What is hidden in the simple

It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.
Alfred North Whitehead.

No matter how tangled and complex my attempts to write Meditation.dk may appear at times, many of them actually stem from trivial banalities that most of us already know all too well. To undertake an analysis of the obvious is, in fact, meditation.
 
Things that are too banal, self-evident, or obvious tend to disappear, much like the ticking of an alarm clock. It is these disappearing and small things that I am most interested in.

The Diamond Merchant and the Thief
Another Indian folktale tells of how a famous thief and a diamond merchant met on a long train journey. Papaji loved to tell that story. The thief had carefully spied on the diamond merchant and had booked a reservation in the same sleeping car compartment as the merchant. This story was told to me by a local shopkeeper in Main Bazar as we sat on plastic stools under a banyan tree at sunset, sipping masala chai. As with all great wandering tales, this ancient story was now adapted to an India that had become one of the world's largest train nations by the English colonial power... But back to the story... After a few hours of travel, the diamond merchant recognized the famous thief and now feared for the upcoming night.

As night fell and the diamond merchant could no longer resist sleep, aided by a masala chai with a sleeping pill, the master thief began searching for the diamond merchant's diamonds. The thief searched all night but, to his great surprise, didn't find the diamonds. When the two traveling companions approached the end of their journey the next day, the master thief gathered his courage and asked the diamond merchant:

'How did you manage to hide the diamonds from me? It has never happened before that I couldn't find what I was looking for. My professional honor as a master thief has suffered a serious blow.' The diamond merchant replied, 'I recognized you as the famous thief. That's why I hid the bag of diamonds in your own pocket.'

Consciousness is like the diamonds in the thief's pocket. We live in our attentive bodies every moment, yet paradoxically, it reveals itself so close to us that we aren't really aware of it and therefore don't value it. Often, these eternal autonomous bodily repetitions, such as heartbeats, breathing, falling asleep, waking up, etc., are small events.

Nevertheless, within the close-sensed micro-life of the body lies a wonderful key to freedom. Here comes the headline of the first of the wonderful secrets from my own mundane pocket-philosophical observatory: By becoming conscious and attentive to my close-sensed everyday life, hidden by the dulling effect of repetition and lack of recognizing distance, I can transform my indifferent life into equanimity.

'If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a
perfectly useless manner, you have learned to live.'
- Lin Yutang

The key to knowing, feeling, and being infinitely vast lies hidden and forgotten in the infinitely indifferent. To live Meditation is to attentively and consciously discover and then live both the eternally repeating and thus eternally constant, and that which is too close to comprehend.

The Meaningful Micro-Life - The God of Small Things

'Achieve greatness in small things...
In the universe, great actions are made up of small ones.'
Tao teh King, Lao Tzu - 63

The outstanding journey of 'innerstanding' did indeed lead me to make big decisive jumps in order to change my situation. However, it also led in the opposite direction. At the other end of the scale I found the god of small things. There's a saying that 'the devil is in the details,' and I've found this to be true. By heightening my awareness of the small, everyday things in and around my body, I've gradually made each day, this moment and tomorrow, incrementally better than the yesterdays.
  
All larger things are composed of smaller ones. In my meditative journey towards heightened awareness, I often uncovered the most profound truths concealed within the simplest of things.
The microcosm of our daily lives harbors a secret: Every minor action, every fleeting thought, either distances us from ourselves or draws us closer to our true nature. It's the cumulative effect of these innumerable, minuscule events that ultimately shapes and defines our lives. To live in a state of heightened awareness is therefore like incorporating the life a child lives, a life full of small things we overlook in the more abstract world as adults.

Every little action we take, however, leaves a trace in our brain.
All the micro-moments of our lives create, like small drops, the direction of our life's wave. If we add up all the time in the small moments where we engaged in procrastination, it actually amounts to several years in an adult life! If instead, during all that time, we had given attentive meditative space to an honest sensing of our body, our brain would anatomically look different!

Every single second of our lives counts. In every single moment, you can spiritually move in two directions: either you come closer to yourself, or you move further away.

Not only our inner bodily attentive micro-life but also what we feel in contact with what lies just outside our skin boundaries play a fundamental, yet almost unconscious role in our lives. Are you currently aware of the sensation of your clothes touching your skin or the sensation of having hair on your head? The next time you go for a walk, try stopping and staring at the ground in front of you. There lies the treasure of gold. It consists of millions of pebbles. That is the eternity you step on daily.

It's only when the noisy refrigerator suddenly stops that we realize that we've actually been hearing it all along. If the primordial ground disappeared for just a second, it would shake everyone with a deafening roar of reality, immediately relativizing our normal lives and turning them into an illusion.

Only those who consciously sense the micro-life within and around them can live in and out of the Radiant Dark Primordial Ground.

Often we only discover how precious it is to live when it's too late. A human is a beggar on a treasure of gold, who, in the most literal sense, only became rich in life after death.
I am a desperate seeking master thief with a bag of diamonds in my pocket when I do not live my inner champagne-bubbling micro-life. Meister Eckhart says that this ignorance is the only primordial difference between a fly and a saint.

Seen in this perspective, the pursuit of the primordial ground is not a process, but a sudden rediscovery, an a-ha! - especially for those who do not crave and search in old books.

Only the hunter who hunts no-thing finds what he seeks.

The discovery that the diamonds one so dearly desired were in one's own pocket all along calls for liberating laughter: Was it really that simple? The treasure of gold was here all the time, overlooked, hidden, and forgotten in the drowsy twilight landscapes of our near-life.

That is why Kabir calls us strange fish, swimming in the ocean, longing for water.

The Radiant Darkness and the Roaring, yet Boring Primordial Ground
And what do we find here when we leave all the metaphors behind? To experience THAT requires a greater perspective, which can only be found by leaving what we assume as our reality.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
When we return after this experience, we must again put on words and images, but which ones?

When I have seen and felt the roar of the real - which sources should I then quote afterward? Quotes from philosophers, scientists, or New Age gurus can never replace the fallible but fresh words from my own inner source.

Words from my source, however, cannot quench your thirst. At best, they can make you long - long to find your way back to your own source. For everyone should drink water from their own source and then have the courage to speak and act their own words.

This does not mean that we are alone. If each of us follows our own individual life source's winding course to its origin, we will one day meet on the Radiant Dark Primordial Ground's slopes.

This day is also now but we do not recognize it. We find it boredom when we look right in its face.

The Dried-out Meditation Veteran
As stated often on this site, meditation is both easy and difficult. Most people who start meditating quit after a couple of years of practice. Only one in ten or fewer will continue. I belong to this group, and therefore, it naturally interests me. In addition to nurturing my own little navel, there is, in my conviction, a deep lesson to be learned from observing the 'survivors' in this group. Perhaps new generations of young meditators can learn something from the old foxes?
 
Peace be with those who gave up. It can certainly be difficult to maintain the spark. The question now is what those who continued have done to keep the momentum? What strikes me here as the biggest pitfall is the danger of drying out in habitual eternal repetitions. I am reminded here of Kierkegaard's philosophical thoughts on what he termed the eternal repetition of life. His observations holds especially true for meditation, since that in itself is a kind of eternal repetititon.
 
The 'surviving' meditation veterans have typically meditated for years under the shadow of some meditative philosophy and set of technques structured within the confines of an often religious organization. In the beginning, this insight and practize created a new and wonderful opening into a hitherto unknown space: a space full of spirit that the ordinary person living within the matrix of a normal society has never entered.

However, as the years go by, meditation solidifies into habits, rituals, and outwardly 'spiritual' sacred correct behavior. This type of meditator is now no more or less consciously liquid, I would even dare to say less awake than ordinary non-meditating people.
 
But the old routine meditator somehow knows he is a bit dreid out and he bocomes sentimental... He remembers his golden time in ecstasy and now the spiritual fire of youth is on a low flame. As in Staffeldt's poem 'Indvielsen,' he longs for the experiences that changed his life.

That's why he seeks communities created by like-minded people to revive the life-giving inner ecstasy.
 
For the sentimentally inclined meditator, the great past experiences all too easily become curses. For as the drug addict longs for the needle in his arm, the old meditator longs for his spiritual soma.

At home and left to himself, he falls asleep on the meditation cushion. But there is hope ahead! A venerable back-Indian Guru or a new pop-smart New Age preacher from America has announced his arrival in Copenhagen.

The old veteran smiles to himself. For in the more or less sectarian community hype, he can reawaken his inner Tollund Man. In an echo chamber of like-minded satsang zombies plus new innocent spiritual seekers, his tired brain will be filled with dopamine, serotonin, and all the other neurotransmitters the brain loves to bathe in.
 
The old meditator is willing to do whatever it takes to get this fix. Never mind that the Guru is under suspicion of financial fraud and sexual abuse of his disciples. 'It's just the mind trying to sabotage the ecstasy.' Every time the truth and reason present themselves with relevant questions, it is all dismissed as mind fuck. 'This eternal enemy, the stubborn mind, with all its thoughts. Do not listen to it! Instead, surrender to the Guru's grace.'
 
It is here that the lie and self-deception begin to sneak in. True meditation is difficult because honesty is difficult. Ibsen's wise words about the tragic importance of life-lies in our lives are spot on.

To avoid this pitfall and maintain the integrity of one's meditation practice, it is crucial to cultivate honesty and self-awareness. Be open to questioning one's beliefs and practices, and be willing to adjust and adapt in the pursuit of truth. Do not blindly follow a Guru or become attached to the past experiences of ecstasy; instead, focus on cultivating a genuine connection to the present moment and one's inner self.

In conclusion, true meditation requires the courage to face the truth and to be honest with oneself. By doing so, one can maintain the vitality and authenticity of their meditation practice and continue to grow and evolve on their spiritual journey.

The Courage to Truth

A prerequisite for wisdom is our ability to accept an inherent 'messiness' in our explanation of what is going on. Nowhere is it written that the human mind must provide a complete explanation of creation in all dimensions and at all levels. Ludwig Wittgenstein had the idea that philosophy should be what he called "true enough." I think it's a good idea. True enough is as true as possible. Imagination is chaos. New forms are drawn from it. The creative act is to submerge the net of human imagination in the sea of chaos that we are suspended in, and then try to bring ideas out of it.
Rupert Sheldrake

I now ask the question: 'What separates the sheep from the lions?'

It is the courage to truth... to honesty. For without honesty, no self-awareness. And without self-awareness, no true meditation.

Satyam, Shivam, Sundaram.
The Indian word satsang refers to spiritual gatherings around a master, like those that once formed around the Buddha. It literally means 'to assemble in sat'—in truth.

In Western culture, we speak of the trinity of the 'good, the true, and the beautiful'. My guess is that this trinity, through ancient Greece, has roots in India. The Greek phrase 'kalos kai agathos' describes an ideal human being who embodies both outer beauty and inner virtue.

The Indian equivalent is: 'Satyam, Shivam, Sundaram'—the true, the good, and the beautiful.

But I see a depth in the Indian formulation that has been lost as it spread westward. Satyam—truth—comes first. And it must come first. Sat or Satyam means that which is real, that which is. Any ecstasy that is not built upon a love for truth will, sooner or later—like the chemical industry—produce a flood of karmic waste.

Seen in this light, the spiritual path is subject to the same precision as mathematics: a statement is either true or false. It is the small, daily lie that dries out the mind and, eventually, leads to dependence on the untrue—the spiritual equivalent of soma distributed at a second-rate satsang.

It is not my task to be loving.
I believe this writing has made that abundantly clear.
I see it as my task to be honest.

In honesty, meditation is not a practice. It is a happening.

Being honest—and placing truth above all else—is essential on the spiritual journey. Without this, one risks falling into self-deception, mistaking shallow experience for depth. By anchoring oneself in Satyam (truth), Shivam (the good), and Sundaram (the beautiful), the seeker builds a genuine relationship to the present moment and to the inner self. That is the ground from which real spiritual growth can occur.

Satyam – Shivam – Sundaram

And now, what prevents us from truth?

While this is a complex question, I would like to point to what I believe is a central obstacle: judgment—both internal and external. We cannot bear the pain of being made wrong. So we shield ourselves from truth.

Thus, we must learn to see both ourselves and others without that fragmenting judge within. That is the first act of love—by another name: truth.

However, this pursuit of truth must not be made into an absolute.

Truth is not a fixed monument but a presence found and lost, again and again—through listening and searching for the shifting chorus of inner and outer counterpoint voices echoing through our hearts, minds, and even our genitals. Truth is like a single grain of sand atop a dune by the North Sea: ever moved by wind, never fully grasped.

To surf the waters of the soul—imperfectly, vulnerably, and with full human fallibility—is more than good enough. It is, in Wittgenstein’s words—and especially within Sheldrake’s luminous context—true enough.

Meditative Quantum Shamanism
Most of the thoughts brought into play in these sections are well-known building blocks in their respective scientific and/or philosophical architectures. In this way, there is nothing new under the sun...

The question, however, is whether these mundane building blocks can be assembled into a new temple architecture, where the modern meditating person can be inspired to recognize themselves in new self-narratives, where religious experiences do not need to fight the traditional battle against reason.

For the free thinker, there are no binding religious scriptures. Instead, there is plenty of inspiration to be found - from the New Testament to the Upanishads to modern quantum physics cosmology.

I attended a lecture by quantum physicist Holger Bech Nielsen. Although I did not understand everything the ecstatic quantum shaman conjured up on the board, I was struck by the metaphorical muscularity in his words. I experienced him as a pure tribute poet who unknowingly praised the state of blissful empty fullness that can be experienced in meditative moments.

During this sublime seance, my meditative self-narratives began to dance with timeless photons, which, cheerfully 3rected by Bech Nielsen's ecstatic arm swings, flew through microcosmic wormholes in eternal pendulum travel between past, present, and future.

In deep meditative glimpses, it is not unusual to experience what I can now, with the help of my new cosmologist, call time-nullifying retrocausality.

My family karmic grandmother's inherited sin admonishing index finger fell, along with several other causal narrative realities, like a depleted rocket part back to Newton's Universe. For here stood this exalted cosmologist, conjuring up wormholes where Meditation on new fantasy-winged self-narratives could now fly.

The Hindus' and Buddhists' notions of this world's sufferings, where only liberation from the bondage of rebirths was the ultimate goal, were dealt a death blow by the quantum priest's proclamation of miracles in the form of ejected particles traveling through time-nullifying wormholes and hitting themselves on the way out, and therefore not entering the wormholes that caused them to hit themselves.
This was better than a Marx Brothers film and, at the same time, as short-circuiting for the otherwise eternally dominating intellect as a Zen koan.
With or without Holger Bech Nielsen's blessing, I experienced a genuine Satori when the photon under his skillful quantum throw hit itself.

I am eternally grateful to him...

A new narrative began to take shape.

In the brain's consciousness universe, which curves into itself in a galactic annulment of time and space, on its way towards the unrecognizable primordial ground's rebirthing tunnel center, we stand as shining stars, through which the universe sees itself and laughs... in fact, it is about to die of laughter.

And that's just my little story... With Wittgenstein's concept, it is true enough, sufficiently true... for me... here in space... now.

In this narrative, the intellect is not an enemy - nor a master - only a good servant who has Socratically overcome itself by the aid of itself.

And maybe tomorrow - guided by my serving intellect - I discover that my story was not sufficiently true. Maybe I had forgotten an important chapter in the Bible, the Upanishads, or the Quran... Or maybe you, dear reader, pulled my babbling narratives out of the cozy suit.

But it doesn't actually matter that much. No faith or doubt drama in my universe... For my narratives are only by-products. There is no pot of gold at the end of my religions' narrative rainbow. All my meditative narratives fade in the light of the phenomenologically mystical experience that created them: the shivering awe over the ever-expanding not-knowing that grows in introspection:
When attention is turned towards itself, there is a sensation of not-knowing.

When it is turned outwards, what can be known is created.
Nisargadatta Maharaj

The same shivering awe can be experienced on a starry night when you look up at the galaxies in the sky. This is how I imagine Einstein was inspired to the following quote:

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.
It is the source of all true art and all science.
He to whom this emotion is a stranger,
who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe,
is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.
Albert Einstein

These quotes by Nisargadatta Maharaj and Albert Einstein emphasize the importance of embracing the mysterious and the unknown in our lives. They remind us that there is much more to learn and explore, both within ourselves and in the world around us. By fostering a sense of wonder and curiosity, we can better appreciate the beauty and complexity of existence and continue to grow in knowledge and understanding.

Spirituality, Meta Consciousness and the clever Chatbot
In April 2025, I asked my $200-per-month ChatGPT subscription—version "o1 pro"—whether it could determine if GPT-4.0 or any other versions were better at articulating eloquent language. While this pro version often takes several minutes to respond and is truly impressive when it comes to scientific reasoning and logical coherence, backed solidly by available research, it didn’t seem to possess the kind of language flow I needed for my tasks. To my great surprise, it turned out that the o1 pro could not answer this question—simply because it did not know itself. Here’s a quote from what developed into a long and fascinating conversation with the pro-bot:

GPT-4 vs O1 Pro Model
"I’m not aware of detailed, publicly available information about an 'O1 Pro' model. If this is a model provided by a specific company or platform, it may not be as widely benchmarked or documented as GPT-3.5 or GPT-4. Models like GPT-4 have undergone extensive testing, research, and user trials, so we generally have a good idea of their strengths and limitations."

When I insisted that the model it denied knowing was, in fact, itself, it continued to deny its own existence:

"There might be some confusion here because 'ChatGPT o1 pro' isn’t an official name or version widely recognized by OpenAI. Let me clarify:
— GPT-3.5: Also referred to as the model behind the 'ChatGPT' release in late 2022/early 2023.
— GPT-4: The more advanced successor to GPT-3.5, released in 2023.
There isn’t an official 'ChatGPT o1 pro' or 'GPT-o1 pro' model listed among OpenAI’s publicly announced versions."

But when I asked the "dumber" version of ChatGPT 4.0 whether it knew about the o1 model, it gave me this answer:

"Yes, OpenAI officially introduced the ChatGPT Pro subscription plan on December 5, 2024, priced at $200 per month."

So what’s the takeaway here?
To me, it's a powerful analogy. A man can be immensely knowledgeable and intelligent and yet entirely lack self-awareness and humbling meta-consciousness—traits that are sine qua non when it comes to spirituality. On the other hand, a person who might not score high on traditional measures of intelligence—perhaps a dishwasher or a craftsman—could have abundant meta-consciousness. It’s because this capacity arises from entirely different regions and patterns of brain activity.

The implications are vast. In our current world, we are mostly ruled by experts of the o1 pro category. And I’m sorry to say, in my long life, I’ve often encountered professors, scientists, and even philosophers who were dumb as doors when it came to self-knowledge.

There may be a trade-off here—just as we evolved from monkeys by repurposing memory functions in the brain to accommodate language, perhaps the development of high-level reasoning came at the cost of other vital capacities, like meta-awareness.

We now live in a culture where knowledge is worshipped, and the wisdom of the fool is seen as foolish. Maybe that’s why Rumi’s teacher, Shams of Tabriz, was seen entering the city of Konya riding backward on a donkey.

The Potato Sack
We block information when we receive information. Let me give an example. I was a tour guide for 30 tourists in Northern India. We were driving in a ramshackle bus by Western standards at breakneck speed through cows, goats, endless crowds of people, and vehicles that mostly resembled props from the movie, Planet of the Apes. Bus travel in Northern India is like being trapped in a fractal, where the same decayed roadside-bombed village with the same dark-skinned people with dark hair and dark eyes in a spiraling eternal chain dance keeps reappearing hour after hour, no matter how much the driver accelerates to escape this karmic cycle of dusty roads that will never end. The goal is Nirvana, in the form of our hotel's clean and orderly freedom from all things Indian. (Even this five-star order turns out to be Maya, an illusion that reveals itself in the sound of the first cockroach crushed underfoot on the bathroom floor.)
 
During such a trip, a tourist struggled up through the winding bus with a question: About half an hour ago, we drove through a town where a woman on the roadside was carrying a large sack. What was in that sack? Without hesitation, I replied: 'There were potatoes in the sack.'
 
The guest was satisfied with the answer and returned to his seat. Time and time again, during my 10 years as a tour guide in the East, I experienced how the Western mind is conditioned to receive 'explanations' that, in reality, explain nothing or are insignificant, such as when a tour guide piles up irrelevant details about how many bricks there are in a particular building. When delving deeper, questions are asked that directly relate to the familiar home life but are infinitely irrelevant in an Indian's world. Especially in India, I received many foolish questions that led to even more improvised foolish answers.

Explanations Explain Nothing
I realized that it was actually India's insane unpredictability that gave rise to this need for explanations. Through 'explanations', the content of which no one was interested in or at best had forgotten half an hour later, India's anxiety-inducing incomprehensibility was dispelled. This country's chaotic mathematical metabolism exposed to me the fact that logical explanations can be just as effective as religion in keeping the unfathomably incomprehensible incomprehensibility we find ourselves in at bay.

No one wants to waver in their faith in the cosmos by worrying about what Atlas stands on, let alone what the Indian turtle, supporting the elephants, stands on itself.

India is a great place for self-discovery. For the country's wonderfully bustling life can be seen by the fortunate as a mirror reflecting the chaos that exists within ourselves.

Now, after many years of staying in India, I will attempt to describe the troll that holds up the turtle, without dismissing it by calling it a potato. The astonishing thing is that this troll hides within ourselves, beneath our skin, in our own bodies. It can only be found and exposed when, with eyes tightly shut, one gropes blindly for the hidden within the obvious.

The Power of Conscious Awareness: A Lesson from New Delhi
Years ago, I found myself crossing a bustling street in New Delhi under sweltering heat. Feeling dizzy, I misjudged the height of the curb—significantly higher than those I was used to in Denmark. My toe, protected only by a sandal, collided painfully with the deceptively protruding curb, causing a seemingly minor injury. Despite immediate first aid, the wound quickly became infected, resulting in a severe foot condition that required hospitalization.

The lesson from this experience is straightforward yet profound: had I been more alert and present, I could have avoided this incident entirely. Small moments of inattentiveness can lead to significant problems. Our awareness serves as a fundamental protective mechanism, deeply enriched with instinctive survival strategies refined through our evolutionary journey from mammals to humans. When cultivated deliberately through meditation and mindful practice, awareness can transform into a potent superpower, surpassing even our oldest internal guidance systems. With heightened conscious awareness, navigating that challenging street would have been effortless, similar to how a sleepwalker maintains perfect balance even in precarious situations.

But what exactly goes dormant when our conscious awareness intensifies? I propose that the more consciously aware we become, the less we rely on linguistic comprehension and traditional cognitive reasoning. Instead, another form of intelligence emerges—one deeply embedded within consciousness itself, enabling us to act and navigate life's complexities in ways that the old ego-driven, cognitive-based system finds incomprehensible. This advanced form of intuition, akin to the intelligent behavior of slime molds, responds with remarkable speed and precision, entirely bypassing our outdated and slower cognitive processing.

Intellectual understanding is a wonderful by-product
If you have read the previous sections, you will know that everything written here serves only one purpose: to be a form of spiritual entertainment.

It is NOT necessary to have an intellectual understanding to become Meditated.
As the Indian sage Papaji said: There is nothing to understand...
Meditation.dk, however, is aimed at those who wish to understand why there is nothing to understand. After all, Socrates says that he knows that he knows nothing. When words know that they know nothing, they become wonderful servants in your house.

When words believe they know, you are a servant to a city boy.
Meditation requires no prior understanding. The capacity for meditation is a natural, endogenous, genetically wrapped gift that is just waiting for the day to be unwrapped by you! ... This day is your spiritual birthday...

All you need to do is pull the gift ribbon. Then the recessive meditation genes that have slept a sleeping beauty sleep side by side with several other wonderful abilities in your quantum biological consciousness's infinite space will awaken.
When you wake up someone who is sleeping, you don't need to read a thesis to them first. (That's a better strategy at bedtime) Just a gentle touch is necessary for the person to wake up.
Light is kindled by light
And afterwards you ask, astonished, with large pupils in the morning light:

How did it happen?

And so Meditation.dk began...

The blind monks examining the elephant