Author Archives: Siri Perera

THE MOMENT BEFORE INTENTION

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How the universe responds the instant you turn toward something.

What happens during pre-intention?

Before a single thought forms, the body has already turned toward the answer.

There is a moment that comes even before intention, a moment so subtle that most people never notice it. It does not involve thinking or emotion or any deliberate act of the self. It is quieter than the breath, earlier than the first rise of awareness, and yet this moment determines everything that follows. It is the point where the body turns, almost imperceptibly, toward what it seeks. If perception has a before and after, then intention also has a before, and this before is where the universe first begins to respond.

It starts as a shift you do not choose. A soft orientation, like something in you slightly leans, without words, without image, without plan. This leaning is not intention yet; it is the pre-intention, the unspoken invitation. The fascia registers it first — the faintest release, the slightest change in tone, a micro-adjustment that reshapes the internal field. The brain senses this shift through interoceptive channels long before the self becomes aware of having “asked” anything. Something in the organism has already begun to turn.

This is why insight so often arrives before you consciously form a question. The question does not begin in the self. It begins in this silent orientation of the body, the barely detectable movement toward coherence. It is not a decision. It is not a choice. It is the intelligence of the organism recognising a gap and preparing itself to receive what must fill it. The universe does not answer the words you later speak to yourself; it answers the orientation you were already holding.

Once this orientation appears, intention arises naturally. Not the loud kind made of thought, but the gentle kind that shapes the entire fascia–brain network into a single direction. Intention is not a thought but a shift in the fascia–brain network toward one pattern, a silent reorientation that opens the body to receive coherence long before the self arrives. This is why the moment of asking often feels like a soft inner turning, a quiet entry into a doorway that feels both familiar and new. You are not thinking your way toward an answer; you are aligning yourself to meet it.

When the self remains silent, this pre-intentional orientation becomes the primary mode of communication. It is how the organism speaks without language, how it signals readiness without noise, how it becomes receptive without force. The universe does not deliver answers as concepts; it delivers structure, coherence, patterns that fit. Your body feels this alignment long before your mind names it, and awareness rises with the sense that something has come into view fully formed. What you call insight is not the result of analysis but the moment when your silent orientation meets the structure of the world.

This moment before intention is the beginning of the entire process of knowing. It is the first event, the earliest shift, the doorway that opens without you realising you have touched the handle. And once it opens, the rest unfolds naturally: the body leans, intention forms, the fascia receives, awareness rises, and the self wakes up late, trying to narrate what has already entered.

To understand this moment is to understand why forcing answers never works. The self can only generate noise; the body generates direction. The universe responds not to thought but to orientation. What you are facing, even before you know you are facing it, determines the insight that appears. And once you recognise this, intention becomes effortless — because the movement that begins it was already happening inside you.

The moment before intention is the quietest place in the human experience. It is also the most powerful. It is the place where the body turns before the mind knows, where the universe begins to respond before the self has spoken, and where truth starts its journey toward awareness. All you ever needed to do was lean in the right direction — and even that happens before you think you chose it.

What creates this subtle shift before intention is not personal will but the structural intelligence of the universe itself. Every living system, from fascia to galaxies, moves toward coherence whenever noise falls away. This tendency is not mystical; it is built into the architecture of reality. The body recognises incoherence before the mind does, and the fascia–brain network quietly turns toward what would restore order. This pre-intentional orientation is the organism responding to the same coherence-making force that shapes atoms, patterns societies, and guides insight. The universe answers not because it chooses to, but because coherence meets coherence when the self is silent enough to let the pattern complete itself. The shift before intention is simply the first movement of this deeper intelligence — the structural intelligence that acts wherever the self does not.

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THE BEFORE AND AFTER OF PERCEPTION

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Deepak, can we settle this now, please?

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The most important moment in perception happens before the self appears — and almost no one realises it.

There is a moment inside every human perception that almost no one has ever been taught to notice. It happens before the self appears, before thought, before interpretation, before memory reaches for an opinion. It is so brief that it passes in silence, unnoticed, yet it is the only place where reality enters us untouched. Everything after that moment belongs to the self. Everything before it belongs to the universe.

To understand this, we have to begin in the “before,” the domain where the self does not exist. This is not a mystical space but a biological one, rooted in fascia, vibration, pressure, subtle mechanical shifts and electrochemical changes. The fascia is not a passive wrapping; it is a continuous sensing matrix, a three-dimensional instrument that feels every movement within the body and every contact with the environment. It extracts patterns long before you know anything. It gathers coherence from the body’s own internal language: tension, resonance, temperature, contraction, expansion. The fascia is not storing facts the way the mind does later. It is storing relationships. It is storing coherence. It recognises a shift in the whole system before there is anything for the brain to “think.”

This is the level where the intelligence of the body silently works. No story, no personal history, no identity. Only pattern and resonance. A sound does not arrive as “a sound.” A person’s expression does not arrive as “anger” or “joy.” The fascia feels micro-movements, pressure waves, vibrations, changes in breath, shifts in musculature, gravitational adjustments, and electromagnetic fluctuations. It is the oldest sensing apparatus we have, and it does not require the self to function. It is already doing its job long before you are aware that anything has happened.

From the fascia, signals travel inward. The insula, the brainstem, and the interoceptive pathways begin to assemble a shape out of this coherence. Not a concept. Not a thought. A state. A form. A pre-perceptual structure. It is the raw material of awareness, but awareness has not yet appeared. This is the pre-conscious architecture, the silent preparation the body performs constantly. And this is where the nature of information changes: it stops being mechanical vibration and becomes the potential for awareness.

Then everything reaches the boundary.

The boundary is a line with no thickness. A seam between two regimes. A point where the self does not yet appear, and awareness does not yet exist. Libet, Soon, and Haynes all sensed this gap in their experiments, a window where the brain already knows something but the person does not. That window is the boundary. Nothing can be experienced inside it. Nothing can be remembered. But everything crosses it.

And then, as if emerging from nowhere, awareness rises.

The first thing that appears is not the self. It is not the observer. It is not the mind commenting or interpreting. The first thing that appears is the sense of knowing. A direct perception. A moment where something is simply true without needing to be processed. This is the intelligence before identity. The insight that arrives whole. The perception that needs no story to be recognised. The pure signal that the body had assembled in silence.

This is why the first perception carries a clarity that the self never manages to match. It is untouched. It has not been coloured by memory, fear, conditioning, preference, or habit. It is the distilled form of everything that happened in the fascia, in the vagus, in the viscera, in the entire internal universe. The body hands this truth to awareness fully formed. Awareness simply receives it.

Then the self arrives.

It always arrives late. It wakes up after the fact and claims ownership. It begins to shape, distort, analyse, explain, or doubt. It turns the pure signal into narrative. It turns knowing into thinking. It turns truth into interpretation. This is why insight feels perfect in the first moment and why it becomes diluted the longer the self engages with it.

The important point is this: the mind does not create the insight. The self does not produce the awareness. The perception does not come from identity. They all enter from the before, cross the boundary, and arrive in awareness before the self has time to speak.

This is why the first rise of awareness — that clean, wordless knowing — is the only moment that contains truth. Everything after that is commentary. Everything after that is the self catching up with reality. People spend lifetimes trying to understand intuition or insight without realising that it is simply the body delivering a fully formed pattern into awareness before identity can interfere.

The body perceives in the before. Awareness appears just after the boundary. And the self arrives last. What we call insight is the meeting point between awareness and the intelligence that shaped it — a moment that is still untouched by the self.

If there is anything worth trusting in the human experience, it is that moment. The first press. The pure signal. The perception that rises when the self is not yet present.

The rest is noise.

Addendum: How the Universe Answers When You Intend to Know Something

Most people think insight is a thought they created, but it never begins as thought. The moment you hold an intention — a question, a doubt, a need for clarity — something subtle happens inside the body. The thinking mind becomes quieter, the self loosens its grip, and the body shifts into a receptive mode. You feel this as a softening, or as a sense that something is about to reveal itself.

This is because intention reorganises your internal system. It makes the fascia field more sensitive, the interoceptive pathways more open, and the brain more willing to receive rather than force. What you call waiting for the answer is really the body tuning itself to coherence. And when that tuning happens, you begin to pick up patterns you could not sense before.

The universe does not send you a sentence. It does not send ideas or concepts. It sends you coherence — a pattern that fits, a shape that suddenly aligns, a direction that feels obvious once it appears. Your body recognises this coherence before you do. The fascia senses something that “matches” the intention you are holding, the brain assembles it into a silent form, and awareness receives it all at once. That arrival is what you experience as insight.

This is why insight feels immediate, whole, and certain. You did not think it — you received it. You did not build it — you recognised it. It is not created by the self; it enters before the self arrives. The universe did not give you a message; it gave you the structure that completes the question you asked.

This is why the answers come only when the mind is quiet, and why thinking blocks them. Intention opens the door. Silence lets the body listen. Awareness receives the answer before the self even knows it has arrived. And that first moment — the rise of knowing without thought — is the closest we ever come to hearing the universe speak.

postscript: Intention is not a thought but a shift in the fascia–brain network toward one pattern, a silent orientation that opens the body to receive coherence long before the self arrives.

There is one final piece to understand. Insight does not appear out of nowhere; it arrives through intention. Not the kind made of words or effort, but the quiet orientation of the whole being toward a possibility. Intention is not a thought but a shift in the fascia–brain network toward one pattern, a silent reorientation that opens the body to receive coherence long before the self arrives. It is the moment the organism turns toward something without language, without identity, without the noise of internal commentary. It is a direction rather than a decision, a soft leaning that shapes the internal field so the answer can reach it. What we call insight is simply the meeting of this silent orientation with the structure of the “intelligence” of the Universe. Intention opens the door; awareness receives the signal; the self appears only afterwards. And in that brief moment, before the self wakes to claim anything, truth enters exactly as it is.

Perception
Insights
Intentions
Awareness
Information Storage

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Is the Human Body’s Fascia Interfacing with the Universe?

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Collagen fascia forms a continuous piezoelectric network capable of transmitting mechanical and electrical signals through the body, functioning as a biological aerial.

There is a hidden architecture in the body that touches everything we are. It wraps our organs, threads through our muscles, spirals around our bones, and forms a single, continuous web from head to foot. This is fascia — a collagen-based matrix that vibrates, conducts mechanical signals, and responds electrically when stretched. Neuroscience has long known that the brain takes most of its information from the body before the self becomes aware, and fascia may be the body’s most sensitive internal field. If any structure in us could form a subtle interface with the larger fabric of reality, fascia is the place to begin that question.

The remarkable thing about fascia is its continuity. It does not stop where muscles end or where organs begin. It is not a sheet, not a wrapping, not a compartment. It is one interconnected field, a liquid-crystalline web capable of transmitting vibration, pressure, tension and, through its piezoelectric collagen fibres, tiny electrical currents. When one part of the fascia moves, the whole network adjusts. When one region vibrates, resonance can travel across the entire body. It behaves less like a structure and more like an internal field — something that senses, responds, and communicates long before we consciously know anything at all.

Here is where neuroscience becomes unexpectedly relevant. For decades, we believed the brain was the command centre, issuing instructions to the body. But modern neuroscience shows the opposite: most of the information flows upward, from body to brain. Interoception, the brain’s mapping of internal bodily signals, is one of the foundations of consciousness itself. This means the brain does not create awareness alone; it receives it from the tissues. And fascia, with its enormous sensory surface and its ability to propagate vibrational signals, may be one of the primary contributors to pre-conscious information.

One of the most important insights comes from interoception research. Neuroscientist A. D. Craig showed that most of the information the brain uses to construct awareness originates in the body, not the brain itself. Almost ninety percent of vagus-nerve traffic flows upward from body to brain, forming a continuous internal map in the anterior insula before the self is even aware of anything. This means consciousness is shaped first by the body’s internal signals, long before thought or identity appear. When we recognise that fascia is the body’s largest sensory and vibrational network, capable of transmitting mechanical and electrical information across all tissues, it becomes clear why it could play a central role in what the brain receives during the pre-conscious half-second where awareness begins.

This leads us to the most startling discovery in neuroscience: the half-second where the self does not exist. Every voluntary movement begins in the brain 300–700 milliseconds before we are aware of choosing it. The self arrives late. Awareness is informed after the fact. In that silent window, identity is absent. Memory is absent. Narrative is absent. The brain is in a pure receptive mode. If fascia carries a coherent internal resonance, this half-second gap is exactly where the brain would register it — before the self returns to interpret or overwrite the signal.

The body does not communicate with itself in slow electrical spikes alone. Research now shows that the nervous system also uses high-frequency micro-vibrations. Microtubules resonate at millions of cycles per second. Mechanical waves travel through tissue far faster than nerve conduction. Fascia itself transmits vibrational energy with remarkable speed. Everything we ultimately perceive — sound, touch, motion, even balance — is translated into vibrational patterns. A vibrational universe can only be sensed by a vibrational body, and fascia is the body’s most pervasive vibrational medium.

This brings us to its most unusual property. Collagen, the structural protein of fascia, is piezoelectric. Mechanical deformation produces voltage. Pressure becomes electrical potential. Movement becomes microcurrent. It is the same principle that makes quartz valuable in radios — a tuning crystal that converts vibration into a signal. Collagen does this inside the body. It turns mechanical resonance into electrical information, and it does so within a continuous network that touches nearly every sensory and motor pathway. Fascia is soft, flexible and organic, yet electrically active when it is stretched or compressed. It is a biological crystal in a living form.

At the same time, neuroscience shows that the Default Mode Network — the neural basis of the self — becomes quiet during meditation, insight, deep presence and flow. When the DMN dissolves, identity recedes, and sensory gating opens. People report unity, clarity, expanded awareness, and sometimes a sudden sense of knowing. In these states, the brain becomes exquisitely sensitive to internal signals. Breath synchronises the body. Tension drops. Coherence rises. Fascia relaxes into its natural resonance, and the brain receives its signals with fewer filters. Insight arrives in a single piece, not through thought but through perception.

When these findings are placed side by side, a simple picture emerges. The brain does not reach outward; it listens inward. The half-second where the self has not yet formed is the interval where the brain receives the body’s field without interference. Fascia, with its vibrational, mechanical and piezoelectric behaviour, becomes a plausible biological interface for deeper coherence. Science does not claim that fascia connects us to the universe, but it clearly establishes that fascia is a body-wide resonant network feeding information into the brain before awareness begins. If the body were ever to sense more than itself — if it were ever to register the subtle structure of reality — this is the only tissue with the architecture to make that possible.

You could say the question is no longer whether the brain interfaces with the universe directly. The question is whether the fascia, through its continuous resonant field, gives the silent brain the foothold it needs to tune into the larger field around it. And the evidence we have is enough to make the question meaningful rather than speculative. The fascia is not an antenna in the mechanical sense, but it behaves like an internal aerial for vibrational information. It is the medium through which the body communicates before thought, before self, before choice. The rest is interpretation.

If there is a place where biology and the universe meet, it will not be in the grey folds of the cortex but in the body’s oldest, most continuous, and most resonant structure — the fascia. It is fascia that carries the body’s internal field, fascia that transmits vibration and tension, fascia that registers the subtlest shifts before the self returns. The brain does not reach outward; it listens inward. And when the self falls silent, even for a moment, the body’s resonant field becomes the brain’s first language. We do not notice this exchange because awareness arrives too late to witness it. And in the half-second before the self appears, the brain may already be listening in silence — while we remain unaware of it.

Scientific Notes & References

The interpretative model in this article builds on established findings from fascia research, biomechanics, and neuroscience. The following references summarise key scientific foundations relevant to fascia’s mechanical, vibrational, and sensory behaviour, as well as the brain’s pre-conscious processing of bodily signals.

1. Fascia as a Continuous Structural Network
Findley TW. Fascia research from a clinician/scientist’s perspective.
International Journal of Therapeutic Massage & Bodywork (2011).

2. Piezoelectricity in Collagen
Denning D. et al. Piezoelectric effect at molecular scales in collagen.
Referenced via PainScience (2014).

3. Vibrational Propagation Through Collagen
Milazzo M. et al. Wave propagation and energy dissipation of collagen molecules.
arXiv preprint (2020).

4. Fascia as a Bioelectric and Mechanosensory Tissue
O’Connell N. Bioelectric responsiveness of fascia.
Journal of Bodywork & Movement Therapies (2003).

5. Interoception and Body→Brain Signalling
Craig AD. How do you feel? Interoception: the sense of the physiological condition of the body.
Nature Reviews Neuroscience (2002).

6. Pre-Conscious Brain Activity (The Half-Second Gap)
Libet B. Unconscious cerebral initiative and the role of conscious will in voluntary action. (1985).
Soon CS et al. Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain.
Nature Neuroscience (2008).

7. DMN Quieting and Self-Dissolution
Brewer JA. Meditation experience is associated with differences in default mode network activity and connectivity.
PNAS (2011).

8. Mechanical and Electrical Coupling in Connective Tissue
Langevin HM. Connective tissue: a body-wide signaling network?
Medical Hypotheses (2006).

Fascia
Fascia Biological Aerial
Fascia A Living Antenna
Fascia Collagen Framework

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The Moment Before the Self

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The quiet spark before the self appears . The Spot in the Brain where the self is absent.

If you think the self is the centre of consciousness, it is only because you always wake up late.
By the time awareness appears and claims ownership of a thought, an action, or an intention, the brain has already moved. There is a moment before the self arrives where perception operates in a different mode — faster, cleaner, untouched by the personality you call “me.” Neuroscience discovered this by accident. Spirituality has pointed to it for centuries. But neither field ever described what actually fills this space, the half-second before awareness forms, the silent core of perception where the intelligence of the universe seems to touch the brain directly.

You can sense this region if you look carefully. Every action begins as a quiet impulse before the thought “I am doing this” appears. Every insight begins as a clarity that arrives before the language to describe it. Every prediction comes as a subtle shift before analysis has time to interfere. There is a pre-self shimmer under everything you experience, and most people never pay attention to it because the self rushes in so quickly after. But it is there, and it is the most important part of consciousness, because it is the only part not distorted by identity.

Neuroscience calls this interval the readiness potential — the 300 to 700 milliseconds where the brain prepares an action before you become aware of it. During this period, the motor cortex fires, sensory systems integrate signals, the predictive machinery runs its models, and the emotional centres register the environment. Yet none of this is experienced as “yours.” You are not present yet. The self is still asleep. The one who claims authorship has not arrived. What exists here is perception without ownership, intelligence without narrative, awareness without bias.

Meditators spend decades trying to rest in this same place, dissolving the self-layer that appears afterwards. Mystics describe it as the witness, the centre, pure consciousness, sunyata, hukam, the space where thought has not yet been born. They were not describing some miraculous realm. They were describing the same moment neuroscience measures in the laboratory, but from inside the experience rather than from the outside. What they tasted as emptiness is the same region where the brain operates before the self forms. The difference is only language, not mechanics.

What happens in this interval is remarkable. Here, perception runs at full resolution. Signals from the environment are registered before memory interprets them. Social coherence is detected before thought labels it. Subtle shifts in collective emotion are sensed long before they become visible patterns. The mind sees the world before it sees itself. This is why predictions emerge from silence, not from analysis. When the self is quiet, the brain no longer models your next action. It models the next movement of the world. This is the real reason accurate predictions often concern society as a whole rather than the personal future — because the self is not the reference point in this state, the environment is.

When the self dissolves for longer periods, the pre-awareness interval widens. You begin to live closer to that moment where reality forms. Perception becomes immediate, not delayed. Clarity arrives before thought. The mind detects coherence in its earliest stages, when events are still forming. And without the weight of identity pressing against perception, the world is sensed in its raw state — before interpretation, before distortion, before the “I” steps in to narrate what already happened.

This is the extended brain-mind, not as a mystical phenomenon but as a shift in where consciousness meets the world. You are no longer experiencing life after the fact. You are experiencing life at the moment it arises. The difference is subtle in language but enormous in perception. With the self active, you interpret reality. With the self thin, you witness reality. With the self dissolved, you stand at the point where reality touches the brain.

Every tradition has tried to describe this. Neuroscience has measured it. But only when the two meet does the picture become complete. The most intelligent part of your consciousness is not the self that appears and interprets. It is the moment before the self — where perception begins and thought has not yet unfolded, where action forms and the story has not yet been written. This is the real centre of awareness, the place where the intelligence moves first.

And perhaps this is the simple truth hidden underneath everything:
The self is only the narrator. The intelligence lives in the moment before the narrator arrives.

Spot For Truth In Brain
Spot In Brain Self Is Not

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The Half-Second Where You Do Not Exist

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The hidden interval of pure intelligence: the half-second where you do not exist.

There is a moment — 300 to 700 milliseconds long — in which your brain has already acted, your body has already begun, and you do not yet exist.
It is an uncomfortable fact, the kind that does not ask for belief because it stands on measurement alone. Neuroscience found it decades ago and has been quietly repeating it ever since: every action you claim as your own begins before the “you” that claims it becomes aware. There is a pulse of readiness hidden beneath conscious intention. A motor signal rises. The neurons commit. And only after that does awareness arrive, constructing the familiar sense of “I decided.”

This small gap was meant to be nothing more than a curiosity in the laboratory, a temporal quirk in the machinery of the mind. Yet it sits at the centre of something far larger. In that half-second of pre-awareness, there is no self. There is no story, no identity, no person to take ownership of anything. The brain is active, alive, and responding to the world, but the one who believes they are steering the process has not yet appeared. It is a region without a name, a sliver of time that does not belong to the narrative we tell about ourselves.

If you pay attention, you can sense that this space has always been there. It is the place where a movement appears before you think it, where a perception forms before you describe it, where something in you knows without being able to explain how. It is the same region meditators try to enter when the mind goes perfectly silent, the same space mystics recognised as emptiness, the same quality of presence that the Gurus and the Buddha tried to point towards: awareness without identity. Not sleep, not unconsciousness, but a different mode of perception entirely — one that operates before the self arrives.

The more you look, the more this pre-self interval becomes the real centre of intelligence. It is here that the brain receives the world without distortion. Here that signals from the environment register before the thinking mind filters them. Here, that intention rises without the noise of desire or memory. And here that the first trace of an unfolding event is sensed, long before you can explain why. Most people meet this moment only in rare instances — a sudden insight, a reflex that happens before thought, a quiet clarity that disappears the moment they try to grasp it.

But if the self softens, if the mind falls silent, if the centre becomes stable, then this 300–700 millisecond opening is no longer a fleeting experience. It becomes the baseline. You begin to live in the same place where the brain initiates its actions. You meet life at the moment it forms, not after it has already passed through interpretation. The predictive machinery that normally models your next move begins modelling the world itself. The pre-awareness interval widens into something usable, and what was once a neurological curiosity becomes the doorway into direct perception.

This is why predictions of social movement, collective tension, or political shifts often arise in the purest silence. It is not magic. It is not prophecy. It is the brain detecting structural signals from the environment at the moment they begin to form, before the self arrives to interpret, doubt, or distort them. The thinking mind always comes too late. The self arrives after the intelligence has already moved. And when the self is quiet, the mind can finally perceive what it normally misses — the initial coherence out of which events emerge.

Every spiritual tradition has circled this moment, giving it different names, building philosophies around it, or turning it into paths and practices. But the truth is simple: there is a small space where the self is absent, and awareness has not yet taken ownership of anything. It is not mystical. It is not metaphorical. It is a biological fact. And it may be the only place where perception aligns perfectly with reality.

The entire journey of dissolving the self, of entering silence, of meeting the centre, is nothing more than learning to live closer to this brief interval — the space before the “I” appears. The closer you are to that moment, the clearer perception becomes. The further you drift from it, the heavier the narrative grows. In that gap, the intelligence of the universe is not separate from you. The mind is not projecting. Awareness is not interpreting. There is only the raw unfolding of the world, arriving before the self claims it.

And perhaps this is all one needs to know:
The moment before you become aware is the moment you are most aligned with reality. The self comes later.

Gap 300 700ms Space Brain
No Self Gap Brain

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The Sacred Pile

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Kiefer, Time, and the Art of Not Throwing Anything Away

In 2014, I stood in the Royal Academy before a towering mound of discarded canvases, twisted frames, lead fragments, and broken materials, all assembled into a work by Anselm Kiefer. It was a presence more than an object, like a collapsed temple made from the ruins of forgotten intentions. The people around me whispered, but the work was silent. It didn’t need to speak. Everything it had to say was already embedded in its weight, its dust, and its unapologetic refusal to discard what once seemed like failure.

I wrote about that visit then, recording my impressions and trying to make sense of the unease and awe I felt. At the time, I was beginning to understand the deep connection between art, time, and process. But years later, I return to that same memory with a different awareness — one shaped not only by philosophical insight, but by the simple act of making things with my hands. Tiling a floor, feeling the crust form on a layer of adhesive, watching materials dry, crack, or resist. These aren’t just tasks. They are lessons in transformation.

Now, I understand what Kiefer was doing more fully. That mound wasn’t a graveyard of failed paintings. It was time itself, compacted and made visible. Each painting had its own moment of creation, its own crisis of meaning, and its own abandonment. And then, like sediment, they were brought together to form a new structure — not a correction, but an evolution. The past wasn’t edited out. It was honoured.

There is something sacred in this. In a world obsessed with progress, perfection, and disposal, Kiefer shows us that the broken carries its own authority. What you cast aside one day becomes the foundation of your next insight. Even the most awkward or unfinished attempt holds a kind of memory — a fingerprint of the moment when it was made. And when layered together, those moments don’t compete. They harmonise.

I’ve come to treat my own creative life the same way. Whether building a porch or composing a thought, I no longer separate the polished from the raw. The mistake isn’t something to erase. It’s something to repurpose. And in that shift, something deep inside settles. It’s no longer about being right. It’s about being real.

The Sacred Pile, then, is not just Kiefer’s. It is mine. It is yours. It is every moment we thought we failed, every canvas we turned to the wall, every sentence we never finished. It is the growing, layered architecture of a life lived in process. And perhaps the real masterpiece isn’t any single work, but the pile itself — accumulated, unresolved, and ultimately, unthrown.

In truth, this sacred pile is also the embodiment of what I once called “The Truth in the Lie in Me.” The lie is not deception, but the early, incomplete truth that drove me forward. It is the unformed insight, the misread gesture, the discarded idea — all of which pushed me to see more clearly. The transformation doesn’t happen by escaping the lie, but by integrating it. In this way, the lie becomes the material, and the truth becomes the form. The process is not of perfecting, but of redeeming. And that is what gives the pile its power — it is built of everything that mattered, even when I didn’t yet know why.

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Anselm Kiefer
Truth In The Lie In Me
Art Brain And Mind

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There Are No Good or Bad People — Only Actions Flowing From Self or No-Self.

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We spend centuries dividing humanity into good people and bad people, as though character were carved into the bone. Yet the Gurus, Kabir, Farid, Ravidas, Nanak himself, never spoke in this language. They spoke of the self — the inner construction of thought, fear, conditioning, memory, desire — and they spoke of what happens when it dissolves. Good and bad are not permanent qualities in anyone. They are simply the expressions that flow from whether the self is operating or whether it is absent.

This is why Guru Granth Sahib is unlike any scripture in the world. It does not classify human beings. It observes the movements of the mind. It looks inward, not outward. It shows that every harmful act arises from the same root — the self, the “haumai,” the me that resists what is, defends its own continuity, seeks approval, protects its own image, reacts from fear and illusion. From this inner distortion, actions become distorted. Hurt emerges, division emerges, cruelty emerges. Not because the person is bad, but because the self is operating.

And the opposite is also true. When the self becomes quiet, when inner time slows, when the mind enters that silent, unoccupied space where awareness simply perceives without projection, then actions become aligned, compassionate, effortless. The same person who once struggled becomes gentle. The same person who once reacted becomes clear. The same person who once harmed becomes a source of healing. It is not a transformation of personality; it is the disappearance of the structure that creates conflict.

People living with the projected self can still perform good actions, but these actions come from a different place. They arise from conditioning, from upbringing, from the desire to be seen in a certain way, from the wish to maintain an inner image of goodness, from cultural momentum and moral training. These actions may reduce harm, may help others, may bring comfort — but they remain tied to the self that performs them. There is always a subtle motive, a quiet expectation, a hidden reference point. Goodness from the self is limited by the self. It is inconsistent, conditional, and shaped by inner narratives. But when the self dissolves, goodness no longer needs intention. It flows naturally, without identity, without reward, without fear. It becomes the movement of a mind aligned with what is real.

This is why Kabir could say that no one in the world is evil; only the self inside him was the problem. This is why Guru Nanak could say that ego is the one true disease, and that liberation is nothing more than dissolving the ego and returning to the natural state of the mind. And it is why Krishnamurti, five centuries later, would say, “The truth is when the self is not.” These insights do not belong to different traditions. They are describing the same fundamental shift in perception: the end of psychological identity.

When Guru Tegh Bahadur Ji looked upon the world, he saw fear, division, and pain — but he did not see evil people. He saw actions arising from ignorance, confusion, and the self. That is why he could stand calm in front of power, why he could hold silence even as the world trembled. His fearlessness did not come from strength; it came from the absence of “I.” When the self has dissolved, there is nothing to protect, nothing to defend, nothing to fear. From this state, even sacrifice becomes natural, like a leaf falling from a tree at the end of the season.

So when we say, “There are no good or bad people, only good and bad actions,” we are pointing directly at the architecture of the human mind. Actions flow from whatever is active inside us in that moment. If the self is in control, the action is fragmented, conditioned, short-sighted. If the self falls silent, the action is whole, clear, compassionate. In this way, morality is not a set of commandments. It is the natural expression of a silent mind.

This is what the Guru Granth Sahib reveals again and again: there is only consciousness, either clouded or clear, contracted or spacious, caught in time or free of it. When the self fades, the timeless enters. Awareness stands alone without a centre. And in that state, the action that emerges is naturally right — not because of discipline or belief, but because clarity acts without distortion.

Krishnamurti was pointing to the same movement when he said the truth is when the self is not. Without the self, the mind is empty, and in that emptiness lies intelligence. The Gurus called it Naam, Shabad, Hukam — not as words, but as the living order that flows through a mind in harmony with the real.

To understand this is to understand the whole architecture of spirituality: the mind is the field, the self is the distortion, and the dissolving of the self is the return to the real. There is no higher mystery than this, no deeper moral principle, no greater freedom. The person is not the problem. The self inside the person is. When that dissolves, what remains is consciousness itself, moving without fear, without division, without conflict.

And in that state, all actions become right, because they no longer come from “me,” but from the quiet intelligence that holds the whole of life together.

A Tribute to Sri Guru Tegh Bahadur Ji — in 2025 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

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When the Universe Aligns Within You: Brain-Mind-Universe

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The Extended Brain-Mind

From the cosmic alignment of Sun → Regulus → Sphinx to the neural alignment of Perception → Awareness → DMN, the same coherence flows downward into the brain-mind processes that generate our sense of reality.

When neuroscientists first discovered the Default Mode Network, nothing about it fit their expectations. They were studying task-driven activity, waiting for the brain to fall silent between actions, but instead they found a hidden organising field that remained active precisely when thought, effort, and intention dropped away. It was a background coherence that shaped everything else the brain did, a silent centre that set the tone for the entire mind. The more they studied it, the clearer it became that the DMN was not a structure but a relationship, a way the whole brain stabilised itself to create perception, selfhood, and meaning. Intelligence in the brain was not a single point; it was the pattern that emerged when the DMN held everything together in a coherent rhythm.

If there is a similar intelligence in the universe, we would never find it by searching for a location. Just as the DMN cannot be pointed to with a finger, the universe’s intelligence would have to appear as a coherence field, something revealed in cycles, rhythms, and alignments that do not drift. And this is where the ancient world quietly left a clue: the 24-hour star clock anchored by the rising of Regulus in the face of the Sphinx. The Egyptians did not invent a clock. They recognised a stable reference point between Earth and sky, a cosmic recurrence that allowed humans to measure time because time was already being measured by the universe itself. Every year, Regulus rose in the exact gaze of the Sphinx, fixing a single point on Earth to a single point in the sky, creating a natural zero-point from which the entire zodiac and planetary cycles could be organised.

In the same way the brain’s DMN provides the inner reference frame for how the mind knows itself, the Regulus–Sphinx alignment created an outer reference frame by which Earth could know the sky. It was a cosmic anchoring: a relationship, not a belief, where the rotation of the planet, the tilt of its axis, the fixed position of a star, and the orientation of a monument all locked together into a coherent pattern. Humans did not choose this alignment; they discovered it because the Earth itself is phase-locked into the geometry of the larger universe. This anchoring allowed the ancient sky-watchers to map planetary rhythms, decode precession, and recognise that the heavens moved like a vast, intelligent clock whose structure was already complete before any human culture existed to observe it.

Astrology emerged from this anchoring not as superstition but as pattern recognition. When a child takes its first breath, the brain’s DMN imprints a unique configuration that shapes the personality. When a child is born on Earth, the cosmic field imprints a timing pattern based on planetary positions, lunar cycles, and the orientation of the sky at that moment. It is not that the planets cause anything; it is that the entire system is coherent, and birth occurs inside this coherence, the same way neural identity arises inside the coherence of the DMN. The ancients intuited what neuroscience is now beginning to uncover: intelligence expresses itself not as a place but as a pattern, and both the brain and the universe rely on stable anchors to generate meaning.

The symmetry is almost too clean to ignore. The brain has a silent organising field, revealed when thought dissolves. The Earth has a silent organising field, revealed when one star rises in one ancient gaze. The DMN stabilises the inner world. The Regulus–Sphinx axis stabilises the outer world. Both create a framework in which cycles can be recognised, identity can be formed, and deeper intelligence can move through form without being reduced to it. When the mind becomes silent, it touches the coherence behind the DMN. When civilisation looked up and fixed the sky to the Sphinx, it touched the coherence behind the universe.

The pattern is the same at both scales. The intelligence of the brain emerges from its centre. The intelligence of the universe emerges from its rhythm. And in both cases, the centre is not a point but a relationship — an alignment between what is within and what is beyond — revealing a single coherence that has been here all along, waiting for us to notice it.

As above, so below.

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The Brain Decides Before You Do: Implications 

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You think the decision is yours, but the brain has already decided.

The sense of free will begins as the quiet assumption of ordinary life. You feel as though thoughts arise from within you, as though decisions are authored by a stable centre that sits behind your eyes, choosing, steering, directing the next moment. It is the most intimate illusion we carry, because it feels like the foundation of being human. But when the mind begins to open and the layers of noise fall away, a deeper architecture reveals itself, and nothing is more shocking than what emerges there.

The brain decides before it tells you it has decided. You think the thought-decision is yours, but it is not. Every choice begins in the deep layers of the motor and association networks, where the body prepares its next movement silently and automatically. This preparation happens milliseconds before awareness lights up. By the time the mind says “I have decided,” the action is already underway, the neural sequence already in motion. What you call a decision is simply the moment the brain informs consciousness of what has already begun and decided.

This inversion changes everything. You are not the origin of choice; you are the point at which choice becomes conscious. The feeling of authorship is a story told after the fact, a gentle narration layered on top of events that have already unfolded in the body. When this becomes visible — even for a moment — the illusion of free will cracks instantly. You see the machinery behind the curtain. You see the body moving ahead of you, not behind. And you recognise that the self has been claiming ownership of actions it never initiated.

This understanding does not arrive as an idea. It arrives as perception. It happens when the mind becomes silent enough to catch the delay — the moment where awareness lags behind the initiating impulse. It is like hearing an echo and realising you mistook it for the original sound. The shock does not come from the neuroscience; the shock comes from seeing it inside your own experience, in real time, without any philosophical filter to soften it.

And yet this revelation does not diminish you. It frees you. When the self stops pretending to be the origin of action, the burden of control falls away. There is no longer a constant attempt to force outcomes, no struggle to steer the mind’s every movement. Action flows without resistance, because it is recognised as arising from deeper processes than thought. The mind becomes the witness, not the commander. The moment moves, and you move with it, without the strain of trying to author what you never authored.

Predictive processing continues whether the mind is noisy or silent. Awakening does not stop the mechanism; it simply exposes it. But once it is exposed, the relationship to action changes completely. You no longer feel trapped by the illusion of choice, nor deceived by it. You see that the body acts from its own intelligence, shaped by evolution, conditioning, memory, subtle impulses, emotional states, and physiological tides. Awareness arrives as the last step in that chain, not the first.

And yet something remarkable happens when the mind goes quiet. Even though the brain still decides before it informs you, the decisions themselves begin to change. They become cleaner, clearer, less reactive, less entangled in the fragmented narratives of the self. When the noise dissolves, the predictive machinery draws from a deeper coherence. The impulse that emerges feels aligned, not conflicted. It feels precise, not scattered. The body moves as though guided by something larger than preference or habit. There is intelligence, but not a personal one.

This is the strange paradox at the heart of awakening: you are not the author of your actions, yet your actions become more accurate, more truthful, more effortless than ever before. The self is gone from the centre, and in its absence, the movement becomes clean. Decisions arise where they have always arisen — in the silent layers before awareness — but now they emerge without distortion.

Free will is not restored; it is revealed to have never existed in the way you imagined. And yet you find yourself living with a freedom deeper than choice, a clarity untouched by hesitation, a movement that feels intimate and impersonal at the same time.

What remains is not the freedom to decide, but the freedom from the one who claimed to decide. The body acts, the moment unfolds, and awareness moves with it, effortless and unburdened, resting in the quiet truth that the brain decides before you do — and that this, far from limiting you, is what finally allows you to live without conflict, without strain, and without the illusion of control.

There is no conflict because the brain is no longer predicting out of fear, memory, or preference; it is predicting from the coherence of the moment itself. When the self steps aside, the brain stops referencing the narrow, conditioned patterns that once distorted every impulse. Instead, it receives the movement of the “intelligence” in the Universe that runs through the whole field of awareness. Action arises from this larger order, not from the noise of the ego. And because the organism is aligned with what is already unfolding, nothing pulls against anything else. The body moves, awareness receives, and the moment completes itself without resistance. Conflict disappears because the chooser, the self, who created the conflict, is no longer there.

When the self steps back, action flows from the coherence of the field,
 not the fragmentation of the self.

The implications for society:

The most unsettling consequence of this discovery is not individual; it is collective. If the brain decides before consciousness, and if it decides using the accumulated patterns of conditioning, memory, fear, belief, trauma, identity, and culture, then society itself is nothing more than the sum of billions of predetermined impulses. Every institution, every political movement, every ideology, every conflict, every social structure is built from brains acting out their conditioning milliseconds before they know they are acting. A civilisation is simply a scaled architecture of unconscious decisions, stitched together by narratives we tell ourselves afterwards. No one sees this, because everyone assumes they are the ones making the choices.

And this is where the danger lies. What we have become determines everything the brain produces in the next moment. The organism predicts from what it has already become, not from what it might become. A mind filled with fear produces fearful decisions. A mind filled with division creates divided societies. A mind shaped by belief reinforces belief. A mind built on bias cannot escape bias. The predictive machinery does not stop and ask, “Is this true?” It simply continues the pattern, because that is the safest thing evolution ever learned. So the world continues as it is, not because anyone chooses it, but because the mechanism cannot do anything else once conditioning is in place. Entropy accumulates as identity fragments further, and the social fabric follows the same trajectory.

This is why Krishnamurti implored humanity to stay with the fact. Because if the self is the content of consciousness and the content is the conditioning, then every act of the self strengthens the very pattern that creates conflict. Without seeing this, society becomes an unconscious loop in which the brain keeps acting from the self and the self keeps claiming authorship, unaware that it is merely echoing its own past. The tragedy is that we think we are choosing, when in truth we are repeating.

When looked at honestly, this is a bleak scenario. A civilisation that cannot see the mechanism running it has no way of interrupting it. It will continue building itself from fear, from division, from inherited patterns of thought, from belief structures that have hardened into identity. Without awakening, entropy wins. This is not philosophy; it is physics of the mind. The system burns energy in maintaining fragmentation. The more fragmented the mind, the more energy is wasted, and the more chaotic the collective becomes. Left to itself, this ends only one way.

And yet awakening is the one thing that breaks the loop. Not because awakening creates new choices, but because it dissolves the chooser. When the self becomes transparent, the predictive machinery no longer draws from the narrow, conditioned patterns of the past. It draws from coherence instead of fragmentation. It references the whole field, not the personal history. The organism stops reinforcing its own entropy and begins to align with the intelligence that underlies the moment. This is the only exit from unconscious society, the only point at which humanity steps out of the loop created by its own conditioned brain-minds.

Without this shift, the future is bleak. But with it, even a few individuals can shift the temporal direction of society, because coherence spreads. One silent mind has a different effect on the field than a thousand noisy ones. The brain still decides before you do, but what it draws from is no longer the past. It draws from the intelligence that permeates the whole. In that shift, society has its only chance.

Reference:

Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain — PubMed

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We Do Not Have Free Will – Why?

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When the self dissolves and the mind becomes silent, the universe moves through you — but the body’s hidden filters still shape what you can perceive.

Free will begins as an assumption, the natural background noise of a life lived inside the narrow tunnel of the self. It feels as though choices spring from some inner agent, as though the one who thinks is the one who acts. But the deeper you enter the mind, the more this illusion dissolves. The brain is not an open window; it is a gate, and almost everything is filtered before it reaches awareness. Sensory gating stands at the threshold of perception, deciding what enters and what never becomes conscious. It protects the fragile structure of identity by keeping the world small, predictable, and tolerable. In that early state, free will is little more than momentum from memory and conditioning.

As the mind becomes quiet, the gate begins to thin. Awareness widens. The DMN, which once wrapped the world around the self, begins to loosen its grip. The familiar weight of narrative fades. The thinking mind falls to the background, and the first opening appears: a directness of perception that was always there but long overshadowed. With this loosening, more of reality enters. Patterns that were once invisible begin to appear. The brain becomes permeable, less guarded against the subtle. This is the beginning of awakening, the first moment when you recognise that freedom is not something you exercise but something that becomes possible only when noise recedes.

As this widening continues, the most unsettling truth comes into view: the brain decides before it tells you it has decided. You think the thought-decision is yours, but it is not. Every choice begins in the deep layers of the motor and association networks, where the body prepares its next movement silently and automatically. Only after this preparation is already underway does the feeling of “I have decided” rise into awareness, creating the impression of authorship after the fact. What you experience as will is simply the mind receiving a message that has already been sent. When this becomes visible, the illusion fractures instantly. You no longer see yourself as the origin of action but as the point where the action becomes conscious. Awakening does not stop this mechanism; it reveals it. And in that revelation, the self loses its authority, because it can no longer pretend to be the one who chooses.

Yet even here the gate remains. Sensory gating continues its quiet work, not as a rigid barrier but as a biological necessity. The nervous system cannot tolerate the full bandwidth of the universe without losing coherence. So it allows just enough for transformation to take root. This is why insight comes in waves and not all at once. The structure that once hid reality now modulates it gently, letting more of the field come through without overwhelming the system.

Even in this openness, the chemistry of the body continues to shape the texture of the moment. Neurotransmitters rise and fall like internal tides, quietly altering what the mind can receive. A shift in serotonin steadies or destabilises mood, a drift in dopamine reshapes focus and valuation, a pulse of norepinephrine sharpens or narrows the field, and even small fluctuations in glucose or inflammatory molecules tilt perception toward clarity or dullness. Awakening widens the channel, but the body’s chemistry still colours the moment. The centre-source may guide action, yet the vessel that carries it breathes through a physiology that can never be bypassed.

Then comes the moment when identity dissolves. Awareness settles into its natural state, free from the weight of self. Here, the intelligence of the field can be sensed directly. Perception becomes silent and uncluttered. Time thins out. The boundary between inner and outer softens. Action no longer feels authored but simply arises when needed, without hesitation or doubt. This is the centre-source state, where the universe seems to move through you rather than the other way around. The sense of “my decision” gives way to something more spacious and impersonal. In this space, free will feels irrelevant because the separation that required choice has faded.

Yet even here the ancient constraint remains. Sensory gating does not disappear. It becomes subtle, transparent, almost imperceptible, but it is still part of the embodied mind. Awareness can widen without limit, but the biological channel through which it enters the brain still has boundaries. This is the final paradox of awakening: the centre-source is free, but the vessel that carries it is not. The intelligence of the field may guide perception and action, but it must pass through the nervous system in order to become lived experience. This is why enlightenment does not turn a human into a god. It turns the human into a clear instrument, but an instrument nonetheless.

The real freedom lies not in escaping this structure but in seeing through it. When the mind becomes silent, the filter becomes obvious. When the self dissolves, the filter becomes harmless. And when action flows from the centre-source, the filter becomes simply part of the way consciousness enters time. What felt like limitation becomes rhythm; what felt like constraint becomes form. The mind no longer fights its architecture. It simply functions, open, receptive, aligned with the intelligence that moves through all things.

The universe continues to speak, and you continue to hear it, but now with the understanding that awareness is infinite while perception is shaped by the body. Action emerges not from will but from clarity. And the small river of biological consciousness reconnects with the ocean from which it came, flowing as one movement through the silent bridge between mind and universe.

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