Just one suggestion: Maybe you could go into this in some post as it is an almost universal misunderstanding among Western meditators. Here’s how it works;
1. We don’t find spiritual inspiration in our (most likely, Christian or Jewish) religion, if we’re in the US. We turn East looking for something as different as possible.
2. We ignore the fact that, say, in India, 95 to 99% of the population has NEVER meditated or done anything related to sunyata or any kind of Vedantic, Tantric or Buddhist philosophy. We ignore Pure Land Buddhism, somehow missing the fact that a number of Zen teachers over teh ages have admitted one is more likely to reach enlightenment in sincere prayer to Amida Buddha than logging hundreds of 7 day seshins which only serve to magnify our egos; we ignore the worship of Krishna and Rama which has been the bedrock of Hindu spirituality for thousands of years.
3. We get depressed, detached, depersonalized by our Westernized meditation and return to “our” religion, thinking we’ve found something the East never knew, not realizing that it is exactly what we ignored in teh East that was what we were looking for.
Is it really about incarnation vs enlightenment: I had an impossibly frustrating conversation the other day with someone contrasting the superior one time only incarnation of Christ, which to him was real, concrete, historical, with the “poetic” mythology of many incarnations in the Gita.
Pure European superiority/prejudice.
Can we finally go beyond East and West, realize it’s one globe, and maybe take a leaf from Swami Vivekananda, who, at his magnificent address at the 1893 Parliament of World Religions, suggested a day will come when each human being has “their own religion” yet all will SEE the underlying (not conceptual) unity of it all.
There’s even a word for this in Sanskrit: Swadharma.
You speak of a need for a new ontology. It's not surprising that Roger Ames, who takes a Whiteheadian approach to ancient Chinese philosophy, would replace the very term "ontology" with "zoetology." He writes, "To provide a meaningful contrast with this fundamental assumption of on or ‘being’ we might borrow the Greek notion of zoe or ‘life’ and create the neologism ‘zoe-tology’ as ‘the art of living’. This cosmology begins from ‘living’ (sheng 生) itself as the motive force behind change, and gives us a world of boundless ‘becomings’: not ‘things’ that are, but ‘events’ that are happening, a contrast between an ontological conception of the human ‘being’ and a process conception of what I will call human ‘becomings’." His "living" is not restricted to biological life.
Segall’s insistence that the now is a flow rather than an instant is exactly right
The present is not something we occupy.
The present is something we are doing.
Relativity dissolves the global “now,” quantum theory resists timeless determinism, and process philosophy reintroduces becoming—but the deeper move here is ontological, not merely physical. The “now” is the local act of world-generation, the moment where identity is actively selecting itself out of possibilities.
The present is not a slice of time but a choice-point in a self-conditioning feedback loop. Each experiential unit (human, cellular, planetary) creates its own now as it resolves indeterminacy into form.
This is why meditation, psychedelics, AI, and physics all collide here: they all disturb the habitual rhythm by which the now is usually constructed.
Science does not fail to explain consciousness — it presupposes it
Segall is careful here, and rightly so. Science does not merely presuppose consciousness —
science is a specialized behavior of consciousness.
This dissolves the pseudo-problem of “explaining” experience from outside experience. There is no outside. There are only nested explanatory styles that consciousness uses to orient itself at different scales.
The Mary’s Room discussion is well-placed, but the deeper issue is not qualia versus physicalism. It is the mistaken assumption that experience is composed of contents rather than organized by value and direction.
This is where Segall’s use of Alfred North Whitehead is crucial. “Perception in the mode of causal efficacy”.
Feeling precedes sensation.
Meaning precedes data.
Direction precedes description.
Illusionism (à la Daniel Dennett) correctly diagnoses confusion—but mistakes that confusion for nonexistence. Experience is real, but not built the way materialism imagines.
Enlightenment without incarnation collapses into nihilism. Segall’s autobiographical turn is one of the essay’s strongest moments. Transcendence without embodiment is dissociation.
Immanence without transcendence is entrapment.
His early meditation practice dissolved ego faster than value could reorganize itself. Without a cosmology that affirms creative participation, emptiness becomes negation instead of fertility.
This is why I have repeatedly warned against “escape mysticism.” Consciousness is not trying to leave form—it is trying to become more skillful at creating it.
Incarnation is not a fall from truth. It is truth learning to operate responsibly under constraint.
Relational individuality is not a contradiction — it is the engine. Segall’s discussion of hypnotic mutual conditioning lands exactly where ontology lives:
We are not autonomous atoms.
We are not dissolved into the whole.
We are self-selecting relational processes.
Individuality is not an illusion—it is a boundary function, a way the universe experiments with perspective. Responsibility arises not from isolation, but from selective attention within relationship.
This is why forgiveness matters metaphysically, not just ethically. Error is inevitable in a universe that learns by creative misalignment.
The evolution of consciousness is real — but not linear.
Segall’s reframing of philosophy as an evolution of consciousness is correct. Consciousness does not “advance” by replacing earlier modes.It adds degrees of freedom while retaining earlier layers.
The “buffered self” (via Charles Taylor) is not a mistake, it is a necessary specialization. The problem arises when specialization forgets its origin and mistakes itself for the whole.
Animism was not projection.Mechanism is.Nature is not humanlike, but machines are lifeless imitations of living strategies. Hence Segall’s excellent inversion: Life does not emerge from machines. Machines emerge from life.
AI belongs here too, not as a rival consciousness, but as congealed human intention, a secondary excretion of biological value-seeking systems.
Psychedelics amplify — they do not orient. Stan Grof’s “nonspecific amplifiers” is exactly right. Psychedelics accelerate whatever metaphysics you already have.
Without a value-bearing cosmology, amplification produces inflation, not wisdom. The corporate capture of psychedelics is not an accident—it is what happens when speed outpaces meaning.
Psychedelics can loosen belief structures, but belief is still doing the organizing. Without responsibility, they magnify fragmentation as easily as insight.
The gift of the Now? The “now” is given, but not predetermined. It is a gift that asks for participation.
Reality does not hide behind veils.
Reality is the weaving of veils into relationships.
The practice is not unveiling everything. The practice is learning how to participate skillfully in the unfolding.
You are not here to escape time.
You are here to teach time how to become meaningful.
On one hand, the assumption that 'ego' is the problem. On the other hand, your well-focused attempt at a coherent, integral philosophy. That coherence is very much your 'I'. Compare Galen Strawson's decades long insistence that he does not have a 'narrative self'. Yet Strawson, too, has a highly coherent view on this, refining it year-over-year. It's his narrative! Perhaps, then it's not 'ego' that's the problem in our civilization, but how the 'I', as an instrument, is tuned?
Thank you. So much here and the comments are also so rewarding. I have been trying to catch up on your recent posts and….because you have such an incredible breadth of exploration that you share.. I have so much to feed on. (I am struck by the parallels between your remarks in a different post about velocity being the ’real deal’ and space and time our attempts to frame that experience and this post’s description of relationships as the heart of reality with boundaries/veils the byproducts of this process.)
You write "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."
My take is that we need to shift from left hemisphere consciousness to the right hemisphere. Since ideas are always in the realm of the left, I don't think a shift from "bad" ideas to "good" ideas will resolve anything. Instead, we need to be able to shift from ideas to experience itself.
This could also explain the challenges you described with Buddhist ideas of emptiness when you were younger - you were stuck in a mental model of emptiness or sunyata instead of being able to get out of your left hemisphere consciousness all together to experience your "before thinking" mind (ie. right hemisphere consciousness.) Of course you'd feel disconnected and depressed if you were stuck in your left hemispheric consciousness.
I disagree that we need a left or right hemisphere mode of consciousness. We need an integral mode of consciousness. As a teenager I wasn't lacking in "right brain" modes of attention. I was quite committed to and disciplined about generating them. What I lacked was a means of translation that would allow me to link together the cultural mores, dominant categories, (un)ethical habits, and institutional structures of contemporary American society with the non-dual modes of consciousness I was experiencing.
"We need an integral mode of consciousness." -> Well said!
Would love to hear more (either here in comments or in future posts) about your means of translation that allow you to link together the cultural mores, dominant categories, (un)ethical habits, and institutional structures of contemporary American society with the non-dual modes of consciousness you were experiencing. To me, these are two approaches that appear to be diverging, and the links appear to be pulling apart, assuming they were even there to begin with.
It's becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman's Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with only primary consciousness will probably have to come first.
What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990's and 2000's. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I've encountered is anywhere near as convincing.
I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there's lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.
My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar's lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman's roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461, and here is a video of Jeff Krichmar talking about some of the Darwin automata, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7Uh9phc1Ow
Sir, I don't know how many times I can read the same comment from you on my posts! Thank you for again informing us of Dr. Edelman's work. It is an important brick in the wall of knowledge production that contributes in its part to helping us understand more clearly. Personally I do not think it is somehow the breakthrough that resolves all the difficulties that remain in the path of understanding.
Great post. Some of your thoughts on consciousness put me in mind of the fabulous book "Irreducible" by Federico Faggin.
Great post with lots of fascinating insights.
Just one suggestion: Maybe you could go into this in some post as it is an almost universal misunderstanding among Western meditators. Here’s how it works;
1. We don’t find spiritual inspiration in our (most likely, Christian or Jewish) religion, if we’re in the US. We turn East looking for something as different as possible.
2. We ignore the fact that, say, in India, 95 to 99% of the population has NEVER meditated or done anything related to sunyata or any kind of Vedantic, Tantric or Buddhist philosophy. We ignore Pure Land Buddhism, somehow missing the fact that a number of Zen teachers over teh ages have admitted one is more likely to reach enlightenment in sincere prayer to Amida Buddha than logging hundreds of 7 day seshins which only serve to magnify our egos; we ignore the worship of Krishna and Rama which has been the bedrock of Hindu spirituality for thousands of years.
3. We get depressed, detached, depersonalized by our Westernized meditation and return to “our” religion, thinking we’ve found something the East never knew, not realizing that it is exactly what we ignored in teh East that was what we were looking for.
Is it really about incarnation vs enlightenment: I had an impossibly frustrating conversation the other day with someone contrasting the superior one time only incarnation of Christ, which to him was real, concrete, historical, with the “poetic” mythology of many incarnations in the Gita.
Pure European superiority/prejudice.
Can we finally go beyond East and West, realize it’s one globe, and maybe take a leaf from Swami Vivekananda, who, at his magnificent address at the 1893 Parliament of World Religions, suggested a day will come when each human being has “their own religion” yet all will SEE the underlying (not conceptual) unity of it all.
There’s even a word for this in Sanskrit: Swadharma.
You speak of a need for a new ontology. It's not surprising that Roger Ames, who takes a Whiteheadian approach to ancient Chinese philosophy, would replace the very term "ontology" with "zoetology." He writes, "To provide a meaningful contrast with this fundamental assumption of on or ‘being’ we might borrow the Greek notion of zoe or ‘life’ and create the neologism ‘zoe-tology’ as ‘the art of living’. This cosmology begins from ‘living’ (sheng 生) itself as the motive force behind change, and gives us a world of boundless ‘becomings’: not ‘things’ that are, but ‘events’ that are happening, a contrast between an ontological conception of the human ‘being’ and a process conception of what I will call human ‘becomings’." His "living" is not restricted to biological life.
The “Now” is not a point — it is a creative act
Segall’s insistence that the now is a flow rather than an instant is exactly right
The present is not something we occupy.
The present is something we are doing.
Relativity dissolves the global “now,” quantum theory resists timeless determinism, and process philosophy reintroduces becoming—but the deeper move here is ontological, not merely physical. The “now” is the local act of world-generation, the moment where identity is actively selecting itself out of possibilities.
The present is not a slice of time but a choice-point in a self-conditioning feedback loop. Each experiential unit (human, cellular, planetary) creates its own now as it resolves indeterminacy into form.
This is why meditation, psychedelics, AI, and physics all collide here: they all disturb the habitual rhythm by which the now is usually constructed.
Science does not fail to explain consciousness — it presupposes it
Segall is careful here, and rightly so. Science does not merely presuppose consciousness —
science is a specialized behavior of consciousness.
This dissolves the pseudo-problem of “explaining” experience from outside experience. There is no outside. There are only nested explanatory styles that consciousness uses to orient itself at different scales.
The Mary’s Room discussion is well-placed, but the deeper issue is not qualia versus physicalism. It is the mistaken assumption that experience is composed of contents rather than organized by value and direction.
This is where Segall’s use of Alfred North Whitehead is crucial. “Perception in the mode of causal efficacy”.
Feeling precedes sensation.
Meaning precedes data.
Direction precedes description.
Illusionism (à la Daniel Dennett) correctly diagnoses confusion—but mistakes that confusion for nonexistence. Experience is real, but not built the way materialism imagines.
Enlightenment without incarnation collapses into nihilism. Segall’s autobiographical turn is one of the essay’s strongest moments. Transcendence without embodiment is dissociation.
Immanence without transcendence is entrapment.
His early meditation practice dissolved ego faster than value could reorganize itself. Without a cosmology that affirms creative participation, emptiness becomes negation instead of fertility.
This is why I have repeatedly warned against “escape mysticism.” Consciousness is not trying to leave form—it is trying to become more skillful at creating it.
Incarnation is not a fall from truth. It is truth learning to operate responsibly under constraint.
Relational individuality is not a contradiction — it is the engine. Segall’s discussion of hypnotic mutual conditioning lands exactly where ontology lives:
We are not autonomous atoms.
We are not dissolved into the whole.
We are self-selecting relational processes.
Individuality is not an illusion—it is a boundary function, a way the universe experiments with perspective. Responsibility arises not from isolation, but from selective attention within relationship.
This is why forgiveness matters metaphysically, not just ethically. Error is inevitable in a universe that learns by creative misalignment.
The evolution of consciousness is real — but not linear.
Segall’s reframing of philosophy as an evolution of consciousness is correct. Consciousness does not “advance” by replacing earlier modes.It adds degrees of freedom while retaining earlier layers.
The “buffered self” (via Charles Taylor) is not a mistake, it is a necessary specialization. The problem arises when specialization forgets its origin and mistakes itself for the whole.
Animism was not projection.Mechanism is.Nature is not humanlike, but machines are lifeless imitations of living strategies. Hence Segall’s excellent inversion: Life does not emerge from machines. Machines emerge from life.
AI belongs here too, not as a rival consciousness, but as congealed human intention, a secondary excretion of biological value-seeking systems.
Psychedelics amplify — they do not orient. Stan Grof’s “nonspecific amplifiers” is exactly right. Psychedelics accelerate whatever metaphysics you already have.
Without a value-bearing cosmology, amplification produces inflation, not wisdom. The corporate capture of psychedelics is not an accident—it is what happens when speed outpaces meaning.
Psychedelics can loosen belief structures, but belief is still doing the organizing. Without responsibility, they magnify fragmentation as easily as insight.
The gift of the Now? The “now” is given, but not predetermined. It is a gift that asks for participation.
Reality does not hide behind veils.
Reality is the weaving of veils into relationships.
The practice is not unveiling everything. The practice is learning how to participate skillfully in the unfolding.
You are not here to escape time.
You are here to teach time how to become meaningful.
So much good stuff here!!
I especially liked the notion of a toxin as a tool, after telling us that weed helped bootsrap you into bliss 😂
Only to remind us that MDMA is also being used by the war machine.
On one hand, the assumption that 'ego' is the problem. On the other hand, your well-focused attempt at a coherent, integral philosophy. That coherence is very much your 'I'. Compare Galen Strawson's decades long insistence that he does not have a 'narrative self'. Yet Strawson, too, has a highly coherent view on this, refining it year-over-year. It's his narrative! Perhaps, then it's not 'ego' that's the problem in our civilization, but how the 'I', as an instrument, is tuned?
Thank you. So much here and the comments are also so rewarding. I have been trying to catch up on your recent posts and….because you have such an incredible breadth of exploration that you share.. I have so much to feed on. (I am struck by the parallels between your remarks in a different post about velocity being the ’real deal’ and space and time our attempts to frame that experience and this post’s description of relationships as the heart of reality with boundaries/veils the byproducts of this process.)
Great article, thanks for sharing!
You write "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."
My take is that we need to shift from left hemisphere consciousness to the right hemisphere. Since ideas are always in the realm of the left, I don't think a shift from "bad" ideas to "good" ideas will resolve anything. Instead, we need to be able to shift from ideas to experience itself.
This could also explain the challenges you described with Buddhist ideas of emptiness when you were younger - you were stuck in a mental model of emptiness or sunyata instead of being able to get out of your left hemisphere consciousness all together to experience your "before thinking" mind (ie. right hemisphere consciousness.) Of course you'd feel disconnected and depressed if you were stuck in your left hemispheric consciousness.
I disagree that we need a left or right hemisphere mode of consciousness. We need an integral mode of consciousness. As a teenager I wasn't lacking in "right brain" modes of attention. I was quite committed to and disciplined about generating them. What I lacked was a means of translation that would allow me to link together the cultural mores, dominant categories, (un)ethical habits, and institutional structures of contemporary American society with the non-dual modes of consciousness I was experiencing.
"We need an integral mode of consciousness." -> Well said!
Would love to hear more (either here in comments or in future posts) about your means of translation that allow you to link together the cultural mores, dominant categories, (un)ethical habits, and institutional structures of contemporary American society with the non-dual modes of consciousness you were experiencing. To me, these are two approaches that appear to be diverging, and the links appear to be pulling apart, assuming they were even there to begin with.
well, it is an ongoing effort!
I enjoyed your story and also found it informative.
It's becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman's Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with only primary consciousness will probably have to come first.
What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990's and 2000's. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I've encountered is anywhere near as convincing.
I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there's lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.
My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar's lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman's roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461, and here is a video of Jeff Krichmar talking about some of the Darwin automata, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7Uh9phc1Ow
Sir, I don't know how many times I can read the same comment from you on my posts! Thank you for again informing us of Dr. Edelman's work. It is an important brick in the wall of knowledge production that contributes in its part to helping us understand more clearly. Personally I do not think it is somehow the breakthrough that resolves all the difficulties that remain in the path of understanding.
I'll try not to comment on your posts anymore. But I view a lot of articles and videos every day, and I can't remember everyone I post to.