What’s worth reading
Stories from consciousness research, contemplative practice, and the wisdom traditions, curated as they surface.
Sarvapriyananda takes Vedanta into the AI conversation
The resident minister of the Vedanta Society of New York delivered a sold-out lecture at Asia Society Texas, placing the Mandukya Upanishad at the centre of the question every AI lab is circling: what is consciousness, and can it be built? Sarvapriyananda engaged Chalmers and the hard problem directly, then showed that the Vedantic position is not a mystical add-on but a rigorous alternative starting point. Consciousness first, matter as appearance within it.
The spiritual core of the hard problem
A peer-reviewed paper in Frontiers in Psychology proposes that consciousness is ontologically primary, not an emergent property of neural processes but the foundational reality from which mind and matter arise. The study draws on Advaita Vedanta, Tibetan Buddhism, and transpersonal theory to argue that first-person and participatory ways of knowing deserve standing alongside third-person neuroscience. The hard problem dissolves once you stop assuming matter came first.
Ramanasramam brings self-enquiry to the Statue of Oneness
Dr. Venkat S. Ramanan, President of Sri Ramanasramam, spoke at the Ekatma Dham festival in Omkareshwar, a four-day gathering dedicated to Advaita Vedanta held beside the 108-foot Statue of Oneness. He presented Bhagavan Ramana Maharshi's "Who am I?" as a practical method rather than a philosophy. A quiet moment: the living ashram carrying its teaching out to a new venue, then returning to Arunachala.
Brown's contemplative studies programme, profiled
A Brown Daily Herald profile describes the university's contemplative studies concentration, where students work in Judson Brewer's lab studying meditators' emotional states and then sit on the cushion themselves. The curriculum draws from Buddhist, Hindu, Christian, and secular lineages, treating each as living tradition rather than historical curiosity. A programme built on the conviction that these traditions cannot be understood from the outside alone.
Saranagati turns twenty
Sri Ramanasramam's eNewsletter enters its twentieth year of continuous publication in September 2026, and the ashram is launching a complete PDF archive of every issue for free download. Twenty years of quiet, faithful transmission: ashram news, devotee accounts, Ramana reflections, and the steady pulse of a lineage that never stopped. The June issue carries Part III of the Swami Ramanagiri series and reflections on self-enquiry.
There is no hard problem of consciousness
Carlo Rovelli argues the hard problem only appears once we picture science as a view from outside the world, splitting the knower from the known. Drop that split, treat the observer as part of what is observed, and the supposed gap between matter and experience loses its footing. The relational move sits close to the nondual claim that awareness and its objects are never actually two.
Why aliens probably have consciousness
Eric Schwitzgebel and Jeremy Pober apply the Copernican principle of mediocrity to inner experience, suggesting that behavioural sophistication rather than biology may be what marks a mind. Along the way they concede that every serious theory of consciousness, from materialism to idealism, turns strange once examined closely. A useful reminder that awareness resists being pinned to grey matter alone.
Reality is a dream, not a simulation
The physician and writer Andrew T. Jaffe inverts materialism, proposing that awareness is primary and the physical world is a lawful, shared appearance rendered within it. He reads gravity-as-geometry and the cosmic speed limit as features of a rendered dream rather than a machine. The dream framing is a direct modern echo of the Advaitic teaching that the world is mithya, real as appearance yet not self-existing.
The consolations of simulation
Paul Nedelisky asks why the simulation hypothesis has taken such a grip on the popular imagination, well beyond the careful arguments of philosophers and technologists. He reads the appeal as a quasi-religious longing for a reality behind the reality, a coder-god and a world that is ultimately mind-made. The essay pairs well with the contemplative intuition that appearances are not the final layer.
Seven days of silence rewires the brain
A University of California San Diego study followed twenty adults through a week-long silent retreat and found quieted activity in the brain’s self-referential networks alongside enhanced neuroplasticity. Participants who reported deeper mystical states showed greater whole-brain coordination. Evidence that sustained silence does measurable work on the machinery of the separate self.
The quiet power of collective silence
Aryavandana traces how activists and artists use shared stillness as a discipline, slow and deliberate rather than passive. The piece frames silence as an act of attention held in common, a threshold where noise falls away and presence deepens. A grounded look at silence as practice rather than the mere absence of sound.
The new science of the near-death experience
Charlotte Martial’s team captured real-time EEG as the brain crossed the threshold of dying, finding bursts of organised activity where silence was expected. The piece sits with the open question of whether the dying brain produces experience or releases it. A careful read for anyone drawn to where awareness goes when the body lets go.
The mythology of conscious AI
Anil Seth argues that consciousness is rooted in being alive rather than in computation, so a machine that talks like a mind may have no inner experience at all. The essay separates intelligence from awareness and asks why we are so quick to project a self into our tools. It clarifies, by contrast, what the contemplative traditions mean by awareness as ground rather than product.
Thoughts are more real than objects
Jeremy Dunham makes the case that idealism is a realism about ideas, not a denial of the world, and that thought may be the most fundamental thing there is. The essay clears away the common caricature of idealism and shows why the view is taken seriously again. It offers a modern Western footing for the Advaitic claim that awareness, not matter, is primary.
Schopenhauer, the West’s nondual sage
This essay places Schopenhauer in the lineage of nondual thinkers, tracing how his world as representation drew directly on the Upanishads and Vedanta. It recovers a native Western voice for the recognition that the phenomenal world is appearance within one underlying ground. A useful bridge for readers who meet Advaita first through European philosophy.
The race to simulate the quantum universe
Shalma Wegsman reports on physicists building machines to simulate quantum fields, work that raises the question of what a simulation of reality even is. The piece keeps to the science while opening the door to the puzzle of reality as computable information. For a nondual reader it sharpens the difference between the world as appearance and the world as substance.
The four layers of consciousness
Thich Nhat Hanh maps the mind into store, manas, mind, and sense consciousness, showing how the felt sense of a separate self arises and how practice can loosen it. The teaching turns a subtle map of awareness into something usable in daily sitting. It speaks plainly to the nondual recognition that thinking can happen without a thinker.
Why our physical bodies may be a core part of conscious experience
A Karolinska researcher reports new rubber-hand experiments suggesting consciousness keeps continuous, privileged access to information from the body. The feeling of being a self in a body may be one of the basic functions of conscious experience.
The long history of silent meditation retreats
A religious-studies scholar traces the ten-day silent retreat from Sayagyi U Ba Khin's Rangoon meditation centre through S. N. Goenka to the global retreat culture of today. A form that feels ancient has a precise twentieth-century lineage.
What master meditators’ brains reveal about consciousness
Matthew Sacchet’s Harvard programme puts advanced meditators in the scanner during jhana absorption, cessation events, and nondual states. The states long described in the contemplative manuals turn out to have clear, repeatable neural signatures.
The science of a wandering mind
A synthesis of what attention research has learned about mind-wandering and the default mode network: the untrained mind spends close to half its waking life somewhere else. The research maps, from the outside, the territory every meditation manual in this library starts from.
Jon Kabat-Zinn on the power of awareness
The man who brought mindfulness into medicine talks about what he left mostly unsaid for forty years: that the practice is nondual through and through. Awareness, he says here, is a hidden-in-plain-sight dimension of being, and the intention is also the result.
The brain might not create consciousness after all
Christof Koch, the neuroscientist who spent decades chasing the neural correlates of consciousness, now argues that consciousness may be fundamental to reality rather than produced by the brain. He points at three places the materialist story breaks: subjective experience itself, what modern physics says reality is, and the patterns showing up in near-death and end-of-life research.
Iain McGilchrist on the unmaking of the world
A long interview with the author of The Master and His Emissary on his 1,500-page successor volume, The Matter with Things. McGilchrist argues consciousness is ontologically prior to matter, and that the contemporary West has handed the keys to the left hemisphere of the brain, the side that fragments and categorises, at the cost of the right hemisphere’s wider, relational grasp of what is actually there.
The problem of mindfulness
A philosopher pushes back at the secular mindfulness industry. Meditation itself is left standing; the target is the picture underneath it, a self that should detach from its thoughts and a present moment more real than memory or anticipation. That picture is a metaphysical position most practitioners never knowingly signed up for.
Buddhanature beyond mere concept
Paul Condon on the heart of the Mahayana view: that what we are looking for is what is looking. Buddhanature is not a state to acquire, it is the awareness already shining underneath the goal-directed self that thinks it needs to find it.
Why the densest part of the brain isn’t conscious
A clear introduction to Integrated Information Theory, the leading scientific theory of consciousness, by Jeremiah Hendren and Hans Busstra. IIT proposes that experience is not produced by neurons doing computation but by the degree to which a system integrates information into a single irreducible whole, which is why the densely packed but feed-forward cerebellum (80% of the brain’s neurons) stays dark.
Insects and other animals have consciousness, scientists declare
Coverage of the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness, signed by hundreds of scientists and philosophers, which holds that a realistic possibility exists for inner experience in cephalopods, crustaceans, fish, and even insects. The supporting evidence: mirror-test responses in cleaner wrasse, episodic memory in cuttlefish, apparent play in bees.
Robert Musil and the no-self minority
A reading of Robert Musil, the modernist novelist whose work circles the suspicion that there is no settled self at the centre of a life. The essay draws a line between literature and contemplative practice as two different methods for thinning the assumption of a fixed I.
Nonduality and consciousness, a very simple introduction
Rupert Spira’s plainest written summary of the teaching he has spent forty years pointing at. The argument is short: awareness is what knows experience, so awareness cannot be one more thing experienced, and the apparent line between subject and object softens once that is noticed clearly.
A simple shift in focus
A phenomenologist's case for sitting practice as a research method in its own right. The mind that learns to watch its own running commentary stops mistaking the commentary for itself, a skill philosophers from Husserl onward have been after.
The problem of now
A philosopher takes the very popular instruction to be in the present moment and asks what it is actually claiming. The present moment is harder to locate than it sounds, and taking the instruction seriously unsettles how we usually think about time, self, and what is real.
Analytic idealism: a serious case that the world is mental
Bernardo Kastrup argues that universal consciousness is all there ultimately is, and what we call physical objects are appearances of mental activity. The piece sets out how dissociation, the same phenomenon clinicians observe in DID, can explain why each of us experiences ourselves as a separate self inside a shared world.
Reality is a user interface
Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman argues that evolution shaped our senses to hide reality, not reveal it. What we see is a desktop of icons, useful for surviving but no more "true" than the trash can on your laptop is a real receptacle.
Quantum fields are consciousness
Federico Faggin, the engineer who invented the microprocessor, now argues that consciousness is not produced by the brain but is the substance of quantum fields themselves. Each quantum state is unique and uncopiable, matching the privacy of subjective experience in a way classical physics cannot.
The world should be considered like a dream
Ramana Maharshi on why Advaita treats waking experience as continuous with the dream state, not opposed to it. Both are appearances in awareness, and recognising that is the beginning of self-enquiry.
It from bit: the universe as a participatory phenomenon
Maria Popova on the physicist John Archibald Wheeler, who argued that information, not matter, is the bedrock of reality, and that observation is not a passive recording of what is but part of what brings it into being.
An introduction to non-duality
Rupert Spira on why the world’s contemplative traditions point at one shared insight: that awareness, not the body or mind, is what we essentially are, and that the apparent separation between self and world is a misreading of experience.
Simulation theory: the mystics got there first
A look at the growing scholarly conversation linking the simulation hypothesis to ideas long carried in Hindu, Buddhist, and gnostic traditions. Whether or not the universe is computational, the suspicion that what we take for solid reality is something subtler is older than physics.
The hard problem of consciousness is a distraction from the real one
An Aeon essay arguing that the standard framing (how does matter produce experience?) is upside down. Take consciousness as the ground rather than the puzzle, and the philosophical knot loosens. Panpsychism and idealism move from fringe to serious alternative.
What awe looks like in the brain
When researchers used fMRI to scan people watching awe-inducing nature videos, activity in the default mode network (the region most active during self-referential thinking) quieted. A small finding with a large implication for why moments of awe leave us feeling less self-centred.
Tibetan dream yoga: waking up inside the dream
Tibetan practitioners have used lucidity in dreams as serious spiritual training for a thousand years, treating the dream state as preparation for the dissolution of self at death. A grounded primer on the lineage, the technique, and why some teachers consider dream practice more potent than waking practice.
The heart as an organ of perception
In Sufi understanding the heart is not a feeling organ but a perceiving one, a place that knows without thinking. A short, clear reading on the heart as the spiritual organ through which the Divine Essence is directly experienced.
Near-death experiences and the case against the materialist self
Marjorie Woollacott takes the standard sceptical critiques of NDE research head-on. The patterns in the data, drawn from thousands of accounts, sit awkwardly inside any purely materialist account of mind.
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