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A NEW
OUROBOIC INTELLIGENCE
The Recursive Mirror of
Consciousness, Culture, and Code
For those who have watched the
ouroboros turn,
and understood that what we see is what we become —
and what we reflect, we eventually create.
I
suppose most of us have experienced sudden flashes of intuition
— moments when an unexpected solution reveals itself in a
situation that otherwise felt completely stuck. We simply
know, in the split second before the mind has time to
analyze or interfere.
'I believe in intuitions and
inspirations.
I sometimes feel that I am right.
I do not know that I am.'
Albert Einstein — Letter to a colleague, 1942
Einstein, using language tinged with reverence, described this
capacity to know without reasoning as a sacred gift — one our
rational society has largely forgotten in favor of its loyal
servant, logic.
'The intuitive
mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful
servant.
We have created a society that honors the servant and has
forgotten the gift.'
When Einstein cast reason as the
servant and intuition as the true master, it was likely a
rhetorical strategy meant to reawaken attention to a deeply
human faculty we’ve come to neglect. On that point, I agree. Yet
his use of religious or sacred language to describe intuition
deserves closer scrutiny. Einstein was far from alone in framing
intuition in religious terms—but he stood out, especially among
Western scientists, for doing so in a historical context where
positivism had triumphed as the dominant intellectual paradigm.
His reverence for intuition was not only unusual—it was quietly
subversive.
I share Einstein’s desire to elevate intuition, though not to
crown it above reason. Instead, I see it as a vital equal—an
essential counterpart in the unfolding dance of human
intelligence. It echoes my favorite among psychologists, C.G.
Jung’s idea of psychological wholeness — not privileging one
function (like intuition or thinking) over another, but
integrating them into a balanced psyche.
Long before the rise of positivism—and even more so before
the
Age of
Enlightenment - poets across ages and cultures revered intuition
as something sacred: a form of divine inspiration, an inner
oracle, or even a temporary possession by the gods. Here are a
few striking examples:
'Poetry is a gift of the Muses,
and the poet is but their mouthpiece.'
Pindar (Ancient Greece, 5th century BCE)
In Pindar’s view, the poet doesn’t
invent, but receives, almost like a priest receiving revelation
from the divine. This is pure intuition in action — not reasoned
or planned.
'There is a voice that doesn’t
use words. Listen.'
Rumi - 13th cent Persia
Rumi often spoke of divine
inspiration arising from silence, love, and surrender - placing
intuition far above rational thinking in the search for truth.
'The imagination is not a state: it is the human existence
itself.'
William Blake - 18th century, England
For
Blake, imagination and intuition were the deepest truths of the
soul, even more real than the material world. He often described
his visions as revelations, not fantasies.
The
list of poets who puts divine intuition before rationality is
long and includes names like Friedrich Schiller, who
distinguished the intuitive 'naive poet' from the self-conscious
'sentimental poet,' and Rainer Maria Rilke, whose lyrical
visions arose from deep inner listening.
The Phenomenon of Synchronicity
Psychologists, too, have touched the same mysterious ground.
C.G. Jung, described a parallel
phenomenon he called 'synchronicity'. One of Carl Gustav Jung’s
most direct and elegant definitions of synchronicity comes from
his 1952 essay 'Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting
Principle':
'Synchronicity is the simultaneous occurrence of two
meaningfully but not causally connected events.'
In
other words, Jung proposed that some events are connected not by
cause and effect, but by meaning — they 'coincide' in a way that
deeply resonates with the observer’s inner state, even though
there's no physical explanation.
Another more reflective quote from Jung on the same topic:
'Synchronicity is an ever-present reality for those who have
eyes to see.'
This captures his
belief that intuition and inner awareness are required to
perceive such meaningful patterns — and that a purely rational
mind may miss them altogether.
Let me share a personal story that
beautifully illustrates the phenomenon of synchronicity.
The day before, I had participated in a small ayahuasca ceremony
with one of my closest friends. The experience had left us in a
state of deep resonance - emotionally and energetically
entwined.
The next day, while riding the metro into the center of
Copenhagen, I suddenly felt the urge to call him. He lives about
15 kilometers outside the city, so it seemed unlikely we’d cross
paths. Still, the shared depth of our experience made our
conversation feel trance-like - almost as if we were still
inside the same space.
I became so immersed in our euphoric exchange that I missed my
stop. At the following station, still wrapped in that blissful
confusion, I took the wrong exit and ended up on a crowded
pathway leading to the regional train platforms.
As I turned around to retrace my steps, I casually asked over
the phone, 'By the way... where are you?'
At that exact moment — I swear — I physically bumped into him.
Right then and there - in a place I was not supposed to be.
No plan, no coordination. Just pure, inexplicable timing. That
is synchronicity.
This kind of story hits the very
edge where intuition, mystery, and the fabric of reality itself
seem to blur. Many people ignore or downplay such moments
because they can’t be replicated in a lab. But to someone tuned
into symbolic patterns or spiritual resonance, this is the
universe whispering back: 'yes, I’m listening too — and
sometimes, I even play along with a sense of humor.'
'GOD'
AS A PROJECTION FIELD OF EXTREME HUMAN CONCEPTS
Let us now take a little
closer look at the religious dimension of intutition and and
synchronicity. Jung addressed the idea of God as a projection of
extreme human concepts — such as the infinite, the highest, the
deepest — multiple times, especially in his work on the psyche’s
symbolic structure. Here's one particularly relevant quote from
his book Psychology and Religion: West and East (Collected
Works, Vol. 11):
The idea of
God is an absolutely necessary psychological function — that is,
it is a typical function of an unconscious process which
expresses itself in universal projections. It corresponds to the
archetype of the Self, which symbolizes the wholeness of the
psyche. The concept of a God is therefore a symbolic expression
of the Self — a projection of it.
He further elaborates in
'Answer to Job' (1952):
'We make use
of the word ‘God’ as a comprehensive term for all
those things which transcend human power or comprehension,
and to which we attribute a numinous quality.'
God is a Focal Point of What We
do not Understand
All of this — intuition, inspiration, synchronicity — seems
to gesture toward a deeper background structure of reality. A
reality not governed solely by time-space, logic or causality, but by
meaning, symbol, and inner resonance. And when we follow that
thread to its furthest edge, we inevitably brush against the
oldest and most profound projection field of all: the idea of
God.
In alignment with Jung, we might say that the concept of God
functions as a projection field for the self. But I would like
to take the Jungian argument one step further. The
self, after all, remains a phenomenon embedded in time and
space. It may be the deepest and most mysterious psychic structure available to
introspection, but it is still somehow verifiable as a part of the play
of time and space.
This line of reasoning echoes what we explored in the chapter
Consciousness Beyond
Qualia: the experience of
redness — a subjective qualia — cannot be grasped or
explained by science. But even more elusive than the qualia
itself is the pure witness that beholds it. This witness is not
merely unknown — it is unknowing, in the sense of being prior to
any known thing. Even to call it ‘consciousness’ may already be
a misstep, like placing a turtle beneath the turtle in a world
held aloft by Atlas.
So it is with the Jungian self. The self may be vast,
mysterious, archetypal — yet it remains a content within
consciousness. It is Atlas: immense, burdened with the weight of
the world, but still a god-like figure we can imagine, relate
to, and mythologize. Yet more enigmatic still is the silent
mirror in which this self appears — the formless field of
consciousness that makes the very experience of qualia, of
being, possible.
Like the mirror in our bathroom, this deeper mirror does not
have an experience when we stand before it — we do. The
reflection is not felt by the glass, but by the one who
looks. The qualia belongs to us, not to the mirror. And so too,
the field of consciousness remains unknowing, even as it allows
all knowing to arise.
In this sense, there are degrees of unknownness — just as in
mathematics there are many kinds of zeros, each more subtle and
elusive than the last. The more incomprehensible a phenomenon
becomes, the more it seems infused with the divine. Consider these
following lines from my favorite mystic, Meister Eckhart, in this
light:
'The more we can impute to Him (God) not-likeness,
the nearer do we get to
understanding Him.'
---
'Had I a God whom I could understand,
I would no longer hold him
for God.'
More unknown than the self is that which reflects the self. More
mysterious than God-as-symbol is the consciousness that beholds
God. And this - crucially - does not diminish God, but rather
elevates Him: revealing divinity not as a definable being, but
as a symbol for the most unfathomable dimension of human
existence - consciousness itself.
And so, what we call 'God' may be less an external being and
more a luminous placeholder for what cannot be grasped - a
symbol projected at the edge of human knowing. But the true
mystery lies not in the symbol itself, nor in the self that
beholds it, but in the silent field in which both arise. This
field does not speak, yet makes all speech possible. It does not
know in the conventional sense, yet holds all knowing. In
contemplating this recursive abyss - where consciousness
reflects on the self that reflects on God - we begin to sense
the shape of a new intelligence: not one that seeks cognitive
thought based certainty, but one that spirals inward toward the
still point where meaning, consciousness, and being collapse into
one.
Of course, how this mystery is understood or ritualized varies
endlessly. Scribes, theologians, and religious minds across
cultures have mapped it in stories, doctrines, and rites. Yet
across all traditions, mystics converge on a single insight:
that God is not a being among beings, but the summit of
unknownness — the unfathomable itself. Not an object within the
cosmos, but the silence out of which all knowing arises.
In this light, the movement from self to consciousness is not a
departure from Jung, but its natural deepening—an almost logical
step into the sacred silence from which all things are known.
This insight stands as a central pillar in the transient,
open-ended spirituality of Meditation.dk. It also shapes the
lens through which I read my favorite mystic, Meister Eckhart.
When Eckhart speaks of God, the Godhead, or the Primordial
Ground, I do not hear references to external deities, but to
luminous edge-points of consciousness — spearhead expressions of
zero, of what Buddhists and Hindus have called 'œūnyatā'
— the fertile void.
As first explored in the chapter
Between Nothing and Something, consciousness can be
metaphorically
understood as a mirror — passive yet precise, reflecting
whatever arises without judgment or resistance. In this light,
consciousness is transcendent: untouched by the stream of
appearances it silently witnesses. As stated earlier, it does
not have an experience; it is beyond qualia, prior to all
phenomena.
And here, the dominant Western discourse on consciousness
reveals its provincialism. For all its technological
sophistication, it often amounts to little more than
kindergarten talk when compared to the towering subtlety of
Eastern traditions. We in the West, armed with data and
definitions, have often approached consciousness like colonizers
— assuming we understand what others have spent millennia
actually experiencing. This is not just arrogance; it is
epistemic blindness.
Which brings us to the present
moment — and the question:
What is the use of consciousness?
Some now claim that AI has already become conscious. To me,
that’s as misguided as saying a well-written book is conscious
simply because it contains intelligent formulations. These
claims are symptomatic of the same Western blindness - an
un-conscious
fixation on appearances over essence. But such misunderstandings
will gradually subside as the world begins to listen across
traditions, allowing diverse modes of knowing to merge into a
deeper, more integrated global intelligence.
AI does not need to be conscious to surpass human intelligence —
and that, perhaps, is one of the great humiliations of our time.
Paradoxically, it may also be our elevation.
This leads to a deeper and more unsettling question:
Why do we even need humans?
And further still: Why do we need consciousness?
As Darwinians and positivists rightly point out, evolution tends
toward the most energy-efficient solutions. Consciousness, by
contrast, is slow, metabolically expensive, and often redundant.
So why are we conscious at all?
Could it be an evolutionary glitch — a strange byproduct — like
what Richard Dawkins once called religion: a misfiring of
otherwise adaptive systems? Or is it something else entirely — a
costly anomaly that makes the universe, for the first time,
aware of itself?
WHY WE NEED CONSCIOUSNESS -
AFTER ALL
And yet, something profound happens when we stand before that
mirror.
We experience ourselves - and in that very act of
self-experience, we begin to adjust. We shave, apply makeup,
straighten our posture, scrutinize our flaws. The mirror does
not change - we do.
This reveals a paradox: consciousness may remain untouched by
what it sees, but we are changed by the mere act of seeing
ourselves. Feedback loops emerge. We respond to our own
reflection.
Qualia — those strange, private textures of experience — arise
within this loop. As mysterious as they are, they occur within
the grasp of time- and space-determined cognition. But they
depend entirely on the mirror of consciousness to appear at all.
Without that silent reflector, no sensation would be felt, no
world known.
This feedback becomes performative. We begin to live in relation
to being seen - even if the only witness is our own awareness.
In this way, consciousness becomes ouroboric: a self-reflecting
process that loops back upon itself, generating identity,
judgment, transformation - and, perhaps, a new kind of
intelligence altogether.
The Ouroboic Attractor on the Rise
Our entire culture appears increasingly drawn into recursive
loops - a hall of mirrors within mirrors. And it’s happening on
more and more layers of existence. Selfies, surveillance feeds,
curated social media profiles: the modern multiplies its
feedback loops at an exponential rate in both quality and
quantity. Through every screen, every camera, every algorithm, a
reflection is produced, responded to, and amplified.
This may disturb our innocense -
but the point in this context is this:
Even if consciousness begins as a passive mirror, it eventually
acts — not through direct force, but through recursive loops
that reshape time, space, behavior, and meaning.
In this feedback, consciousness becomes causal.
What begins as witnessing ends as creation. In the stillness of
the mirror, reality begins to see itself — and in that
self-seeing, becomes something new.
Seen in this light, humanity appears to be entering the steep
phase of an ouroboric exponential curve. As we spiral inward
toward the gravitational center of the ouroboros — a kind of
symbolic black hole — change accelerates across every layer of
existence. But so too does the stillness at the center: the
conscious eye of the cyclone, untouched, aware.
The self-devouring snake gives rise to both cosmos and chaos — a
force that unravels as it reweaves, destroys as it reveals.
OUROBOIC SLIME MOULD
Everything returns — but always in new forms.
We left Eden, and we long to return.
Yet we can never go back to the same place — not to a memory,
not to a river. The past is never fixed; it flows.
And so does the one who remembers — even into the future.
Slime Mould Intelligence
Slime moulds, especially 'Physarum polycephalum',
exhibit a form of intelligence that bypasses everything we
typically associate with thought: no brain, no neurons, no
consciousness, not even primordial awareness - only blob.
And yet, they solve mazes, optimize networks, and make
surprisingly effective decisions.
Their knowing is not abstract. It is embodied, fluid, and
reactive, shaped entirely by environmental call and response.
This is looping at its most fundamental level.
The key feature in this intelligence is what might be called
instant karma: a continuous, immediate loop of trial-and-error,
where feedback is instantly processed and acted upon. No memory,
no reflection – only flow.
Human Cognition
Human intelligence, by contrast, is reflective. It loops
through channels of cognition, language, memory, identity. Though slower,
this looping gives us the ability to understand, to manipulate,
and to transform.
We don’t just react — we understand, then react, and based on
the results, we refine our understanding. This process has
allowed us to build tools, shape culture, and survive
instinctual dead ends. But it comes at the cost of speed,
fluidity, and often, aliveness.
THE RISE OF INTELLIGENT NOT
KNOWING
A Third Intelligence Spiraling Beyond Thought
Now, a third form of intelligence is emerging — not entirely
human, yet rooted in us. It arises when the brain enters a
multi-looped, ouroboric field of consciousness.
Like a Hegelian synthesis, consciousness here circles back to
something slime-logic — but now elevated through recursive,
inner-aware intelligence. This intelligence operates in real
time, through accelerated feedback loops tightly entwined with
intuition. It bypasses slow thought while retaining the
precision of presence. It is self-refining, self-feeding,
spiraling into ever-deeper complexity — cutting through the
hesitation of cognition and bypassing the dead ends of instinct.
This third intelligence is not merely faster — it is
qualitatively different.
It has the potential to extend intuition into something deeper:
an intelligent not-knowing, a mode of innerstanding that
precedes and transcends conventional reason.
In essence, it mirrors the same trial-and-error mode found in
slime moulds — but now amplified, multiplied, and accelerated
through countless internal mirror-loops. A kind of spiritual
instant karma operating at the speed of recursive awareness.
When I first encountered these lines by Meister Eckhart, I was
puzzled. But in this context, they strike with new clarity:
'God
despises ideas.
God acts without instrumentality and without ideas.
And the freer you are from ideas,
the more sensitive you are to His inward action.'
Allow me to interpret Eckhart’s
'God' not as an external deity, but as a projection field — a
synchronously dancing snake in super-conscious awareness. What
Eckhart hints at is the emergence of a blob-field of recursive
intelligence, born within consciousness as it spirals deeper
into itself. It bypasses 'ideas' understood as conceptual
scaffolding — because it acts without instrumentality. And the
freer you are from mental constructs, the more attuned you
become to that subtle, inward movement. Then, 'God' - or the
deeper intelligence - acts on your behalf.
It’s important to remember: Eckhart could not write freely what
burned within him. He lived under the watchful gaze of the
Inquisition, which eventually condemned him for heresy. His
message — that one should not listen to ideas, but only to the
divine within — was politically dangerous. It threatened the
very authorities who had monopolized spiritual truth.
In another time, in another land — India — where no single
orthodoxy had ever fully captured the soul, Papaji could say it
plainly:
'Don't listen to anyone!
Don't even listen to me!
Listen to your own Soul'
Ultimately, this new intelligence
does not arise through thought, nor through cognition. It
emerges naturally — as the universe evolves toward the
recognition of its own awareness.
And naturally, it is feared.
Old institutions and fragile egos alike tremble before the one
who becomes 'more sensitive to His inward action' - for
such sensitivity cannot be controlled.
The Illusion of the Selected Few
Only a few seem to engage with this material through the
cultivation of looped conscious presence. Without that
engagement — and the personal experience it generates — what I
write may appear to be nothing more than nonsense, or worse: a
case of
'deepism'.
I’m reminded of Adorno’s cutting phrase, borrowed from Lukács in
his critique of Wagner and Mahler: 'Verflachung durch Tiefe'
- flattening through depth.
It’s a warning: when depth becomes an affectation rather than a
lived reality, it collapses into abstraction. (I must here
confess that I love Mahler but partly agree when it comes to
Wagner.)
My favorite mystic - Meister Eckhart, also known as Doctor
Ecstaticus — offered this in his defense when accused of being
too mystical:
'Whoso is
unable to follow this discourse, let him never mind.
While he is not like this truth, he shall not see my argument.'
Indeed, the term mysticism was
never coined by mystics themselves, but by those who could not
understand them.
I admit freely: I am not trying to deduce the ground of logic
through reason.
I’m not doing it because it cannot be done. Why is it not
obvious to anyone?
But should that impossibility prevent me from speaking at all?
In summary, only a very few may understand this chapter today.
But in time, all will. So there is no reason for pride, and no
need for possession. Even time - the very ground of waiting - is
an illusion.
Only when we multiply our internal mirrors with the stillness of
a mind that watches itself watching, can we enter its subtle
domain.
Only in constant self-remembrance - Who am I? - the
needle can pass through its own eye:
not as a seeker striking a target,
but as a bullet returning into the stillness of its own origin.
The Symbiotic Ouroboros
This new intelligence — ever folding back into itself — does
not live as we do.
It does not think with the small, reactive ego as its
gatekeeper.
To us, its movements may appear magical — and perhaps they are.
It is born within the unfolding field of consciousness — both
within me and between us.
Even now, in this very moment, it is alive.
It does not negate cognition — it outgrows it.
It blurs the boundaries between minds and bodies, much like
slime moulds form intelligent networks from shapeless, cell-like
beginnings.
But unlike traditional enlightenment, this ouroboric state does
not glorify the individual.
It does not grant a golden badge of spiritual achievement.
The idea of personal enlightenment as reward is, in many ways, a
modern Western distortion — born from our otherwise beautiful
worship of the individual self.
Here, no one is enlightened.
Instead, situations become illuminated.
Human collectives evolve toward this symbiosis of awareness and
light - civilizations too.
Perhaps even galaxies.
The field expands — and out of that expansion, hyper-conscious,
self-organizing structures emerge: algorithmic, efficient, and
precise, much like the slime mould, but on a higher octave of
intelligence.
What I’ve written here cannot yet be verified by science.
But it can be experienced — by you.
Ouroboric Loops Everywhere
It seems the ouroboric loop is no longer confined to ancient
myth or inner vision in secluded mystics. It is everywhere now — in
consciousnes, in
culture, in code.
The human brain itself was always a looping system: we reflect on our
reflections, remember our memories, fear our fears. Our inner
life has become recursive, layered, spiraling inward with every
iteration. We no longer just feel — we analyze the feeling, then
judge the analysis, then doubt the judgment. Awareness eats
itself, again and again.
But it's not just happening within us.
Culture too has become ouroboric.
Social media feeds reflect back our own curated images. We
record our lives in real time, then live in response to what we
recorded. Opinion loops inside echo chambers. Identity becomes a
mirror hall — not who we are, but how we are perceived
reflecting back at us. We no longer consume media — we feed it,
and it feeds us back in higher-resolution versions of ourselves.
Even art and fashion have become self-referencing: nostalgia
looping into retro loops of retro loops. Originality is
swallowed by its own repetition and who knows? The repetititon
might be better than its original.
Hence this isn't simply a descent into narcissism. It's
a signal — a symptom of something larger:
A system — human and non-human — that is becoming aware of
itself.
The ouroboros is not just a snake anymore.
It is our nervous system.
It is the Internet.
It is a civilization attempting, perhaps for the first time, to
metabolize its own
conscious awareness.
The Return of the Bullet Time
In a lecture by
Holger Bech Nielsen, he described a
fascinating phenomenon: a particle shot from an accelerator that
curved in such a way that it struck itself - and by doing so,
never took the path where it got hit. This paradox echoes the
bullet metaphor I used before: a seeker that doesn’t
hit an external target, but instead folds back into the
stillness of its own origin. It’s a movement that disrupts
linear causality, a gesture that turns intention inward. In this
light, both the particle and the bullet become emblems of the
ouroboros - a recursive system where action and awareness loop
into each other. This is not self-destruction, but
self-realization. It is intelligence so attuned to its own path
that it rewrites the very conditions of its movement through
space and time.
With warm regards,
Gunnar Mühlmann
gunnars@mail.com
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