The Many Faces Of Aloneness

Like the weather shaping landscapes, aloneness pervades our psyche in ways that continually modulate its character. This topic recently came to be worked through in one of my psychotherapy groups, and as if by synchronicity, it also surfaced in the Mindsight Intensive during our explorations of unfamiliar modes of awareness we can access through meditation. I took this as an opportunity to try to put some order in this complex topic that elicited many questions from patients and students alike.

Etymology

‘Alone’ (= al-one) is originally made up of the two words ‘all’, meaning ‘wholly, entirely, without limit’, and ‘one, only one of me, oneself’. Combined, these two notions mean ‘limitlessly just oneself’, or ‘unaccompanied, solitary, without companions, all by oneself, wholly oneself’, which by implication also includes ‘… and nothing or nobody else’. By the same token, ‘all, entirely’ also implies ‘all that is, everything’, meaning that when one is alone, one is also everything or with everything. The fact that the word ‘alone’ combines these two clusters of meaning, ‘all one and nothing else’, which implies an endless void around it, and ‘all that is, everything’, which implies an endless fullness of everything, suggests that the meaning of aloneness can correlate with several possible human experiences.

The resonant dance of feeling felt

Aloneness is both, an inescapable psychological reality that can be either painful or pleasurable, and an acquired capacity necessary for growth, health, and wisdom.

To begin with our psychological development, as infants we are dependent on adults to take care of us. Nature has made sure to wire our brains and bodies so that for the most part there is no escaping the development of a strong nurturing bond flowing both ways between child and caregiver. I am referring to the mammalian attachment system that in humans is based on a special neurocircuitry called the resonance circuitry or social engagement system. In brief, physiological and mental states in both child and caregiver resonate deeply with each other like two well-tuned musical instruments. This resonance causes both organisms to attune to each other and respond empathically to the other’s expressed needs. In this dance, each partner receives, registers, and interprets the verbal and non-verbal information coming from the other person in a way that ensures that the responsive action meets the other person’s needs. Like in a good dance, each partner feels heard and seen by the other as needs are being felt, shared, interpreted, and responded to in a timely manner that fully meets the relational requirements of that moment.

Our social engagement system that sings through the vibrations of our resonance circuitry is responsible for both, our relationships with others as well as our relationship with ourselves. That is the reason why in attuned relationships both partners can see themselves through the other person’s eyes, and learn to feel felt and be seen and heard. When we feel heard by the other person, we can hear ourselves, and vice versa. We enjoy access to the many layers of neuroprocessing in the body, from being somatically attuned to our body, to recognizing and regulating our emotions, all the way to being able to make sense of our life stories. The attuned relationships that shaped us become internalized, so that when we are alone, we are also with all these people who have shaped us in a healthy way – they are always with us in our minds. Applied to the child’s relationship with her parents, when a young child enjoys attuned relationships and therefore develops a secure attachment to the parents, after a heartfelt goodbye the parents can leave the room for a while, and the child will not only be happy and able to concentrate on playing by herself, but greet the parents with warmth and joy when they come back. At most, the child may be a little upset when the parent leaves, but calms down quickly.

With a well-developed capacity to be alone, we are present with ourselves the way we were able to be present in our relationships with our loved ones, and the whole world is with us. We don’t feel lonely, but deeply connected. Given the double function of the social engagement system responsible for one’s relationship with both others and oneself, when children have the opportunity to develop attuned relationships with their caregivers, or when adults later take the opportunity to do the same with their therapists, teachers, or mentors, they also develop attuned relationships with themselves. In other words, through attuned relationships, we internalize those healthy external relationships into the ways our own psyche manages our internal relationships with ourselves. In this way, even when we are alone with ourselves and nobody is around, we are in the company of these remembered internalized attuned relationships. This represents the capacity to be successfully and pleasurably alone without feeling lonely, restless, or stressed.

Of course, as nothing in life is perfect, that attachment dance is not perfect either. Occasionally the attunement process does not work properly, and we stumble. As long as that is the exception, and in those moments of stumbling we can apologize and repair the broken link, assuring one another that nothing fundamental is broken in the love bond, we continue to thrive. Such empathic failures of attunement are an inevitable part of healthy intimacy and ensure our capacity to be resilient in the face of inevitable disturbances life circumstances throw our way. This is the healthy situation of a ‘good-enough’ relationship, implying that attempts at having a ‘perfect’ relationship are not only impossible, but will inevitably fail and cause a lot of stress and disruption.

From the brain’s wiring perspective, attuned relationships result in increased connectivity between different brain regions, thereby maximizing the brain’s resilience and capacity for processing new and challenging life situations in creative and efficient ways.

The dance of attunement in the construction of a useful illusion

With healthy attunements in our relationships we are able to be fully creative and use time alone as an opportunity to fine-tune internal attunement and groundedness in one’s healthy sense of self. Through the cultivation of attuned relationships, we develop a healthy sense of self. Unable to elaborate on it without going beyond the scope of this article, be it just said that this sense of self is a construction by the brain that gives us a psychological centre of gravity from which to organize how we conduct our lives. As useful as this sense of self is to ensure our survival, it is nonetheless an illusion. Experientially established at least a couple of thousand years ago in Buddhist psychology, this has relatively recently also been scientifically confirmed.

To be precise, the successful construction of our sense of self occurs within the scope of our ordinary waking consciousness. Its hallmark is our experience of life as a duality between our ego-self ‘inside’, which we deem to be the observing subject, and an objective world ‘outside’, observed and experienced by this ego-self. To be sure, the successfully developed ego-self that marks the subjective pole of our dual world, is at the same time the healthy sense of self that makes us into a ‘somebody’ who allows us to live life competently in accordance with society’s norms of success. Once we have achieved the developmental milestone of having become a ‘somebody’, we can use it as the springboard for a transition toward existentially more evolved modes of awareness we will discuss below, through which we discover the illusory nature of our sense of self. Like the wizard of Oz, upon close scrutiny, our sense of self reveals its essential emptiness. Armed with an initially strong and well-grounded illusion we called our ‘self’, we can then embark on the journey of deconstruction and allow ourselves to discover its inherent emptiness and the surprising fact that at our core we are a ‘nobody’.

Imperfections of the dance of attunement

Life circumstances are not always very forgiving, and children often grow up without the experience of optimal attunement from their parents. We can therefore also internalize unhealthy relationships, and when we are alone having been shaped by relationships that cause pain, we are in pain. The painful quality of a dysfunctional relationship to parents becomes the painful experience of relating to ourselves.

The pain can be very different, depending on what went wrong in our formative relationships. We may have experienced absence and unavailability, leaving us with an incessant yearning for a connection we can never have or fulfill, combined with a deep withdrawal and disconnection from ourselves that mirrors the disconnection with the absent parent we yearned for. Such a child does not even acknowledge or feel the need to say goodbye to the parent who leaves the room in the clinical experiment. The child gets easily bored and restless when alone, and does not respond upon the parent’s return. The style of relating to others and ourselves becomes avoidant, rigidly cut off from our and other people’s internal world, body and emotions. We may also have experienced ambivalence and inconsistency, intrusiveness and control, leaving us conflicted with regard to closeness; we yearn for closeness, but closeness is disorienting, suffocating, or conflicted. This applies to both the external relationship and the relationship with ourselves. Such a child is clingy and gets very anxious when the parent leaves the room, and it has a hard time letting go. While the parent is away, the child is anxious and distraught, and when the parent comes back, the child can’t easily calm down, remaining anxious and angry. The style of relating to others and ourselves becomes ambivalent, as we experience our own and other people’s internal world as chaotic and overheated.

In all these cases, being alone is a painful situation, because we are unable to successfully feel at peace and content in our own skin. Our relationship with ourselves is fraught with disruption of one kind or another, avoidant or ambivalent, shut down or nervously restless, and we cannot see ourselves clearly. We, therefore, end up struggling to properly regulate our emotions and mental states, experiencing stress and restlessness, or a sense of scarcity and lack in life. When alone we experience loneliness and remain dissatisfied. Being alone feels stressful in different ways, either like being in an overcrowded market one cannot find a quiet place, or in a boring abandoned factory, one cannot find anyone to meaningfully connect with. Our sense of self does not feel secure, but insecure, always on edge or shut down.
From the brain’s wiring perspective, such unattuned and insecure relationships result in less efficient connectivity between different brain regions, thereby compromising the brain’s resilience and capacity for processing new and challenging life situations in creative and efficient ways. Life’s challenges are not met with ease and we are prone to developing symptoms of all kinds, from psychological symptoms of dysregulation, relationship problems, and addictions, to physical illnesses.

When catastrophe hits

Our attachments can be even more disrupted when we have experienced trauma. This is different from the less-than-optimal attachment patterns we just discussed that cause lesser efficiency in our brains’ connectivity. Trauma is defined by the relationship between an overwhelming event, series of events, or persistently overwhelming life circumstances, and the way a person responds to such overwhelming events, causing the brain to become completely ‘paralyzed’ or so overwhelmed that normal functioning becomes impossible. The need for loving connection and the reality of dangerous toxic assaults on the child are completely at odds with each other, creating an inescapable situation of toxic love without solution. In these cases, the brain’s wiring becomes not just less efficient, but literally broken to use a metaphor, to the point that different brain regions become completely severed from each other, incapable of communicating and cooperating. This is called dissociation. The likelihood of developing symptoms of all kinds as mentioned above becomes much higher and more severe.

Aloneness after trauma is a different experience from the one described in the first two instances of attachment disruption. This one is not just unpleasant, but it is a terrible aloneness based on a complete fracturing of our relationship with ourselves and with certain other people, rendering relationships not just more difficult, but variably impossible. Our sense of self never had a chance to be constructed in the first place and is so shattered that there is no real center, not even a constructed one to be found. Reaching inside means finding broken pieces of ourselves and others littered all over the place without hope of ever putting Humpty Dumpty back together again. Internally, instead of a sense of self, there is literally nobody to be found, a gaping void and abyss of nothingness with nobody around. From moment to moment, one never knows which fragment will predominantly respond to life’s circumstances and react to life’s demands by fighting, fleeing, or freezing. If one is lucky, one has compensated for this inner void by developing a false sense of self as a person that can more or less function in the world, but that false self, that mask feels very brittle and fragile, unable to contain the horrible internal reality of complete fragmentation.

The vision of a future destiny

Having reviewed various experiences of aloneness that depend on our history and attachment development, we now must also look into the future and the growth potential of every human life. Everything described so far belongs to an awareness mode we call the field of consciousness, which I briefly described above as the kind of ordinary waking consciousness we are intimately familiar with, and that creates a view of reality steeped in duality; we see ourselves as a separate subject in the form of our ego-self experiencing a separate world of objects. Within this field of consciousness, we engage in scientific research, psychological explorations, and philosophical musings, all in an attempt at improving our lives from its perspective. Many people live and die within this mode of awareness, without ever transcending it and embracing a larger contextual apprehension of reality by developing access to two further awareness modes, the fields of nihility (nothingness – from Latin ‘nihil’ = ‘nothing’) and the field of emptiness (which paradoxically is fullness). These latter two modes of awareness humans are capable of require at least special attention, if not outright training to be accessed.

It would be beyond the scope of this article to pursue an in-depth exploration of these three modes of awareness with their fields, and their importance for decreasing suffering in our lives. Instead, we will touch upon certain aspects pertaining to the fields of nothingness and emptiness that bring us face to face with one more version of aloneness we need to be able to recognize and distinguish from the previous versions we already discussed.

Busy singing and dancing on the sinking Titanic

The field of nihility beckons for example when we are faced with extreme situations that render everything we have so far known in life meaningless, such as the loss of a child, a terminal diagnosis, etc. It goes without saying that meeting nihility is one of the aims of mindfulness meditation – to die before we die, so that we don’t die when we die. When nihility raises its ‘ugly’ head, we are called to answer existential questions such as what the purpose of our lives is, why we exist, where we come from, and where we are going both within and beyond the boundaries of birth and death. This is when we leave the domains of science or psychology and enter the existential realm defined by the juxtaposition of life and death, existence and non-existence, things and nothingness. The moment we are born, death is closely afoot, ready to tap our shoulders as an inescapable reality – like the backside of the moon we never see and yet always exists as an inextricable aspect of the moon. This ‘backside’, or rather underbelly of existence, called nothingness or nihility, is the absolute negation of existence we are perpetually, unconsciously, and frantically trying to ignore by staying busy within the field of consciousness of our ordinarily lived lives. This effort of repression is not only costly wasting a lot of energy, but creates in itself a significant amount of suffering. We are busy making music, dancing, and sharing drinks on the sinking Titanic.

The moment we open ourselves up to the underbelly of existence, we first encounter the unsettling experiences of meaninglessness, absurdity, forsakenness, and aloneness that open within the awareness field of nihility. To make sure we understand this correctly: The field of nihility is an awareness mode we are customarily not familiar with, and usually avoid entering and developing, because it is unsettling and even scary, the way freedom is scary to a prisoner who is released after decades of imprisonment. This being said, it is precisely through a full surrender to the inescapable character of nihility that makes no sense from our field of consciousness perspective, that we break through the most profound illusions of our lives and find liberation beyond them. As the physicist Lawrence Krauss remarks in his book ‘A Universe From Nothing’, nothing is the fullness of pure potential, unstable, generative, and creative. The field of nothingness is quite similar that way, something you immediately discover and experience when you are trained to access that awareness mode.

Freedom beyond illusions

The existential sense of aloneness within nihility is very different from the horrible sense of aloneness after trauma. They echo off each other and can be used to inform each other, as long as we know how to distinguish them and ‘treat’ them differently and appropriately. Existential aloneness of nihility is not horrible, because the internal search for the self does not reveal traumatic fragmentation as such, but the illusory nature of the self’s construction instead. That is a big difference!

The aloneness of a non-existent self because of fragmentation is far more ominous and dangerous than the aloneness of a non-existent self because of the revelation of its illusory nature. In the first instance, one mourns the absence of something real and important that should have been there, but never came about – in other words not a loss, but the abortion of something real and necessary. In the second instance, one mourns the loss of a useful illusion, which as illusion appeared to be real and necessary for a certain developmental stage in our lives – in other words, the compelling awakening from an imprisoning mindset that unwittingly causes suffering like the illusory power of the wizard of Oz. Trauma aloneness feels like senseless nothingness without existence, while, no less vast and abyss-like than the aloneness of trauma, this latter aloneness of nihility is imbued with a hopeful, liberating sense of being shared with all that exists.

Obstacles on the path

The main gate to the Zen ideal of ‘being free and easy in the market place’ first opens into hell. Make no mistake, before we reach the promised land, we first have to endure the forty years lost wandering through the desert, the forty days fasting in the same desert, or the night sitting without moving under the Bodhi tree, and so on. The path to enlightenment does not consist in pursuing sources of light, but in bringing the darkness into awareness. The first order of business is to include the underbelly of existence in existence, which means integrating the field of nihility into our lives.

As mentioned above, that is easier said than done, thus the Christian metaphor that ‘many are called, but few are chosen’, or the Buddhist metaphor that ‘one has to want liberation more passionately than a drowning person wants air’. Metaphors always sound more heroic than the reality they highlight, but it is an honest question that needs to be asked – how we can withstand the deconstruction of illusions all the way down to the bottom of the ocean of suffering. There are no easy answers to these questions, which is why I have designed a whole intensive mindfulness meditation course called the Mindsight Intensive around these questions. Here, I just want to highlight issues to be considered around the challenge of aloneness.

We all start from the basis of the field of ordinary waking consciousness. After all, that is the awareness mode we grow into from childhood and consolidate during adulthood. Within that field, we have seen that we may have any of the three main attachment patterns and senses of self: The secure, insecure and disorganized/traumatic sense of self. Accordingly, someone with a secure sense of self will experience secure aloneness, someone with an insecure sense of self insecure aloneness, and someone with trauma traumatic or disorganized aloneness. Of course, these categories are not absolute and should rather be seen as signposts on a spectrum of experiences. Meanwhile, each category of aloneness has its advantages and disadvantages.

At first blush, secure aloneness is the ideal springboard into nihility, as the secure sense of self is the most resilient one capable of withstanding the challenges of deconstruction. Its main disadvantage, though, is the fact that people with secure attachments are the happiest ones that are most comfortable with life as it is, and they may have the least amount of motivation to seek greater wisdom beyond the field of consciousness.

Less comfortable is a life with insecure attachments and an insecure sense of self. Granted, these people are more fragile and often busy enough trying to be as happy as they feel they could be, which leaves less excess energy available for growth beyond the field of consciousness. By the same token, the motivation to explore life’s mysteries more deeply might be enhanced by this impulse towards greater health, making them often excellent candidates for the exploration of nihility and emptiness. In any case, what these people have to be particularly attentive to is the differentiation between psychological suffering within the field of consciousness and existential suffering that beckons to grow beyond it, because those two kinds of suffering require different treatment approaches. If they get confused, the outcome is not good and will almost unfailingly lead to more suffering, more symptoms, and more decompensation. Before they can have free rein to pursue transcendence, making sure that they develop a more secure sense of self is paramount. “You have to be somebody before you can be nobody”, Jack Engler wrote back in the 1970s.

When it comes to traumatic aloneness, the issues discussed in the previous paragraph are even more extreme. Plunging into the abyss of aloneness in nihility for someone with trauma, who has not done any psychotherapy, will almost certainly trigger massive, overwhelming anxiety and decompensation that is tantamount to a re-traumatization. The principle of focusing first on the development of a more secure sense of self is even more important here. With time, when substantial healing of the trauma has been achieved, the depth of the traumatic abyss of aloneness these people used to experience and may still have access to, can indeed become a boon as it echoes the abyss of nihility. No stranger to that depth of deconstruction, these people may sometimes have an easier time recognizing the daily calls of nihility most people routinely ignore. The trick, then, is to embrace nihility without falling into traumatic annihilation.

Coda

What this article tries to address are no doubt complex matters that require years of patient study, exploration and practice. Even though this text uses the path and journey metaphor that suggests a destination, this work is indeed the thousand-year human journey with no end nor destination. That is the mysterious paradox of the present moment, where the finiteness of time intersects with the vast eternity of timelessness. The being of the world is the time (becoming) that devours it. As we put one foot in front of the other, walking on the path to nowhere from moment to moment, let’s always remember the futility of lofty goals as we surrender to the one and only aspiration we may be granted to relish as we proceed – the joy of noticing improvement.

When we get used to embracing the inevitable reality of death as part of life and life as part of death, a deep sense of relief arises that soothes our suffering. Being existentially alone eventually leads to the realization of our home ground in the Great Life of real Being, our true identity as the being, vanishing, and becoming of everything. As we anticipated at the beginning of this article from the etymology of the word ‘aloneness’, while trauma aloneness has ‘nothing else’, existential aloneness entails ‘everything’.

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Silicon Dreams. Carbon Amnesia.

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July 2, 2026

I. The Blind Spot

We stand at a peculiar crossroads in history: transfixed by the spectacle of silicon minds assembling themselves from human thought, we have turned our gaze outward toward the machine – and in doing so, turned away from something infinitely stranger and more wondrous. The neuron firing in your visual cortex as you read these words has been refined by 500 million years of ruthless experimentation. It speaks simultaneously in electrochemical gradients, synaptic geometry, glial whispers, epigenetic memory, and the mysterious way it feels to be you – a language so layered that we have barely begun to translate it. Artificial intelligence, for all its breathtaking mimicry, is a shadow cast by the organic: flat, fast, and legible precisely because it has been stripped of the irreducible complexity that makes life alive. The real frontier was never the one we built. It is the one we inhabit – and have barely looked at. The real moral concern is not AI’s consciousness, as it will forever just be a machine; it is the irreducibly different organic world of biology – life. Substrate matters.

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II. The Flight from the Organic

And yet, rather than turn toward that complexity, we are doubling down on the flight from it. Somewhere deep in the cultural psyche, an ancient archetype is running – a Noah’s Ark for the digital age: the dream that we can load our minds onto servers, colonize Mars, and outrun the fate of being mortal, embodied, and organic. It is a fantasy that the laws of physics greet with indifference. Mars is not an oversight in our evolutionary story; it is simply not within the conditions that made us possible. We are not minds that happen to have bodies. We are bodies that learned to think – and the thinking cannot survive the abandonment of the substrate.

Meanwhile, mindfulness – which might have been the corrective, the return to the full-bodied, right-hemispheric, emptiness-rooted intelligence that the organism actually runs on – has been quietly colonized by the same left-brain agenda it was meant to interrupt. Stripped of its contemplative roots in what I have coined Core Mind Realigning, it has been repackaged as a cognitive performance tool: stress reduction by spreadsheet, attention training as productivity hack. MBSR, as it is now commonly taught, too often becomes another exercise in mental management rather than a genuine rewiring of the organism’s relationship to itself. The silence at the center – the emptiness that is not absence but generative ground – has been edited out. What remains is technique without transformation: the map sold in place of the territory. Even technique is routinely taught superficially as many of my students coming from elsewhere attest – stripped of the exacting, unhurried rigour that navigating the infinite complexity of the mind demands. Too many practitioners have become more invested in the reductive confidence of evidence-based orthodoxy than in the kind of authentic human engagement that makes living transmission possible. But the deeper problem is one of timescale. The journey toward liberation from suffering is not a course. It is a lifelong apprenticeship – and the willingness to commit to it without horizon is not incidental to the path; it is the path. This is a principle Core Mind Realigning holds at its centre – with rigour, precision and commitment. It is no surprise, then, that people who complete a time-limited MBSR program without further training remain essentially untrained, unable to sustain a meaningful daily practice – because transformation is not an outcome. It is a way of living, a way of patiently walking the thousand-year journey and notice improvement.

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III. The Complexity We Cannot Build

Consider what forgetting life with its organic substrate actually costs. Despite centuries of biochemistry, we have not yet assembled a single living cell from its chemical constituents – not one. The cell remains, in this precise technical sense, beyond us: a self-organizing, self-repairing, meaning-making system of such staggering intricacy that our most sophisticated laboratories can only observe it, never truly replicate it from the ground up. Even if we eventually construct something that qualifies as a living cell, what it would lack is not an ingredient but a history – and four billion years of unbroken evolutionary inheritance is not a detail that any laboratory procedure can retrospectively install. And the cell is merely the beginning. Trees negotiate resource-sharing through fungal networks with a sophistication that shames our internet. Animals navigate, grieve, play, and remember in ways that suggest an interior life we have only begun to take seriously. Ecosystems regulate climate, water, atmosphere, and fertility through feedback loops so interdependent that we cannot yet model them fully – only disturb them. And disturb them we have. Roughly 70% of insect biomass has disappeared within living memory, quietly and almost without public mourning, even though the loss of insects would mean the collapse of the terrestrial ecosystem. The organic world – the only world that actually made us – is being unmade, and we are largely looking elsewhere. Time matters, evolution matters, nature matters – replanted forests have little in common with old growth jungles. Just as a rich broth cannot be hurried – only tended, over hours, until what was raw and separate becomes nourishment – so the untamed processes of the mind yield their healing secrets only under the slow, sustained heat of trained awareness.

This is not only an ecological crisis. It is a crisis of attention – and perhaps, at its root, a crisis of wonder. Where is the mindfulness project equal to this moment? Not the one that teaches you to breathe through a difficult meeting, but the one that rekindles genuine passion for what we are made of – that positions the practitioner not merely as a calmer self, but as a custodian of biological heritage and wisdom. The original invitation of contemplative practice was never stress reduction as its core; it was the direct investigation of the nature of mind and reality – including the emptiness at the heart of both. Quantum biology is now finding that coherence, superposition, and non-locality are not metaphors when applied to living systems – they may be operational realities at the cellular level. The void is not outside biology. It may be biology’s deepest mechanism.

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IV. The Left-Hemisphere Civilization

And what happens to the collective mind when this dimension is foreclosed – when a civilization becomes, structurally and habitually, a left-hemisphere operation? The results are not difficult to observe, and they are not accidental. The left hemisphere, as McGilchrist has meticulously documented, is not unintelligent – it is narrowly, brilliantly, dangerously competent. It categorizes, systematizes, and controls with extraordinary efficiency. What it cannot do is hold complexity without resolving it, tolerate paradox without collapsing it, or remain in relationship with what resists being named. When it becomes the dominant mode of a civilization – not merely a tool but the operating system – the dire consequences ripple outward into every domain of collective life.

Politics becomes the first casualty. Discourse that was once capable of holding tension – the irreducible tension between liberty and solidarity, tradition and renewal, the individual and the commons – hardens into opposed and irreconcilable certainties. Each side constructs an internally consistent worldview devoid of common sense, a closed epistemic system that processes only confirming data and experiences disconfirmation not as information but as attack. This is not disagreement. Disagreement requires a shared ground. What we are witnessing is something closer to parallel realities – each one coherent from within, each one increasingly unable to perceive the other as fully human. Dehumanization does not begin with violence. It begins with the foreclosure of ambiguity.

Religion (from Latin ‘re-ligio’ meaning ‘re-connection’), which at its contemplative root was always an encounter with what cannot be controlled – the groundlessness beneath ground, the silence beneath thought – gets conscripted into the left hemisphere’s project. Mystery becomes doctrine. Paradox becomes heresy. The apophatic tradition, which knew that the deepest truths can only be approached by unsaying, is replaced by literalism: sacred texts read as mindless instruction manuals, transcendence repackaged as tribal identity. God becomes a flag. The infinite becomes a weapon. And those who wield it do so with the serene confidence of people who have mistaken the map for the territory so completely that they have forgotten a territory ever existed.

Power displaces respect because respect requires the recognition of an interior life in the other – and that recognition is a right-hemisphere act. When the right hemisphere’s contribution is diminished, the other becomes a category before they become a person: a demographic, a threat vector, an ideological position. Empathy does not disappear entirely – but it narrows, becomes tribal, and then, in one of the more tragic ironies of our moment, turns against itself in suicidal inevitability. What begins as genuine moral sensitivity curdles, under left-hemisphere management, into a performance of sensitivity – competitive, punitive, and ultimately self-consuming. The result is the tyranny of division, entitlement and indoctrination. Truth becomes dangerous, because it is routinely inconvenient and offensive to the spineless – then gets replaced by the scourge of political correctness. Cultures begin auditing their own histories not with the nuanced grief of people trying to integrate a difficult past, but with the prosecutorial zeal of systems seeking to purge contamination. Here again, the substrate is forgotten, history is forgotten, the sense of identity lost. The result is not healing. It is a new form of the same splitting: the world divided again into pure and impure, victim and oppressor, the saved and the condemned, with the terms simply reversed.

Polarization deepens not because human nature has changed but because the cultural and technological environment now systematically rewards the left hemisphere’s preferred mode: fast, certain, categorical, and emotionally activating in the most reductive sense. Social media does not merely reflect the divided mind – it selects for it, amplifies it, and profits from it. The algorithm has no investment in wisdom. It has an investment in engagement, which is to say, in the kind of arousal that forecloses reflection. We have built, at civilizational scale, a machine that feeds the part of us least capable of governing wisely – and then expressed bewilderment at the quality of our governance.

What is missing – what has always been missing from political discourse conducted entirely within the left hemisphere’s jurisdiction – is the capacity McGilchrist calls 'Aufhebung': The ability to hold opposites in a higher synthesis without destroying either pole. This is not compromise in the weak sense – the splitting of differences – but genuine dialectical movement, the kind that requires sitting with discomfort long enough for something new to emerge. It is, not coincidentally, precisely what contemplative practice trains. The still point is not politically neutral. The capacity to remain present with what is unresolved, to resist the premature closure of complexity into slogan – this is a civic faculty as much as a personal one. Its absence is not just a spiritual problem. It is a governance crisis.

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V. The Return

And yet – and this is the turn that neither the political left nor right can quite bring itself to make – the remedy is not more analysis. It is not a better ideology, a more refined critique, or a superior epistemic framework. The left hemisphere cannot think its way out of dominant left-hemispheric insanity. The exit is not through the same door. What is required is a return – not a nostalgic one, but a radical one, in the original sense of radix: root. A return to the substrate. To the body that breathes without being asked. To the forest floor where a single teaspoon of soil contains more microbial organisms than there are human beings on earth. To the silence that is not the absence of noise but the generative presence of something prior to noise – the ground state from which experience arises and to which, in deep practice, it returns.

This is what the organic world has always been quietly offering. Not consolation. Not escape. But scale – the humbling, orienting scale of a complexity so vast and so intimate that it cannot be othered. You cannot stand in genuine relationship with an old-growth forest, with the mycelial network threading beneath your feet, with the migratory intelligence of a bird navigating by magnetic field and star – and remain entirely inside the left hemisphere’s jurisdiction. Something shifts. The boundary between self and world becomes, not dissolved, but permeable. This is not mysticism as an add-on to biology. This is biology, perceived at the depth it deserves.

The contemplative traditions knew this long before neuroscience had the instruments to confirm it. The Zen master pointing at the moon was not making a metaphysical claim – he was performing a corrective, redirecting attention from the symbol to the thing, from the map to the living territory. The Buddhist teaching on śūnyatā – emptiness – was never a nihilistic statement about the unreality of the world. It was a precise phenomenological observation: that all phenomena, including the self, arise interdependently, without fixed essence, in a web of mutual conditionality that modern ecology recognizes under a different name. The Buddha and the mycologist are, at some level, describing the same discovery. The cell membrane and the Markov blanket are, at some level, encoding the same ancient problem: where does self end and world begin, and what does it mean that the answer is always – here, and not quite here.

Core Mind Realigning we practice in our meditation programs at The Mindfulness Centre – the full-spectrum return to embodied, right-hemisphere-inclusive, emptiness-rooted awareness – is not, then, a wellness intervention. It is a reorientation to reality. It asks not merely “how do I manage my stress” but “what am I, actually, and what world am I embedded in.” It trains the capacity to tolerate not-knowing long enough for genuine knowing to arise – the kind that includes the body, the relational field, the silence beneath thought, the intricate aliveness of the organism that has been, all along, doing something far more extraordinary than anything we have yet programmed a machine to do.

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VI. The Frontier We Forgot

We are not at the dawn of intelligence. We are, if anything, at a moment of reckoning with how much of it we have ignored. The intelligence that assembled the human eye, that coordinates the immune response, that allows a murmuration of starlings to move as a single fluid mind without a conductor – this intelligence does not fit in a prompt. It does not run on servers. It also does not require the optional imaginative maneuver of engaging in an intimate relationship with a divine creator. It ‘simply’, yet astoundingly runs on carbon, water, time, and a set of thermodynamic constraints so precise that the margin for life, in the universe we can observe, appears almost impossibly narrow. We are that margin. We are what happened when matter became curious about itself – and the least we owe that fact is attention.

The mindfulness project, at its fullest, is nothing less than this: the cultivation of a quality of attention adequate to the complexity we actually inhabit. Not the attention that optimizes, extracts, and moves on – but the attention that stays, that deepens, that allows the world to become strange and specific and irreplaceable again. The trees are still communicating. The genome is still, in every cell division, copying three billion base pairs with an error rate that would humiliate any human engineer. The glia are still doing something in the brain that we do not yet fully understand. The emptiness at the heart of matter is still – against all our productivity – simply here and, if you prefer, simply God in its incomprehensible essence. God does not have to be posited separately. This very ordinary embodied moment is extraordinary beyond imagination when we know how to look closely – it is God’s magnificent incarnation.

We did not need to build a mind. We need to inhabit the embodied one we have – and wake up, at last, to the world it arose from.

Automaticity of the human mind

Human function, action, cognition and behavior under the lens of automaticity

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1. Left brain perspective

For several consecutive early spring days, a single, distinctive fly appeared to relish the bright sunlight illuminating my bathroom. We have grown familiar, coexisting as two entities engaged in our respective routines. I designate her as "she"—perhaps influenced by the feminine grammatical gender of la mouche (French), la mosca (Italian), and die Fliege (German)—an intuitive attribution rather than a biological assertion. She occasionally positions herself on the curtain railing above my bathtub, observing as I shower. More frequently, she rests on the windowsill, tracking my movements as I shave, and at times briefly alights on my hair for a few seconds. I have been aware of her presence throughout, akin to an inquisitive cohabitant sharing this confined space, but today I intentionally sought a deeper engagement.

She was once again stationed on the windowsill, basking in the sunlight, as I shaved. I approached closely, examining her large, compound eyes, and posed the question, “What is it like to be a fly?” Initially, my cognition activated a predictable analytical response, retrieving stored knowledge about her physiology: a head encasing a compact brain; expansive, multifaceted eyes affording a broad visual field; antennae functioning as olfactory and gustatory sensors; specialized mouthparts adapted for sponging or piercing-sucking; a thorax anchoring six articulated legs, rapid wings, and club-shaped halteres for flight stabilization; and an abdomen housing digestive and reproductive systems, concealed from view. Her exoskeleton, black with muted grey striations, bore a subtle, fur-like texture, as though she had ornamented herself for this encounter—a sizable specimen, impossible to ignore.

Yet, I deliberately suspended this intellectual framework, opting instead to engage her in a silent, receptive state. My question became more personal and changed to “what is it like to be you”? I consciously down-regulated the default mode network—the neural substrate of self-referential thought—relinquishing the ego’s persistent drive to assert its permanence. This ego, in its dualistic framework, projects constructed identities onto the external ‘other’, rendering her so alien that I might, without reflection, swat her away, extinguishing a life deemed insignificant, irritating, or even repellent by that limited perspective.

In this shift, a different entity began to emerge within my awareness—not a mere object, but a presence actively relating to me, exhibiting a form of consciousness distinct yet perceptible. Her curiosity, perhaps reciprocal, prompted her to take flight and settle briefly on my hair. I remained immobile, registering the faint tactile sensation of her tentative exploration of my surface—an interaction probing my identity as much as I sought hers. The contact was transient; she soon returned to the windowsill, fixing her gaze upon me. I speculated that she might, in her own unknowable way, ponder a parallel question: “What is it like to be this massive, terrestrial organism, incapable of flight, beyond my capacity to name?” The perceived separation—me here, her there—dissolved into a unified ‘we’, marked by a tangible exchange of vitality through our shared, living awareness. Though our modes of consciousness diverge, they intersect intimately, each of us enacting existence according to our inherent capacities. Together, we participated in a dynamic interplay, a microcosm of the universe’s unfolding, so affecting that tears briefly surfaced, reflecting regret for the countless instances of inattentiveness lost to automaticity.

This encounter with such a remarkable organism illuminated a progression of awareness. Initially, I had navigated the ‘dark night of the soul’—a dualistic state of nihility, a relative nothingness characterized by existential desolation and the collapse of meaning within a self-other framework. Beyond this, I accessed a non-dual absolute nothingness, a broader mode of awareness where subject-object distinctions dissolve into a unified field of being, devoid of relational constructs. Yet, this was not the terminus; it opened into emptiness—the ultimate awareness mode, a boundless, vibrant expanse where the extraordinary manifests within the ordinary flux of daily existence. This state, achieved through direct presence with this fly, surpasses any chemically induced psychedelic experience in its clarity and depth, revealing a profound interconnectedness inherent in the fabric of life, the extraordinariness of ordinary existence. No answer could ever come close to the tantalizing peace of timeless questions.

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2. Right brain vantage point

For several radiant spring mornings, a singular, remarkable fly has basked in the golden sunlight flooding my bathroom. We have become familiar companions, each merrily tending to our daily rites. At times, she—yes, she, anointed feminine by the lilting echoes of la mouche, la mosca, die Fliege, a soft intuition humming through language—perches atop the curtain railing above my bathtub, a silent witness to my shower’s misty veil. More often, she lingers on the windowsill, her gaze fixed upon me as I shave, now and then darting to alight for a fleeting instant upon my hair. I’ve felt her presence all along—a curious housemate in this shared sanctuary—but today, I vowed to bridge the chasm between us.

There she rested once more, cradled in the sun’s warm embrace upon the windowsill, watching me wield my razor with quiet intent. I leaned closer, peering into her vast, prismatic eyes—kaleidoscopes of a secret world—and murmured, “What is it like to be a fly?” At first, my mind thrummed with the familiar pulse of knowledge: her head, a miniature cathedral of instinct; those grand, jeweled eyes unveiling a boundless vista; antennae, fragile wands of scent and savor; mouthparts sculpted for sipping or piercing; her thorax, a delicate frame bearing six crooked legs, wings that shimmer with thunderous speed, and halteres, poised like a dancer’s plumb line; her abdomen, a veiled chamber of life’s mysteries. She gleamed, black as night with faint grey stripes, her form cloaked in a gossamer sheen, as though she’d adorned herself for this tender rendezvous.

This time, like as many other times as I can possibly honour in daily life, I let this torrent of facts dissolve, beckoning her to meet me in the hush of silence. The question changed to become more personal: “What is it like to be you?” I stilled the restless clamor of my mind, loosening the ego’s tenacious hold—that brittle self, desperate to cling to its mirage of eternity, casting endless conceptual shadows upon the being before me. So remote she might appear, I could, in a careless flicker, swat her away, deeming her life a trifling annoyance, a speck of disdain. But no—a different essence began to bloom within my consciousness.

A presence unfurled, no longer separate but alive with me, awake in her own cryptic grace, her curiosity a mirror to my own. Suddenly, she soared, settling upon my hair. I stood statue-still, captivated by the faint tickle of her pilgrimage across my scalp, a gentle quest into the enigma of my existence. The moment was ephemeral; she soon returned to her sun-gilded throne, gazing back at me. Perhaps she mused, too: “What is it like to be this lumbering, wingless colossus, a riddle beyond my silent tongue?” The gulf between us—me here, her there—dissolved into a luminous we, tethered by a pulsing filament of shared aliveness. Our ways of knowing diverged, yet entwined, each of us threading life’s arc with singular devotion. Together, we spun a strand in the vast loom of the cosmos, a dance so piercing that tears brimmed in my eyes, lamenting a lifetime’s moments lost to the fog of unawareness.

In that tranquil void, beside this astonishing fly, I brushed against an abyss beyond sorrow—a stillness forged in the crucible of the soul’s dark night, rising into the infinite embrace of nothingness. From there, it was but a tender plunge into the world’s embrace, a surrender that let peaceful nothingness blossom into vibrant emptiness—a radiant field teeming with the miraculous veiled in the everyday. This quiet epiphany, outshining the wildest psychedelic odyssey imaginable, unveiled life’s timeless poetry: unspoken, extraordinary, woven into the ordinary cadence of days. The nameless question remains.

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