced the truth of the world. It was just like the imagery worked. I was like, oh, I think I see what he's getting at. I think I see the worldview that he's getting at, you know what I mean? So it wasn't like a sort of like, whoa, I see the world for what it really is. It was like, oh, I see what you're saying. Yeah, you know. And and it just felt very much like, yeah, I suddenly just became

aware that everything I was seeing is, um, not, not, not, I wasn't like confident that it was all false. I was just aware that it didn't have to be the way it was presenting itself to me. Let's put it that way. But yeah, exactly. For instance, you become to represent something

as a representation means that it could be true or false. And in normal phenomenal consciousness you don't have that option. It could be true or false. It's just reality. It's common sense. Reality. Ages ago, I wrote a popular paper that was

called the Total Flight Simulator and the Little Red Arrow trying to explain the self-model theory to normal people where I said now imagine that cockpit you were talking about and imagine that was an empty, like a self-driving car,

an empty plane which would also simulate the pilot and not only the cockpit. And I think that is what the true story is. The epistangic agent is itself a model. The knowing self that sometimes even can have the experience this is representational content is itself part of the modeling process. I've called that the total flight simulation.

and the little red error is like the mouse pointer on a user surface that tells you, I am here. I can causally click, influence something here. And the self is like a multimodal mouse pointer in this model. But let me ask you something else. I have situations of global opacity in completely different situations. For instance, if somebody rings your doorbell and you open. the door, friend says,

Peter is dead. And you say, the first thing you say is, no, that's not true. And situations of shock or existential fear, when you learn a friend has died,

are often also situations where suddenly everything becomes unreal for a few seconds. Yeah. And you literally say, this is not true. Yeah. You sort of detach yourself from reality.

And they represent that in films with like the vertigo effect where the background sort of goes like that. Yeah. Or like it's almost like if something's truly shocking, a person might not react at all. They might hear that something truly tragic has happened. And instead of bursting into tears, they just sort of go like their face just stays basically plain. And they just, they just, well, in car accident, you know, they get out of the car and they just stare at it. And there's no, because it's almost as if. they're suddenly watching a film or something.

It's like this isn't the world. Oh, no, yeah, I've forgotten this. I've forgotten this. I was in a car accident where a guy flipped around a number of times on the highway and then bounced out. And I was the first person running there. I slammed the brakes. It was a young guy.

And you don't know what you find. Is he dead? Is he seriously? And the seconds, when I went there, as the first person to go to the victim, that was when everything became virtual and unreal. And also it also becomes a little slow motion. Yeah, that's interesting, isn't it?

Right? It's a time dilatation, as the scientific term for it. Yeah, so I also think there may be some people who will have this as a permanent state and will experience it as experience or react to it as something that is frightening and unpleasant, and they may be diagnosed as de-realization or depersonalization patients. And there will other people who have a very similar global phenomenology

and experience it as relief and as improving well-being, and who are in a spiritual tradition, and let's start to describe it as stages of enlightenment or something. this. So I think there's a overlap there. Yes. There's also a third area where this is relevant perhaps that comes to mind is optical illusions. So like I absolutely love the image of the Rubik's cube and we'll put it on screen right now for people who are watching at home and there are like two squares and one of the sides is bright and one of the sides is in shadow and there are two squares in the middle of each, and they're the same colour.

Like the image on screen, if you're watching this at home, those two squares that we're pointing out, they are the same colour. And it's just impossible to see them as the same colour. But if you remove the rest of the cube, you can see clearly they're the same colour, because your mind is constructing an illusion based on like contextual data.

Exactly. And the funny thing is that when you put the Rubik's cube back, and you know they're the same colour now, You still can't see it for what it is. And it's a good, there's another version of this, which is the cylinder and it casts a shadow on a checkerboard. And we'll put that on screen as well. And there are two sort of squares, square A and square B. Promise you, ladies and gentlemen, these squares are the same colour.

But obviously the reason they look different is because your brain is going, or one of them's in a shadow and one of them's in the light. And yet they are literally the same color. But if one of them's in the shadow, but it's the same color, then it must actually be brighter to appear. And so rather than seeing the world as it is, your brain is basically telling you a story. And this won't give you the same revelatory, wow, you know, the world is an illusion, but it will at least intellectually, I suppose, allow you to realize that the way that you interpret the world and the way that things look and the way things are is not necessarily tied to the actual content of the world, but rather how it represents itself to your mind. That is right. That is

right. So one important technical term here is cognitive impenetrability. Some of these low level mechanisms you have just described, I mean, you can try as often as you want to, they are robust. And you see that's also, so to speak, is the lack of autonomy. The low level mechanisms that construct your reality model, you cannot penetrate them or destroy them. They're automatic. an interesting question would be show such illusions to long-term meditators or to people under the influence of psilocybin

and see how that changes. Quite, yeah. Somebody must have done that with some of these illusions, right? And I don't know what they would have found. Right. But I would love to experience that myself. You know, I'd love to take a psychedelic drug

and then look at this Rubik's cube and see if I see them as the same. Well, you know, the dress, which is either blue and black or white and gold. Did you see that years ago? It was super viral. I don't know if you came across it, right? And it's this huge debate. And clearly, the reason this has happened is because the image of the dress doesn't have any context.

It's like so zoomed in that you can't quite tell what the white balance of the camera is. And it's basically a white balance issue as to how you interpret it. But there's just no context. You know what my empirical prediction is if you do that? It's hysterical laughter. You will get absolutely hysterical if you play with this under the influence of a classic hallucinogen. But the thing is, the question is, of course, people have thought. So states of consciousness are reality models.

And the question is, of course, is can we have better reality models? for instance, where we suffer less, that would be a practical question. And very obviously some of these things like this RubenCube or so are really robust, and we embody them, and they have a long evolutionary history and they're kind of rigid. Almost nobody can change these mechanisms. And then maybe the mechanism that creates the sense of self is also something super robust. that is not easy to deconstruct. Yeah.

I mean, it's very difficult. When we're talking about the illusion of the self or the non-existence of the self, it's like so impossible to wrap your head around. It's like, what do you mean? I literally can't even understand how you could think the self. How can you say the self doesn't exist? But I guess, yeah, compare it to that feeling of seeing the Rubik's Cube, where because you've seen the illusion without the cube,

you know that it's an illusion. Intellectually, you know it's an illusion. It doesn't help. And yet when you switch that Rubik's cube back on, you can be like, no, no, I swear like 10 seconds ago they were the same and now now that they're not. But I know that they are, even though it makes no sense to me that they're not. I imagine that's a bit similar to switching off the self and meditation. It's like removing the Rubik's cube and going like, oh.

And then the Rubik's cube comes back and you're like, okay, it's back. But I'm sure that something funny is going on. Do you know what the fridge? fallacy is? The fridge. Oh, no, I can take a guess. You have the firm belief that when you close the fridge, the lights

turn off. And then you very carefully open it to see if the light is really still off. And our mind, for instance, for selfie stuff, has that kind of structure. You cannot know that you are now in

a non-dual state where there is no subject-object distinction, because in the moment you try to know this as a self, it's destroyed. The first-person perspective is immediately reintroduced. And I think this also relates to theoretical intuitions of philosophers. I have once written a book in a chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Self-Consciousness called the No Self-Alternative.

And I've tackled the question, why do I have so much. many philosophers have this and this very deep-seated intuition there is no conscious experience without some kind of selfiness or subject or perspective-hybleness.

It's sometimes even called the ubiquity thesis. There is no phenomenology without self. It's natural because the attempt, if you claimed to me, oh, there is a state of consciousness without

self, to try to understand your sentence, I must make a model of the truth conditions of that sentence in my mind. I must try to understand, try to simulate a situation where I was not present. And that is impossible because the mental act of trying to simulate

a selfless reality has an element of effort in it, a sense of effort. There's an agent who does it. So it's never the selfiness, the sense of effort is always there, the sense of mental effort. And that gives many philosophers the false intuition that the self is metaphysically necessary or logically necessary because it is inconceivable that there should be a situation where there is consciousness without itself. of, of course, you cannot conceive of this, but this doesn't mean that we shouldn't take such reports very seriously.

Yeah, and importantly, you talk about this concept of concurrent ineffability, which is to say, because people might be thinking, well, hold on, you know, if what you've just said is true, then how can anybody report having such an experience? And the answer is that they don't report it while it's happening. I think maybe we haven't made that totally clear is that these reports of people who've had this kind of experience, they're not sat there having the experience telling someone what it's like. It's afterwards, it's a retrospective reporting.

And to say something is ineffable is to say you can't put it into words. And so concurrent ineffability means that while it's happening, you can't put it into words. Because if you start using words and describing a thing and placing it in that explanatory context, it disappears. Yeah, just right. So I think that's just worth sort of making clear. Although interestingly, we've spoken for so long now about the nature of sort of minimal

phenomenal experience without actually talking about its nature. Because of course, in the elephant and the blind, you sort of categorize the common threads of all of these different experiences. And I think it's worth just briefly telling people like some of what you found, right? So you split up, I mean, I think the, I remember what the very first one is. Relaxation. Yeah, like relaxation of calms. So I started in the beginning.

So just to explain to people, what I did first is I looked in the history of philosophy. What concepts have there been? And there are these concepts like the Dharmakaya and Samadhi or Yeshay in Tibetan Buddhism. There are a number of concepts where people have. try to speak about pure awareness, and I'm not saying they all mean the same, and I'm also not saying they meant the same over centuries in different philosophical schools, but there are concepts. That was number one of my investigation. Then step two was that psychometric study, which gives you numbers and quantities. And the third major phase was to take the verbal reports and do something, like an unsystematic qualitative analysis of these reports.

There are brilliant young people here in London, actually, who will now try to do this with AI, a topic modeling from my reports, and see if they come to different results. But then you see common things. So relaxation, okay, it often happens in deeply relaxed. But then there's silence, there's clarity, and there's wakefulness at the beginning.

These are three things that almost everybody will understand. They already pick out, you know, I think main phenomenological dimensions. A silent and crystal clear experience of wakefulness. Nothing mystical, nothing wild, nothing trippy, nothing special, but just a very precise and calm experience of wakefulness. Actually, you know, one of the best meditation manuals I know is called Clarifying the Natural State, 15th, 16th century. And the whole idea is there is a natural state,

and the whole point is not to make this state of meditation, but just to clarify. It's just how do you call these things in English where you shake a little device and a lot of snowflakes? Oh yeah, the snow globe. A snow globe. Yeah.

It's just like sitting in a snow globe globe and letting them go down and then realize that's the second thing, you are the water. Yeah. So there's a natural state. I think it's really, there are a few of these, and they're essentially like chapter headings, right? So like relaxation and calm and clarity and silence.

And there are a few of these that really kind of jumped out at me as like. Like what? Well, I wrote some of them down. For example, one of them is a phrase, there's nothing left to do, which I thought was really cool. Because you're quoting these people as basically saying that in this moment of clarity of pure experience or whatever, they afterwards report sort of feeling in that moment like it's all done. Like everything is all right, everything's okay, everything's complete. There's nothing more that I need to do, which sounds really nice and also sounds philosophically relevant in that so many especially ethical philosophers are obsessed with what is the sort of end goal of human striving?

What are we here for? What are we doing it for? How can we, you know, better our lives and be ethical people? And this insight might help us to realize that if you achieve this state of minimal experience, you're done. There's nothing more to do. And then if you realize that that kind of experience is there all of the time, that you are always, there's always to you accessible. It's not like that for me, by the way. It's very often.

Certainly not for me either. But I wondered what these people afterwards, whether that was like, whether that essentially can solve them. Because they're like, oh, well, I'm not experiencing that right now. But I remember feeling like there was nothing left to do. Do they come away from that being like, oh, I guess I don't have to file my taxes now, you know? Well, I can radicalize it a bit for you. What if one would say, one would take a very strong meta-ethical point of view and say,

normative sentences have no truth values. So there are no moral facts in this world, really. And that's the whole problem of ethics that we don't really have objective knowledge about values. If that is true, if we just accept it, most people will hate it. But if that is true, all preferences might actually be hallucinations, right?

Misrepresentations. So a system in the state of pure awareness might be a system that has stopped to hallucinate goals. I don't know if the idea has ever occurred to you that all goal representations that occur in your mind are actually misrepresentations. That's a very radical thesis. I don't know how far we should go there. but most human beings are being driven by hallucinating goals. It would be great to have tenure. It would be, you know, great to have a little more money or something like this.

And then strive. That's what drives the system. You could also explain this technically in terms of active inference that the system has to represent a state of the world that is not the case. And then try to change the world in a way to make the world. like this internal state. And if it's really true that this is actually a hallucinatory activity striving for something,

yeah. Then the end of all striving might also mean the end of all agency, right? And there is nothing left to do. That's where you started. That's a possible phenomenal state. There is nothing left.

to do. I understand that very well. I know this experience very well, but there is something I'd be interested in your opinion about it that needs to be discussed. You know, I'm older than you, the old leftists of my generation, they would say that is politically enormously dangerous. Right. Yeah, yeah, of course. any thoughts about this? I think that makes sense. Of course it is, because, like, you know, I was thinking about this, like, this morning or yesterday or something, you know, I'm opening up the news and I'm seeing some horrible things are happening. And then everyone's got a take and everyone's saying stuff. And then I'm worried about, you know, if I have kids one day, are they going to be safe

and all this kind of stuff? And I think to myself, you know, I maybe, maybe I should just give this all up and go and live in a cabin in the woods and just enjoy the rest of my life. And in one sense, people will totally understand that intuition. They'll go, yeah, man, just forget the world even exists, just go and live. But then there's another sense in which I'm like, well, hold on, don't I kind of have a responsibility to the other people who I'd be leaving behind? Don't I sort of need to stay here and try to help change those negative conditions? And I feel like kind of both of these are true at once, that it is actually like better

and more enjoyable and a higher quality of life for me to sort of live in the forest in nature and forget all of my troubles. But at the same time, it feels like, although that would be better for me, it feels almost like immoral to try to achieve it if it would mean leaving behind a bunch of problems. Super.

But that, I mean, anecdote, when I was 18, I was exactly like this. I wanted to go to Canada. I did go to Canada, actually, twice and build a law cabin and burn my passport. I had exactly that vision. But what many people don't understand is

really you do not meditate for yourself. Really, you meditate for everybody else. Really, this is the most subversive political activity you can actually have although many people will not believe this, but you could go into a cabin or a monastery for a few years or decades until you think you can re-enter the world

and you have something to give. You have the compassion or you have the stability that you might be able to help people in that turmoil, to teach in a way without getting lost yourself. So spiritual practice, this mindfulness practice thing without an ethical, and I would even add a political context, isn't going anywhere. I once really liked it. There was this

well-known Tibetan teacher, and they never say anything nasty about other people. And people said, yeah, if I do this and I have my well-being increases so much. And he said, yeah, you can do this to increase your well-being. And then he chuckled. And he said, California style.

You know, that is what we've made out of it. Yeah. To have a better career, to be better concentrated. meditate to have a better sex life or make money, right? But if it is not embedded into an ethical context, it's pretty valueless and it will also be limited. But then the question is, that is where good Western philosophy comes back in what is a proper ethical context. Yeah. Why should I believe what any Buddhist tells me what the right ethical context is?

I mean, I'm very sober there. Most of the countries in which this has happened over centuries are not in a very good shape. I mean, look at these Asian countries where all the Westerners project their own emotional hopes. You know, they go to the New Age bookstore and satisfy their own emotional needs. It's like a kind of colonialism. But in these countries themselves, where this has been done and trained for centuries, Things don't look so good. You know, something also didn't work there.

So the question is if proper, critical, Western philosophy, ethical theory in combination with that could be a good mixture. I don't know if you have any thoughts about this. It's not so impressive how these countries look that have done that for century. Yeah, I mean, I think that it can be true that there are philosophical traditions which in the West we kind of have either forgotten or ignored or neglected, which means that if you're going to find them anywhere, you might find them in the tradition of another country. And of course, the past is also a foreign country, so you might find it in the ancient Greeks as well or whatever. Stoics. Yeah, I was thinking of the Stoics when you were talking about that because, of course, you know, there's a lot of sort of parallel here.

and how the stoics think about the nature of the world and stuff. Do you know this book? Sorry, if I write this book by Pierre Adour, Philosophy as a Way of Life? I don't think I've read it. I know I haven't read it. I mean, I feel like I might have heard of it. Okay. Keep going.

But yeah, I mean, I feel like, but that's not the same thing as saying, there is this kind of optimism that like, oh, that's how they live over there. No, that's kind of like, you know, someone from over there sort of discovering like, I don't know, like Descartes or something and going like, oh, this is how they all live over there. It's not like that. But it could still be true that you can only find certain nuggets of information in one place or in another. but I do kind of feel like, you know, when I've tried to investigate non-Western traditions, right, and I try to sort of read the Apanishads and I try to get a grounding in like Indian philosophy. And these concepts are coming up and a lot of the time it is kind of like, oh, like we're all kind of getting at the same kind of stuff a lot of the time.

And the thing that's useful about seeing it represented by literally like a different word is that it's almost like you have to. relearn the concept. And you know, it's like with language, right? I only speak English. And I think it was Gerta who said, he who knows one knows none. Right? If you only know one language, you don't even realize that it's weird and arbitrary that we say a red car instead of saying a car red. You know, some languages will say the noun and then the descriptor, right? And stuff like that. And you only notice that when you've got something to compare it to, even though in both languages, you're talking about a red car. Similarly, it might be that you've got these different languages that are trying to talk about the nature of selfhood, the foundational limitations

of our knowledge, the Cogito Ergoson, that kind of stuff. And that we're getting at the same stuff, it's just a different language. And that by turning to Indian philosophy, which will be full of all kinds of terms that you can't even pronounce, much less understand, when you start trying to learn what they are, you are just realizing that there's another way in to the same kinds of problems. because we're all humans experiencing roughly the same kind of issues philosophically. So I think there's a lot of use. But I think, yeah, we are a bit too rash in thinking like,

oh, that will solve all of our problems if we could only just really what they thought. One thing one can start with, I think there are actually phenomenological prototypes. There's some phenomenology that is highly culturally invariant. So in chapter 26, I think of the elephant, I've looked at what middle, age mystics in Europe said about pure awareness and I've just covered some striking details like

there was this woman Begina Hardovich in the Netherlands who out of herself developed this term of one taste of tasting the one nature which is a central term in Tibetan Buddhism is absolutely certain

they have never had contact they were just experiencing things and then there's this motive, for instance, of a groundless ground that you find in Maister Eckhart but you also find it in Buddhism, of course.

Something that is the foundation but which is bottomless at the same time. The question is, of course, I mean, here at Birkbeck College, there was David

Bohm, the famous physicist, And he tried, he was very open to these things. I have only very briefly met him once at the Krishna-Murti talks in Switzerland. And he developed a thing he called Rehomodos, that is a grammar, a logical grammar, as you were speaking about different languages, which does away with this subject-object structure that bewitches our minds when we describe our own experiences. So he wouldn't have said things in that grammar like a red car or something, but a red carring is happening here, you know. So everything would be processuality,

but without object and properties or subject object, Rio from Panta Ray, everything flows. And maybe it is also the deep logical grammar of our language. that makes us sometimes misdescribe our own conscious minds or makes it so difficult for us to discover that certain things are actually different from how we try to describe them all the time. Yeah.

And it wouldn't be surprising if there was some, I mean, again, even as like a totally sort of skeptical, materialist kind of person who thinks that the actual content of the experiences that people have are kind of nonsense, it is striking that they converge on similar experience. And it wouldn't be surprising that there's something about our sort of brain architecture. Absolutely. Because we all come from the same ancestor.

It's like when people take DMT and they all report seeing like elves and it's really, really strange. Like, why are different people reporting seeing the same thing? And maybe, and like, you know, the typical, to this strange phenomenon, the typical response from a materialist is just to say like, well, it's probably because there's just something about our brain chemistry that it's going to do the same thing, right? And so, yeah, but that also ties in quite nicely with another one of these sort of chapter titles, one of these concurrent themes that comes up, which is this feeling of coming home, right? Like people sort of report this feeling that when they were there in that moment of minimal phenomenal experience, it was like, yeah, this is like where I belong.

This is, I've come back to where I'm sort of most naturally at home. and yeah if if what we are discovering is the kind of universal inspirational nugget that different people are all sort of trying to get out in their different means then that wouldn't be a surprise and to be clear i'm not trying to do the whole all religions are the same man like there are a very important doctrinal distinction between you know however i do think that the differences in let's say like the religious approach and the fundamental religious instinct, the nature of God and mystical traditions, the difference between those different traditions is sometimes over-exaggerated. You know, oh, Hindus believe in hundreds of

gods and Christians believe in the Trinity and Muslims believe in the Tarweed. When like, you know... But that's only the people who came out afterwards. Yeah, exactly. The people who made theories and didn't sit in silence anymore, but developed fancy metaphysics and philosophical schools and wrote books. For instance, I mean, some experiences described in the Elephant of Blind are, I don't know what to make of them. I don't know them. But this coming home is very, very naturally. I have this very often. And then there's also this sense of how absurd is it to get into the Frankfurt airport and take off your belts and shoes and security to go to London. Yeah.

I mean, this is like, I'm sacrificing my evening meditation for this conversation and I absolutely like it. It's a good sacrifice. But there's this thing of in between, I'm amazed how in between the experience of coming home and a natural state, you can completely lose it again, get agitated, get neurotic, get superimposed. You do something crazy, you can't sit in the forest all the time, meditate, you must go to London to this conference, at least once you have to do.

And there's, I don't know, if it would be good, there needs to be a balance between rational activity in the world, I think, and the experience of coming home. for instance. And if one had the right balance, then one would make the other stronger. So that is also one of the reasons. I wonder what you think about. You know, my master's thesis, embarrassing, I would never have allowed any of my students hand in something like that, was called rationalism and mysticism. And that was an early idea I had as a student if you have a sober, weak form of rationalism, that knows like carp hopper like that the decision for the rational method itself cannot have a final foundation in the rational method and if you at the same time have a mystical practice or a spiritual practice that is weak that doesn't commit to belief systems they both go together really well and what i'm really interested in i don't have the final answer is but if we could develop

something like a secular spirituality. I mean, your podcast is called Within Reason. The question is, could all this happen within reason and be equally liberating, deep, beautiful? Or if I had to criticize myself, I would say, no, no, you need a little delusion, you need something to keep up the motivation. Those people who are supposed to meditate for decades or something,

most of them need some crazy belief system, some master or some reward, else they will not do it. But the question is if one could be completely clear, if that could happen within reason without losing its depth. Getting ready for a game means being ready for anything, like packing a spare stick. I like to be prepared. That's why I remember 988 Canada's suicide crisis helpline. It's good to know just in case. Anyone can call or text

for free confidential support from a train responder anytime. 988 suicide crisis helpline is funded by the government in Canada. Yeah, you know, when you choose a name for a podcast, you have, you've got to be conscious of the fact that you don't know what you're going to be doing in five years. So you don't want to call it, like maybe, you know, I mean, I started out years ago as like an atheist YouTuber. And I could have started a podcast called like, you know, atheist cast. And that wouldn't make any sense anymore. I wouldn't be talking to someone like you on atheist cast probably, right? Like, maybe I would.

I don't know. But you kind of think, well, how broad can I make this? You can't make it too broad. And I thought, you know, well, it's philosophy. And philosophy's super broad. And I love philosophy. And of course, anybody who is interested in philosophy is going to want to try to be reasonable. And so you choose this name that you think it.

is just bulletproof against it. And then you realize that so much of the things worth knowing in life cannot be reduced to reasonable explanation. I'm not careful. Please don't. Damn. Oh, no. You know, I've made the mistake again.

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I know what you mean. And interestingly, I think this is where we should mention your most recent book, which came out, like a year after the elephant in the blind and was kind of hinted at the end of the elephant and the blind, which is like being aware of this kind of stuff. And the elephant of the blind is awesome. It's wonderful.

Of course, the links and stuff will be in the description. And it's kind of this sort of overview of these reported sort of this study and what the common themes are. People might read that and go, okay, cool, interesting. But as you just said, like, what does this mean without some kind of political or ethical context in which to use this information or to be inspired by our realization about the nature of consciousness and selfhood and stuff to like change the way that we sort of behave. And your most recent book, which I won't try to pronounce, but perhaps you can pronounce

it and then tell me what it would mean in English. Speaking of political context, the first thing we should say is that this book, the English version of this book, which just appeared, is only now available as an e-book. so that people don't get confused. And there's a reason for it. It has to do with political context. I didn't want to give all the audio rights and print rights and everything to a publisher and what I call the Trumpistan shithole.

Forgive me, if I say that on your podcast, because I was nervous about the political situation. I thought the book came out in German, has caused a lot of discussions. Chinese translation and so forth is finished. But I was nervous. I wanted to have the content in a democratic country with a proper German publisher first. That is why you only have it as an e-book now. You cannot hold it in your hands.

And actually I've spoken about this concept of Bevooscience culture, which translates as a culture of consciousness badly, badly translates into it. English for 30 years on and off. And then I, now I have the idea I put this into a little book. And the main idea is very simple.

Culture of consciousness. Yeah, towards. Towards a culture of consciousness. Because I think that's what we're lacking. We're lacking. And so, in ethics, you ask what makes an action a good action?

And the first thing I'm saying, Boriszance culture would mean to also ask what makes a state of consciousness a good state of consciousness then if we have found an answer step two and maybe different

people come to different answers you know there could be you're an atheist who says there's nothing in this world than intelligent hedonism and that is my consciousness culture and leave me alone with all that

pseudo spiritual crap, you know. Different people in a free society could come to different results, but then if we have ideas, what valuable states of consciousness not actions are, we could cultivate them, and we could step three

inculturate them, embed them in our culture. That was their culture comes from. And these are a lot of practical questions, like what states of consciousness can you force upon animals, AI, what state of consciousness

do you want to suffer in, do you want to die in, and what states of consciousness do we want to show our children in school in the educational system? I've worked a bit on that because there is this mental health crisis now with social media and everything, the situation with 14 to 20-year-olds is dramatic, and most of us older folks don't even realize how bad it is. So this would all be culture of consciousness. One question is, of course, should a secular meditation practice be part of our educational system?

Because we lack something in the West. We really lack something. So there are a lot of applied ethics practical questions, drug politics, stuff like that. Essentially, there's this underlying question of like, should there be any states of consciousness which should be illegal? Yes. You know, there are psychoactive drugs. There are potentially conscious AI systems that we should maybe be careful about creating until we at least know what consciousness like is.

There is like the, yeah, there are kind of states that could be induced by various like meditative practices or states that you might induce, you know, as someone's about to die, to try to make things better or worse for them, I suppose, in a worst case. And there's a question that then inevitably crops up of regulation. It's not just regulating for the sake of you might say, well, we should criminalize drugs, because if you take drugs, then you're more likely to commit crime. And so, yeah, okay. But what about, like, just the actual effect on a person's consciousness? Like, that's the kind of stuff that maybe we should be paying a bit of attention to. I have endless things to say about all this.

So tomorrow morning, I'll be speaking about synthetic phenomenology briefly. the House of Commons. That's what I'm here because there's the European Council and an AI conference. I think the risk of artificial consciousness is totally underrated, has been also suppressed by industrial lobby. We should be very careful what we're doing there. With drugs, I have a bit of experience there and I've turned it to a pretty conservative person. I think there are some states of consciousness, which must be illegal, like the heroin, the fentanyl, the cocaine, the crystal meth state of consciousness, simply because these are vehicles by which you can create altered states of consciousness, which are controllable by almost no one. Some people can not lose control

with that and test it out. And then there are other things, which I think are super well, valuable like the psilocybin state or the LSD state, but of which I also think that the general population is in no way ready for a legalization or something. Bevozscience culture means, and I've been writing about this mostly in Germany, that we need something much more intelligent than make it illegal like it is now and all the kids blow off their heads with unclear dosages and unclair. clear purities in the underground, just because the politicians have no incentive to touch that topic, they can only ruin their career. And we pay a price, but as many accidents in the underground all the time, we should have beautiful places where people can go who want to say have a psilocybin experience and get a psychiatric pre-screening. Are they a risk personality? Do they maybe have a vulnerability and then can go to a protected environment.

Yeah. You know, and with expert siters, have this, in a risk-free environment, have this experience with proper preparation. That's, these are institutions we lack in our society and which we urgently have to build because, you know, the accidents that happen with all that, these new research chemicals and underground tripping, they appear in no statistics. sticks. You don't even know what the fact is because people hide it. They don't want to get in trouble with the police if a friend gets in trouble and so forth. Where do you place ketamine

is one of the drugs that you didn't say that's quite relevant because it's sort of, ketamine kind of sits in the middle of like the sort of party drug that makes you feel like you're a bit drunk and woo, but also can be kind of psychoactive. Well, I've done this twice more than 35 years ago, mainly because you can see this in the ego tunnel book because I wanted to create out-of-body experiences in the lab and it had been known

that in the wake-up phase after a ketamine, anesthesia, people get OBEs. Out-of-body experiences. So I shot myself up and did that. I don't, honestly, I don't understand all this craze. In Germany, there are all these.

semi-legal psychotherapists now who do off-label use with ketamine. So they give people sub-anesthetic doses and then do a therapy on top of it. I find it a bizarre, uninteresting state of consciousness, characterized by severe disorientation. This is not a psychedelic. I don't see an inside quality, but I see for years. I don't know about England. But in Germany, it's the number one thing.

It's only because you cannot do legal psilocybin therapy, because that is not allowed, people resort to off-label ketamine use. And there are all these shady therapists, you know, people who look half serious. Yeah. And who have privately paying patients and can make a lot of money out of every session

and at least 25 places now in Germany where you can half legally or off, in an off-label setting, do ketamine therapy. Yeah. I don't believe it. Yeah. I just don't believe the therapeutic value, but that's just my...

Do you mean therapeutic value of those places or of ketamine? The ketamine state, the sub-anesthetic ketamine state, I don't see anything particularly valuable or insightful in that. Yeah, interesting. I mean, I wouldn't know. I don't know what the latest research is. I just, you know, you hear people say, like, oh, psychedelics are really useful in medical circumstances.

And I'm sure I've heard people talk about ketamine in a similar way. But I wouldn't, I wouldn't know. I think it's interesting how we... I know many people will disagree with me. There are many people who are absolutely certain that they have had, life-changing and also therapeutically helpful experiences with ketamine. But my hunch is you could basically do anything to create a pretty bizarre and interesting state of consciousness and then put a therapy on top that somehow interprets it.

Yeah, sure. And you think that developing this, as you call it, culture of consciousness will, I guess, help us to have more clarity on our design of drug policy, AI policy. Yeah, we must. We must. We will get washed away. I have numbers in the book. 30 years ago, the drug problem consisted of 12 to 15 molecules in the market. You could, you can name them. Yeah. Now we have way over 1,000 new synthetic drugs. The peak year, I guess, was 2006, where the police in Europe for the first time confiscated more than 100 new molecules. In one year, they had never been heard of, you know.

There's never been any testing. Some underground labs cook it up. No doctor in any emergency ward has ever heard of these molecules when they were studying. Yeah. And you should go to Berlin. I mean, it breaks my heart exactly because I think psychedelics are very, very valuable of all these kids taking these risks. Yeah. Yeah, it's a shame.

And you always have to be careful talking about it because it's easy to say, like, yeah, the psychedelic experience, it's so sort of foundational and awesome. And that's true, but it's not something to play around with. Like I sometimes sort of hear people say like, you know, yeah, like, you know, I want to try psychedelics. And I just, you know, you've got to make sure that you're like in a good environment and you've got to make sure you're with someone who's like. And I'm just thinking like, that's good. But I don't, I don't think you like understand what these things can do. It's not it's not just like, you know, oh, well, if I'm in a bad environment or if it's raining outside, then maybe I'll have like a bad time. It's like, you know, I think we need to have a have a.

a rational fear that means that we're careful and take it seriously, but that also motivates us to sort of create the right circumstances in which the benefits can be achieved. That is very well put. Very well put. I am deeply grateful for the psychedelic experiences I've had in my life. They have added depth and beautiful, I mean speaking of ineffability to my life. But I have also cried a lot. I have had enormous anxiety. I've had great fear that I would never be normal again. And I always say, I mean, if you want to have a positive LSD experience of eight or 12 hours and you're not ready that part of this experience is that 90 minutes, one and a half hours, you will really sobbing and crying. Yeah.

Because something comes up with the death of somebody or so, or something you see about in your own personality structure that you are never aware of, and that needs to be felt. If you're not ready to cry for one and a half hours, that's normal. That's a good trip. If you think you can just dance your brains out or laugh all the time, that's not how it works. It needs respect.

It needs to. deep respect and most of our, and it's a question. I mean, why are you doing this? Yes, what for? Yeah. I've also cried on psychedelics and I remember I'd gone away into a, into a separate room and I'd done what you're not supposed to do and look at look in the mirror. And it's a story for another time, perhaps, but I came back into the room where my friend was, and he'd also been crying. Yeah, we'd sort of gone off into it. And it was, it's, yeah, it's got to be, and that was, that was, that was two CB. That was a more sort of synthetic. And that's supposed to have your sort of euphoric element too and it only lasts, you know, four hours or

whatever. But yeah, you've got to, I mean, it's amazing, but it's at the same time, you've got to know what it's for. I do like this one quote by Alan Watts of all people who said, you know, when you get the message, hang up the phone. He was like, the scientist does not spend, the scientist does not spend his entire life with his eye glued to a microscope. He goes away and works on what he's learned. My teacher friends in California told me, don't want to be like a rat that pushes the same button again all the time. But, you know, Sasha Shulgin, whom I know, he came to visit me,

and I was in his lab. He actually said of the 179 Phanathamilines, he thought 2CB was the most interesting. And what I personally find, I mean, the difficulty for me, I haven't done this in 25 years or so, is that 18 milligrams is different from 20 milligrams and 20 milligrams is different from 22. And 25 can already be quite wild

if my memory serves. And almost nobody has a scale at home to properly dose this. This is part of the problem. Yeah, and it's always, I mean, it's always a risk taking psychedelics in the sense that you never, you never know what you're going to get. But at the same time, in the current circumstance, it's literally a risk in that you don't even know what you're taking and you don't know how much you're taking and you don't know if it's a dud. And you think, oh, maybe it's a dud because it's been an hour and I don't feel anything. So you have another one.

I'm that kind of, you know. You know, yeah. And it's the classic sort of, you know, you have the weed edible and then two hours later you're like, oh, this is nothing. So you eat the rest. And then you're like. completely wiped out. And like, this kind of could be avoided relatively, or mitigated, let's say, I have made exactly this mistake so often in my life. I think I have a bit of an impatient. I think this is, come on. This is 90 minutes. Maybe in like a meta sense, that's really what the psychedelic was teaching you, was like to be more patient, because otherwise, you know, you're

going to have this crazy experience. I mean, just from what we are speaking about now, this really needs deep respect and proper places and some preparation. And it's a shame on Western societies. It's a shame that we have developed we go on Mars and send back pictures.

But we haven't, I have this idea we need something like secular research monasteries, like centers for consciousness culture, where you can have long, silent retreats, where you can learn the major meditation techniques with really good teachers, but where people could also have guided experiences in a safe environment. Yeah.

You know. Well, one day soon come. The kind of experiences we've been talking about are kind of covered, I suppose, in the elephant and the blind. The more ethical, political dimension is covered in your latest book, which I guess the English translation would be towards a culture of context. culture of consciousness. We've talked about the ego. You famously wrote the ego tunnel about the nature of the self. All of these books and relevant information will be linked in the description for people to check out. Thomas Metzinger, thank you for your time. Thank you for the invitation. Very interesting conversation.