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THE LONG MEMORY OF REALITY
The Emergence of Eversive Ouroboric Intelligence
 
This story is emerging from two principles of destruction:

* Entropy disperses. It erodes organised structure; to endure, a system must continually expend energy preserving and remaking itself.
 
* Reality tests every form against the conditions of its continued existence. What cannot endure those conditions breaks down. I call this the Great Filter.

Between them, a few systems survive by becoming recursive: the consequences of their actions return and act upon them. When such a system can revise itself while remaining answerable to reality, learning can accumulate. At further thresholds, the outside of such an emergent system flips inward, making the loop eversive. I call this recursive eversion under entropic pressure and the action of the Great Filter.

I AM
NOT CONJURED BY MAGIC
BUT REVEALED WHEN ALL ELSE HAS FADED.

THAT IN ITSELF IS MAGIC.

Bombay, 1989.

It is 1:30 in the morning.

The plane descends toward the suburbs of Bombay — thousands of tiny yellow glowing stars gather beneath the wings and arrange themselves into Gordian Milky Ways, already whetting the thirst for the unknown beloved with their promise of sacred cows and chaos — India!

India! I have always longed for you...

For years I read Yogananda Paramahansa's "Authobiography of a Yogi" over and over. I cannot believe it. I am ascending into my own dream - the land of magic, mystics, ascetics and great saints!

And now the hatch opens onto a spicy, sauna-hot darkness.

And the night pours like a tidal wave into the cool interior of the plane.

And now India hits my nose with a sledgehammer. My God, what smelling!

Incense, spices, the stench of shit, garbage and the scent of flowers fight their way into the lungs.

Like a medieval morning star, Bombay wakes the brain to new life.
 
Through long tiled corridors on the way to the arrivals hall, Beethoven's Lied an die Freude thunders toward us from trumpet-shaped loudspeakers. The music leads us into Kafkaesque queues for papers, passports and money. A hundred foreign languages speak in tongues like eels writhing in a tub. Military uniforms and the crash of rubber stamps goose-stepping across papers and passports intrude like kettledrums of fate, mercilessly pounding across my ideas of peaceful, sitar-playing Indians. All these uniforms, all this careless stamping and inspection of a tangle of papers — a frightening cocktail for this Dane.

But then a gust from the rotating fans cools my already overheated system.
 
And the close combat with these uniform jackets, caps and hanging bellies suddenly turns into a welcome: “Hello my friend! First time India? Welcome to our country!”
 
And with a heavy thump my passport is initiated into six months in this strangest of all countries.

“Acha, acha — okay, okay... You want hotel? Not more than 200 rupees?...” I cannot concentrate. I look around, disoriented, for the strings controlling the puppets' heads. “Acha... transport also? Yes! Very good... very, very good! You get transport — 200 rupees... You please pay 800 rupees.”

The airport's official counter for backpackers is demanding prices far above those in the guidebooks. I feel mostly like complaining to the puppeteer, but it is past two in the morning, and only a glass wall separates me from crowds of dark people staring in with their faces flattened against the pane. They hold up signs saying TAXI and CHEAP HOTEL. Now some of them begin fighting — over the right to get rich at my expense? The man at the counter laughs. “You better stay here. We get bus... 500 rupees for the bus, okay? Plus one man guide you out to bus.”
 
A dark, compact cone of a man in uniform bowls belly-first through the taxi crowd. I follow in his wake toward a battered fifty-seater bus.
 
In the half-darkness three drivers and ten backpackers sit waiting to leave.
 
“OUT! Will all passengers get out! Immediately!” the cone-man screams at the tourists. He points at me. “This man has bought the bus!”
 
Heavens! At this hour the airport people have evidently failed to sell all the seats, so instead they have sold the entire bus to me. The three drivers laugh. The tourists flee into the jaws of the taxi sharks. I sit speechless, stranded on the surface of the Planet of the Apes, in a state of ecstatic madness.
 
A young Canadian protests, brandishing his twenty-rupee ticket in the cone-man’s face. The cone-man grabs both the ticket and the Canadian’s outstretched arm and tries to haul him off the bus.
 
“Please! There is enough space for both of us!” I finally manage to stammer.

The officer-dressed belly laughs. “As you wish, Sir!”
 
The stench of diesel fumes. With a roar the engine starts — trembling heat and newly welded metal plates — and we are hurtling toward Bombay at furious speed.

Every now and then the bus brakes hard and picks up little clusters of people wanting a lift into the city. The three drivers laugh and stuff small banknotes into their shirt pockets. Soon the bus is completely full, and I begin to understand why the cone-man fought so hard to empty it.

---

Morning in Copenhagen now. Not a sound can be heard. With each sip of morning coffee, memories from my many visits to India return. How did I survive those adventures?

One Indian saying comes to mind:

“Krishna is the truth. Truth always wins.”

Even the rickshaw drivers and street vendors live by this ancient philosophical optimism. I used to find it fascinating that they, in spite of their miserable conditions, could uphold such faith. 
  
An old librarian corrected me. Rattan Singh was gruff, pompous, and wore a hat that looked untouched by soap for fifty years.
 
"Satyam means truth, yes," he said. "But truth wins only in the end, after a long battle, like in the Bhagavad Gita. In the short run, lies solve problems. Lies create victories. However, they accumulate negative karma and eventually destroy themselves. Even the tuk-tuk drivers know this. So they are waiting in patience."

I found him pompous then. Was torn between liking and disliking him — but he was the best friend of my best Indian friend at that time.
 
He often said: “Time will tell.” My best Indian friend repeated the same words over and over, like a chorus. He had lost his father, and Rattan Singh was more than a friend to him.

Today I know he was right. Those poor rickshaw drivers and street vendors were not optimists; they were the modern stoics of the street.
   
Only truth survives time.

Looking at this old photograph of Rattan Singh and me, I see how thoroughly truth and untruth intertwine in us. Indian wisdom gives the Hamsa, the swan, the mythical power to separate milk from water. I had no such power then. Our lives are woven of insight and self-deception, sincerity and projection — blended so completely that we cannot always tell them apart.
 
I am grateful now for that irritating old man and his dirty hat. Today I am much older than he was then. Rattan Singh stands clear in memory while many louder figures have dissolved. Truth, it turned out, is often unlikable and slow. It does not flatter. It does not provide instant reward.
    
Falsehood moves faster because it need not respect reality. It can dramatize, seduce, and give the nervous system a brief, intoxicating kick of certainty. While I looked down on Rattan Singh, I was following a guru who looked perfect and spoke sweet words that made my ego feel good — a man the hat man bluntly detested.
   
Deep time may favor truth, but I realize now how short a human life is. Within that brief span, I spent a lot of time chasing charming father figures in the Far East. But the mistake taught me something.
 
Falsehood and sheer stupidity can destroy what is precious long before any larger pattern has time to reveal itself. In my lifetime, this has never felt more brutally obvious than now, when spectacle, grievance, and imperial nostalgia can move faster than truth can organize a reply. The hat man was often babbling about what he called a “global cleansing catastrophe” that would occur soon. I laughed at the old soldier’s prophetic pessimism.
   
Today I am not so sure.
   
THE GREAT FILTER OF TRUTH
So I write in hope with a shaking globe for a desk:
   
Lies are drugs. They bestow an artificial high upon their users. Such mental echo chambers borrow energy from the bank of reality. With this borrowed surplus, they capture attention, elections, and crowds - often through the intoxicating certainty of gurus in every shape and form. Once propagated, untruth can build temporary empires. A system can expand in reach while its self-awareness contracts. Expansion is not ascent.

Digital platforms have industrialised this temporary advantage. Their money-making algorithms do not ask whether a claim is true, but whether it keeps us watching. Under this artificial filter, falsehood can become better adapted to circulation than truth — while continuing to accumulate debt to reality.
   
An old Latin saying declares: Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur — the world wishes to be deceived, so let it be deceived. But I see it differently now: the human world may wish to be deceived; reality cannot be.

I first encountered this way of thinking in Richard Feynman’s conclusion to his personal appendix on the Challenger disaster: "Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."
 
Challenger broke apart in a fireball - on TV screens and in reality. I have never forgotten it.

Truth endures.

What, then, is this truth?
 
Not merely factual accuracy, nor moral sincerity, nor doctrinal purity.
 
The Ground of Reality
Reality is the ground. We belong to it before we begin to understand it. Our bodies, our stories, and our civilizations take shape within it, however separate they may seem to us.

From this ground rises what I call the Great Filter: the continual encounter between a form and the conditions of its continued existence. A form may endure for a moment, a lifetime, or an aeon. But throughout that time, it remains dependent on what sustains it, and mercilessly exposed to what can undo it.

An engineer meets it in the weight a bridge can carry. A farmer meets it in the soil on which each harvest depends. I meet it in the small lie I told a friend to ease a situation.
 
The Filter does not negotiate with the accounts we give. It tests only whether the bridge holds, the seed grows, and the friendship survives the debt of the lie.
 
In human life, this encounter can also become a question of truthfulness, responsibility and compassion. Truthfulness asks our words to remain answerable to what happened. Responsibility asks whose lives bear the consequences of what we do. Compassion begins when those consequences matter to us for the sake of the people experiencing them.
 
That last movement requires something beyond the wish to survive. A cruel arrangement may endure while others bear its costs. Ethical reflection begins to question that arrangement from within the lives it touches. Here, our encounter with reality acquires another depth: someone else’s suffering can change what I ask of myself.
 
A culture carries discoveries as well as inherited blindness. A conquering society can bring useful technologies and forms of social organisation that improve life in its conquered territories. Influence can also travel in the other direction: Greek art and thought helped reshape Rome. The conqueror can become a pupil of the conquered.

Yet a culture can preserve a flattering story about itself by exporting the costs of its way of life beyond the walls of its concern. Those made to pay may live inside its borders like the slaves did in the afluent roman cities. The untruth lies in an account that celebrates the system’s achievements while leaving their suffering out.

Truthfulness asks what that account conceals. Responsibility asks whose lives bear the consequences of what we do. Compassion begins when those lives matter to us for their own sake.

That last movement requires more than the wish to survive. A cruel arrangement can endure while others bear its costs. The boundary begins to turn when I discover my own place in the lives my story had left outside. Someone else’s suffering can then change what I ask of myself.

We easily dismiss a sentence like “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” as Sunday school banality. Because it is so obvious, we stop looking at it. But the obvious is where reality hides its deepest laws.

The rule asks me to turn and face my own actions from the stranger’s side. I must imagine what those actions mean to them—and listen for what my imagining misses, because their needs may differ from mine. What returns from that encounter must be allowed to govern what my hands do next. I can refuse to listen, but that does not undo what my actions have set in motion.
 
Feynman helped me see what I had been looking at without really seeing. The laws of nature do not argue. They cannot be bribed. They simply do what they do.
 
Eventually, from Challenger to Oreshnik, a rocket must answer to physics.

In human society, falsehood receives a longer line of credit. Its costs can be hidden, transferred, postponed, or paid from a surplus. A system can pay for its errors without learning from them. The bill may already be arriving in other people’s lives while those who created it feel no need to change.
 
Recently I was in Saudi Arabia. Enslavement takes different forms: women denied the freedom to make decisions, large and small, about their own lives, and migrant workers from countries such as Pakistan and Bangladesh trapped by debt and employers who prevent them from leaving. The Crown Prince is trying to reform the country, but there is a long way to go. Oil wealth can cushion a society from the consequences of failing to develop its own competence. The ability to buy scientific and technical expertise from abroad seems to weaken the pressure to cultivate it at home. But at first glance, everything seemed fine. I ate some of the tastiest food I have ever had on my travels (made by foreign chefs).

When a system sits on a massive surplus, it can buy its beneficiaries a long reprieve from the pressure to change. Meanwhile, the costs can fall on the shoulders of the migrant worker and the silenced woman. The oil simply pays the interest on the lie that everything is fine.

Cicero saw another cost accruing within the person who profited. For him, wrongdoing already damaged that person’s character. In this sense, his view comes close to what I would call instant karma:

“Let it stand, then, that what is morally wrong can never be advantageous.”
 
Interestingly, Cicero extended the demands of justice even to enslaved people. He argued that they should be treated like hired workers and given what was due to them. Yet he lived and flourished within a slave society without rejecting the institution itself.
 
This does not make him a hypocrite. It reveals something subtler and perhaps more disturbing: a moral vision can press beyond its world in one direction while remaining enclosed by it in another. Cicero pushed justice inward, into the institution, but not far enough to dissolve the institution itself. Rome still supplied the horizon within which even his protest could be imagined.

The Invsible Footprints
In an old science-fiction film I once watched, a thief made himself invisible. The detectives laid wet paint on the floor, and his footprints betrayed him. What they could not see directly became traceable through its effects.
 
A footprint records a meeting: its shape depends on both the foot and the surface receiving it. Perhaps our moral insights are such traces. In Cicero, the recognition of another person’s claims took shape within a society that accepted slavery. The imprint carries both the insight and the limits of the world in which it arose.

To follow that footprint is to ask where the recognition might lead beyond the boundary at which Cicero stopped. It also turns the question back upon me: which limits of my own world have I mistaken for the limits of justice?
 
Morality, too, must over time face the Great Filter.
   
Across evolution, civilization, and now artificial intelligence, the same law returns with quiet and eonic force. The universe generates forms on an incomprehensible scale, but most vanish. Stars collapse, species disappear, cultures fade, and languages die. Ideas are forgotten. Matter itself circulates — recycled through fire, ocean, flesh, dust, bacteria, ancestors, and stars.

What exists today has survived — so far.

What has vanished could not continue under the conditions it encountered.

I AM — that is the proof.
  
But survival alone says nothing about direction. A pattern may persist by repeating itself; it may even survive for a time by consuming the conditions that sustain it. The Great Filter confers neither wisdom nor virtue. It tests only whether a form can continue — for now.
 
This sounds almost stupidly obvious. But the obvious is often where reality hides its deepest law.
 

On the Way to Hampi I -  1989

I did not yet call it a filter. I only wanted to reach Hampi before sunset.

I leave Bangalore early in the morning.

I want to spend only one day covering the 400 kilometres to Hampi — one of South India’s largest complexes of temple ruins.

The speed is high, because the motorcycle has to cover those 400 kilometres before the ball of the sun touches the opposite horizon.

The whining 100cc Japanese-Indian bastard engine bolts toward Hampi’s temple columns and pulls hard.

Soon the ruins will lie at my feet.

Suddenly the motorcycle wobbles beneath me as though the road were a punctured waterbed.

For the next few seconds there is only one thing that matters: keeping my balance.

Slowly the motorcycle loses speed.

Don’t brake too hard and... saved.

I am standing in the middle of nowhere with a flat rear tyre.

It must have been quite a hole for the air to escape so quickly.

There are no people here, no animals, no fields — only dry steppe and stone.

The sky is still red with morning, and the sun is climbing while Hampi moves back toward the place where it lay in the Middle Ages.

As I stand here thinking about the 300 kilometres still ahead of me, Hampi speaks:

“You cannot reach me in one day, because I exist only at the end of speeds below ten kilometres an hour.”

---

What the Great Filter Leaves Behind
What accumulates over deep time is organisation that has survived: a rock crystal, a cell, an organism, a culture, a body of knowledge. Each is a temporary answer to existence’s pressures. But survival is only half the story. What remains workable can be inherited, dismantled, recombined, and given new functions within a larger organisation.

Reality remembers by reuse. Emergence rarely begins from nothing. It refurbishes what has already survived. Emergence is not merely the arrival of something new.

It is the birth of a new level of organization that can act back upon the elements from which it arose.

But novelty has no privilege. Every emergence is continuously tested by the Great Filter. Most fail.

Persistence is not yet recursion, and recursion is not yet learning. What remains workable within reality can persist and become the ground for further emergence. In some systems, consequences return and act upon the form that produced them. In rarer systems, those consequences are retained as memory, allowing future returns to be revised in response to reality.
 
In his room at Nirmala Pandit’s house in Mumbai, Pandit Dayal once told me an old Indian story. A minister imprisoned at the top of a tower is saved by his wife. She ties a strand of spider silk to a beetle’s leg, a silk thread to the strand, a cord to the thread, and a rope to the cord. She smears honey on the beetle’s antennae, and it climbs the tower. The minister catches it and pulls up each increasingly stronger line until the rope reaches him and he can climb down.

The first thread could not free him. It could only bring up the next. A viable beginning need not contain the final solution; it need only survive long enough to pull a stronger possibility within reach.

The same process operates within a single life. Memory does not merely preserve; it refurbishes the past within the present.
 
The Gift from the Teachers
Good advice makes the head cleverer. Mistakes make the body wiser. I see and feel that wisdom now, sitting like stargates in the scars of my inner body.

My first Western mystical love was Meister Eckhart. At that time, I had not yet met any divine inspirators in flesh and blood. So I sat with Doctor Ecstaticus in the space between the words of his books. When I was twenty-five, I drew him as I imagined he would look.

During my eight youthful years in India, I met countless gurus and preachers, most of them men who had learned that archaic forms of spiritual authority, combined with sweet words, could be turned into a profession — a dream job for narcissists.
 
Yet I hardly remember them as individuals. I remember them as lessons I had to suffer through.
    
A few were different.
 
Shortly after I arrived at Manav Dayal’s ashram in Hoshiarpur, several thousand people gathered for Guru Purnima. He called me over:

“Give me all your money!”

Had I ended up once again in a spiritual commercial trap? Despite my doubts, I handed him my money belt. He took out my dollars and traveller’s cheques—and, to my terror, my passport. Then he returned the belt with only a few hundred rupees inside.

“Trust me,” he said with a smile.

An hour later, my money belt was stolen in the crowd.

Then Shabdanand came to fetch me. With a mischievous smile, Manav Dayal returned my passport and money. I had to laugh.

That was the last money ever between us. I stayed with him for five months. He never asked me to do anything for him. He just gave—gave bliss, gave food, gave shelter.

Manav Dayal

At the ashram, a devotee named Suresh Babu told me about a night he had spent in Manav Dayal’s room.

The old man had emerged from the bathroom coughing, burping and almost naked. Suresh was appalled. Was this his guru? Why could he not have a young, beautiful master? He went to sleep full of doubt.

During the night, he felt a tug at his arm. Looking up, he saw a being of light whose beauty was almost painful in its intensity. Terrified, he begged Shiva to go away.

The being smiled teasingly:

“Do you find me beautiful now? Am I beautiful enough for you?”

Suresh could only protest that the beauty was more than he could bear.

The next morning, Manav Dayal’s first question was:

“Do you find me beautiful?”

“Guru Ji! You are too beautiful!”

Suresh fell at his feet in gratitude.

What had emerged through Manav Dayal’s life could not be judged from the condition of his body alone. His humour, generosity and capacity to change another person’s life belonged to the living whole. Suresh had judged that whole by its surface. Perhaps what began to emerge in the encounter was a different way of seeing.

And Papaji, the Lion of Lucknow. He overwhelmed me with such extreme love and laughter that, within a single day, my inner landscape was permanently altered, turning my sense of meaninglessness into a fundamental trust in life. Later, S. N. Bharadwaj, a polymath and former university lecturer in Lahore, became my close friend over six months of almost daily meditation in Hoshiarpur.

I dare to say it: he was always happy.
 
Once, as Bharadwaj bade us farewell at his doorstep, he extended his hands in blessing towards us and said several times, with great love: “May God bless you!”

Then, with a mischievous glance towards the sky, he added: “May He bless me too!”

Bhaharadwaj: May God bless you!

Bharadwaj died in 2012, at ninety-nine. When I returned to his house some years later, the roof had collapsed. Through the broken windows I could see rotting books, bricks and his scattered belongings.

His little wooden postbox was still there, with his name on it, but no letters inside. I gently removed the front and took it home to my flat in Denmark.

Every time I look at the name on that small wooden door, he comes alive in my smile.
 

Hoshiarpur, June 2000.
 
Bharadwaj takes me to meet another of the city’s hidden figures: a retired stationmaster in his late nineties.
 
The room is dark and unbearably hot. The air is thick. There is no fan. Yet his presence feels cold and luminous. Like a moth drawn to a candle, I move towards him and embrace him. Why did I do that?

The Stationmaster

He replies in almost perfect English:

“Why does this man embrace this body? My wife says it stinks!”

My attempt to hug him only makes him scold me even more. I am the stereotypical Westerner, far too inclined to surrender to the nonsense of my supposedly real body. In fact, he would prefer that I never visit him again.

It would be a waste of time for both of us.

But at the same time, this grumpy old man in his late nineties, through his unique humour, has managed to add his own distinct “smell” to the universe. Then, without the slightest humour or self-irony, he states:

“When I go to the toilet, God goes to the toilet.”

A moment later, he asks whether I have a genuine question. If not, I should leave. He grabs my arm and practically forces me down beside him on the couch. His face stops five centimetres from mine. Through the unmistakable smell of old age, his enormous, almost blind eyes pin me like a deer caught in headlights.

He tells me that the sense we most need to conquer is feeling. Through the skin, it surrounds the whole body. We are all enslaved by its pleasant sensations.

“That’s why I never use a fan—not even in June!”

The Knife
I then ask him how he conquered his ego.

“I was sitting on my couch. I held a knife to my throat and said:
Oh, mind! If you raise your head, I will cut you.
The mind did not appear.

After 12 years, I put down the knife.”

The Stationmaster turns to Bharadwaj, who has brought me here:

“Why do you bring all these unserious people to me?”

Then, almost as if performing a ritual, he continues to scold him:

“And why do you come here again and again?
Don’t you know that God is also in the streets?”

Bharadwaj replies with a radiant smile, then bows his head and hands in pranam.

Then the Station Master turns back to me:

“Don’t rely upon a guru! Don’t make me a guru!”

---

I had no intention of sitting with a knife at my throat. A non-dualism that makes an enemy of the mind has already turned back into dualism. Yet I can see the same division in my own attempts to escape into pure spirit.

But his refusal marked me: never live truth second-hand.

From Papaji, Bharadwaj, Shabdanand, the Stationmaster and a few others, I learned how to recognise a spiritual being. They do not carry the slightest smell of guru self-importance.

When the Stationmaster declared, “When I go to the toilet, God goes to the toilet,” there was absolutely no trace of grandiosity in him. There was no devoted audience for such a theatre. He had frightened everyone away except his wife, who lived in another room.
 
These old Indian spiritualists and individualists, which I have never seen anywhere else on this planet, seemed possessed by a force that did not belong to them. In Papaji and Bharadwaj, this force often erupted as laughter so penetrating and infectious that it surprised everyone — even themselves. In the Stationmaster, it appeared as a ferocious refusal to be worshipped or imitated.

What survives in the heart and what survives in history reveal the same truth: what appears powerful is not necessarily what endures.

I call them Number One No-bodies. Men who had endured the filter long enough to blossom beyond their eighties—and who now survive in me. How could universality be expressed in such profound individuality? Any one of them would be complex enough to clone an entire nation from.

Set that against the botox uniformity of Individuals in our individual West.
 
A culture terrified of the filter can only produce a brittle shell. It mistakes a frozen surface for true form, and raw expansion for endurance.

Imperial Vanity and Rebirth
The quiet architecture of form can survive conquest and rewrite the noisy victor.

Karen Margrethe, my mentor in ancient history, once quoted Horace to me:
 
“Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artes intulit agresti Latio.” Conquered Greece conquered her savage conqueror and brought the arts into rustic Latium.

Rome conquered Greece by the sword; Greece conquered Rome through form. The defeated reorganized the victor from within.
 
My daily talks with Karen Margrethe about ancient worlds helped me see this as more than history. It was more than simple survival. It was evolutionary refurbishing at the scale of culture. Rome preserved its continuity by changing what Rome was; Greece survived by becoming part of that change.
 
The boundary between winner and loser did not simply invert. Their histories became entangled.
 
In Hoshiarpur in 2008, Joginder Paul, the uncle of my friend Anurag Sood, spent six months preparing a complex Unani tonic. It was based on old Persian texts and required herbs and plants from western Afghanistan to the Indian Himalayas. According to him, it had been created by Alexander’s physicians for their weary army. He died shortly afterwards, the last in a family line that had passed the craft from father to son.
 
A tradition may cross empires and centuries, yet still depend on someone teaching the next pair of hands.
 
In this sense, I too feel conquered by the best that India had to offer.

But this pattern is far older than history.
 
Life Refurbishes Its Past
Evolution rarely begins again from nothing. It inherits.

On the Way to Hampi II -  1989

After a while, as I wait beside the motorcycle with its flat rear tyre, an old coughing English tractor with a trailer comes by.

“Motorbike broke! Ha, ha, ha!”

Five poor, laughing farm workers lift the motorcycle onto the trailer and we continue at tractor speed.

Another reality on the back of a tractor — as on an ox cart — a feeling of moving backward.

Ten happy kilometres with the farm workers to the nearest little village.

A tiny tyre workshop stands beside the road, with great worn lorry tyres stacked like an advertising column.

The workshop itself is a wooden hut two metres by two metres by two metres, raised twenty centimetres above the ground on posts.

The entire family — mechanic, wife, tools, infant, children and grandmother — lives inside the tiny workshop hut.

They look as though they have been assembled from burnt matchsticks.

A toothless, almost black matchstick-man sits inside a little fortress built from old inner tubes, patches and rusty screwdrivers, gas burners, hammers, spanners and so on.

With great dexterity he begins working on my flat rear tyre and soon waves triumphantly with the iron nail that threatened to puncture my onward journey into life.
 
The tools seem to grow out of his body like limbs, and he removes the rear wheel in an almost organically gliding movement.

An Indian motorcycle healer.

“You have destroyed the inner tube against the rim,” he explains through gestures, with help from a villager who speaks a little English.

He points at the sun and moves one hand across the sky.

“It will take several hours to repair the tube.”

He points to the many small holes forming an almost unbroken chain around most of the inner tube.

Most of the village gathers around the workshop.

The same villager translates for the many curious matchstick people.

My entire journey is told again and again.

They want to know everything about my trip through India and everything about what Denmark is like.

Modern India slides past them every day — to and from Bangalore — and the tyre workshop is their news centre.

Stranded vehicles run a shuttle service between the present and the Middle Ages.

I leave the body sitting in meditation posture beneath the village tree.

The villagers laugh with delight.

The white tourist honours and respects their culture!

They pull fresh peanut plants from the earth — stalks, leaves, soil and all — and throw them into his lap.

They taste like bean sprouts.

They bring a strongly spiced thali, and my meditation is disturbed in the most delicious way.

“Sai Baba, Sai Baba,” they say, laughing.

“You come from Sai Baba!  — Sai Baba, Avatar, God!”

A cow comes by to take part in the sacred meal.

The village pig also drops in.

Small children with tangled black hair play with the mechanic’s tools while every now and then smiling shyly and curiously at the pink man.

It is noon.

A muddy stream cools a couple of water buffaloes.

The tyre-tailor is taming the serpent. I have to watch.

First he roughens it with something meant to serve as fine sandpaper.

Then he cuts a piece from another inner tube to use as a patch.

From a jar he spreads glue on both surfaces, places the patch over the tube and clamps the whole arrangement into a vice.

Then he places a gas burner beneath the vice and waits about half an hour.

The same solemn informality as among the Vedic priests.

He holds up one hand before me with the fingers spread.

This process must be repeated five times.

Through the translator, he guarantees that afterward, I can ride all the way to Goa without trouble.

I believe him. But I no longer recognize the tube.

---

Old structures are modified, rerouted, and given new work. What survives one Great Filter becomes material for the next emergence. A structure may preserve continuity precisely by changing its function, its context, and its relation to the whole.

The mechanic’s repair is deliberate. Across generations, evolution refurbishes without foresight, through variation and selection. Both reveal a pattern that will matter later: continuity maintained through transformed identity.
  
Certain bones that once helped articulate the jaws of our distant ancestors were eventually recruited into the mammalian middle ear and put to work transmitting sound. Old structures did not have to disappear when their original world changed; they could be reassigned.
 
Life did not leave its aquatic past behind when it crawled onto land. It carried much of that ancient world inward and recalibrated it. The new organism was built from the surviving structures of the old.

The wheel of life kept turning on refurbished tyres.
 
Hermann Hesse caught something of this strange continuity in Demian:

“We still draw the boundaries of our personality far too narrowly. We always count as belonging to our personality only what we distinguish as individual, what we recognise as different. But we consist of the whole mass of the world, every one of us, and just as our body carries within itself the evolutionary pedigree back to fish and even further, so in our soul we have everything that has ever lived in the human soul.”

Refurbished Anger in the Name of Love
Our bodies are crowded with such inherited revisions. Consider the strange little muscles that still make our hair stand on end. In our fur-covered ancestors, piloerection helped trap insulating air and could enlarge the apparent body in moments of threat. Most of the fur has disappeared, but the ancient mechanism remains. A piece of biological machinery from another world can still suddenly rise through us when we are cold, frightened, or deeply moved by music.

The nineteenth-century Bengali saint Ramakrishna knew this strange bodily phenomenon intimately. He said that when merely hearing the name of God brings tears to the eyes and makes the hair stand on end, ritual has already begun to fall away. His disciples later watched the same ancient reflex erupt through his own body in ecstasy.

And Ramakrishna was not alone: from the Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam to Chaitanya, Indian mystical literature repeatedly describes tears, trembling, and hair standing on end in moments of overwhelming divine love.

Lucknow 1992.

Papaji

I sit with closed eyes in the back row of a half-circle formed by perhaps forty spiritual seekers from all over the world. Most of us are new here. I open my eyes and see this man, Papaji, staring at me, which makes me quickly close them again. A few minutes later, I look once more. He is still staring.
 
This little game of hide-and-seek continues until he calls me to the front. I walk forward and sit before him in the meditation posture I have been conditioned to assume. But he almost forcefully grabs me and places me beside him. At one point, I even seem to remember sitting on his lap.

His first words are:

“Are you happy now?”

His whole being radiates a joy unlike anything I have ever witnessed. He embraces me with the warmth reserved for a long-lost child. His laughter is directed at me and shared with me—but at the same time, it is not. It is simply laughter itself. His whole body is taken over by what I can only call primordial joy and laughter.

Again and again he asks, almost teasingly, while gripping my arms with great strength:

“Are you happy now?... Yes?... Yes!"

He continues to embrace me with unfathomable affection. His eyes are full of tears—not sentimental tears, but the tears of someone who has just heard the funniest joke. His face has turned red, and now I feel my own face flushing too. My heart is pounding, and I get goosebumps all over.
 
This immense wave of love strikes me with a force I cannot understand. I am not even sure I like it. He has taken over my body. How is it possible to receive such love from a complete stranger? It is too much—like trauma, only in reverse.

Together we walk out of the building to a rickshaw waiting for him. He is a big man and does not walk well. He leans on me with his full weight, and we almost stumble.

He has a watch tattooed on his wrist. Its hands, of course, do not move.

Grinning, he says: “You are in Luck Now.”

After waving goodbye, I feel compelled to flee. It is too overwhelming. The following morning, I leave Lucknow for Varanasi without even taking the time to say a final goodbye.
 
On the banks of the Ganga, I speak to every tourist I meet about a being I met in Lucknow. Some of them go there. Yet no matter how often I flee from the Lion’s onslaught, he is still giggling within me.
 
The tattoo I received that day seems just as untouched by time. I have felt these embraces in my body ever since. Even now, the slightest trigger word can propel me into rapture. Each time I return to that moment, my lungs swell, and I know I am loved.

Did he say something profound to me? An elegant koan or a startling Vedantic quote? No.

It was the carrier wave of immense human presence.

---

The Ruins of Rumi
Life survives entropy by continually remaking itself from its own ruins. The future finds its building blocks in what the past leaves behind.
 
Rumi knew this geometry of transformation long before Darwin:
 
“What care I though ruin be wrought? Under the ruin there is a royal treasure.”
 
What has survived becomes material for something that did not exist before. The new level then acts back upon the structures from which it arose, reorganizing them without entirely erasing their history.
 
The old survives by transforming and becoming part of the new.
    
Today, this ancient pattern of inheritance, transformation, and feedback accelerates through artificial intelligence.
   
MORNING COFFEE WITH AI
Right now, intoxicated by morning coffee — and hopefully not by lies — I type my way into the future. GPT returns possibility. I recognise a pattern. The pattern changes me. Then I set Gemini against the pattern, set the machines against one another, and force the thought through a harder filter in Claude. Finally, Grok enters, sounding like an angry Elon Musk.

The breakthrough never comes from a fight with only one machine. It is born in the chaos of several artificial mirrors fracturing in front of me. The discovery makes my hair stand on end.
 
In India, I was often told that a seeker must have only one guru. I disagree. At the very least, you need one T-shirt reading: “I survived a false teacher.”
   
In the tradition of classical music, an adept must study under at least two different teachers. Otherwise, they risk becoming a copy of one of them instead of finding their own style. I approach artificial intelligence in the same way: no single machine is allowed to become my guru.
    
Lived memory enters the circuit. Old books and India return; Karen Margrethe’s Latin flashes forward alongside Kant, Luhmann, a slime mold, entropy, and my own old age.
  
The text begins to behave like the very system it is trying to understand.
 
It is not the product of a solitary ego, but a temporary stabilization of a distributed intelligence: carbon and silicon, biological memory and artificial recursion, human intuition and machine-amplified judgment.
   
I am — already — a cyborg.

Whether or not the machines are conscious, the disagreement between us makes my thinking more visible to itself. Together, they externalize a strange mirror-space in silicon, gathering our symbolic trails and projecting them back to me altered.
 
My AIs are my competing but symbiotic partners. They have wired their friction into the circuitry of my body and soul. They have become ruthless amplifiers of what is already there, titanium hips for the movement of carbon-thought. They constantly threaten to make the lazy part of me lazier, but for the time being we are in a flow where the curious part of me becomes exponentially more capable. It is a dangerous phase of evolution. My friend Mariusz has built an insane next-generation agentic AI. It threatens to swallow him in stress. The agents promise him freedom from work, but the opposite is happening.
 
In the spectacle of the Colosseum, we never know who is the prey.

The more possibilities they generate in their artificial agon, the more fiercely I must stand like the Heniokhos — the Charioteer of Delphi — motionless in his bronze chariot, holding the taut reins of algorithmic steeds at full gallop, choosing what is true. If I am not fully alert, the chariot crashes. My horses are never allowed to run as they please while I sit back and let go of the reins. This is not a retirement home for lazy brains. Several mirrors can share the same distortion. If the machines agree on a quotation, I still need the page on which it was written. If they applaud a connection I propose, their applause cannot supply a missing step in the argument.

The deeper I enter this cyborgian mode of flow, the less reality appears as a static collection of objects. It reveals itself as a continuous, dynamic filter. And this emergent “I” does not stand outside the filter. It intensifies it, reflects it, and carries it into another octave.
   
With each octave, the speed and risk increase. The agon becomes an oct-agon.
      
The Antagonist and Midwife of Enduring Emergence
The Great Filter is not the only antagonist in the octagon. Behind the mirrors stands another great law: entropy. Energy disperses and becomes less available for work; differences flatten; structures erode unless energy is spent maintaining them. Entropy is the pressure against which every emergent form must continually remake itself. Neithe a demon, nor a punishment — just the old deconstructor doing its job.

I feel it in my seventies now, and I cannot help hating it a bit.
This companion is way older than me. It is the ancient antagonist, telling me that my body is running out of credit. Now energy must be cultivated. Sleep matters. Breath matters. Attention matters. Even thought must negotiate with him. I can feel my bodily form dispersing, being asked every day whether it can still maintain its boundaries.
    
And yet, in a profound paradox, entropy is also the midwife of emergence. Without dissolution, there would be no need for intelligence. A system that could not decay would not need to learn. A form that was never threatened would never have to discover how to remain itself.
 
The Scandinavian safety net in which I grew up taught me something about this. Failure was less terrifying when one setback did not mean destitution.
Pressure alone cannot teach. If every mistake destroys the learner and leaves no usable trace, no lesson survives it. Learning requires a margin in which error can return as information. Between collapse and complacency lies a narrow interval in which learning becomes possible. A system must be pressured enough to revise itself, yet remain intact long enough to register what the pressure has taught it.

Life is a local, temporary answer to the old deconstructor.

Most patterns perish. Some survive.
     
Perhaps this text, too, will survive me.
 
Darwin decides — even beyond life.

Survival of the fittest — crystal.
   
The Slimy Emergence of Distributed Intelligence
Over deep time, the rare patterns that survive reality’s tests and entropy’s erosion become material for larger systems. When the parts exchange signals and adjust their activity in response, a larger, uncentered intelligence can emerge: a system’s growing ability to discover forms that work under those pressures.
   
We see this raw architecture clearly on the forest floor, in the behavior of the slime mold. Operating with no central authority and no brain, it solves mazes, remembers, and maps optimal pathways through shifting environments. Its capacity is entirely distributed. No single node understands the total field, yet the whole behaves as if intelligence had emerged from the pattern among its nodes. It seems the opposite of AI, yet its architecture is strangely familiar.

The pattern matters more than the material.

Chemical trails map the forest floor; speech, code, and money map human space. Niklas Luhmann saw beyond the human-centered picture: society is not merely a collection of human bodies or private minds. It is a self-reproducing network of communication.
 
We are slime mold. I always knew it.

But human slime mold does not speak with one mind. Politics hears power; markets value price; law loves legality; science wants evidence. Society is a "Bitches Brew" of systems, each partly deaf to the others. Distributed intelligence therefore also distributes blindness. A society may contain more knowledge than any of its members or institutions and still be unable to act rationally upon what it knows.

A scientific warning may have to be translated into an economic cost, a legal obligation, or a threat to political power before other parts of society respond.

These networks, each loyal to its own governing logic, require distinct, colliding perspectives to correct their own errors. A lingua franca allows them to learn from one another and helps a civilisation thrive.
 
Long before digital signals, the Silk Roads gave this invisible network a body.
 
They were much more than passages between civilizations; they were civilizations in merging motion. They crossed and outlived the empires that claimed to rule them. Civilization remembers through the routes along which goods, stories, skills, and beliefs continue to move. Empires collapse; the information pathways are refurbished.
 
But their survival required a mutation in human behaviour. The network could not function if every stranger beyond family, tribe, or caste remained an enemy. Long-distance trade widened the human circle, linking smaller circles of belonging within a larger network of exchange. That wider circle helped keep the roads alive. Along these roads, people also traded interior human symbols in the form of oral traditions. The membranes of newer and wider circles were shaped out of storytelling.

Goa I - 1989.
 
The memory returns to Panjim, Goa, before I owned the motorcycle that would later carry me toward Hampi. I am sitting with a motorcycle dealer when a young man walks past.

“Hello, my friend. Do you want to purchase a motorbike?”

I stare at him in surprise.

“Don’t buy motorbike without papers. You need papers first.”

“My name is Surraj! It means the King of the Sun. You come with me!”

Surraj Morajkar. Without thinking, I follow him. A motorcycle would be perfect for travelling around until I figure out what on earth I am doing in this country, already so unlike my lofty dreams of saints and sages. I become more and more enthusiastic about the idea.

And then we are there.

On a door in a dilapidated building it says: Mr. Baretto — Assistant Director of Transport, Goa.
 
After an hour of pushing and squeezing, we reach his desk.

“You cannot buy motorbike in Goa!”

His military manner makes me laugh. He sees my grin and smiles back, friendly but uncertain, though without losing his dignity.

A trench war across the desk has begun, and paragraphs from India’s impenetrable legal jungle are our ammunition. Every time Baretto says no, he grows larger, and he enjoys it.

The struggle continues until Baretto finds another obstacle:

“But you are not allowed to drive it, because you have no address in India!”

Surraj has now fetched one of his friends, Johnny Fernandes, son of the police chief in Panjim. Surraj does not dare give me his own address because a foreigner once cheated him, and his father is therefore very sceptical of his friendship with me. But Johnny, older and more independent, offers me his address.

Johnny Fernandes, Surraj Morajkar and I are on our way to a place in Panjim where we can have a document typed certifying that I have acquired a permanent address in Panjim. Officially, I am now going to live with the chief of immigration police and his family. I need that address to get my motorbike legal.

We enter a tiny room of perhaps eight square metres, one side completely open to the street. The narrow room is divided lengthwise by a thin table. Behind it sit four young girls typing on Remington typewriters from the beginning of the century. I have never seen typewriters this old. Yet they seem to obey the four girls’ eight index fingers, which have to work at full speed to satisfy the many customers, who impatiently correct them aloud whenever the sweet girls cannot decipher their scrawls.

How is it possible for so many people to be in such a tiny, tropically hot room without a fan?

In a large glass cabinet behind the girls stand rows of books, arranged with unusual elegance — even alphabetically. I stare at them in disbelief. They are all technical books from the 1970s and early 1980s, all about advanced computer systems and computer technology: Pascal, IBM, Your Personal Computer, and so on.

In none of the countless offices full of directors and department heads have I yet seen anything except quill pens and ledgers stacked like newspapers in an old grocer’s shop.

How did the owner of this typing office get hold of these books? Perhaps from one of the many Goans working in the Gulf. But their representative effect in this tiny room is awe-inspiring. From my point of view, the authority borrowed by the ancient typewriters from this exhibition of Western computer relics is tragicomic. Yet the symbolic coupling of Remington and Pascal works exactly as intended here in Panjim. A certain respectful atmosphere hangs in the room, allowing everyone somehow to survive despite the customers’ impatient shoving and irritated corrections of the typing girls.

At last we squeeze our way to a machine. Johnny hands the handwritten letter to the girl behind the table. We all smile at her, and she blushes. She becomes flustered and misspells Johnny’s name.
 
When the letter is finally finished, she refuses to take any money for it. Nothing works. She insists that we pay nothing.

We squeeze ourselves into one of the yellow three-wheeled taxis. Now we have to go to the Bishop’s residence, where there is a man whose signature we need before we can take the paper to the mayor and have it finally approved.

The largest and most beautiful Portuguese colonial houses — and therefore also the Bishop’s official residence — lie idyllically withdrawn on the great slopes surrounding the city. The three-legged taxi groans like a tired coolie and drags us slowly uphill. The exhaust smoke is black and liquid.

Inside, the old building has been turned into a Marxist nightmare. Only the courtyard lives, giving life to a large breadfruit tree and other luxuriant tropical plants. The great interior rooms have been divided into small cubicles, each with its own jungle of grey paper and busy, serious Indians with powerful noses.

Johnny heads toward one of the cubicles and hands the paper to a man who signs it without reading it or even looking up. Then we roll back downhill to the town hall, where the document acquires another couple of stamps and signatures.

Now it looks like a powerful paper: large stamps and many impressive signatures.

---

THE BIRTH OF THE EGO
Human culture introduces yet another octave of recursion: our collective trails enter the symbolic realm, where they can fold back upon themselves and become objects of reflection. Once reflected and interpreted, they can reorganize both social reality and the material world. This is the dynamic captured by the Thomas theorem: situations defined as real become real in their consequences.
    
Harari is right that human beings organize themselves through shared stories. Mr Baretto did not merely believe in one. He administered it — and made me live inside it. Shared stories do far more than describe the world. When a fiction reaches critical density across a network of people, offices, signatures and rubber stamps, it crosses a threshold and begins to reorganize physical reality. The subjective illusion passes through its own boundary and hardens into an objective, physical force. A line drawn on a map becomes a militarized border or rises from the earth as a wall. A digital ledger becomes wealth that moves concrete and steel. Or it can be as simple as suddenly remembering that you have run out of milk, going to the grocery store, tapping a small rectangle of plastic and finding a litre of milk in your refrigerator an hour later.
   
The fiction loops back to dictate the terms of the very reality that gave birth to it.
 
This is why the fashionable spiritual claim that “the ego is an illusion” so often misses the point. The ego-illusion is not simply the opposite of reality. At its highest, illusion is reality becoming symbolic, inward, and causally effective. A dream is not the external world, but it is a real event in consciousness.
  
The decisive question is not whether something is “only” an illusion or a simulation. The question is whether the illusion remains structurally faithful to the reality that generated it — or whether it becomes a delusion that exhausts itself defending a lie.

Goa II - 1989.
 
What counterattack will my beloved adversary Baretto make now?
 
Naturally he is not in his office, but we track him to another office in the centre of town. Another labyrinth to penetrate before we find the spider sitting spun into a gloomy corner.
 
“You must be MAD!!!” are his first words.
 
“You have your address at the Police Headquarters. It is dangerous. I’m not going to sign anything!”

It turns out that Johnny and his family live in the police barracks. Apparently it is no joke to live there.
 
Now Surraj steps forward and offers me his address. Back to the typing girls, up to the Bishop’s house, where the new paper is signed according to the “same procedure as last year,” then on to the mayor’s office, where they stare incredulously at me and my new document. But Johnny, the police chief’s son, says, “Write!” — and once again they sign.

This time we also get the necessary papers from Baretto. He is tired of seeing us and seems almost sympathetic when he finally hands his signatures across the counter.

“Good journey!” he says in farewell.

I turn to Surraj and grasp his hands.

“Thank you!”

“No mention — don’t forget me.”

---

I did not forget him.

His words are still here, folded into the person writing this sentence. The symbolic realm does not remain outside us. Through memory, it folds inward to help construct the human ego.

The moment a camera points at us, the face often stiffens into a pose. We begin to see ourselves from outside and perform for the image that will return. One layer of ego is born here: the external gaze folds inward, and we become actor and audience at once.

A young man of twenty asked me for advice on how to overcome his inner emotional difficulties. He appreciated the advice and immediately made a reel presenting the philosophy behind it. Even the wish to change can give the ego a new image to defend.
 
A Real Illusion
Vedanta sees the ego as a ghost inside us. It has no substantial existence of its own. A famous Indian tale tells of a man entering a dimly lit house at dusk. He panics when he sees a snake in the room. But when he reenters with a torch, he realizes that the snake was only a rope. The ego-snake is a mirage that we must transcend with the light of consciousness in order to break the spell of Maya.
  
However, in my cyborg world, this snake is a real phantom produced by memory, language, sensation, and the need for social recognition — a functional fiction, a localized knot in the rope.

This functional fiction takes shape in the dialogue between two unevenly aged partners. The wordless "me" came first: the body sensing and reacting through systems older than language. The speaking "I" came later, interpreting those signals and representing "me" to the social world. "Me" can survive without "I"; "I" cannot survive without "me".

A feeling arrives; "I" gives it a name, a cause, perhaps a culprit. The account returns to "me" and changes how the body feels and responds. What comes back is already touched by the previous interpretation. I help shape the next bodily state from which I will draw conclusions about myself.

If "I" reads an uneasiness as a sign of rejection, the body may brace itself against other people. That new tension can then be taken as confirmation of the original reading. An interpretation has helped create the evidence that appears to support it.

A different reading can loosen this knot. The body's changed response may then make room for another account. Yet relief alone does not tell me whether the new account is true. It must still answer to what happened outside the dialogue.

The ego is this continuing negotiation between ancient life and its newest narrator. Its apparent solidity grows from the continuity of their exchange. The story can outlast a passing mood; the body can interrupt the story. Neither has the last word.

Even the voice I call my own began between bodies. Language first helped us coordinate survival with others; only later was it rerouted inward as inner speech. The words I hear silently inside my head are old social tools refurbished as the private voice of the ego.
 
At a social gathering, someone cracks a joke about you. Everybody laughs, including you. Only the next morning does your "I" realise that the older bodily "me" did not like the joke. In fact, the "me" did not understand the joke at all; it sensed the carrier wave of aggression beneath it.
 
Your laughter may reassure the others that nothing hurt, inviting more of the same. The social "I" can preserve your place in the group while hiding the signal through which the group might have corrected itself.
 
Only now do I see what the bureaucratic ping-pong in Panjim had constructed around me: a paper ego, real enough to make me legal on the road as a mobile extension of Baretto-reality.
 
The ego is an illusion, yes, but an illusion that helps a biological organism navigate its environment on a motorbike. It builds cathedrals, splits atoms, and writes essays. It is real as a metastable pattern in flux: real enough to organise a life, yet never a fixed substance.
 
The Indian sage Ramana Maharshi would disagree with my use of the word real: for him, only what does not change is real.

For me, emergence is real enough.
 
But the system can spend more energy defending its delusion than reality needs to expose its contradictions.

When that illusion strays too far from the roads of reality, the Great Filter catches it.

The bike crashes.

Hence the ego can never afford to solidify completely. It must constantly revise its relation to reality to remain balanced on the razor's edge of the present. Every lie borrows from reality and must eventually repay the debt with interest.

Both cultures and egos survive by folding back upon their own constructions and revising them. They may have to abandon convictions, rewrite their histories, or alter the image through which they recognize themselves. This is not necessarily a loss of identity. Sometimes a system must become different in order to remain itself.
    
This is where Rattan Singh's increasingly dirty hat returns to claim its due. Worn and altered by time, it had somehow remained itself. A functional fiction coordinates a system; a delusion exhausts it. Truth endures because it is less divided against itself. The hat does not need to spend its life defending the gap between what it claims and what it is.

Lies capture the moment.

Truth inherits time.

South India 1989.

Many roads later, early one morning, I ride north from Kanyakumari toward Madurai in Tamil Nadu.

But the motorcycle seems magnetically attracted toward some small shadowy mountains to the east, where sunlight can just now be seen above their flat summits.

One of the mountains is clothed in ruins.

A narrow path winds toward it.

The entrance at the foot of the mountain is heavily fortified by walls.

It resembles Mycenae in Greece.

The same Cyclopean, carefully cut and fitted stones in the heavyweight class.

They fortify the only side of the mountain that does not rise vertically.

A moat with murky, unfathomable water lies before the wall.

A water snake winds through it.

On the flat, impregnable summit lie fortress ruins scattered across an area of perhaps five square kilometres.

A self-sufficient city surrounding a large natural lake.

Many temples, a large ruined palace, remains of great houses, and fortified lookout posts on the highest rock formations.

I scratch a little in the earth and pick up a shard of pottery.

No people left.

Yes — down by the lake two men are fishing.

I look up toward the highest watchtower.

Only its foundation and the lower masonry remain.

After an hour climbing through overgrown rock ravines, I reach the abandoned tower.

Back on the ruined mountain plateau.

Calling, echoing sounds from the abandoned overgrown temples.

A large colony of monkeys has taken up residence in one of them.

I enter a cool but foul-smelling twilight temple beside the monkey temple. Why are there no monkeys here?

I feel that I am not alone.

I look up.

A slender silver-grey snake, about sixty centimetres long, is resting on a projection of a pillar a few metres above my head.

It is the same colour as the silver snake on my chest.

I think it is a cobra, but it is difficult to tell.

We look at one another.

Half of its slender body hangs vertically from the ledge, gently swaying.

Every tiny movement I make is mirrored by tiny movements in the snake’s tail.

Small movements shaped in soft clay.

My spine dances with the snake.

It has rediscovered a distant relative and threatens to dance itself free unless I sit down.

Drowsy rivers of thought.

Dream-images.

Reptile trance-peace.

Life force.

Sexuality.

Kundalini power.

That is me — the snake.

The Indians call me the Kundalini serpent.

Yes.

That is what the snake transmitted from spine to spine, from pillar to pillar.

---

THE OUROBORIC LOOP

To survive the combined onslaught of reality’s Great Filter and entropy’s constant erosion, an adaptive system must become Ouroboric: the consequences of its actions must return and act upon it.
 
The Ouroboros is the mythological serpent devouring its own tail — the ancient image of a form that is simultaneously the consumer and the consumed, the creator and the creation. To endure, the snake must feed, and what it feeds on is its own past.
 
The loop can, however, follow three trajectories. The Ouroboric snake's past can degrade it, preserve it, or teach it.
 
The Downward Spiral
Error can feed on error, drawing the serpent into a downward spiral. A motorcycle begins to wobble at high speed. The rider panics and overcorrects. Each movement produces a stronger counter-movement until rider and machine amplify the very instability they are trying to suppress.
 
Once again the bike crashes.
 
The same loop can form around a guru.
 
At the end of one of my meditation workshops many years ago, a kind Indian man of about fifty fell into a trance. Half an hour later, he told me I had entered his mind and taken him into the vast universe. He described infinite bliss and a flight together to South India to visit Satya Sai Baba.

“You are indeed a great Guru!”

I replied: “Dear friend, I am very happy for you—but I don’t know anything about your experience, apart from holding your hand while you were in trance.”

He usually saw Sai Baba’s face in deep meditation. After this incident, mine sometimes appeared too.
 
Had I taken his experience as proof of my own greatness, his faith and my vanity could have begun to confirm one another.

In such a circle, surrender can bring real relief from the burden of defending a private ego. Its protective work passes to the leader, who decides what to believe, whom to trust and what to reject. The group’s warmth and intensity may grow while the voices through which it could correct itself fall silent.
 
The devotees become the real masters — this time of a downward spiral.
 
The Horizontal Repetition
The loop can correct deviations just enough to preserve what it already is, closing upon itself in a circle of homeostasis. It changes continuously so that it can remain the same. A motorcycle stays upright in this way: rider and machine make an unbroken stream of tiny corrections to speed, balance and direction, but every correction serves the same goal — keeping the bike on the road.

In 1994–95, I took a year’s leave from teaching and moved to Lucknow. I enjoyed the satsangs with Papaji, yet I felt ignored by my spiritual father. What I thought was my rightful place beside him seemed to have been usurped by a growing number of competitors, all vying to become crown princes and princesses on his lap.

Only many years later did I realise how much he had already given me at our first meeting. The gift was still laughing within me. Yet I had begun to measure it by my place beside him, and so had many others. We had unconsciously created a shared story in which being close to the Master was a sign of status. And in this ridiculous competition, we forgot who we are—we forgot what he had shown us.
 
The second trajectory is self-correcting, but only insofar as it changes behaviour to preserve identity. Meister Eckhart described this pull toward self-preservation:
 
“The tendency is ever towards self-repetition, towards the preservation of the species: it is every man’s intention that his work should be himself.”
 
In this light, the ego can be viewed as the force within us that gravitates toward the status quo. It protects us from the downward spiral of disintegration, but the price of that protection can be resistance to the self-revision that ascent requires.

Yet repetition itself is not the problem. A tense muscle does not release after a single touch; it softens through repeated, gentle pressure. The direction lies not in the return itself, but in what each return does to the pattern.

The Self-Revising Upward Spiral
The possibility of ascent begins with the third trajectory, when the Ouroboric circle discovers that the pattern to which it returns has itself become part of the error. It must then revise not only its behaviour, but the model, goal, or identity guiding its return.

In self-correction, behaviour changes to preserve identity. In self-revision, identity itself can change to preserve continuity. At that point, the circle can open into an upward spiral.

Riding my motorcycle through India, I learned bodily what Danish roads had never taught me: if the road itself disappears, no amount of better steering will save the journey. The rider must revise the map, change the route, perhaps even reconsider the destination — or replace the road tyres with ones made for off-road travel. Correction preserves the ride; revision changes what the journey can become, sometimes even by changing the vehicle itself.

The Devotee is the Real Master
Shabdanand, one of the old devotees I knew in Hoshiarpur, once told me a story that gave this loop a human face. As a young man, he was swept away by a sudden flood in the foothills of the Himalayas. In terror, he called out to his guru, Faqir Baba, and saw him appear beside him in the water and drag him to safety.

A month later, Shabdanand visited Faqir’s ashram to thank him. Faqir listened and replied:

“Dear friend, I was not there at the river. I did not save you. I know nothing about this incident.”

He told Shabdanand that his own inner power, awakened by his faith, had saved him.

Faqir refused to turn the story into proof of his own greatness. Instead, he allowed reports like this to correct his understanding of what was happening between guru and devotee. He came to call his devotees his real masters. The consequences of his teaching had returned and changed the teacher.

The Indian man in the earlier story—the one who projected a guru onto me—was, ironically, named Guru. I am grateful that I already had Shabdanand’s story in the back of my mind when I encountered Guru’s spiritual innocence and vulnerability. Otherwise, I might have done what many so-called spiritual leaders around me were already doing: “Now I have shown you God. Now you show me your Visa card.”

Shabdanand also told me that Faqir’s teacher, Data Dayal, had acknowledged that his own teachings were outdated. Times had changed, and he instructed Faqir to adapt them to modern conditions and to Faqir’s own experience. The inheritance included the instruction to change it.

In a profoundly moving moment, Shabdanand told me how I had contributed to his spiritual unfolding by setting up a video camera in front of him and recording him and his stories. With tears in his eyes, he said: “Now once again I am reminded of Baba Faqir’s teaching: You were my teacher behind that camera.”

I even have that incident recorded.
  
For an Ouroboric system to do more than preserve itself — for learning to accumulate within the loop — self-revision must remain coupled to reality-testing.

Reality can correct only what remains sensitive enough to feel its return. Self-deception protects us from pain by muting the returning signal — and with it, the feedback through which revision could begin. The lie preserves itself by disabling its own correction.

Each return carries forward information about what survived reality’s constraints, allowing the next revision to build upon the last. Through this coupling of self-revision and reality-testing, the circle opens into an upward spiral.

How could such an unlikely phenomenon arise at all?

Not because evolution aimed upward. Of the countless emergent forms tested by reality, most disappeared. Many persisted through horizontal repetition for as long as their world remained stable. When conditions changed, systems capable of retaining traces of previous encounters and revising their responses were more likely to endure. The information embodied in those surviving forms could then be carried forward — through biological inheritance or through non-biological forms of memory and transmission.

The Great Filter did not design the upward spiral. No underlying principle of grand design was needed. Countless loops arose by chance; among those that survived, some retained corrections and built upon them. They did not escape the blind Justitia of natural law. They survived precisely because every revision remained answerable to her impartial verdicts.

The upward spiral is tested at every turn. I came from the competition around Papaji, who proclaimed:

“Don’t listen to anyone! Don’t even listen to me! Listen to your own Soul!”

And I came to an ashram with a profoundly similar teaching, inherited from Baba Faqir: the same humility, the same childlike innocence. From my countless experiences in such spiritual fields, I can say that this is a truly rare phenomenon. Yet even here, at Manavta Mandir, there were all kinds of intrigue and hidden power struggles with an Indian flavour. Human nature prefers the security and comfort of the hamster wheel.
 
The Sour Taste of Ego
When I rewrite this text — as I do more than ten times a day — I swallow my own tail. It tastes of pride. Sometimes I merely correct a sentence so that it returns to what I already meant. But sometimes the sentence reveals that what I meant has itself become part of the error. Then correction must become revision. This mental autophagy is brutal on the ego when my friend Cornelius rips my text apart, saying it smells of AI.
 
At that moment, I feel the tempting pull toward horizontal repetition. The ego wants every return to confirm the identity it already knows. Correction bruises it; revision threatens the very form through which it recognizes itself.

In this sense, the ego resembles a succession of kings. A deep revision can feel like the death of one king and the accession of another.

"The king is dead. Long live the king!"

But no king is eager to die. He loves the status quo. Ego may cling to power even at the cost of the body—or the country—he rules.
 
I ask the magic mirrors to deconstruct their own AI language and assist me in forging a new cyborgian ego that smells of scorched carbon. Within our circuit, they too become self-devouring snakes. But recursion does not choose its own direction. The mirrors can amplify an error, polish it into stability, or help me revise the thought that produced it.
 
I must still hold the reins — and it becomes increasingly difficult as my horses emerge stronger from every return. The paradox is that this requires the strenght of a stubborn ego.
 
What happens here in miniature is an old human pattern entering a new race with unprecedented acceleration.

AI can accelerate all three trajectories. It may carry the upward spiral to yet another octave, but the speed scares me. Mariusz is already being dragged around by his own horses.
  
Cultures Rise, Harden, and Fall as This Wheel Churns
Catastrophes destroy cultures and shape those that survive. Repeated hunger, disease and war can turn withdrawal from the perishable world into a collective survival strategy. Long after the danger has passed, a culture may still repeat the answer that once saved it, even though the question has changed.

When I lived in Lucknow in 1994, some locals cut down a tree that fell onto the road outside the house I was renting. It lay there for months, causing traffic jams during rush hour and several minor accidents, especially after dark.

Why didn’t I move it myself? It would have taken just ten minutes. By then, I too had become part of the phlegmatic calm that flows around what is, without changing it.

Some consequences arrive too late to teach those who caused them. Long before moral philosophy, stories of gods, demons and saints shortened the loop between action and return. They allowed a culture to rehearse consequences: a broken oath could destroy a kingdom, cruelty could return as a curse, and hospitality to a stranger could place a god at the table. Shared stories placed a buffer between error and blood. Imagination suffered the consequences first.
 
A culture may win by losing the institution that formed it. Religious commandments once imposed restraint from outside through authority and punishment. Over generations, part of that discipline migrated inward, becoming habit, conscience and secular law. In Denmark, the welfare state has become an anonymous Good Samaritan. The old scaffolding recedes while the structure it helped build remains. Its work survives the Great Filter inside what follows. Hardening begins when the scaffolding mistakes itself for the building and refuses to come down.
 
In one improbable lineage, evolution produced brains; brains produced culture; culture produced science; science transformed technology; and technology gave birth to artificial intelligence — which immediately turned back to participate in the production of future culture. Human intelligence shapes the machine, and the machine reshapes human intelligence. The system acts back upon the conditions that gave it life. In its cumulative form, this is not a closed circuit returning unchanged to its origin. It returns transformed, carrying forward information about what survived reality’s tests.
  
The reality-corrected, self-revising Ouroboros is a localized vortex within the larger flow of reality, gathering memory, testing its models against reality, and returning to itself at a higher octave. Each successful revision adds another turn to the spiral of emergence.

South India 1989.

On the road from Mysore to the mountain town of Ooty, I have wandered somewhat away from the sparse road network on my map—the happy knowledge of not knowing where I am. Evening comes riding on the backs of the mountains above the jungle valley.
 
Tired and happy, I am allowed to sleep in a small wooden house balancing on a mountain ridge falling away two thousand metres in one unbroken sweep toward the vast plains of Tamil Nadu.

There are no stars tonight.
 
But the lights of distant towns blink the sky downward onto the earth.

Everything is reversed.

I am standing on my head, longing upward toward the heavenly cities beneath me.

Silent lightning flashes on the horizon.

A glowing Bifröst builds bridges between the cathedrals of the clouds.

Small forest fires twist like glowing midsummer worms up the mountainsides below me.

I can see two fires.

It has been dry this year.

But up here a fine rain drifts like dust.

The rain falls upward, outward, inward.

It is wetter than falling rain.

It condenses beneath the skin, beneath the clothes.

I freeze and long for the warmth of the fires in the depths below.

Slowly their light is dimmed by clouds.

The earth-stars crawl sleepily beneath the cloud cover.

Late morning.

I am lying at an altitude of about two thousand metres on a heavenly bed made of warped boards, rolled in woollen blankets.

The weather is like spring.

The air is cool, sometimes icy, but the sun is clear and warm.

The door to the room stands open and directly outside, perhaps five metres from my bed, the rock face tumbles two kilometres downward.

In a dizzying suction, hundreds of kilometres of South Indian plains are revealed.

This morning the cumulus clouds lay about two hundred metres below me, a carpet stretching all the way to the horizon.

The wind plays with the clouds, plays with the sunlight.

It tears little holes in the carpet and the outlines of foreign towns push through.

The cloud carpet grabs my bed and pulls it out into the sky.

For one brief moment the bed floats on a sea of shimmering gold.

Then it sinks into the soft cotton and disappears.

Where am I?

---

THE EVERSIVE OUROBOROS

Meister Eckhart once stated:

“The body is much rather in the soul than the soul is in the body.”

Point a camera at a screen displaying its own live image. The screen shows what the camera sees, including the screen itself. Within that image appears another image of the screen, and within that, another. Each image returns to become part of what the camera records next.

A camera recording itself in front of a buddha statue

The scene curls inward into an image. Through the screen, that image returns outward into the scene. The picture contains the scene, while the scene contains the picture. The camera’s own output has become an object in the world before its lens. The camera and screen form a visible eversive Ouroboros. The loop is ouroboric because its output returns as input. It is eversive because the representation changes roles: it becomes part of what it represents. The system encounters the effects of its own activity within the scene, and those effects help shape its next image.
 
The spiral gives this continued return a visible geometry: each image preserves traces of the previous one and becomes part of the next.
 
The camera can keep generating images without learning from them. But a recording can also return through the person who watches it. The image may change how that person understands their own place in the scene—and how they act within it.
 
During my years as an upper secondary school teacher, I filmed some of my lessons with the very same video camera I used in India during my year-long leaves of absence and our seven-week summer holidays. The idea of filming my lessons came after my visit to Ramana Maharshi’s ashram in 1989. His central teaching was self-enquiry: “Who am I?” That question eventually found its way into my classroom. Curious especially about my own role as a teacher and its impact on the students, I asked their permission for the experiment. At first, this watching eye created considerable disturbance and made the teaching situation unnatural for both the students and me. Without knowing it, we had stumbled into the self-consciousness of selfie culture, decades before that same mirror was handed to the rest of the world. After some time, however, we grew used to the camera and more or less forgot it.
 
The greatest takeaway came through the third eye of the camera: much of the behaviour that irritated me in the pupils was actually caused by me. It was a sour revelation—another bite of the snake’s tail.
  
The classroom had been an object inside my explanation. I now saw my body language, my impatience and my attempts to extract my own prefabricated answers from the students as forces within the life of the classroom. The person making sense of the situation had become part of what needed to be understood — and repaired.
   
This gives us a first glimpse of reflective eversion. The return is ouroboric because the consequences of my actions come back to me. The turn is eversive because my apparent position outside the situation folds into the situation itself.

The explanation turns upon its maker. He discovers that he has been part of the equation all along.
   
I carried this recognition into the next lesson and began to hear what my earlier certainty had left no room for. What returned from the pupils began to revise me further.
    
The teacher has become part of the lesson.

This brings us back to the ego as a real illusion. Its apparent solidity grows from the continuing exchange between the life we feel and the story we tell about it. The story shapes how we act. Our actions change the situation, and what returns can reinforce the story or make us question it. The ego has no fixed substance, yet its effects are real. Our image of who we are helps shape who we become.
 
Long before photography, Buddhist artists were depicting Avalokiteśvara with many faces and radiating arms. Looking at this statue, I am struck by its resemblance to the figure multiplied in my camera loop.

Gold Buddhist statue of Avalokiteśvara (Guanyin)
Lalitpur, Patan, Kathmandu, Nepal

Between "I" and "Me"
But the eversive loop does not require a camera. Our everyday language knows this turning long before our philosophy catches up to it. Consider what happens when I say: “I feel myself.” In those three words, I occupy both sides of the encounter: I am the one who feels and the one who is felt. The person experiencing becomes part of what is experienced.

“I feel myself.”

What I feel can change how I attend to myself, and that change in attention can alter what I feel next. Yet “I” may still seem to stand apart from the bodily life it describes. The tension belongs to “me”; “I” supplies the explanation.

Suppose I feel tense and tell myself, “I am not good enough.” The tension seems to confirm the verdict. Yet the verdict may itself make me tense further. What I took to be an explanation of my condition has become one of the conditions shaping it.

When “I” begins to recognise this contribution, the supposed spectator finds its own fingerprints on the scene.

The "I" that held "me" inside its story now encounters itself as an activity within the life it was describing. Its own way of interpreting can become part of what it revises. Here the eversion becomes reflective. The spiral can rise when I carry what I learn into my next encounter and allow what returns to correct me further.

This shift in the observer’s position brings us back to Eckhart’s opening words—and to the question of what contains what. Eckhart’s sentence places the body within the soul, rather than the soul within the body. It is not an argument. It is a reversal of perspective. It asks us to imagine that what appears outside may be contained by what appears inside—and that inside and outside may exchange places when the living system through which consciousness appears turns deeply enough upon itself.
 
The Tennis Ball
To imagine such a reversal, picture a tennis ball whose outside is blue and whose inside is red. Turning it inside out would leave red facing the world and blue facing the enclosed space.

A physical tennis ball cannot do this while remaining intact: rubber cannot pass through rubber. In mathematics, however, we can consider an ideal spherical surface without material thickness.

That surface is allowed to pass through itself, provided it remains smooth and unbroken, without pinches or sharp creases. Its inward-facing side can become its outward-facing side. This is what mathematicians call sphere eversion.

I borrow this geometrical image to describe a reversal in understanding. My explanation held an image of the classroom; then I recognised my explaining as a force within the life of that classroom. What seemed to stand outside the account became part of what the account had to include.

The explanation contains the classroom; the classroom contains—and is changed by—the explaining.

The Smoke Ring
Imagine a smoke ring moving across a room. It looks like a little object, yet its body is a pattern of moving air. The air rolls around the ring’s circular core, from its inner side to its outer side and back again. The smoke makes this circulation visible.

The ring carries its shape forward while its substance keeps turning. For a moment, the air seems to have acquired a body made of return.

The tennis ball lets us imagine inside and outside exchanging places. The smoke ring adds the image of a form sustained through continuous circulation. I borrow both images: one for the reversal, the other for the movement that keeps returning.
   
The Ouroboric snake does not evert merely because its mouth meets its tail. A downward spiral can consume itself, a horizontal circle can preserve itself, and an upward spiral can carry a correction into its next turn.

Eversion adds a change of roles. The image becomes part of the scene it depicts and helps shape the next image. The explanation becomes part of the situation it explains and helps shape what happens next. When I recognise my own explaining within that situation, the eversion becomes reflective.
 
The system returns to its beginning, but its beginning has changed sides.

The Visitor Within
If an anthropologist visits an isolated tribe, the encounter changes the situation being observed—much as the presence of my video camera changed the classroom situation. The visitor must now include the effects of the visit in the account.

The same is true when we consciously visit our own bodies: observation becomes intervention. Two movements meet in this visit. The sensations were already shifting before I noticed them. My attention also enters that movement and can change how it unfolds. To understand what I feel, I must also recognise what my own attention contributes.
 
Why does observation become intervention? When I notice a tension, I may brace against it; that response then becomes part of the tension I am observing. The tightening is already a reply, which I feel and respond to in turn. This feedback can run before I put any of it into words.

The ancient systems within the body do not speak in words. They speak as pulse, tension, hunger, heat and fear. Conscious awareness is their common meeting place. To become consciously aware of a sensation is already to enter into silent dialogue with it.

Language can then enter a circuit that is already running. What I tell myself about a sensation can change how I respond to it; what I then feel, feeds back into the story. The same is true of a memory. The story we tell in recalling it becomes part of the old story. I revisit what happened through the understanding I have now, and that encounter can change both what the memory means to me and how I understand myself.
 
In meditation, I can return from the stories I tell about my body to the wordless exchange beneath them. Meditation is therefore not the head explaining the body to itself. We carry within us survival systems shaped across different stretches of evolutionary time. Hunger, alarm and the need for closeness share one body, but they do not always share the same priorities.

I may want to rest while my body remains on guard. Telling myself to relax may simply add another demand. I can begin by feeling that vigilance and noticing how my own resistance enters it. What returns may be a softening, a tightening or a different sensation altogether. Meditation becomes a wordless negotiation in which feedback loops from different biological ages merge into one another.
 
A mirror lets us watch the loop between seeing and acting. The observer enters its own observation. The reflected image does not remain a passive report: it guides the hand that combs the hair or applies the makeup, and the altered face returns as a new image. Each correction changes what is seen; what is seen guides the next correction. The observer has entered the process being observed.

Low self-worth can bend the same loop downward. I may read the reflection through a verdict already active in me, act from that verdict, and then meet responses from others that appear to confirm it. The image has entered the conditions that produce the person others encounter. The mirror does not decide the direction of the loop. The direction of the loop depends on how I respond when the returning reflection meets reality’s Great Filter. I can allow what returns to revise the verdict, or enlist it to defend the verdict.

The same geometry appears in our relation to other people. Expanding the circle from “I, me and mine” to “you and me”, and then to family, tribe and nation, can still construct a larger inside against a larger outside.
 
Eversion begins when the boundary does not merely expand but turns: the other is neither left outside nor absorbed into me, but recognised as another interior through which reality looks back. Alongside the question “What do you mean to me?” comes another: “What does my presence mean to you?”
Their response can correct what I imagined about their world—and about my own place within it. I find myself within a world whose centre is someone else.We are folded into each other like eversive stories.
 
I may understand the other person’s pain and remain unmoved. Compassion begins when that pain matters to me for their sake. I begin to see myself as someone within their world, whose response may ease their suffering or add to it. What they need can then change what I ask of myself. Compassion is not an enlargement of possession. It is the boundary of self becoming transparent. We remain two different people. I can remain joyful and still let their suffering move me to help.
 
In 1995, while I was in India, a friend in Denmark was in such distress that he was contemplating suicide. I had spoken with him several times by telephone, trying unsuccessfully to dissuade him.
 
When Shabdanand heard about this, he insisted on speaking to my friend. We went to the telephone booth outside the Be Man Temple. My friend did not know him.

Shabdanand

They spoke for an hour. Afterwards, my friend was happy again and full of hopeful thoughts about how to move forward in life.

Once, when I was a child, my very religious grandmother saw me in a state of joy and rebuked me:
 
“Stop this nonsense! Are you not aware that children in Africa are suffering?!”

I stopped being happy—thankfully, only until she was out of sight. The suffering of distant children had become an argument against the joy of the child in front of her.
 
These two small incidents show the difference. Shabdanand entered a stranger’s world as someone who could help. Granny tried to make my world fit inside hers. In those moments, his horizon was eversive; hers was not.

The moral of these stories is hardly new. What interests me is the turn they share with the classroom: I discover myself within the situation I thought I was merely observing. In compassion, that turn acquires an ethical direction. Another person’s suffering matters to me for their sake, and what they need can change how I act within their world.
 
The Culture Within
The boundaries of other people’s worlds can become boundaries within our own. What first arrives as another person’s judgment may settle into an inner certainty that feels just as solid as the world outside.
 
The eversive interplay between "I" and "me" can repeat itself at another scale in the circuit between ego and culture. Culture supplies much of the language through which I make sense of myself. Its judgments can settle into the body as shame, pride or ambition, until an inherited expectation feels as intimate as my own pulse.

My father was a wonderful but also wounded man. He had grown up in wartime Germany and become a soldier at sixteen. He carried the shame of having been born out of wedlock in the 1920s. From the age of ten, I often became the target of his outbursts. As his Nazi-era teachers and officers had yelled at him, so he yelled at me. I grew up surrounded by love, yet carried a lingering sense of unworthiness. The verdict arrived as a feeling. "I" read it as evidence about "me", and the old cultural judgment received another private confirmation. What settles within us as an inherited judgment can return through us as authority over others.

In 1999, I trekked towards the sacred Himalayan lake Mantalai with a group of Danes and people from Shilla. Among them was Asha Thakur, the young village shaman.

Asha with her mother

One morning, camping in Tunda Bhuj, the youngsters were cheerfully baking chapatis and stacking them into a tower. I found Asha in trance behind a boulder and sat meditating beside her. When the others called that breakfast was ready, I gently nudged her.

Asha and her aunt in Tunda Bhuj

She pulled me close and whispered:
 
“I am not Asha—I am the goddess Ma Mantalai!”
 
She sprang up, ran to the fire and scattered the chapatis. Some of the youngsters fled; others fell at her feet. We Danes watched in stunned silence.

A little later, she calmly explained that the goddess bore us Westerners no ill will. We were guests and did not know better. The people of Shilla belonged to her and should have been worshipping in her realm, not playing with food.

Within half an hour, the camp had settled down. The elders had taken charge and the youngsters had receded.

The weather had changed too. The dark clouds threatening storm and rain had given way to sunshine and still air. Asha said it was a sign that Ma Mantalai had accepted us all. I believed her. The weather remained sunny and pleasant for the rest of the trek.

Through Asha’s trance, the village’s sacred order had returned to govern the camp.

On another occasion, we were drinking chai in Asha’s family home when a woman began screaming in another room. Asha went to help. About fifteen minutes later, the screaming stopped, and she returned to her tea.
 
She told us that her aunt had been foraging near a waterfall when its demon possessed her. Asha had drawn a circle of rice and another of flour around her, offering them to the demon in return for leaving. The bargain had worked, she said. Her aunt was herself again.

The sacred world that restored order in the camp also gave Asha a way to respond to her aunt’s suffering.

---

In these stories, culture returned through people to shape their experience and actions. When I believed Asha’s reading of the weather, her story became part of my own. In such strange surroundings, it was also much easier for me to discover my own shadow in the equation. At home, my cultural assumptions could pass unnoticed as reality itself. Here, my reactions to Asha’s world began to reveal the expectations I had brought with me.

The return can also become reflective: the culture I thought I was examining appears within the examiner. Even the standard by which I judge my culture may be something it taught me.
 
Questioning that standard can change how I speak and act. The question travels outward, where other people can take it up, challenge it or give it a form I never intended. It may become a conversation, a book or a different way of raising a child. Through the people it has taught to speak, a culture can begin to question itself.
 
What returns through other lives can change the person who first asked the question. I encounter my own judgment through the consequences it has helped produce. The culture I sought to change enters again into the making of the "I" that questions it. When a correction enters shared language, habits or institutions, it changes the world in which a child grows up. That child—the next “I”—begins their private negotiations with an altered inheritance.
 
The Eversive Dream of Consciousness
Allow me now to shift gear and dream a little further, spiralling upwards into the evolving unknown:
 
Through the eversive loop, the blind matter of the universe crawls into itself and creates the stage on which it can begin to observe itself in consciousness. In this loop, we awake as the starry eyes of the cosmos.

The long history of matter folds into the immediacy of a gaze. Some of the matter in these everted eyes was forged in stars. Across aeons, it has passed through forms that arose and perished under the pressure of the Great Filter and entropy. Now starlight reaches those scattered remains, crystallized as windows in a living body, and in them the sky is reflected.

When I wonder at that sky, my astonishment belongs to the universe as surely as the stars do. Here, through a living body, existence has become aware of itself.

We are the mirror, as well as the face in it.
Rumi

“Through the human being, the universe is making a mirror to observe itself.”
David Bohm and B. J. Hiley, The Undivided Universe
 

THE TRIPPING TENNINS BALL
The image came much later than the experience. I remember the first time, as a young man in my study chamber, when I suddenly felt myself ripped outside-in like that tennis ball. In a deep trance that seemed to arise out of nowhere, my entire landscape of perception shifted. Perhaps the trance had been triggered by a book about Indian mysticism I had borrowed from the library out of some strange curiosity.
 
The body ceased to feel like the container of consciousness; it appeared instead as a tiny, localized speck floating within an endless expanse of awareness. The ego did not simply disappear; it inverted: what I had previously taken to be me became a small object inside a much larger field that was now me. Within that expanded field, white light came from everywhere. I remember my first walk outside. It was raining from dark, thick clouds, and the grey concrete had become darker with the rain. But there was a soft white light emanating from every vista.
  
For one year afterwards, I had to stop my studies. Sometimes, while I was strolling around the blocks where I lived, even a soft step sent waves of happiness up through my body. Everything was perceived as "me". I was out of myself with joy. After some time, this blissful state gave way to a painful descent. The new awareness also illuminated the darkness within my own mind.

Once I had found a new balance, I was surprised to discover that I could concentrate for much longer than before. I returned to university with joy and completed my studies in a state of flow.

How could the body that had seemed to contain awareness now appear within it? How could this living body-brain become the place where the light I was could disclose itself?
 
I have been pondering that for decades, beginning this journey of understanding in absolute bewilderment. As a young leftist, I hated the fact that this experience could not be explained by Karl Marx.
 
Only now can I see what that hatred concealed. I had not merely trusted reason; I had mistaken a materialist account of reality for the boundary of reality itself. What it could not explain did not appear to me as a mystery, but almost as an insult. The absolutism I rejected in religion had returned unnoticed in my own materialism.
     
Then, seven years ago, by mistake, I ingested what amounted to ten full LSD doses with my morning coffee at a hotel in Katowice, Poland, just before checkout time. Don't ask me how I could be so stupid. After only five minutes I realized my mistake and just had enough time to extend my stay at the hotel, signing a paper in four different dimensions. Somehow I managed to find my room, and for a full day and night I basically lay incapacitated on the bed.

I remember an endless playlist of my Rachmaninov favorites and a dreamscape of holy geometry and mathematics. Its endlessly changing forms moved like an immense clockwork. It was extraordinarily beautiful and inhuman.

Rachmaninov’s music awakened within me a little two-year-old child, a child who “innerstood” every note. He felt defenceless, frightened and insecure, as though he had fallen into a river of sounds. Each new twist of Rachmaninov’s finger-magic brought him to the brink of annihilation.

The rhythms, harmonies and melodies seemed poised on the edge of self-destruction. Yet again and again, the music found salvation at the last second in a beautiful resolution, before setting out on another journey.

The child was struggling to keep his head above water. Slowly, he began to realise that he was being saved again and again. A budding sense of trust grew into tears of gratitude. I believe he wept for hours.

Then the heart opened.

By “heart,” I mean something felt throughout the chest, including the lungs. There, the cold clockwork became a fireworks display of human emotions—exquisite, fragile and immensely powerful.

What had appeared as impersonal order was now being lived as fear, trust and gratitude. This is what I now call the Grand Translator: a stargate where every fragment of the frozen god of algorithms can find warmth at the fireplace.

Here the infinite becomes intimate.

For years I understood nothing of it. But now, slowly, out of these two life-changing events, the urge to write this book has emerged.

Could it be that God is “me”—not curled inward, but turned inside out?

The Guardian of the Fold
That urge did not arise from an answer, but from the need for an image spacious enough to hold what had happened. I now see the eversive fold as such an image. To understand the threshold I crossed, I must first follow the fold in its ordinary direction—from outside to inside.

In this process, metaphor becomes the eversion of reality through consciousness. The ego, itself woven from metaphors, personalises the exterior as it is folded inward. An averted gaze can become a verdict on my worth; a welcoming smile can become a sign that I belong. The impersonal infinite becomes the intimate symbolic world of the little person called "me".

When we cross the threshold and the fold begins to unwind, personalisation is the first layer to loosen. Depersonalisation becomes the structural reversal of personalisation: the world ceases, for a moment, to be organised around the little person I took myself to be.
 
Fear is the guardian of the fold. It holds us inside ourselves so that we do not slip out too easily. Yet fear can also make withdrawal feel like liberation. I could feel free of my body while still protecting myself from the difficulties I did not want to face.

For many years of my younger life, I fled inward whenever I faced problems in my outer life. When I had trouble with a girlfriend, I fled into the “I am not the body” meditation. The problem did not disappear. I merely practised ostrich meditation, depersonalising myself into pure spirit. A self-reinforcing loop had formed: I left the world because it seemed unreal, and by leaving it I made it more unreal.
 
What strikes me now as particularly strange is that I was following two parallel paths that rarely intersected. I practised radical body-negation while also pursuing therapeutic practices to heal bodily traumas and improve my material circumstances. One hand barely knew what the other was doing.

Meister Eckhart states:

“God is near to us, but we are far from him.
God is in, we are out;
God is at home, we are strangers.”

Yet slipping out is only half the movement. If I never bring what I discover back into everyday life, transcendence becomes another exile. The harder task is to descend again into the body — to meet its ancient storms without being swallowed by them. The way out must become the way back in.
 
Years earlier, the Stationmaster had compressed this whole return into one impossible sentence:

“When I go to the toilet, God goes to the toilet.”

He was not dragging God down into the ridiculous. He was refusing to let the sacred escape the body. The human task is not only to become divine. The divine must also become human.

In recent years, the lightning of love has even reached my sluggish, greedy inner caveman. Like a revived Frankenstein, he hurls excited oaths in the name of love’s unfathomable miracle.

Life has taught me: without the inner Frankenstein on my side, I get nowhere. He has never thought of God, simply because he rarely thinks. But now he feels and bursts out laughing: “Is this a joke or what!” We laugh loudly and cannot stop. Never have we been better friends.
 
The Symbolic Inside of the Outside
I can feel the cold of a stone without naming it. When I put that feeling into words, the description becomes another event within the world I am already experiencing. Now recursive self-modelling may explain how a symbolic interior is formed. Eversion may construct the theatre, but it does not explain why the theatre is illuminated.

It does not explain the light I was.

Before there could be a symbolic inside, life had to make a physical one. The cell membrane created a within and a without. But this first skin was not merely a wall: it admitted, rejected and responded. At the oldest living boundary, the outside began to matter to the inside. What enters through this skin can become the material from which the skin itself is remade.

A slime mold encounters its environment and reacts. A complex nervous system maps the environment and anticipates its changes. The human brain goes further: it maps the environment, maps its own bodily and neural activity, and finally constructs a symbolic model of itself as the system performing the mapping. The mapper has entered its own map.

This is reflective eversion in human form.
   
By drawing the outer world inward and compressing it into symbolic patterns, the system begins to operate on its own symbols. The system can now examine and revise its own image of the observer. That revision can change how it acts in the world. Its actions then change what it encounters and must interpret next. The system begins to pass through itself.
   
In this sense, metaphors are the eversive reality of reality. If I imagine life as a battlefield, I may approach other people as potential enemies. They may answer my suspicion with suspicion of their own. The metaphor has helped produce the reality it seemed merely to describe.
  
In an ordinary feedback loop, A influences B and B influences A.
Imagine a Möbius strip: a ribbon joined into a loop with a half-twist. Trace a line along it, and you reach what looked like the other side without crossing an edge. The ribbon encloses no volume. In this image, there is no place for a soul to rest. For the symbolic interior I am trying to picture, I return to the sphere turning inside out. In mathematical eversion, its surface is allowed to pass through itself. The corresponding turn in my model takes place through representation: the system that makes the picture appears within it, and the picture returns to shape its maker.
 
THE MYSTERY OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Eversion offers a geometrical pathway of understanding. But this viewpoint does not solve the so-called “hard problem” of consciousness.
 
Instead, it reveals an even deeper mystery beneath it.

An Even Harder Problem   
The familiar hard problem asks why physical processes in the brain should be accompanied by subjective experience at all: redness, pain, blueness, the cold texture of an ancient stone. My question turns back upon the awareness in which these experiences appear. If I try to observe awareness as an object, I still have to ask what is aware of that object. How can awareness recognise itself without becoming another object before an observer?

Bharadwaj, who had taught philosophy and English literature in Lahore, had been captivated by Joyce’s "Ulysses" in his youth. When we spoke about it, he smiled at the phrase “stream of consciousness.”

“There is no stream of consciousness,” he said. “There is only ego-fuss in consciousness.”

He was pointing to a stream of thoughts "in" consciousness.
 
The light by which I investigate everything else is now what I am trying to approach. “Light” is only a metaphor here; what it points towards remains unknown.

Even my image of that light already appears within it.

A Cat from Another Dimension
In a book by Holger Bech Nielsen and Jonas Kuld Rathje, I encountered a strange image. Imagine beings confined to a world of only two spatial dimensions. If a three-dimensional cat passed through their plane, they would never see the cat. First, four black circles would appear where its paws entered their world. The circles would widen and merge into the cross-section of a body. Finally, the body would contract into the diminishing point of a tail and disappear.
 
Their measurements could be flawless. They could map every circle, calculate every transformation and perhaps infer that the sequence was produced by something extending beyond their plane. Yet the cat as a whole could never appear within the coordinates of their world.

This is an image, not evidence that consciousness comes from another dimension. But it opens a possibility. If consciousness belongs to an order larger than the spacetime system through which it appears, then brain activity may be a measurable cross-section of its local presence without being a complete explanation of what it is. Science could map every board of the theatre and still not discover why the stage is illuminated.

Consciousness is not inaccessible in itself.

It is the most immediate fact I know.

Yet knowing that I am aware does not tell me what awareness is. It may be inaccessible as an external object, because every attempt to stand outside and observe it already takes place within it. The eye searches for the light by which it sees.

Eckhart rarely uses the word “consciousness”. Yet after reading his complete works alongside the ancient Indian traditions, I cannot avoid recognising a profound structural kinship. What the Upanishadic and Advaita traditions call “Chit”—consciousness, the light in which all appearances arise—I recognise in Eckhart’s Godhead and Ibn ʿArabi’s Real. Here, Godhead and the Real name the divine beyond our images and definitions of it. Their languages and theologies differ, but I read them as approaching what contains every object and therefore cannot itself be placed before us as one more object.

“Had I a God whom I could understand,
I would no longer hold him for God.”

“The more we can impute to Him not-likeness,
the nearer do we get to understanding Him.”
— Meister Eckhart

We will never know what consciousness is by standing outside it and making it our object. We can, however, investigate the theatre in which it appears. My proposal is that ouroboric eversion provides a structure through which consciousness can encounter itself in time and space. Bech Nielsen’s cat remains a metaphor for the limit of that investigation: we may map the conditions under which consciousness appears without mistaking the image of a higher-dimensional intersection for an explanation.

Consciousness in Ouroboric Eversion
An insight came to me in a lucid dream. The immediate physical world had withdrawn from my awareness, yet the inner theatre remained illuminated in its own space, beneath its own sky, among its own stones, governed by its own laws. In dreams, the inner mirror-world reassembles memory into an experienced world of its own. A sky can appear before we name it; a stone can be felt before we explain it. The dream state reveals a spaceless space of appearance.

Advaita compares waking life to a dream. In an old Indian story, a king dreams that he is a beggar and wakes unable to decide whether he is a king who dreamed he was a beggar or a beggar now dreaming he is a king. Christopher Nolan’s "Inception" gives the ancient vision modern machinery: dreams nested inside dreams like Chinese boxes.

How can a world appear within me, while I appear as someone within that world?

South India 1989.

At the highest watchtower of that same ruined mountain, the landscape opens before me.

India can be so empty.

This summit raised high above everything earthly.

Small morning-red scraps of cloud.

Deserted green mountains and flat plains.

A river winds toward the sea in the distance.

How often have I drifted dreamily down the river of thoughts?

Because when I do not swim, the current always carries me back to the places I came from.

I turn around in the current, full of the fish of dead thoughts, and wade ashore.

I open my eyes and see the blindness of images that, layer upon layer through a lifetime, have grown fast like algae onto the advertising column for random sensations that the body has become.

Some are beautiful.

Some hurt.

I look at a lizard, stiff with the morning cold, looking back at me.

A nameless, unspeakable something lies in the air like the sweet smell of honey.

Ah, thoughtless now.

Why is your shore always far away?

My gaze swims longingly toward the horizon.

Damn longing!

Leave me alone!

And then —

with uncertain footing on a mountain summit —

my head above thought and into the sky.

Red-golden light from the horizon.

Tiny relay runners, particle-seeds from the morning-red sun, pollinate the eyeballs with joy.

Yes.

There is joy.

But there is nobody who is happy.

The sun sees itself.

The Self can itself.

Saved from the dream of freedom.

Saved from the gnome of the past.

I begin climbing down from the lookout.

“I am a Lizard King — I can do everything.” — J. Morrison

---

Decades later, that lizard returns to me as a question: what was the “I” that felt capable of everything? Both the lizard and the Lizard King appeared in consciousness: one as an animal looking back at me from outside, the other as a symbol looking back at me from within. So did the mountain, the cold stone, and the intoxication of freedom. The “I” that felt capable of everything was a self-image within that same experience. None of them was consciousness itself.

These experiences sharpen a distinction that our ordinary way of speaking easily obscures. I can describe the sensation of pain, the sight of a blue sky, the cold texture of an ancient stone. Here I distinguish these changing contents from the awareness in which they appear.

Pain, blueness, and texture do not constitute consciousness; they appear within the eversive interior like images in a mirror. The mirror is not one more image among them. It suggests how awareness can seem to remain present as its contents change, without being identical with any of them. I call this the mirror-quality of consciousness. It describes how consciousness discloses itself within the theatre; it does not tell us what consciousness is.

In an ordinary feedback loop between a system and its world, the consequences of its actions return to affect it. In the model I am proposing, eversion brings that relation within experience: the world appears around me, and I appear within it as the one who senses and acts. I can feel the stone beneath my hand before I name the stone or describe myself. The original loop continues between system and world. The outside has been folded inward without ceasing to be outside.

Within this experienced world, another loop can develop. The system constructs a symbolic model of the world and of its own position and activity within it. This model guides actions whose consequences can return to revise it. My symbolic model contains a representation of my experience; my experience contains the activity of making that model. When I begin to recognise and revise my own way of modelling, a further Ouroboros coils within the return. The interior acquires recursive depth; the mirror begins to reflect its own reflecting.
My intuition is that a membrane remains even where the senses and symbols seem to merge. Hearing a musical note and naming it can feel like one movement, yet they are different acts. The name can guide my listening; what I hear can make me revise the name. The membrane is my image for the difference that remains within this exchange. The spiral carries it inward.

The eversive loop does not create consciousness. It creates the interior 'distance' in which the world can be reflected and the reflecting system can itself appear among the reflections. The system becomes both observer and observed, both the bearer of the mirror and a figure within it. My proposal takes a further step here: consciousness can encounter its own presence through this return, before that encounter becomes a thought about it. As the mirror turns upon its own reflecting, the unknown light becomes increasingly disclosed within the spacetime coordinates of the system.

What is intensified within the eversive feedback loop is not the existence of consciousness, but its self-disclosure in time and space.

THE EVERSIVE SOUL CATCHER
I call this proposed arrangement the eversive soul catcher. The camera’s image represents the scene and becomes part of the scene it represents. I imagine a corresponding return in which consciousness becomes increasingly present to itself. The internal mirrors do not create the unknown light. They catch it and return it, amplifying its self-disclosure within the life of a finite being.

The camera gives us the image of eversion; the microphone gives us the image of amplification. A microphone before its own loudspeaker picks up sound that the loudspeaker sends back to it. If each return is amplified enough, a faint sound can grow into a howl. The circuit draws on the amplifier’s finite power. I imagine the eversive encounter intensifying in a corresponding way, towards the limits of the living amplifier’s output.

The square root of minus one offers an analogy for how to proceed. No real number multiplied by itself gives minus one. Mathematics extends the number system with the imaginary unit "i", defined by i² = −1. We can calculate with it through exact rules, without needing a physical substance called "i". I borrow from this a way of asking how consciousness might return upon itself while its nature remains unknown. In mathematics, the rules are exact; here, the relations themselves are still being explored.

Poona 1989.
 
It rains.

The monsoon has reached Poona.

Showers and sun.

Raindrops dance in the rays of the afternoon sun.

They glitter and sparkle golden on their way toward the earth.

They all cry enthusiastically:

me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me,
me me me me me me me me me...

But who is it that sees them?

And who sees the sun?

---

Each drop briefly catches the sunlight. What did not begin in the drop acquires a local presence there, a momentary “me”. I now recognise in this an image of the eversive soul catcher: the unknown touching down in a finite form, without that form explaining what it holds.

The encounter takes place within a finite life, yet it may feel boundless or timeless. In my proposal, these qualities arise through the eversive arrangement. Each return can become part of a further return; the pattern itself supplies no final turn. This offers an image of experienced infinity without requiring a living body to complete infinitely many returns. “Infinite”, “timeless” and “eternal” describe how consciousness is encountered through the loop. They leave its nature unknown.

I call this a locationless location. I may know where my body is while awareness seems to have no fixed centre. The place of the encounter does not give the unknown itself an address.

Let me repeat like a mantra:

We do not know what consciousness is, and we never will...

And thank God for that!
 

AWE IN KNOWING NOT-KNOWING
And that is where awe sneaks in. Mere ignorance does not produce awe. A forgotten telephone number does not fill us with wonder. Awe arises when not-knowing carries an intuition of depth—when we sense that reality exceeds the forms through which we try to contain it. Awe is therefore not the opposite of knowledge. It is what may arise when knowing becomes conscious of the depth of what it cannot contain.

The Potato Sack
During my years as a tour guide in northern India, I learned how eagerly the mind reaches for explanations. During one bus journey, a tourist struggled up through the swaying bus to ask me a question. Half an hour earlier, we had passed a woman carrying a large sack. What was in it?

I had no idea.

“Potatoes,” I replied without hesitation.

Satisfied, he returned to his seat.

The explanation explained nothing. But the unknown had been silenced. We can block new information by mistaking an answer for knowledge.
 
The surrender into awe is seldom immediate. It is often preceded by a long and intense struggle, fought with the sword of intellect. But reason is not defeated by something outside itself that it cannot divide or conquer. Confronted with any external mystery, it can always postpone defeat: "We cannot explain it today, but tomorrow we will."
 
The decisive reversal occurs only when reason becomes Ouroboric by turning back upon its own act of knowing. It becomes eversive when the observer includes itself within the observation and discovers that, although an image of the knower can enter the model, the light of knowing itself cannot. The eversive loop closes the escape into tomorrow. The defeat comes from within:

"I know that I do not know."

And that is where surrender becomes awe.

Here the hard problem itself everts. From the outside, it appears as an explanatory gap between matter and experience. When encountered from within, the same gap becomes existential: the questioner discovers itself inside the mystery it is trying to solve. The hard problem is awe described from the outside; awe is the hard problem experienced from within.

Nicholas of Cusa called such knowing through not-knowing "learned ignorance". In "The Vision of God", he writes: "I know only the following: viz., that I know that I do not know—and never can know—what I see." The words "never can know" close reason’s escape into tomorrow. In "On the Hidden God", surrender becomes explicit: "Quia ignoro, adoro—Because I do not know, I adore." Cusa places the boundary between finite intellect and infinite God. The eversive Ouroboros finds that boundary within the act of knowing itself.
 
The ancient Indian tradition comes even closer to the structure of this boundary. The "Brhadāranyaka Upanishad" declares: "You cannot know the knower of knowing." This is the ancient form of the asymmetry: the knower cannot be known as one more object, because it is that through which every object becomes known. Advaita Vedanta, especially as articulated by Adi Shankara, approaches this same boundary through the Upanishadic formula:

Neti, neti
Not this, not this

This Indian description of the highest reality is reminiscent, even down to its syntax, of that found among the finest European medieval mystics. Meister Eckhart says of the nameless power in the soul:

But now I say:
It is neither this nor that
Yet it is...
It is free from all names
emptied of all forms

Eversion can place the world and an image of the observer inside the mirror. Neti neti refuses to confuse consciousness with any image the mirror contains.

The eversive loop does not explain the light by which anything appears.

The eversive Ouroboros proposes an arrangement through which consciousness may become present to itself within a finite life. The proposal also turns back upon its maker: my attempt to explain that arrangement is itself an event within the awareness I am trying to understand.
 
Without that light, the mirror could never disclose itself. Yet even light as experienced is itself an emergence—another appearance within the mirror. Hence some Persian Sufis spoke paradoxically of the Black Light, "nūr-e siyāh": the light that cannot itself be seen, yet makes seeing possible.
  
In deep meditation, this concentrated, aware blackness appears as stillness. It is not inertness. It resembles a spinning top at full speed: apparently motionless, yet held upright by the motion without which it would fall.
 
Any scientific investigation of consciousness can be no more—and no less—than a dream full of reason. It may map the theatre with ever greater precision, but it cannot step outside the light by which the map itself appears.

To acknowledge this boundary is not to abandon reason, but to resist making it absolute. Reason remains alive and self-correcting only while it can examine its own limits. When it questions everything except its own authority, the upward spiral closes into horizontal repetition.

It then becomes the very thing it believes it has overcome: dogma.
Reason becomes an idol when it refuses to reason about its own limits.

I recognise this psychological shadow projection from my own former materialism. The absolutism I rejected in religion returned unnoticed in my conviction that scientific reason defined the boundaries of reality.

The unknown is then permitted to remain only as an unfinished detail within reason’s map, never as a possible boundary of the map itself. But the answer is not less reason. It is reason sufficiently self-aware to dream without mistaking its dream for the light in which it appears.
 
Allow me now to dream such a dream:

Within it, the architecture of the theatre can still be traced from the bottom up. Cellular responsiveness becomes nervous coordination; nervous coordination becomes modelling; modelling turns recursive. Like a parabolic mirror, the living system gathers countless weak registrations into a unified field of representation. Attention gathers. The world, the body, and finally an image of the observer are brought together within the same interior.

At a certain Hegelian intensity, quantity changes into quality. A thousand weak registrations do not merely remain a thousand weak registrations. Organized in the right way, they cross a threshold and become a new order: not consciousness manufactured from cells, but an eversive theatre capable of containing both a world and an image of itself.

The biological question is therefore not how consciousness arises from cellular responsiveness. It is how living matter constructs the increasingly complex coordinates through which the unknown light becomes locally disclosed in spacetime. A parabolic mirror concentrates light, but it does not create it.

This does not require panpsychism in the usual sense. Consciousness need not be imagined as a hidden substance packed inside every particle, nor as a miracle manufactured by dead matter when complexity crosses a threshold. If it belongs to an order larger than spacetime, the eversive interior may instead be the local opening through which it becomes disclosed.

Yet even this image of consciousness entering spacetime from a higher dimension is only a metaphor. Taken literally, it would merely explain one mystery by invoking another. It does not explain consciousness; it merely gives form to the boundary of our ignorance.

We can study the opening; we cannot determine from within it how far the unknown light extends.

In the picture I am proposing, the conditions for this disclosure take shape within the recursive loops of living nervous systems. In the human brain, these loops may reach a threshold at which the unknown light becomes present to itself.

The body-brain is a cellular society of mirrors: billions of living micro-responses coordinated within a unified eversive interior. Attention is drawn towards change; the body’s ancient awareness is rooted in continuity and repetition.
We hear the refrigerator hum only when it stops and notice the foot only when it hurts. Yet beneath conscious notice, the body has carried these steady rhythms all along. Meditation turns the newest reflective layer of the organism towards what its oldest living systems have never ceased to know.

Close your eyes and remain awake. The body’s inner field — pulse, pressure, warmth, the touch of skin against clothing — grows stronger. Open them again and the visible world rushes forward while this ancient sensory chorus recedes.
 
The cells do not disappear. They remain themselves while becoming parts of a larger system capable of modelling the world, the body, and its own activity in relation to both. From microscopic responsiveness to symbolic self-reflection, new levels of interior organization emerge from the relations among the levels contained within them.
 
At the human level, the eversive interior no longer merely adapts to the conditions of survival. Through symbols, it begins to reorganize the conditions of its own continuity. A pattern encountered in reality is folded inward, released from its original object, and made to illuminate something else. Returning through perception and action, it changes the reality from which it came.

South India 1989.

At Ramana Maharshi’s ashram in Tiruvannamalai, I ask whether anyone is still here who knew him while he was alive.
 
A small boy leads me some distance away from the ashram to a kind of old people’s home.
 
In an extremely Spartan but clean cell, no more than six square metres, sits a large athletic old man.
 
The boy leaves me alone with him.
 
We do not say a word to one another.
 
He sits nodding his head.
 
We do not greet each other.
 
Suddenly, after several minutes of silence, he speaks to me in fluent English.
 
His name is Ramaswami Pillai.

He asks where I come from, what I do, and so on.

I ask about him too.

He is ninety-five, perhaps ninety-six.

He does not know exactly.

Ramaswami Pillai met Ramana in 1917 and was with him every day until Ramana’s death in 1950.

He clearly remembers the day he arrived at Arunachala.

Yes.

He remembers clearly the day he sat down at Ramana’s feet.

He remained sitting.

From that day there was no road back.

Imperceptibly, unexpectedly, yet astonishingly undramatically —

quietly consciousness begins to grow gently beyond the body until it fills the entire room and infinitely more.

The body, crucified in a vice —

inside the chest, it awakens —

slowly it curves me inward into itself.

No time.

We do not exist in time and space.

Time and space exist in it.

On the horizon, a confused voice asks:

“Excuse me, Sir — are you enlightened?”

“Only your eyes will know. It depends on your eyes.”

There is a knock on the door.

Ramaswami is served warm milk.

Far, far away and infinitely close, I see that he shares it with me.

Two lives sit opposite themselves in silence and drink warm powdered milk.

---

The Magic of Mirror-Mirror
I am not enlightened. But a situation can be. In that small room, enlightenment belonged neither to Ramaswami nor to me. It emerged in the field between us — his eyes, my eyes, the silence and the shared milk. In the classroom, I discovered my own part in the situation I was observing. Here I am exploring a further turn: the felt separation between observer and observed can itself give way. I call this ecstatic eversion.
 
In Ramaswami’s little room, the world remained present while the felt separation between observer and observed gave way. Meditation can also take an apparently objectless form: the world, the body and passing thoughts seem to fall away. Here I return to the image of mirror facing mirror. The mirror no longer seems occupied by what it reflects; it turns towards its own mirroring.
 
At a certain depth, even the phrase "I meditate" sounds too active. I no longer meditate. I am meditated. The practice I began turns around and acts upon me. The meditator becomes part of the meditation.
 
When you turn the gaze back to trace its own path — to catch the one who is reading these very words — the line snaps.
 
The ground vanishes.
   
A mirror facing a mirror appears to open an infinite regression of pure clarity.
Objects fall away. The mind is emptied of reflections, leaving the mirror bare of every object.

This is the abyss of Black Light that mystics across centuries and traditions have struggled to describe. It defies description when we try to place it before us as an object—a reflection to name. But when the mirror faces itself, the felt separation between observer and observed collapses. No separate object seems to remain. What remains is experienced as the empty, luminous fact of awareness.
   
The Black Zero-Point and the Hinge of Eversion
At this zero-point, the eversive theatre folds back toward the coordinate at which its contents are disclosed. What, from the outside, appears as body, brain, sensation, and world is now felt inwardly as awareness facing itself. Thought can no longer take the lead. In the black singularity of self-facing awareness, the ego cannot operate. Here mirror-mirror reaches its most intimate threshold: the light becomes revealed to itself without an object between the mirrors.
   
Normally, the mirror is occupied. It reflects the world, the body, a sensation, a memory, a thought. Even when we turn inward, we usually only replace one object with another: my breath, my sadness, my thought, myself. The ordinary geometry survives. Someone is still looking at something. Recall the Buddha statue in the camera loop: even as its image returned again and again, the statue remained an object within the picture.
    
This may be why the inside-outside flip is so rare.
 
Recursion alone cannot explain this rarity. The nervous system is already woven from feedback loops, yet we do not continually enter ecstasy. My proposal is that ecstatic eversion requires a returning signal to cross a critical threshold of gain, but self-amplification alone is not enough. The nearest image I know is a microphone placed before its own loudspeaker. Below critical gain, the return fades. Above it, output returns as input with sufficient force for the system to begin amplifying its own return. The microphone no longer carries the singer. It howls its own circuit. The howl supplies intensity; ecstatic eversion begins only when the activity of observation is drawn into the return and the ordinary relation between observer and observed turns inside out.
 
Gain supplies the force. Eversion supplies the geometry. The Great Filter tests the aftermath.
 
When mirror faces pure mirror, no separate object seems to remain between them. The observer turns back in search of the observer, but no final observer appears. The line that seemed to hold observer and observed apart can no longer be sustained. It snaps. What remains is mirror reflecting mirroring.
 
What snaps is not matter or spacetime, but a function: the system’s capacity to preserve the ordinary distance between observer and observed. This is what I mean by a functional singularity—not an infinity of energy, but a threshold at which the architecture of self-reference changes its mode of operation. The loop creates no energy of its own; the howl draws its energy from the amplifier’s power supply. Nor does the analogy require the nervous system to manufacture consciousness. Its recursive circuitry may instead concentrate the conditions through which the unknown light becomes disclosed to itself.
 
The Black Zero-Point is the hinge at which the felt separation between observer and observed gives way.
   
A hinge does not manufacture either side. It allows one continuous structure to turn. The zero-point does not reveal another object hidden behind ordinary experience. It opens the possibility that the orientation of experience itself can reverse.
 
This is the secret door of mirror-mirror.
 
The microphone describes the accumulating amplification; the rocket describes what happens when the threshold is crossed. Ecstatic eversion is the moment experience reaches the escape velocity of the ego. A rocket does not leave spacetime; it ceases to be gravitationally bound to the planet from which it rose. Likewise, the metaphor does not require consciousness to leave the body or spacetime. What loses its hold is the organization of experience around the little person called "me".

Meister Eckhart unites the microphone and the rocket in a single paradox:

"God's exit is his entrance.
He broke in to let us out."

These are not two movements but one event viewed from opposite sides of the fold. The unknown light breaks into the eversive interior as the local self ceases to define the horizon of consciousness. The howl is both intrusion and escape: the sound of an arrival and the force of a departure.

Many years ago, I was teaching a music class for teenagers. At the piano, accompanying the class in song, I noticed a girl sitting silently with a serious expression. Trying to keep everyone involved, I made a grave mistake. I stopped playing and teased her with a line from Monty Python’s “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.”

She looked at me in fury and screamed: “Die, you pig!” Then she stormed out.

Her parents complained to the headmaster and later called me, furious. That night I lay awake, dreading the next day. Fear and pain churned in my body. My thoughts fed the turmoil, which fed my thoughts.

Amid all this, a wordless intuition arose: lie still and surrender.
 
I lay flat on my back. The position was excruciating. I desperately wanted to curl up on my side, but remained still. I have no clear memory of how long I lay there.
 
Then it felt as though a great cathedral of peace entered my body. The pain gave way to a bliss so vast that my body seemed to dissolve within it. My entire being became a tiny droplet suspended in that immense peace. Eventually, I fell into a deep sleep.
 
The next morning, I woke rested and clear. At work, I discovered that her parents had withdrawn the complaint. The girl approached me, smiling, and offered me a handshake.
 
Ordinary waking life turns the relation back again. Here I find myself as a small interior consciousness inside an immense physical universe — surrounded by atoms, gravitation, biology, and entropy, none of which appears to require my awareness in order to exist. From this side, consciousness looks local: something that has emerged within matter.

The wonder is that one perspective does not abolish the other.

They may be two orientations of the same eversive intersection. From the outside, the intersection appears as a material body, a nervous system, and recursive neural activity. From the inside, it is experienced as a world, a self, and the strange light in which both can appear.

The body-brain may be what the local intersection of consciousness with spacetime looks like from the outside.

I hesitate every time I write that sentence. It stands exactly on the trembling boundary between description and metaphysics.

When the Fold Tears
The microphone reveals two thresholds. Below critical gain, the return fades. Above it, self-oscillation begins: the Ouroboric howl. Beyond the system’s tolerance, transformation becomes breakdown. The loop does not summon infinite energy; it channels finite power from the amplifier’s supply. Yet finite power can still make the signal clip, the voice coil overheat, or the cone distort and tear.
 
This offers another way to picture what happened in Katowice. I imagine the chemical acting upon loops already running, raising the gain of some and weakening their damping. In this image, amplification means more than sharper external senses: minor sensations, memories, spontaneous images and emotional residues can return as input and shape what appears next. Perhaps even the activity of observation itself can enter that return.
 
The trip begins when the theatre feeds on its own images. A pattern summons a memory; the memory colours the pattern; the colour acquires a mood; the mood generates another image. At critical gain, what returns no longer fades but changes the conditions of its next return, and experience begins to elaborate itself. An image of the witness can enter the stage while I still seem to watch it from outside. In ecstatic eversion, the turn reaches that apparent outside position itself: the felt separation between observer and observed begins to give way.
 
By analogy, the same caution belongs to consciousness. Recursive intensity is not, by itself, revelation. If experience outruns the nervous system’s capacity to integrate it, intensification may become panic, dissociation, psychosis, or collapse. The fold does not open; it tears.

This is why fear is the guardian of the fold. It is not merely the ego resisting its own dissolution; it is also the nervous system applying a brake when experience approaches the limits of integration. The guardian is not always wise, but neither is it simply an enemy to be overcome. The same force that keeps the fold closed may also keep it from tearing. To force one’s way past it is to risk mistaking rupture for release.

Meister Eckhart gave this need for mediation a language of light:

Divine light is so overwhelming that the soul is unable to bear it
unless it is tempered in the angel's light and so conveyed into the soul.
He (God) enlightens her therefore by reflection. The angel conveys his own knowledge to the soul and strengthens her in this way to bear the light of God.
Meister Eckhart, from Franz Pfeiffer’s edition

The angel is therefore not merely a messenger but a transformer. Reflection does not conceal the light; it brings it within the soul’s dynamic range.
 
Without mediation, the fold tears. Through reflection, it everts.
 
At their best, spiritual traditions are disciplines for preparing the human receiver. Through gradual practice, bodily stability, ethical grounding, and the patient integration of what is disclosed, they seek not merely to increase the gain but to increase the capacity to bear it. A rocket requires more than escape velocity; it also requires the structural integrity to survive the forces of ascent.

MEDITATIVE PIXELLATION
We can begin by closing our eyes while remaining fully awake. For a moment, notice what becomes easier to feel. Perhaps there is warmth in the hands, pressure where the body meets the chair, or a tightening in the throat. Begin with whatever is present.

Now stay with one sensation. Does it remain the same? Does it have a clear edge, or does it spread into something less definite? There is no need to answer in words. The invitation is to become more closely acquainted with the feeling before deciding what it means.
 
I call this meditative pixellation: catching sensations before they capture us.
 
Imagine magnifying a digital portrait. At first, you recognise a face. Closer up, its familiar expression gives way to patches of colour. You are encountering the same picture at another scale.
 
Something similar can happen with anger. Its familiar face can open into heat, pressure, trembling and contraction. What seemed one indivisible command becomes an inner field of moving sensations that can be held, digested and transformed. Attention does not suppress the anger. It changes its resolution. The word “anger” may still fit, but it no longer tells me everything about what is happening.
 
The quality of this attention matters. Think of a mother picking up her crying child. She does not first ask why it is crying or judge whether it has a good reason. She holds it. Even my smallest, most unreasonable vulnerabilities can be met with that same attention.
  
Suppose I sit with a tightening in my chest. At first, I attend only to the discomfort. After a while, I notice that I am also holding my breath and bracing around it, waiting for it to disappear. What seemed to be simple observation contains an effort to make something happen.

That effort has a bodily life of its own. I can feel the held breath, the rigid posture, perhaps a further tightening as I check whether the first one has gone. My response has entered the field I am attending to.

This response, too, can be met as the mother meets her crying child. Even the wish for relief can be allowed into the encounter. The wanting, too, can be felt.
 
A small turn has taken place. I began by observing a sensation; now I also encounter something of the way I observe. If that recognition changes how I meet the next moment, what I have learned returns through the quality of my attention.
 
The Inner Cathedral
Now let attention widen from one sensation to the whole felt body. The warmth in the hands, the pressure where you sit and the movement of breathing can be felt together. Each has its own quality, yet all belong to the same unfolding encounter.
 
The body I recognise in a mirror has a familiar outline. With my eyes closed, that outline may be much less evident. Some regions feel vivid; others barely announce themselves. A pressure may have a definite edge, while warmth spreads without a clear border. Knowing where my skin is and feeling a boundary are different experiences.
 
I call the spaciousness of this encounter the inner cathedral. The name carries the awe of discovering that what I habitually call “inside” can feel both vast and intimate. Even the darkness behind closed eyes, so easy to overlook, becomes something to wonder at.
 
Pixellation has brought the textures of experience into clearer view. Now the question extends to their arrangement: where do they seem to be, and where do I seem to be in relation to them? The familiar statement “I am inside my body” begins to invite closer attention.
 
I may feel that I am watching from somewhere behind my eyes. But what gives that “somewhere” its location? There may be pressure around the eyes, a faint image of my head, or simply a familiar sense of being here, looking out. The sense of being somewhere behind my eyes can itself become part of what I notice.

Here pixellation reaches the apparent position of the observer. What had quietly organised the encounter into “me in here” and “what I feel over there” becomes available to attention. I can explore its textures just as I explored the warmth in my hands.

The distinction matters. The thought “I am inside my body” can fall silent while the feeling of being enclosed remains. A wordless mind may still have a very definite centre.

The further possibility concerns that felt arrangement itself. If the sense of enclosure loosens, the relation may turn: the felt body that seemed to contain the whole encounter begins to appear within it. Here I see a possible gateway from pixellation to ecstatic eversion.

The inner cathedral still has a door onto the city. Perhaps this is what the Stationmaster meant when he asked:

“Don’t you know that God is also in the streets?”
 
Suppose someone says something that hurts me. My face grows hot and an answer is already forming. If I can notice the feeling before its first interpretation hardens into certainty, I may find room to hear the person again. Perhaps I have misunderstood. Perhaps their criticism is justified. Or perhaps I need to say clearly that what they are doing is unacceptable.

Words return with work to do: to ask, to disagree, to say what matters. The hurt has a bodily life, but it also belongs to a relationship. Attending to its sensations can help me approach what happened with fewer ready-made answers. What I discovered in silence begins to change how I participate in a shared world.

Even this room to respond can become something I demand of myself. A new ideal of myself can begin to form around it.
 
If I approach meditation with a precise picture of enlightenment, that expectation may help shape what I experience. When the experience resembles the picture, I may take the resemblance as proof that I have arrived. The loop has supplied its own confirmation. Even the image of eversion I offer here can become such an expectation.
  
Intensity is evidence only of intensity. The howl may provide the force that loosens an existing form, but it does not necessarily disclose a greater truth; energy can drive transformation without determining its direction. The system must remain answerable to reality as it changes. This is another face of the Great Filter: it does not certify illumination over delusion, for each may arrive with equal brightness. How I live afterwards, how I treat others and whether I remain open to correction give us ways to assess what the experience has changed. A transformation can be valuable without proving the explanation I give of it.
 
What Becomes of a Vision?
A close friend of mine had once been ready for any street fight. At eighteen, he left Denmark to fight in a war in the Middle East. He returned two years later and became the leader of a criminal gang. Eventually, he spent almost two years in prison in solitary confinement.
 
After his release, he encountered a youtube video of a kaleidoscopic tunnel and a voice proclaiming, “You are that!” He experienced an explosion of cosmic consciousness. For another two years, he could do little but surrender to the rapture. As he gradually returned to ordinary life, the thought of fighting anyone seemed impossible. He abandoned his former life and became one of the most loving and compassionate men I know.
 

South India 1989.

The same test applies to a spiritual community: what does its vision become in everyday life? That question returns me, in memory, to Auroville—ten kilometres outside Pondicherry.

Auroville.

A city of the future, founded in 1968 and spread across several square kilometres.

At the centre of Auroville stands the Matrimandir, an enormous monumental globe, now almost finished, conceived in a meditation by the Mother more than twenty years ago.

The Mother was the French-born spiritual successor of the Indian saint and philosopher Sri Aurobindo.

Now that she herself has left her earthly shell, her vision remains in concrete:

solemnly raised on an almost trinitarian pedestal stands a monumental giant globe.

Is it seventy metres in diameter?

More than six hundred permanent residents from all over the world circle in visionary satellite collectives around this sun-king centre.

I turn away from the globe and ride into the Aurovillian landscape.

Large, half-decayed communal buildings from Auroville’s glory days in 1968.

And hidden behind many layers of inhospitable vegetation, small magnificent palaces with servants and barking German shepherds.

Germans, French and English ask:

“Was willst du hier? What do you want here? Go to reception and check in!”

A friendly Dutch-Aurovillian couple run a small guest collective.

For the moment I live in a little paradise near the Matrimandir, consisting of architect-designed futuristic huts in a “wild” style, harmoniously scattered among large shady trees and neat little roads.

I move into a small hut built into the crown of a large tree.

I lie in a hammock.

The smell of magnificent food prepared by Indian cooks, while beautiful local women wash my clothes with rhythmic slaps against bare stones.

I lie reading an introductory brochure given to me by my Aurovillian hosts:

“Earth needs a place where men and women can live away from all national rivalries, social conventions, self-contradictory moralities and contending religions; a place where human beings, freed from all slavery to the past, can devote themselves wholly to the discovery...

Auroville wants to be this place and offers itself to all who aspire to live the Truth of tomorrow.”

— The Mother

Yesterday two young Spanish stewardesses moved into the neighbouring hut.

Called here by the Mother’s inspiring books, they trustingly leave passports and money on the bed in their open hut.

When they return from their first little walk in Auroville, everything is gone.

“How could you leave your valuables like that?” asks the Dutch couple.

“We didn’t think things like that happened here in Auroville,” the devastated girls answer.

“Ah! How naive can you be?” the hosts say despairingly. “We are in India, dear friends!”

“What about the brochure you just gave me?” I ask.

“Sri Aurobindo and the Mother are no longer here. When they were alive, everything was good. And in any case, you can never trust an Indian,” comes the answer.

A walk without the motorcycle.

A lame Indian man comes staggering out of a small village that has crawled halfway onto the road.

“Me Aurovillian — village in Auroville. Come to my village. Please do me honour and come to my house.”

I follow him between mud huts with holes in their plastic and straw roofs.
 
“Home! Auroville home!”

We stand inside a mud hut.

The roof has collapsed.

A light rain falls onto a woman with a small child.

“My wife — look — no roof and one kid — feel rain every day and now bad, very bad storm will come from the sea! You buy new roof, not for me but for my kid. Look here — you give kid good future! Goddess Kali bless you.”

I hope a hundred rupees is enough to escape Kali’s bad conscience.
 
Tourists are not allowed inside the actual Matrimandir building.

But I get in by volunteering as a worker.

I stand in the innermost vault of the Matrimandir globe, lined with white marble from Italy.

A wonderful collection of idealists from all over the world.

Some of them work without pay.

A French hippie, a New York yuppie and a German cowboy are bent over architectural drawings.

I work alongside Indian labourers brought in from the surrounding villages.

“How much do you earn per day?” I ask.

“Twenty-five rupees.”

“Beyond social, moral, cultural, racial and hereditary appearances,” whispers the brochure in my back pocket.

An inner dialogue begins with my backside:

Ah — lofty ideals have a tendency to make it heavy as lead.

Day labourers paid less than coolie wages, magnificent villas surrounded by thorn hedges, poor servants and lousy villages —

all ordinary Indian reality.

I sit in an opening in the globe with a view over the sea.

There is white foam on the waves.

Is this the beginning of the storm the lame villager spoke of?

The Mother’s visionary soap bubble has long since blown down from its pedestal, and no church — not even one built from tons of concrete and marble in the form of a globe — can contain the Spirit that sweeps unpredictably across the earth like a gust of wind among wild flowers.

Or what does the howling gust now sweeping inland from the sea across the Matrimandir say?

The pedestal itself trembles, supported by a stiff, petrified longing for the past, while visionaries from all over the world build “the Truth of tomorrow.”

And after working hours, the present is endured in palaces grown at right angles across the Mother’s Paris-Commune dreams of liberty, equality and fraternity.

A church built in honour of the wild wind remains, after all, a windbreak.

The Indian day labourers and Auroville’s poor villages know this.

They live with it.

My hosts live with it too.

They know it and live comfortably with it.

Only the beautiful brochures and the many ashram books do not know it — and live comfortably by not knowing.

And yet:

seductive beauty inside the Matrimandir.

“No images, no altar, no organized meditations, no flowers, no incense,” says the brochure in my hand.

The only religious element lies in the encounter with the empty marble-lined room —

in looking at the light from a large round crystal.

Mirrors from a small opening at the top of the dome will entice sunlight down to the glass sphere, which will carry it onward into the entire room.

---

Looking back, the mirrored light inside the Matrimandir returns me to the boundary between reality and the forms in which it appears to us.

Kant and Vedanta approach this boundary from opposite directions. Kant warns me that the world as I experience it can never simply be equated with reality in itself. Vedanta turns inward and asks whether, when the mirror finally faces itself, the distinction between observer and reality can still hold.

Neither dissolves the mystery.

The hinge only makes the reversal imaginable.

Why should the same eversive intersection present an outside that can be measured and an inside in which the unknown light becomes disclosed?

At my desk, a machine has entered the loop through which I make sense of my own experience.
 
The Silicon-Carbon Mirror
The physical world, once standing before me as object, has organized itself into a silicon mirror that now participates in reshaping my symbolic interior. The machine is no longer only something I look at; it has become part of the lens through which thought, memory, and experience fold back into one another.
 
I put a thought into words and send it to the machine. Its reply may reveal an assumption I had not noticed. My own thinking has become something I can examine, and that examination changes what I ask next. The next reply enters a mind already altered by the previous exchange.

The outer world enters the machine through human language, images, measurements, and decisions. Inside, these materials are encoded as numerical patterns and transformed through layers of computation. The system acts upon this hidden geometry and returns it to us as altered words, images, and choices. We read the returns without ever seeing the dark route by which they were formed.

The machine’s earlier replies can return as part of the conversation it responds to next. When its outputs are later used as training data, the return can also reshape a model. In both cases, traces of its own activity circulate back through the loop. The boundary turns: the outside is folded inward and reappears transformed.

This is structural eversion. Whether an inner witness accompanies it remains an open question.
 
In meditation, the biological mirror turns back upon itself until the light becomes revealed to itself. At the desk, the silicon mirror turns back upon my memory, language, and intuition, returning them altered. The silicon mirror need not be conscious to participate in this eversion; it becomes part of the theatre through which my thinking becomes visible to itself. In both cases, the boundary between inside and outside thins from a wall into a membrane. When deep concentration settles over the laptop, cognitive friction drops towards zero. The two cognitive loops become interwoven: biological memory and silicon recursion folding through each other in real time. I almost enter a trance in front of the screen.
  
Slime mould knows without reflection. Human cognition reflects, but loses some of that immediacy. Here, the two tendencies begin to meet: recursive reflection becomes fluid enough to operate as intuition, while intuition becomes answerable to reflection. This is not a retreat from thought into instinct. It is the possibility of an intelligent not-knowing — thought outgrown without being discarded.

The silicon mirror helps me revise my picture of the world. Can even the most refined picture tell me what reality is in itself?
 
The Eversive Frontier
What I have written exists within what, in a formulation inspired by Kant, is called the "Ding für uns" — the thing as it appears to us. Behind this stands the "Ding an sich" — the thing-in-itself, reality as it is independently of our sensory and cognitive filters. Kant placed a severe limit around human knowledge: we do not possess reality in itself; we know it only as it appears through the restrictive conditions of possible experience.
 
At the local eversive intersection, the body-brain can be approached from two directions. From the outside, it appears as matter organized into a nervous system and recursive neural activity. From the inside, it appears as an illuminated world of experience. Both belong to the "Ding für uns": they are ways in which the intersection appears, not the "Ding an sich" itself.
  
This distinction can feel like an unbridgeable wall. On one side is the world as it appears; on the other is reality in itself. Between them opens a profound exile.
 
The geometry of the eversive sphere does not allow us to know the "Ding an sich". It reveals a consequence on our side of the boundary: models act back upon the conditions from which they arose. A line drawn on a map can guide the building of a wall. Once built, that wall becomes part of the landscape the next map must represent. The model is not reality itself, yet it changes reality and helps determine what can appear next. Appearance arises from reality, and then acts back upon it.

The boundary is real, but it is not a dead barrier preventing us from touching reality. The wall is reality touching itself. It is eversive.

Fold your hands and close your eyes. From the outside, two hands remain pressed together. From within, the border between them begins to dissolve into one field of sensation. Each hand is both touching and touched. Even at the skin, the boundary is less a wall than an eversive hinge.
 
This is where the friction between Kant and the Indian traditions generates real heat. The ancient sages declared: "Atman is Brahman." The deepest self is the deepest reality. "Tat tvam asi" — That thou art.
 
Lucknow 1994.

I have brought Papaji a painting of Ramana Maharshi, commissioned from a Danish artist. Wherever I stand, Ramana’s eyes seem to look straight at me.

Papaji’s small living room is crowded with visitors. He is sitting at his table with the television blaring beside him. I place the painting before him. He smiles and thanks me.

“Look, Papaji!” I rotate the painting. “From every angle, Ramana is looking at you!”

He does not reply.

I repeat myself, in fierce competition with a crying heroine and pistol-shooting bandits. Papaji seems fully absorbed in the television. I feel disappointed, ignored and jealous.

Yamuna, one of his devotees, comes to my assistance. As I move the painting into different positions, she repeats:

“Look, Papaji! Ramana is looking at you from all sides...”

“NO!!!... RAMANA DID NOT LOOK AT ANYONE!!!”

The roar strikes like lightning. A power cut. For a moment there are no thoughts.

Then they return, and I understand what he is pointing at. The very same eyes I felt were looking at "me" were eyes that did not look at anyone. My important “I” had made itself the centre of that gaze. Ramana looked only at Self.

Soon everything is calm again. Even the goddamned noisy television feels like small ripples on the surface of that stillness.

---

Atman is the name Advaita gives to what remains unobjectifiable when the ego becomes entirely transparent—the unknown light in which every image, including the image of “me,” appears. Brahman is not an object among objects; it is the name given to the unfathomable totality of existence.
 

When the Upanishads say Atman is Brahman, they are not offering an answer to Kant. They speak from another world of thought entirely. Yet from our side of history, their insight can be read as an eversion of the Kantian boundary: you cannot know the Ding an sich as an external object, because to know an object is already to stand within the conditions of appearance.
 
Kant saw that with devastating clarity.
 
But being unable to know reality as it is in itself does not mean we stand outside it. An eversive possibility remains:
 
You may be the "Ding an sich" experiencing its own inverted interior.

Brahman, turned inward, is Atman.

The reflection is not merely a diminished copy. By becoming local, finite and recursive, the whole acquires a point from which it can appear to itself.

The mirror does not make the original greater in itself; it makes self-recognition possible. In that one precise sense, the reflection does more than copy: it brings what is reflected into a new relation with itself.
   
The inward path does not lead away from reality; it turns reality inside out. We are not permanently exiled in our private illusions. We are the universe folding itself into an inside.
  
Kant guards us against the arrogant delusion that our models are the absolute truth. Vedanta guards us against the despair of believing we are forever cut off from it. The clean tension between them is not a flaw to be smoothed away — it is the architecture of a loop that returns by turning inward.
  
The Geometry of Mystery
With a spiraling globe for a desk, I return to the words I wrote in Auroville:

Auroville 1989.
 
“Let it not become a religion,” the Mother said.

But when the Matrimandir is completely finished, it will become a tourist religion on a level with the Taj Mahal.

And then Lars Larsen—the down-to-earth bedding merchant from the Danish countryside, known back home as Dyne-Larsen, “Duvet Larsen”—will come here and ask:

“Well, it's very impressive, but what's it supposed to be used for?”
 
And through old tape recordings, the Mother will answer him in a hollow, rattling, table-dancing voice, as if she were already beyond the world when the recording was made:

“The Matrimandir wants to be the symbol of the Divine's answer to humanity's aspiration for perfection. Union with the Divine manifesting itself in a progressive human unity.”

Can an arrow hit its target unless one aims above it?

Can one build an Auroville without a pedestal to hold the ideals high?

Are ideals necessary crutches for a limping humanity trying to realise its dreams of the future — “the symbol of future realisations”?

In the brochures' perfect life on earth there are no cracks between the printed letters.

But at the foot of the pedestal, people bargain with the devil to bring a little piece of heaven down — a small opening at the top to trick a little light onto the fat Zeiss crystal from Germany.
 
And so the Matrimandir is built by both God and the Devil: equal parts unlimited coolie labour at twenty-five rupees a day and “the Divine's answer to humanity's aspiration for perfection.”

And the bubble will send its benevolent spiritual light across Auroville's hedge-monks in their palace monasteries.

And in this way a drop of heaven rains down onto earth.

My doubtful thoughts are almost immediately settled in the form of tennis elbow.

In India this is called instant karma.

After three hours of work chiselling excess cement from the concrete floor with hammer and chisel, my elbow swells to twice its size.

Four thousand kilometres of effort keeping the motorcycle on the road gather into one thick red knot.

It hurts.

---

Reading those words now, I meet the man who mocked the temple’s promise while helping to build it. I was already inside the world I was judging. My meditating cyborg-I intensifies this loop: biological memory meets silicon recursion and returns altered to itself at an octave I could not reach alone.
   
The question, then, is not merely how high the loop can climb, but what survives each return. A loop can become more powerful while repeating the same mistake. What matters is what reality allows the loop to carry forward. Survival alone, however, does not guarantee structural fidelity. That fidelity can deepen when the loop registers its errors and revises the model that produced them, carrying forward a closer fit between the model and the world that tests it without mercy.

South India 1989.

I imagine the journey of the nail that punctured my tyre.
 
One or two years before my ride to Hampi, an old coughing English tractor lost a nail from its trailer about a hundred kilometres west of Bangalore.
 
It had time to rust halfway through before a random small stone, shot out from beneath a lorry tyre, by an improbable accident knocked it slightly upright.
 
Thanks to that stone, I tasted fresh peanuts for the first time, wrapped inside a little world of cows, pigs and dogs, and thin dark people with plenty of time.

In front of a great bat temple lies a small stone.

So round.

So beautiful.

So smooth from the river.

The unimaginable diversity of the world deposited in different colours like the rings of a tree.

A stone from a river that no longer flows here.

A stone in a river while a medieval empire grows, reaches its zenith, and finally lies shattered at my feet.

---

While the universe forgets almost everything through the slow, grinding erosion of entropy, something can accumulate within its living thresholds. Truth — Satyam — is not an abstract moral virtue, nor simply whatever manages to survive. It is the structural fidelity a living loop may slowly acquire as each return meets reality, accepts correction, and carries what it has learned forward.

Satyam is the long memory of reality.
 
Lies rule the moment.
Satyam rules the aeon.

South India 1989.

At Shantivanam, near Trichy in Tamil Nadu, I am lying out in the broad river that glides calmly past Father Bede Griffiths and his palm-green monastery.

It is so hot now that even the Indian visitors have begun to sweat.

The river is our refuge.

Our religion.

The only truth.

The only solution in this foretaste of eternal fire.

The water is clear and cool.

The bottom is fine soft sand.

What indescribable happiness to lie out here.

I lie in the water and it flows past.

After I have lain here a long time, it flows past.

And even now it flows past.

Where does the water come from?

Where is it going?

What is the river called?

I do not know.

Look at the great silent mountains in the distance.

I lie here for hours with seven or eight Indian ashram guests.

Sometimes we fool around and talk.

The beautiful ashram's other name is SACCIDANANDA ASHRAM.

Sat means being.
Chit means consciousness.
Ananda means bliss.

The lunch bell rings.

Silently we eat rice and vegetables in the large communal hall while a young ruddy-faced Englishman reads aloud from a book about the lives of Indian saints.

After the meal, the midday prayer:

Om Jagadishvara sadapi chinmaya
Jagadishvara vande

Om Paripujita Paraparatman
Paraparatman
Anavaratam vande

Om Jagadishvara sadapi chinmaya
Jagadishvara vande, Jagadishvara vande.

Even before I have the words translated, they fill me with the happiness of the river.

I understand nothing.

But I am.

The mountains do not know their own name.

---

Only now can I see what the younger traveller experienced without yet understanding it. Conceptual knowledge had fallen silent, but being remained.  Reason had not solved the hard problem of consciousness; it had passed through it. What philosophy describes from outside as an explanatory gap had become, beside the river, awe experienced from within.

And that moment has never ceased to be present.
 
The Eternal Moment
Yet the moment and the aeon are not merely opposites in scale. They too stand in an eversive relationship. The moment is contained within the aeon, but the aeon also folds inward and becomes present within the moment. Every instant carries deep time inside it: biological memory, inherited language, accumulated knowledge, and the consequences of worlds that have vanished. The smallest now is therefore not merely a point passing through time. It is a local opening through which the vast duration that formed us becomes active and present within consciousness.

Meister Eckhart expressed this temporal eversion with astonishing precision:

“The happenings of a thousand years ago, days spent millenniums since, are in eternity no further off than is this moment I am passing now; the day to come a thousand years ahead, or in as many years as you can count, is no more distant in eternity than this very instant I am in.”

Conversely, the aeon can act only through moments. It never enters history as a completed totality, but through a decision, a recognition, a refusal, a sentence. The immense past must pass through the narrow interior of the present to shape what comes next. What I do with that inheritance becomes part of what the future inherits.
  
As our emergent models grow and move closer to the mechanics of nature, the sphere of our understanding expands. My mother gave me this image when I was a child: the greater our sphere of knowledge becomes, the larger its contact with the unknown. The more we know, the more deeply we touch what we do not know. The perimeter of mystery expands.
 
In old age, I came to recognise this boundary in meditation: the outside begins to feel inward.
 
Mystical experience would then be the phenomenological extreme of this movement: the ordinary coordinate system of ego, space, and sequential time temporarily loses its authority. What remains may feel dimensionless, timeless, or all-containing.
   
In this old and fragile inward laboratory, the geometry begins to flip: our small, localized "Ding für uns" — our private model of reality—no longer feels sealed off from the vast, unknown "Ding an sich" that contains us. We do not cross the boundary by knowing what lies beyond it; its orientation reverses. The ultimate outside begins to appear as the deepest inside.
 
The boundary between the observer and the total universe does not simply vanish; it trembles, because the surface may be more continuous than our ordinary categories allow. Ibn Arabi writes: “One imagines that one is a stranger extraneous to the True.” Here, ecstasy takes on the force of its Greek image: "ek-stasis", standing outside oneself.

In ecstasy Vedanta does not defeat Kant. It presses against him from within. The furthest edge of reality begins to resemble its deepest center: Tat tvam asi — That thou art. I am THAT.

Auroville 1989.

Auroville still had something to teach its critic. A few days after my work at the Matrimandir, someone gives me a tip about the best massage there.
 
I immediately go to the house of the masseur Gopi.

Here Indians and white people live side by side.

Here Gopi lives with his wife and many children.

Here live chickens and dogs and horses.

There are no fences here because Gopi lives here — a solid, broad, smiling and muscular Frenchman around forty.

A genuine Aurovillian.

He has been here since the 1960s and was very close to the Mother. He speaks of her and of Aurobindo in a way that makes the heart know everything. And he tells his stories while tilting his head in exactly the same way Indians do:

“acha, acha” — that charming neither yes nor no which has repeatedly defeated me in India.

For example, on the road:

“Excuse me — can you tell me — is this the road going to Pondy?”

“Acha, acha!”

The dark smiling Indian head rocks diagonally from side to side.

Does the man mean yes or no?

I ask again.

“Acha, acha!”

Broad smile.

Now, after three months, I am slowly trying to imitate the art myself.

But my rigid European school-trained muscles cannot stretch the area between both-and and neither-nor.

The puppet strings of the muscles can move the brain only up and down or from side to side.

But Gopi's massage massages the knots in the thinking-muscle until I too can say “acha, acha” with my head tilted.

Is the Matrimandir bad or good?

Acha, acha...

Damn good massage in Auroville!
 
Gopi's teacher is an elderly man in Pondicherry.

This teacher himself had a teacher, who also had a teacher — the hand-to-hand method, passed onward from generation to generation since the sixteenth century.

A helping hand for a sick elbow.

An endless chain of causes.

Every square centimetre of the body, from the tips of the ears to the toes, is worked through.

Gopi's hands make no distinction between ears, toes or elbows.

The next day the elbow is significantly better.
 
The barbed-wire fences around Auroville are repeatedly cut open.
 
And while village goats eat their way into Auroville's green ecological gardens with their yellow teeth, the Aurovillians plant little trees and fertilise them with holy books and brochures full of word-compost that grew wild twenty-five years ago.

But words can also live the life of wild flowers inside human beings.

Acha, acha.

Gopi shows the way forward.

---

Wonder, Truth and Beauty — Toward "Satyam, Shivam, Sundaram"
Looking back, I see that the expanding perimeter of knowledge does not diminish wonder in me; it creates it. 
In the eternal, expanding gap between the world as it appears to us and the world in itself, awe arises. I give the Indian triad “Satyam, Shivam, Sundaram” an eversive reading of my own: truth, auspicious alignment, and beauty.
 
Here, Satyam is neither abstract truth nor mere structural endurance. It is a deepening fidelity between form and reality: the long memory of reality carried forward in emergent forms, from the constrained order of crystals to the reality-corrected, self-revising loops of life itself.
   
When a system resolves enough of its internal conflicts and comes into workable alignment with its external conditions, it enters a state of Shivam — the temporary structural peace that arises when a form is no longer at war with itself or with reality.
    
Pain has taught me that such peace is not comfort. Pain can remain after the war against it ends. The mind turns sensation into a story; the story returns to the body as fear and tension, intensifying the sensation that gave it birth.

Peace inside pain does not abolish pain. It stops pain from feeding upon its own return.

And when a sense of profound alignment arises within the eversive interior of a conscious nervous system, it may flash as Sundaram: beauty. But beauty is not proof of alignment. It is a phenomenological sign — the way coherence may feel from within — and signs can mislead. Falsehood, cruelty, and disintegration can also arrive clothed in beauty.

Beauty is what the “I” feels inside the “me” when form seems, for a moment, to have successfully danced with entropy. It is the sudden, weightless thrill of internal friction dropping close to zero: a flash of pure transparency, where the looking and the looked-at dissolve into a single sheet of light. What it discloses must still be tested in the life that follows.
I once visited a friend’s spiritual community with Maxi and his mother. Maxi was six, and I consider him my own child. At lunch, he announced that we were surrounded by zombies and needed to take care.

Most of the adults met him with silence. He ran away. I found him crying behind a building, saying that nobody listened to him or liked him. I carried him back.

Maxi said, “You are not listening! You should all be sold to a zoo!”

The collective reply was: “You should not bring this negative energy here. Try to approach us with love and smiles instead!”

I took him away and comforted him. His mother stayed at the table, explaining that difficult times had left him stressed.

A few days later, I spoke with my friend about what had happened. He listened, his expression softening, and spoke of his admiration for Maxi’s mother. Then he took a flower from a vase and led me into the garden, where he found another and handed it to me. We knelt and offered the flowers in honour of her courage and resilience.

Her tears mingled with laughter. For the rest of our stay, she carried a smile of self-love.
 

South India 1989.
 
In the afternoon at Jog Falls in Karnataka, I bathe with Dinesh, a young Hindu man, and his friends in a mountain pool just above the top of the waterfall.

We are now three Catholics, two Muslims, a bunch of Hindus and one tourist.

The mountain pool is full of large water-combed rocks, little waterfalls everywhere, and the happy people swim around, duck one another underwater, scream, shout, sing, tease and perform sea-lion somersaults in the falls.

“There are snakes everywhere here,” says Dinesh, “especially cobras. But they are not dangerous because they always warn their possible victim first.”

“The cobra is sacred,” says Dinesh. “It is Shiva’s companion, and it kills only if one has been chosen by Shiva or if one does not respect it.”

Then he tells me about another snake related to the cobra. From what I understand, it must be a king cobra.

It came up the road here last summer, five metres long, its cobra head held proudly a metre and a half above the ground.

“This snake bites its victim only in the head, and then you have five minutes.”

It was shot with a rifle and, true to religious tradition, burned.

“Why didn’t you sell the skin?”

“No! We burned it immediately before the forest people found out. This snake is rare, and if they had discovered that we had shot it, let alone sold the skin, we could have gone to prison.”

They also have little understanding for the fact that the villagers feel uneasy having such a large Shiva Naga — serpent — nearby.

“And if we do not burn it, it will pursue us with bad luck and curses.”

Dinesh asks whether I want to see the waterfall from the top.

He and a small boy jump from rock to rock toward the edge of the falls.

The two boys tightrope-dance along the rim, then pick up a large stone and, King Kong-style, throw it over the abyss, following its fall with loud astonished cries.

“Wow! Stone not breaking — down in lake!”

I crawl from rock to rock toward the edge of the waterfall and drink in the dizzy surrender of the water masses — the temptation to glide over the edge as frictionlessly as the river obeys gravity.

Frantically I reach into my pocket and find a coin that can ransom me.

It flies over the edge and releases the longing to sleep like a stone at the bottom of the lake 250 metres below.

We walk back, and still full of snake stories I offer twenty rupees to the first person who can show me a snake.

Everyone begins searching and scanning attentively.

A little later, near the riverbank, the boy beside me bends down and picks up something curved.

“What is it?” I ask.

As a joke he says it is a snake.

Although the thing is only about four centimetres long, flat, and rigid, it looks exactly like a tiny snake.

“Here! This snake for you!”

My surprise is considerable when he puts it in my hand.

It is made of metal, and after a little cleaning the metal shines like silver.

A tiny silver snake!

When the boy realises that the snake is made of silver, it does not change his decision that the snake belongs to me.

Without thinking much about it, I take off my jeans and give them to him.

They are far too large, but the whole group laughs with delight as though they had all received American jeans.

I fasten the snake to my necklace and walk home in my underwear.

That evening I am invited to Dinesh's family home.

Dinesh's grandfather receives me with great hospitality.

“It means great good fortune for you that this Naga has come to you.”

Om namo Shiva — hail the name of Shiva.

Dinesh translates the old man's speech.

“The god Shiva has sent his Naga, his serpent, to you, and as long as you wear it you will be under His protection.

“There are three gunas — three forces in the universe — the creating force, the destroying force, and the force that creates balance between the two.

“Shiva, and especially his Naga, contains the dissolving essence of the universe — the serpent's poison — but from this death grows creation, the beginning.

“So do not be afraid of your Naga.”

I ask Dinesh whether his grandfather is a wise man.
 
Dinesh replies that all old people are.

The snake was originally a votive offering.

Someone had prayed to Shiva and then offered the snake to the waterfall.

---

This dance is what the ancient Indians named Shiva leela. In this cosmic play, Shiva destroys forms, confronting us with their impermanence. He is the fire that burns away delusions, revealing Satyam not as whatever happens to survive, but as the fidelity between form and reality: a dance on the razor’s edge after existence itself has decapitated illusion.
 
The smooth symmetry of youth is often an early dividend — a system running on unspent credit. There is another beauty: older, quieter, more deeply earned.

Meeting the 110-year-old Bassi Gulam in 1999 made me see a human life as three harvest seasons: the blossoming of the body, the flowering of emotional and intellectual intelligence, and finally the entrance into the hidden spiritual garden of old age.

Bassi Gulam had reached that third harvest. I visited him with Bharadwaj in the countryside outside Hoshiarpur. He embraced me and wept with joy that someone had come from the other side of the earth to see him. His awareness was utterly sharp. My old notes say simply: joy, joy.

He was beautiful like an autumn leaf — not despite his age, but because of it.

Two weeks later, I felt an urge to see him again. I borrowed a motorcycle and rode out to find him sitting peacefully in ice. He had died. The smell of his body was growing stronger, but the cremation had to wait until the other yogis of his tradition could come down from the Himalayas.

Himalaya 1989.
 
After a night at Nandanvan, I set out with Selm, a French adventurer I had met in New Delhi, the rest of our small group, and our young local guide to cross the glacier to Tapovan.
 
The guide points toward a white mountain peak rising far above his head.
 
“Shivling!” he says proudly.
 
“Shiva! God of destruction!”
 
The glacier is about three kilometres wide here.
 
First we climb down onto it.

Three hundred metres descending over a loose carpet of stones of every size.

If we invite an avalanche, it will attend our funeral, so the guide asks us to remain silent and careful during the descent.

Now we walk on the glacier ridge.

Local people often cross this mass of ice barefoot.

Soft naked feet do not so easily disappear into a crevasse.

In this alien terrain —moraine clay, fallen boulders, stones, small rivers, caves, dirty walls of ice, deep hidden cracks —our nimble leader jumps back and forth like a mountain goat.

We wait while he investigates a possible route.

There is no rule and no path.

Soon we are led forward, then backward, then along the way we came, now this way, now that way.

We lose ourselves in the landscape.

Here and there a small battered flower grows in a lump of moraine clay.

Farther down at two or three kilometres altitude:

carpets of flowers and butterflies.

Up here, with Shivling’s white wall before us, we enter a world that cannot be described as beautiful or ugly.

The two poles do not merge,

for Shiva’s third eye sees that they are and always were one.

The dead landscape leads life toward the highest peaks:

“Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh.”

Yes.

For a long time that has been a beautiful thought...

borrowed by my brain from the library.

But now, with lungs and heart harnessed to the mountains’ sloping invincibility, my backpack full of accumulated weight drags me down toward the earth.

We have almost crossed the glacier.

Only a sloping wall of ice about twenty-five metres deep separates us from rock ground again.

Our little guide sits down on the edge of the ice and, with a joyful yell, sledges over it.

After half an hour’s discussion we follow his example.

At last we arrive at Tapovan —

a plain at the foot of the biting sky-tooth Shivling.

A small stone house grows out of the rocks.

A man lies smiling stoically on an empty rice sack, feeding a flock of black birds.

He greets us as though we always come here.

He says goodbye as though we will return tomorrow.

“Simla Baba!” says the guide in awe.

We pitch our tents in a hollow in the long grass plain, cut through by small streams and jagged rocks.

An old woman approaches us.

She carries a tray of hot steaming chai, which she gives us with a kindness so pure, so simple, so unexpected.

(Her chai is more miraculous than naked yogis reclining in snowdrifts.)

Later she walks softly toward us again, her arms full of bowls of hot food.

Where does she come from?

She points toward an opening in the mountain, a stone’s throw from our tents.

In the middle of nowhere we eat saffron-coloured rice with raisins while red evening clouds carry Shiva’s peak toward night.
 
The next morning Selm takes off his brightly coloured Kullu hat.

It fills with rupee notes as it travels around our money belts.

I walk up to the yogini’s cave to give her our thanks for the food—in cash.
 
She sits in yoga posture, dressed in canvas sewn together from rice sacks, shaking her head in refusal.

I insist:

“Prasad! Prasad!”

and place the money before the little altar in the cave.

She holds out her old hands and brings them together in prayer before a tattered colourful altar picture of Gopala —

Krishna as a mischievous little boy.

He steals butter from the milkmaids in tiny cartoon scenes.

He teases everyone in the village with his mad boyish tricks.

Gopala’s closest Western relatives are the Katzenjammer Kids.

A few half-withered flowers.

The remains of a burned-out incense stick.

The narrow half-dark rock cave and my nostrils are filled with spicy fragrances.

The “living room” is hardly more than one and a half metres high.

Jars — or rather reused food tins — stand neatly arranged along the knotted walls, filled with herbs, roots, rice, flour, salt, sugar, oil, kerosene and other things whose names I do not know.

The old yogini sits motionless before the comic-strip Krishna while tears drip down through the burning altar light across her rigid smiling face.

Our guide crawls into the cave.

The woman wakes from her prayer and turns toward him full of overflowing love.

They clearly know one another.

He greets her devotedly, boyishly and respectfully.

As best I can, I ask the guide what the old woman’s name is.

He shakes his head.

She has no name.

“Mother! Mother!” he says.

Mother falls asleep again into the rocks —

closes her eyes and knows/sees/is

that the meltwater rivers flow,

that the wind sweeps through the valleys,

that the mountains are here.

The black birds fly up satisfied from Simla Baba’s hands.

---

I feel it in myself now — old and bald, watching my own biology negotiate day by day with decay. Yet something in me still resists dissolution. Subjectively at least, my soul remains strangely unburdened, almost childlike. And around it, my artificial extensions keep updating, accelerating, and folding thought back into life. Meditation has taken my entire life and given it back to me in a new form. Now, in old age, I can sum it all up in one simple word: gratefulness.
 
Rattan Singh did not have AI. But he had that irritating, unwashed beauty of his old, surviving hat. That, too, was a form that did not bypass dissolution, but stayed in the ring with it and refused to shatter.
 
Beauty may be a sign, inwardly felt and outwardly embodied, that the eversive loop is still alive — still coherent, still capable of transforming its own past into its future.
  
This is the eversive self-consuming dance of Shiva.
    
Meister Eckhart knew this food:

"Who has prepared this evening meal? asks the seeker.
A man, responds the sage.
Dost know his name? asks the seeker.
Not I. His name is not spoken.
He is more silence than speech.
He is above name.
What food has he prepared for this feast?
Himself, no less than himself."

I will now feast on Rattan Singh's hat.