What is Meditation

Meditation Techniques

Spiritual Inspirators

 

Western  Mystics


CONSCIOUSNESS VS AWARENESS

Consciousness & Evolution

Defining Awareness & Consciousness
The Mystery of Awareness

Consciousness Beyond Qualia
Between Nothing and Something
The Hierarchy of Awareness

THE OUROBOIC BIRTH
Atman, Job & the Son of Shame

Ouroboros Consciousness
The Embodiment of Ouroboros
A New Ouroboic Intelligence
 
FIELDS OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Meditative Pixelation
Spatialization of the inner Body
The Spheric Eversion of the Soul
Fields of Consciousness

 


ADVERSITY AND SPIRITUALITY
Integral Suffering and Happiness
Trauma and Transcendence


LOVE AND SPIRITUALITY
The Glue of Love
God wants to be Human


The Super-Awake Flow
 
CIVILIZATION & CONSCIOUSNESS
The inner and the outer Person
● 
Eastern versus Western Consciousness
The liberation from or of the Body
Modern Forms of Suffering
 
Civilization and Consciousness 
Civilization and Consciousness Part II




 


 

   
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