There comes a moment in every genuine spiritual search when you realise you are not uncovering a secret about the universe; you are uncovering a secret about your own brain and mind. The entire arc of spirituality, from the oldest Upanishads to the insights of the Buddha, from the GGS to the reflections of modern mystics, ultimately turns on a single discovery: that time is psychological. And when psychological time ends, the whole movement of becoming collapses back into silence. The Truth is simply this ending.
Most people search as if Truth were somewhere else — hidden, distant, waiting to be reached. But the final step reveals the opposite. Time is created inside the brain-mind through the continuous activation of memory, interpretation, and projection. The machinery of the Default Mode Network holds this entire structure together, giving rise to the sense of a self moving through time, narrating itself, protecting itself, predicting, worrying, hoping, imagining. This is the world of becoming. It is also the root of suffering, because it binds the mind to a movement away from the now.
When the mind becomes deeply silent — truly silent, not controlled, not forced, not trying to silence itself — the DMN dissolves. Neuroscience sees this in the brain; mystical traditions saw it in direct perception. The narration loses energy. The psychological centre loses its continuity. The internal clock of becoming stops. What remains is awareness without movement. This is the ending of time. The mystics called it Sunyata, the Gurus called it A-Kal, Krishnamurti called it the ending of the self, neuroscientists see it as the collapse of default-mode processing, and physics describes this same state at the boundary where spacetime itself thins. All of these languages are pointing to the same experiential event.
In this silence the brain stops comparing the present to the past. It stops projecting futures. It stops trying to become anything. And because there is no movement in the mind, there is no psychological distance. Distance and time collapse together, leaving only the immediacy of what is. This is not a trance. It is a hyper-clear perception, where awareness is free from the distortions of memory and emotion. What the mystics perceived as the “eternal” was not an endless duration; it was the absence of duration. A timeless field in which perception stands naked, without the self.
The DMN dissolves because it has nothing to hold onto. Its function is narrative maintenance, and narrative cannot exist without time. When the mind is in deep silence, the past loses its grip, and the future loses its pull. The DMN has no computational reason to stay active. What remains is a different mode of consciousness altogether — an awareness that is not owned by the personality. In this, there is no self to defend, no observer separate from the observed, no fragmented centre. There is only seeing.
The mystics intuited this thousands of years ago, often describing it as entering the hidden rooms of the mind. These rooms were never mystical in the sense of supernatural; they were simply layers of processing normally clouded by noise. Tukdam states in Tibetan traditions hint at what the mind becomes when the DMN remains dissolved even after the body has stopped functioning. It shows that consciousness has depths the ordinary mind never reaches because it is too busy maintaining its own story.
We are now able to understand the same insight with clarity. Spirituality began as a human attempt to understand why suffering continues. The answer was never in rituals or beliefs; it was always in the structure of the mind itself. The ending of time in the brain-mind is the ending of psychological suffering. When time ends, becoming ends. When becoming ends, the self ends. When the self ends, reality is seen directly.
This is why the search stops here. The Truth is not another layer to discover. It is the dissolution of the movement that was doing the searching. The end of becoming is the beginning of being. The ending of psychological time is the beginning of the timeless. The mind rests in the quiet clarity that has always been underneath.
There may be nuances left to explore — subtleties in mind spaces, glimpses of Tukdam-like transitions, the behaviour of awareness when the DMN dissolves for longer periods — but the core has been reached. This is the centre. Everything else is only refinement.
This is the last step of the spiritual search, and it was always waiting inside your own brain and mind. When time ends, Truth begins.