The Question of Now

Reflections on time, consciousness, maya, meditation, psychedelics, and artificial intelligence

Yesterday I met with Akshay for a conversation that approached spirituality from a number of different angles. I suspect it will be of interest to anyone spiritually inclined who feels a mix of curiosity and disorientation in response to our weird and wonderful moment in cultural history. He’ll be sharing the video soon on his podcast. I’m grateful for the invitation to speak with him, and for the conditions he helped create for slow thinking. A certain pacing is a prerequisite for a dialogue to have any hope of touching the real. It wasn’t that we spoke for some epic amount of time, it was just the quality of the attention brought to the time we shared.

The following reflections tightly track the transcript of our conversation.

I always try to have a sense of geography when I speak to someone. It’s easy to think we all just coexist in cyberspace, floating in a frictionless “now,” but we don’t. We’re embodied. We’re somewhere. Akshay was in Ontaria, Canada. I’m in Northern California. Even when we’re mediated by screens, we’re still situated. This quickly opened out into the weirder question of what “now” even is.

Relativity, Quantum Theory, the Flowing Now

Akshay mentioned Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time and the way relativity scrambles our ordinary assumptions about simultaneity. I read Rovelli’s book back in 2018, when I posted this vlog about it:

There is no way to physically define a global now. There is no universal present that can be measured and shared as the same instant across distance. It is mind-bending to inhabit the frame of relativity theory. And yet, relativity is not the only frame we can inhabit, even in physics. We also have quantum theory. And if you really want to understand non-unitarity and what collapse means, it’s hard to do so without bringing in irreversibility, directionality, and flow.

That word—flow—it’s why process philosophy matters to me. Reality does not show up as a set of fixed things so much as a creative advance, a becoming, an unfolding. Even the now is a flow. It’s not an instant. To say it’s a flow is to bring time back into our thinking, though not necessarily clock-time. Something more like duration, or creative flux. Reality as I experience it is a process of revelation. Not revelation as a one-time religious event, but revelation as the ongoing way experience discloses itself, moment by moment.

We only ever think, or feel, or will, or do anything in the present. So when Akshay me asked, plainly, “What is this moment?” it felt like not only the right but the only honest place to begin thinking slowly.

One way of approaching the moment is to skeptically peel back layers: You can keep saying, “That’s not the whole of me. There’s also this.” You ripple outward: ego, family, country, species, stardust. And still you never arrive at a final layer, because experience is new every moment. That’s crucial. The point isn’t merely that there are more layers to analyze. It’s that there can never be a final veil to pull back, because the “peeling” is not just an epistemic activity—it’s what reality is doing. The flow peels. That creative flow is always underway.

The Power and Limits of Natural Science in the Study of Consciousness

This is where I tried to be precise about the value of science. Modern science is a powerful means of accurately and honestly describing and predicting the patterns that hold through this flux. We should take science very seriously. But science can’t tell us who we are. It can’t tell us what we’re doing here or what we should do next with all this knowledge. It can’t even tell us why there should be knowers in the universe. Science presupposes conscious experience. It presupposes knowers. So when people insist science must explain consciousness, I find myself pushing back. I don’t think that’s a scientific question. It’s a spiritual question.

We moved into Frank Jackson’s Mary’s Room thought experiment as a way of naming that limit. Mary can know everything there is to know about wavelengths of light without knowing what it is like to see red. The thought experiment exposes something important. And yet I also wanted to complicate the usual framing of the concept of “qualia.” I don’t think we should take it for granted that consciousness is best understood as being built up of “raw sensa,” a Humean patchwork of colors and tones, etc. Whitehead’s alternative is to suggest that our most primordial experience is not bare sensation of clear and distinct, immediately present qualia but the feeling of vague, emotional, purposive flows. Whitehead calls it “perception in the mode of causal efficacy”—the feeling of energetic inheritance from the world, the push of the past, the sense of direction, the emotionally-toned temporality of life.

Oddly, this is also where I find myself agreeing with some critiques of qualia from philosophers I otherwise don’t often agree with. Daniel Dennett’s critique, for instance. The illusionists have a point about how confused the qualia concept can become. I discussed this with Keith Frankish a year ago:

But I also think illusionists miss a deeper way that experience is irreducible, untouchable by materialistic explanation. So my stance is not “phenomenal consciousness is composed entirely of qualia, and quales are obviously the hard core of reality” and my position is also not “consciousness is an illusion.” I think the usual terminology here is confused and we need an entirely different ontology of experience to advance understanding.

Process Philosophy and Changing the World

We also talked about what a process orientation might change in the world. It’s a huge question, because on one hand, if process and relation is the nature of reality, there’s nothing to be changed about it. And on the other hand, human beings seem uniquely capable of feeling out of place in the cosmic process. We experience anxiety, alienation, depression, meaninglessness. Modernity has this double face: more knowledge and power over nature, and more alienation from life. It seems like the power of scientific knowledge and the alienation of modern existence seem to go hand in hand.

If a process orientation took root, I think it could relieve some anxiety. It could help us feel less alienated. It might help us make better use of our knowledge and power, because right now we have all the tools but we don’t know what we want make. We’re out of touch with our emotional life, our heart, our sense of what is good. Our civilization’s picture of “success” tends to produce wealth alongside exhaustion and sickness. That’s misalignment. We have technical and political problems, yes, but the root will not be reached with a new engineering trick or policy proposal. At the risk of sounding trite: we are in obvious need of a shift in consciousness, a shift of attention away from ideas that are killing us and the earth toward ideas more conducive to flourishing.

From Meditation to Incarnation

Akshay and I also touched on the information age as a strange amplifier potentially ushering in an age of what he called “spontaneous enlightenment experiences.” Everyone on the planet, even people living in relative poverty, has a smartphone, and they can connect to the internet and access spiritual teachings from the whole history of humanity. That is a very new situation. Yes, there have been cross-cultural exchanges for thousands of years; East met West on the Silk Road, and so on. But not to this extent, and not at this speed.

For me, this situation created an opportunity as a teenager to really explore Buddhism and Vedic philosophy and Taoism—to try to meditate, to experience sunyata, emptiness, or moksha, to have that sense of experientially contacting the groundless ground of reality. I was trying to see through the illusion of the ego, see through the illusion of material possession and everything that’s impermanent, and to touch truth—not just as a belief, but to really touch it.

But what I confessed to Akshay is that, as a nineteen-year-old, I was doing a lot of meditating, and it was contributing to me becoming very depressed. I was struggling socially. I wasn’t finding frat parties meaningful, and I felt disconnected from my friends who wanted to go to those parties. I had this anxiety when I wasn’t meditating, the worry that “I’m just not cool. I don’t fit in. I’m not going to be able to do this and advance in this world,” where you’re expected to behave in certain ways that, to me, felt totally spiritually vapid and intellectually lacking. And so I was having this holier-than-thou experience while meditating to dissolve my ego.

I started to feel a kind of derealization, too: “Well, this is all Maya. This is all illusion. None of this stuff that I feel like I’m supposed to care about really matters. All that matters is just this pure being, the consciousness of emptiness.” And I would seek out that experience. I got pretty good—especially if I smoked a little weed—at entering that experience of emptiness.

Eventually, through some dramatic mystical experiences and an influx of new ideas, I shifted. I realized my culture as a modern American teenager was making me incapable of really understanding what Buddha meant by sunyata. I was conflating it with nihilism. I was mistaking the no-thingness of emptiness, in the context of Buddhist spiritual teaching, for meaninglessness, for existential nihilism. Lots of people have written about this, but what I eventually came to realize (and Carl Jung was helpful here) is that I was looking to a culture foreign to my own to save me.

I’d been raised by a secular Jewish father and an evangelical mother. I had run away from the biblical tradition because it seemed uniquely stupid and dogmatic. I went to the most mystical and esoterically deep forms of Asian spirituality and religion and philosophy. It had a formative influence on me, and I’m still a student of that massive, many thousand-year-old, very diverse set of traditions from the East. But I also came to realize that I needed to work with what I grew up with because, whether I like it or not, it has shaped me to the core, and I can’t escape it.

So instead of seeking enlightenment—at least in the way I was seeking it then—I’ve shifted in my spiritual life toward what I would call incarnation. It’s different from blissing out with meditation. It feels more like deepening into relationship with others and with this world. I think you can have both, but for me it’s been a major shift in emphasis from twenty years ago.

Relational Individuality

Akshay shared his sense of our deep relationality as people, that we’re all hypnotizing each other every moment. We’re all being conditioned by whoever, whatever, wherever our awareness gets drawn to. This raised the question of integrity: how to take responsibility for our own lives when we’re so profoundly shaped by our relationships.

This is part of the challenge of incarnation: being in relationship, and recognizing how we are hypnotizing each other. We don’t exist in isolation from one another. Even so, individuality is not simply an illusion. Each of us has some sort of soul-spiritual nature that affords us freedom and responsibility for how we show up in the world and what we attend to. But at the same time, we are so beholden to one another—especially to those closest to us. We’re incomplete without them. No human being closes in upon themselves and is self-contained.

And so we struggle in all of our relationships against codependence. We want to enter relationship maturely, not out of neediness, but out of mutual respect. You don’t love someone if you’re just an emotional vampire in relationship to them. That’s not love, at least not adult love. It may be an infantile form of love that’s appropriate when you’re a newborn, but not when you’re an adult. Navigating how to be responsible individuals in relationship to those who are composing us, and who we compose in turn, is a very difficult maneuver—difficult in the sense that it’s painful, and difficult because we’re each fallible.

We need to hold ourselves as responsible for our actions as we can, but we also have to acknowledge that none of us can take full responsibility in some absolute sense because we can’t be fully attentive. We can’t be as aware as we want to be. I try to forgive people when they make mistakes or hurt me. If there was malintent, I might reconsider how I relate to them in the future. But I try to forgive people even if I decide I don’t want to be in close proximity anymore, because I know I make mistakes. And so I grant that same leniency to others to the extent that I can. It’s hard. We are relational beings.

The Evolution of Consciousness

From there we moved into why I view the history of philosophy as an evolution of consciousness. I was trying to redirect us from the usual understanding of it as a history of ideas, as if the same mentality existed across thousands of years and was just exchanging concepts. It’s not that five thousand years ago people were “less rational” than we are today. In terms of cognitive capacity, human beings have had just as much potential intellectually as we do today for hundreds of thousands of years. The evolution of consciousness is about something else: what’s changing is not just the concepts we think about, or how intelligent we are, but our perceptual Gestalt, our very experience of what we take ourselves and the universe to be.

The modern Western sense that I am inside my head, probably somewhere between my eyes, and there’s this world out there that exists apart from me; that most of nature is inert and dead, and then a little bit of it seems alive, but it’s all separate from me—this dualistic common sense view is very new. Charles Taylor calls it the “buffered self,” and he offers a very detailed genealogy of how we got to that mentality. We have not always been this way. To understand something like the Vedas, you can’t simply bring your rational modern dualistic mindset, because the experience-structure is different. And I don’t just mean dualism as an explicit philosophical position. Most people trained in philosophy would say they’re not Cartesian dualists, but they live as if they were. Tacitly, they experience themselves as if Descartes was right about the mind-matter relationship (or lack thereof).

If we keep the evolution of consciousness in mind, then we can entertain the possibility that primal human beings experienced the world in a much more porous manner. Whereas now I think about ideas and it feels like I’m the one generating them, many primal indigenous modes of being were participatory: thinking and meaning were experienced as direct transmissions from the gods, as if we were being “thought in” by a larger cosmic intelligence. That wasn’t some idea or belief they had that they added to experience. That’s what they experienced.

The modern anthropological story labeled that “animism” and said it was projection. But the modern mindset is doing way more projection, and is in a way more anthropomorphic than so-called animist cultures. Nineteenth-century anthropologists would say “primitive” people project their social-symbolic world onto nature—heroism onto the sun, for example. But what if the vector is the other way? What if we learned what heroism is because the Sun is heroic?

On that view, primordially human beings received a sense of meaning and value and wisdom and intelligence from the cosmos, and directly experienced that transmission. In the modern period we feel cut off and alienated from that and think all the ideas are ours, all the meaning is made up in our heads, and the cosmos is meaningless. I think it’s the modern alienated way of being that is projecting meaninglessness and mechanizing the cosmos. It’s a mechanomorphism, if you want. Human beings make machines. Nature’s not a machine. To treat nature like a machine is anthropomorphic in that sense.

Life is not a machine; Life makes machines

Our conversation about projection opened onto questions about where we draw the line between natural and artificial, living and non-living. I said that cellular life is definitely something new in the universe, a creatively emergent mode of existence that needs to be acknowledged in any scientific account of cosmic evolution. But I also think that whatever life is at the biological level, it had to be possible. If we have a mechanistic conception of matter as dead, meaningless, aimless stuff, I don’t see a rational way to explain how it could become living, much less conscious. Scientific materialism makes the emergence of life appear impossible.

I’m sympathetic to Evan Thompson’s mind-life continuity thesis—that the first living cell is already conscious or has something like mind in minimal form—but I would go further. I think the whole universe is a living thing, or at least that this is a more adequate metaphor than imagining the universe as a collection of machine parts. In a sense I’d even say it’s more scientific, insofar as it’s more adequate to the data we have, to say the universe is organic rather than mechanistic.

That doesn’t mean artifacts are alive. When Akshay held up his computer mouse and asked if it was alive, I said no, it’s a machine created by a human, an artifact. It is a product of life, the excretion of a very intelligent organism. Life creates machines. That’s pervasive in the biological world. (My friend Timothy Jackson, a chemical ecologist who studies toxins, has helped me see this even more clearly: toxins are tools, and even very simple organisms use them.) The order of priority is inverted: organisms are not machines; organisms make machines. There were no machines before organisms.

Mountains are subtler. I tend to agree with neo-animists who relate to them as potentially living beings. It’s hard to know where the boundary of one mountain ends and the next begins. Cellular membranes are clearer boundaries, even though life is relational and symbiosis is the rule. With mountains, perhaps it depends. Maybe some mountains are alive and others aren’t. Part of it may depend on the quality of attention the local community brings to it, how they relate to it and what they evoke from it. I think the whole earth is alive, and you could see a mountain as part of the skin of the earth.

Boundaries as Connections and the Gift of Learned Unknowing

Akshay then brought in von Uexkull’s idea of umwelt and the limits of sensory perception—how our brain constructs reality, how other organisms detect what we can’t. That led me to the suggestion that experience can only articulate itself into something definite by creating boundaries, veils. The temptation, especially after meditation or mystical experience, is to peel back layers of the onion and then declare, “All of this is an illusion. It’s all appearance.” But the moment you do that, you imply there’s some bedrock reality you could get to behind the veils. You impose reality over against appearance, as something supposedly lying beneath it, when in fact you’ve never actually reached anything like that. It turns out that supposed “separations” aren’t really separations. Every boundary is as much a connection as a separation. It’s another way of being in relationship. The shift for me was from getting stuck in “veil after veil after veil, it’s all Maya” to attending to the relationships between veils instead of seeing borders that cut me off. Veils, borders—these are modes of relationship. The bedrock I thought I might reach, the reality behind appearance I was trying to get to, isn’t anywhere else than in the relationship, than being in the in-between, in the relating.

“What’s given,” Akshay offered. It’s a phrase I like because it implies a gift. None of us knows what’s going to happen next because it’s a creative process—novelty is constantly ingressing, to use Whitehead’s term. But we do have some sense of how the process works, even if we don’t know specifically where it’s going. I’m surprised by experience all the time, and I’ve grown to expect it. That expectation has made me prone to a playful attitude toward life. It’s an intentional way of meeting experience because I have some expectation that it’s going to play back. It leaves room for spontaneity, this mode of expecting something unexpected. There’s a tension to hold between knowing and not knowing, and part of the practice is accepting experience as the given—as gift—which is to say, saying yes to it. Any improv artist will tell you: you have to say yes to whatever happens or you’re done.

Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga

Akshay noted that I have discussed Sri Aurobindo in the past. It’s been a while since I’ve read Aurobindo closely. I first encountered him as an undergraduate. I found The Life Divine in my university library at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, and it really captured my imagination. The structure of his sentences felt fractal to me: the whole vision nested in each clause. I remember reading it out loud and feeling like I was drinking divine nectar.

Later, I ended up going to graduate school at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, where “integral” is in direct lineage with Aurobindo. Haridas Chaudhuri—one of Aurobindo’s students—was handpicked to come to California to start the school in the 1950s. I discovered Aurobindo first and only after that did I discover and eventually apply to CIIS. I studied with Robert McDermott, a scholar of Aurobindo’s work. His vision of an evolutionary spirituality—an integration of the most profound aspects of Eastern traditions with Western philosophy—continues to feel of great consequence to me. Aurobindo studied German Idealism. He understood the need for a planetary civilization to integrate East and West. He was a political revolutionary before he was a yogi. In prison, he experienced everybody as Krishna, and this transformed him, initiating him into a different kind of struggle. He’s one of the most important voices of the twentieth century, and I hope he continues to be heard in this century.

The “Psychedelic Renaissance”

From there, Akshay asked about psychedelics—how they’re changing society now, and whether they have any role to play in the movement toward a planetary civilization. That question pulled me back to when I first started reading about psychedelics as a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old, in the context of studying the 1960s and the counterculture, becoming more politically aware, and trying to understand the role psychedelics played in transforming music and art and culture. My question then was Why did the psychedelic revolution fail? And how was it co-opted? How did LSD become the Beatles become an Apple commercial?

So when the so-called “psychedelic renaissance” erupted and psychedelic research brgan to get mainstream attention, I had mixed feelings. On the one hand, I was shocked: I couldn’t believe psychedelics were suddenly getting a fair hearing in academia and the media. As an undergraduate I was interested, had some experiences myself, saw their value for consciousness studies and potentially for cultural change. But society still seemed far from open to reengaging with them. On the other hand, I’ve also felt that calling it a “renaissance” can reflect a certain academic elitism. Psychedelics were publicly repressed after the 60s, but research and exploration never stopped; it remained widespread in underground subcultures. Yes, there’s been a tremendous amount of new well-funded, well-designed research within academia and medicine since the famous Johns Hopkins psilocybin/mystical experience paper, but it’s not like nothing was happening before academics began paying attention again.

But fifteen years or so into this renaissance, I told Akshay that I think it’s mostly bad news. Everything is being co-opted by the pharmaceutical industry. People are more interested in microdosing for efficiency in the office than they are in transforming themselves. I used to fantasize like people did in the 60s—“if we could only dose the water in Washington, we could instantly change American politics.” I don’t believe that anymore. It ignores the shadow side, and it ignores that psychedelics, especially as they’re used in the modern West, often lack a cultural container and a cosmology to integrate what they open.

Stan Grof’s phrase came up here because it’s still the best description I know: psychedelics as “nonspecific amplifiers.” They catalyze and manifest mind—new ideas, sensations, perspectives—but the moral vector comes from elsewhere. And we don’t have the cosmology, we don’t have the cultural containers, to integrate what gets catalyzed. So a lot of inflation happens. Living in Northern California, around a lot of psychonauts, I shared (with as much compassion and humility as I can hold in my heart) that there’s a lot of psychedelic narcissism around, people detached from reality and with an over-extended sense of self-importance. Rather than dissolving the ego, psychedelics can also dramatically inflate it.

That’s why I’m no longer convinced they’re a silver bullet or that they automatically bring about positive change. We’re also moving into a situation where the Pentagon seems to be one of the biggest funders of MDMA research—not because they’ve suddenly become peacemakers, but because they want soldiers healed from PTSD so they can get back on the battlefield. That’s how far the psychedelic counterculture revolution has come.

All that said, I still find altered states of consciousness and conscious allyship with plants and fungi have a place in human life. But it needs to come along with cosmology, spiritual forms, ritual practices, and community containers, so the catalyzation—the acceleration of consciousness evolution that these substances can bring—is channeled in positive ways. Because it can easily be channeled in negative ways, in Charlie Manson ways, or “get these soldiers back on the battlefield” ways. So I’m more cautious now. Psychedelics may be important, but the fact that they’ve gone mainstream—corporate America and government beginning to accept them—is not necessarily a good sign. Careful what you wish for!

Artificial Intelligence: Simulation versus Realization of Sentience

Akshay then pivoted to AI. He’d read my recent chapter on the subject (below).

He asked if I think AI can become sentient. I answered that, since I’m a panpsychist of sorts, I can’t entirely rule it out. I think there’s some degree of experience or modicum of mind in everything. I don’t think rocks are conscious, exactly, but I would argue the atomic elements that make up rocks have some degree of self-organizing integrity, and to the extent that energetic organizations individuate, they enjoy some horizon of experience.

So can AI be sentient? Can it be conscious? Can it realize qualitative experience—living through what would otherwise just be the blind crunching of code? For me it’s an open question, and it depends on how individuated the system is. Once you start talking about cybernetic-organism hybrids—neurons interfacing with circuit boards, which exists now—of course those neurons are experiencing something. Is there automatically a coherent sense of global selfhood emerging from nervous tissue placed in a silicon situation it’s never been in before in the history of biological evolution? Probably not. Can I foresee engineered cyborg systems that are sentient? Yes, that seems within the domain of possibility.

But I drew a hard line around what people often mean in the hyped up discourse of the day: I don’t think any of these large language models are conscious or could become so. I think it’s a profound category error to imagine that what we find meaningful in outputs of symbols is meaningful to a server farm crunching ones and zeros in transistors. “Information” and “data” are ways of measuring flows of energy. Information isn’t something substantial; it’s a way of measuring flows of electrons that, properly displayed on screen, have meaning for us within our symbol systems. Information is not the sort of thing that might be conscious.

When Akshay pushed—what about multimodal systems, cameras and microphones, 24/7 input, memory access—I said: sure, you could produce a very sophisticated, convincing simulation of sentience. But would the system itself be sentient? I don’t think it makes sense to say that. That said, it is possible that larger novel fields of sentience could emerge that are augmented by these systems, but only because humans are in the loop. The question is not whether computers can be conscious but what sorts of sentience are we going to participate in cocreating as we engage with these technologies? Of course, watching the latest robots walk around with such human-like fluidity, seeing how quickly they’ve advanced, it does blow my mind. It’s impressive. But we still have to keep in mind the difference between simulation and realization. The simulation of human behavior has advanced dramatically; I don’t think that approaches the realization of consciousness from an experiential point of view. Once you bring organics into intimate interface with transistors, that’s a different story. But if we’re just talking about computers as we’ve known them, I don’t see it.