This article documents and analyzes a three-month intercultural performance collaboration with Metamorphosis Theatre in St. Petersburg, Russia, during the summer of 1992—a pivotal moment following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Drawing on the author’s fieldwork methodology developed through decades of collaboration with Indigenous communities in Alaska, Southern Africa, and Siberia, the...
Modern education has made incredible progress in science and technology, but for all the breakthroughs, people still feel stressed out, confused about morals, and keep searching for meaning in their lives. You can’t fix those problems with material knowledge alone. The kind of inner spiritual wisdom that addresses these things rarely gets any attention in academic circles. Most scholars set it...
In the era of material success brimming to the heights of advancement, the mankind feels the need for resurrection of consciousness which is the governing force of life. It is a bitter truth that the quest for fulfillment remains ever poorly the same. The restlessness that creeps in amidst the valour of expanding knowledge seems to weigh us down in every walk of life. In the wave of...
Two of the core concepts in the Buddhist prose of Zen Master Thích Nhất Hạnh are non-self and mindfulness. These notions play a pivotal role in cultivating inner peace and fostering a harmonious world. This study focuses on two representative non-fiction prose works by Thích Nhất Hạnh: “Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life” (Thích Nhất Hạnh, 2023a) and “No Death, No...
Why does consciousness exist at all? This essay argues that the question, often treated as metaphysical, admits a structural answer. Consciousness — understood as costly global integration across otherwise independent processing channels — exists because, above a critical threshold of inter-channel conflict, the fitness cost of incoherent responses exceeds the metabolic cost of integration. A...
Illusionism holds that phenomenal consciousness, understood as the intrinsic qualitative character of experience, is an illusion generated by cognitive systems. While attractive in its parsimony, illusionism is often criticized as imcomplete: it denies qualia without explaining why the appear so compelling. This paper develops the Wet Room model as a constructive extenstion, arguing that...
Abstract The brain continuously integrates information from the external environment (exteroception) and the internal bodily milieu (interoception). How the balance between these two processing streams shifts across vigilance states with differing levels of environmental responsiveness, however, remains poorly understood. Here, we examined neural responses to external auditory and internal...
The physical substrate of consciousness remains theoretically underdetermined. Two empirically tractable accounts occupy the field: the Organisational Substrate Hypothesis (OSH), which holds that the pattern of neural closure is itself sufficient for consciousness regardless of implementation, and the Intrinsic Causal Power Hypothesis (ICPH), which holds that the specific causal identity of...
Over the past two decades, consciousness science has advanced from descriptive correlations to mechanistic predictions. Core requirements for conscious states have been clarified, and new diagnostic tools — most notably the Perturbational Complexity Index (PCI) derived from TMS–EEG — are moving toward clinical use. PCI indicates about a 95% probability of detecting consciousness in...
Anomalous perceptual experiences (APEs) have been reported anecdotally in ultra-endurance athletes. These experiences occur in the absence of psychiatric illness and may reflect the effects of extreme physiologic and environmental stressors. However, the literature is fragmented and terminology inconsistent, limiting understanding of the nature, prevalence, and mechanisms of these experiences....