Consciousness between Science and Spirituality

Hi. Nice to see you again.

My name is Daniel Dick. I have different facets right now. I'm in a Buddhist center, practicing Tibetan Buddhism as my main thing here in the COVID times. That's the best thing: to really go into retreat and go inside, and having spent much time in the garden. And meanwhile, we're working on some publications, some projects to finish.

Before coming here, I was much more into organizing institutions around consciousness. I co-founded two institutions around consciousness studies, and I have been many years in systems science. So my past has been very much the academic career, trying to combine, on one hand, consciousness, spirituality, knowledge about the mind, about how the world actually works, if we see it as something that we are able to get to know.

So that was my academic path, coming from social and cultural anthropology, always focusing on religion and consciousness studies. And besides that, like I said, doing photography, but that's only on the side. This has been my main [thing]. I have also [done] a bit in consulting. I'm a bit into astrology, especially the Mayan system. I'm enthusiastic about the Mayan calendar and teach some people about that.

And privately, also in South America, I was involved in healing arts, holistic healing arts, and trying also to combine this with the science that I had. I wanted to do a PhD about that, but actually it didn't work out, and it was better like that.

And that makes a lot of [sense], learning from cultures, because that's more the former background, cultural and social anthropology. My parents are from [unclear], I'm from Germany, and I always loved to travel and to learn from different cultures. I was asking the question: what is common to different religions? Why do people in South America have mermaids and talk about things that I thought would only happen in European fairy tales? Different stories about how the world works, and seeing that in different parts of the world they come to the same or similar conclusions. That was my interest. So to get this together in my mind, to get [this together] with my experiences, also with psychedelics, especially in South America, medicine plants. And making my mind up about what life is and what we're doing here, and what's the best thing to do moving forward, trying to be a good human somehow.

I have no family [of my own]. My family is my brother and my mom and my friends. And relationships themselves have shaped me in my way very deeply, because the question about the meaning of life was always kind of related to love, in a sense. What is human love? What is the spiritual love that has no boundaries or no exclusivity? Those were some guiding questions of my life. Why does love have to be exclusive? If you love someone, why can't you love someone else? And then comes jealousy and anger and feelings of "you can't do something", or what is freedom to love or not. So those kind of inspired a bit of the [book].

I kind of had a cut with academia, with scientific exploration, because it had some limits for what I was searching.

In the past, I was very much into science and getting knowledge about consciousness studies, which gave me a lot of information about how my mind actually works. And therefore you're constantly involved with your mind, with your consciousness, examining what the consciousness does. So it's a very closed loop, and it gives you a lot of concepts. Actually, you get into a lot of projections. You see your mind, and your mind is what you perceive. And especially if you go into symbology, archetypes and stuff like that, it becomes very interesting to see how different shapes, as I said, come together from different cultures, different patterns always repeat in different stories and stuff. So my main interest was really this curiosity about how the world works.

And in the past, I mean, I can go even further back, because one event in my life was very hard and shaped my life very deeply: my father committed suicide when I was 14. And then it was a lot of survival mode. I took on the father role in the family, because I was the older one. Just from one day to the other, I was an adult. My mom wouldn't ask me anymore when to come home. So I was 14 and I was fully responsible for my life.

And then the question was, of course: what's life, what's the meaning of life? If your father commits suicide, you ask yourself, really, what the hell are you doing here? And psychology, Jungian psychology, says that these questions usually come when you are really about to die, after you're past your fifties and so on, and you ask yourself, oh my God, what did I do with my life? So these questions came to me when I was 14.

And there was an interest in philosophy. And because of my mom and my dad: it was my dad who was always interested in holistic healing methods, that was my father's side. And my mom has always had a spiritual connection, say, very special dreams and stuff like that.

After I finished school, I went to South America, and it really was this wish to explore this meaning of life, with the shamans and [their] purifications, and to learn Reiki, healing arts with hands and energy, which opened up a dimension of perception and of beings which at that time was [just] experience. I couldn't even make my mind up about it, really understand this in a coherent worldview. These experiences have very deeply shaped my life in various ways, because they are now shaping very much what I am discovering now, also from the Buddhist knowledge.

So on one hand, the death of my father and the reflection about death and the meaning of life put me on a track to ask philosophy, spirituality and stuff like that about this meaning of life, which led me to a lot of experiences, and those experiences I couldn't explain to myself.

And then I went to study. Actually, I wanted to do photography and travel around, and that's why I thought anthropology would be nice. But there was this professor who was teaching consciousness and religion studies, and I was like, wow, that's my field. There I'll have more answers. So I started studying under him, became his tutor, and he my mentor. But then he died in 2013 from cancer.

And three months after that, the skeptics came. It's like a self-named police against bad scientific behavior, you could say, because some of the students really did not a good job on their theses. But they just want to have a safe worldview that everything is just material and everything has cause and effect. So there was an article in the news that was defaming very much his work, or the fellowship that he created.

And that led me to study the materialistic worldview, which in turn led me to ask about the philosophy of science: how do you actually get to know what you know? That was my thesis. And this led me to systems science. Systems science led me back to consciousness. And going through these institutions of consciousness studies, I was discovering myself again: the actual deep longing was going back more to spirituality.

But two years ago I had a very deep cut in my life, which was very provocative, this cut, which [confronted] me in various ways to say, okay, stop, I won't do this work anymore. I don't know what I'm going to do, but I'm just noticing that I forgot very much about myself, because I became very ambitious about the career of being someone important, flying around and doing conferences and stuff like that.

The last year, I was together with a girl who was American, and we got together to open up a holistic healing center in Germany. She was from America, so that was also the way we could stay together. And then came COVID, and the relationship didn't work out.

And then I said, okay. It was a very old wish that I had, to go to a monastery or something like that. I always had a deep sense of it. Very often I was telling my girlfriends: at some point, I would have to go to the spiritual path. I don't know, I always had this in my mind, that I had to do this.

So now I'm in a Buddhist center. I'm finding this very much [a] home. Sometimes I'm a bit impatient, because it's a lot of discipline, but it's in Europe, so it's nice that you don't have this harsh, harsh discipline as you would have in India or Nepal and stuff like that. And having COVID pass in here was also a very nice ambiance.

And meanwhile, I also wrote a book with two other guys about sex, masculinity and God, which is tackling, in a conversation, very much this question about the exclusivity of love, the sexual drive, the very unconscious doing around mating relationships, but also what it does with ethics. If you're true to yourself, you're feeling for someone else, but you're in a relationship: what does it mean? Very philosophical questions. Like, what do life and death actually have in common? It was a very deep investigation.

And out of one of the institutions that I co-founded, the Academy of Consciousness Research of Vienna, there's still a book to be finished. It took us a while, but we are now on a very good run, so that it could really be finished. There were, I think, 12 people involved in that. I'm very happy to be able to present these findings in a proper way. Unfortunately, it will be in German. The other one is in English.

I think the best way I could summarize it is actually in Nietzsche's words, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: the three metamorphoses of the mind.

He said that in the beginning the mind is like a camel. It takes all the heavy load, and the more you thirst to know something, you take the burdens to go into the desert, and you have patience, and you carry heavy load, and you go on, maybe in a caravan, and you have some companions you go with, and you make it from one oasis to the other to really get your thirst stilled.

And the second turning is to become a lion. The lion is the one that doesn't ask anymore "what should I", but turns the values around and says "what do I want". He becomes the power, how to say that, the king of the desert. And he is the one that creates the values while he's fighting the dragon that has the old values written on him.

And then you ask: what is the third change of mind, the third metamorphosis of the mind? It is the child, to say yes to life and to look at it openly, as every day new, as if you would know nothing again. And that summarizes it very much.

I could tell the story of one professor who was studying a very, very tiny island in Ireland. And he said to me: when I wrote my PhD thesis about this island, I knew exactly how this island worked. He was an anthropologist and looked into economy, politics, religion and stuff like that. And he said: after 10 years, I was like, yeah, I don't really get what's happening there. And now I've been studying this for about 40 years, and I have no idea.

So that's how I feel about consciousness. You can say a lot about, first, perception. You have your senses, and out of your senses you make a distinction to say that [this is] something. And in that moment you have a second level that creates time, because you got a fraction of a moment where you realized that this is something, and a moment which is not.

And then what is something is usually charged with emotion, with a judgment. I mean, it's even a judgment to say this is a laptop. And you might even have a heavily emotionally charged perception and say, wow, that's a very beautiful laptop, or it's even my laptop. So this is the first notion where we create meaning.

And if we repeatedly have this notion of time, that we put together that we have experienced something before and judged "this is that", then we have something that creates the world of ideas, I would say. Simply, we have words. Suddenly you know what a laptop is without knowing what my laptop looks like, because you have seen a lot of laptops, and each time that you recognized it and said "this is a laptop", you would now have an image of what a laptop is. And this creates a consciousness around things that are not actually in the time and place of your senses, which is a very interesting consciousness itself.

And then we have the next notion, where we put all these ideas together into proximity. We can say the laptop is usually on the table. Next to the table there's the floor, and next to the floor the walls; around the walls, there's the house. So everything is kind of next to each other. And we put systems of thought together, and these systems of thought can go all around. We have these rules among the words that we have, and the things that are close to each other make a set of rules, so that this conglomerate of ideas stays together. And that's how religion works. That's how companies work. There's a boundary around a proximity that is not localized, but extends over time and space through the ideas.

And in this level we have various levels. Some are very short in time, and others are very long in time, and they can be so long that they are close to infinity. And this is when we come to a symbolic order of the universe, in archetypal and symbolic meanings. Things repeat each other in different notions of time, and patterns run throughout the creation of ideas, which are reflected in our minds. And interestingly enough, through all the times that had the capacity of building up a civilization, to project us.

And beyond that, there's not much more, when you really are trying to unfold it. And here even words are very difficult, because you're already in the symbolic order, which on one hand has to be also sound, has to be also color, has to be also movement, has to be also shape, has to be also understood, not from a conceptual framework of knowing what it is, but having the system of thought, and at the same time no concept, [being able] to feel with that concept while having the system of thought in mind. And this is a very interesting sphere.

And beyond that, there is the mind that is able to embrace all of that, which is just nothingness. There are two kinds of nothingness. One nothingness is like the dark void. It's like shit there. So really nothing. It's a very uncomfortable place to be. And there is the other. Then it's actually not nothing like a shitty place, but actually a very beautiful place, because it is filled with compassion. It's always described as a pure light, or as God, or as emptiness and compassion at the same time for the Buddhists, or as the bliss of being.

And there's the question of how much, or how clear, that is in between. The experience of the light itself, in its colors, but it is beyond the colors, a sphere that is, you could say, without color. If you have a prism which divides all the colors, you just go behind that. We don't see light. It's not something that you can perceive. It's something that is there all the time, but it's beyond the veil, beyond this prism that spreads out the light in its spectrum.

So basically, this concept that I was talking about is not only Buddhist. It is, I assume, highly influenced by systems science. I mean, they come very close, the Buddhists and the scientists. That's why they are very friendly to each other.

But in the end, if you take any symbolic order, like Freemasonry or those, I mean, that's where the most [is]. The [Tibetan] culture is very rich on that. But if you go to the Andean cosmology, you can go into that too. They don't have much notion about these ultimate stages, but actually some of them do; it's just not very much recorded. You also have this in Native American traditions, when they talk about the great mystery and the great father and stuff like that. The great mystery goes to this world where there is nothing, but everything comes out of it. And the important thing in these traditions is really the heart: to not go into a dark voidness, but into a light voidness, where you can hold on and want to contribute to the life-giving forces. Even though things die, but to the [genesis] itself.

To give it also some scientific background, one major question right now is quantum physics. When I was in this other institute, there was a lot of talk about the convergence of quantum physics and psychology: that you can't distinguish the observer from the observed. They have an effect on each other, because the experiment always changes if someone looks at it. So then the hard materialists have to look into psychology, because there's something going on there.

And the second thing that led to this question is actually coming from systems science. And here I have to point out Niklas Luhmann on the first hand, but also George Spencer-Brown. They have taken up the key formulations for this kind of thinking. But if you're looking at Kant, at the end he said, well, what you know is what you are, but actually it's more about what you imagine. That becomes more important at the end.

And I mean, to bring it down to earth: we always think that things are very separate from ourselves, and that things don't have much influence on how we feel and what we do, what we think. But there are some proofs from science, from research on how you change water molecules with your emotionality and your wording, or how you can change random generators, machines that generate random numbers, and put an intention to change the randomness. So some intention there in the mind has an influence even on machines.

And if you think about your mom and she calls you: these are small things where love shows a connection that is very visible. So there are only some hints, but you can always ask yourself: if you dream, with which eyes are you seeing? You have a dream, you see something: what are the eyes that are looking at these dreams?

Sex, Masculinity and God, exactly.

The book was first introduced as an idea to me by Cadell Last, because I met him, and we talked about his philosophy, and he talked about: what's the real in philosophy? We're getting all these ideas. We talk all the time about these ideas in philosophy, but what's the real, where we can base a philosophy in the real? And there is nothing.

Because philosophy, for example, is thinking about thinking and how thinking works with thinking. So they got into a loop where the world of ideas is explored, but when it comes to daily life, then we get into trouble, because we have relationships, because we have feelings and stuff like that.

So his question was very much about how we can put philosophy back down to earth, to what matters to [people]. Not some elitist thinking where it doesn't really matter to everyday life. Where are the people, what really matters? And what everybody is kind of involved in is sex. Sex and food, maybe, and sleeping. Those are some basic needs. But actually almost nobody in philosophy talks about sex. And this is something really, I mean, wow. Almost no philosopher talks about sex, but then [there's] Freud and stuff like that.

And from this discussion, he said he's going to invite a third person, that is Kevin Orosz. He is a coach for masculinity, and it's very much in [his] popular approach to empower men in their masculinity. Because we have this feeling that, especially in academics, you're not allowed to be a man really anymore, because there was a lot of awareness about rape culture.

So the book is actually setting up the question about attraction, and it's a bit of a look at the irritation of contemporary masculinity. And it is actually a deep dive into psychological development that comes out of the [desire], into the unconscious and the deepest desires that are actually leading the consciousness and your movement through the world. And how does it relate to ethics? How does it relate to archetypes of different cultures? How does it relate to the absolute truth, to the absolute love, and to the relative world? How do we really find each other in relationship, too? How can we be true to ourselves? What is truth at all?

It describes a bit of this path that you go through, through desire, through a learning process, to uncover what has been unconscious to the consciousness, and very down to earth, through the questions: what is sex, what is death, what is love, what is ethics, what is real?

So that was the attempt to really make a conversation out of it, Cadell Last, Kevin Orosz and me, to have just trialogues, we call it, to uncover what really matters: relationships, love, our desires for the other half. To say, so what's happening there? There is no half anymore.

It started through online conversations that have been streamed on Facebook. And that was transcribed and re-edited. And we had a second round, where we had 10 of these episodes again, to revisit these 10 chapters, these 10 episodes, and it is now in the process of being re-edited as the second edition of the book. In addition to the 10 chapters that we had before, it's coming as a redefined version.

Interesting three years for the three of us, going through a lot of processes, emotionally, on a personal side, and intellectually. It was a very wonderful journey to have a ride with these gentlemen, Cadell Last and Kevin Orosz. [We are] giving a workshop and a talk at the European men's gathering in the summer in Denmark, which will be very interesting too. And we got really good feedback so far from people. So we'll see.

I mean, the first thing that has to be changed in the mind of the people is that we depend on each other. Like nature: if you take something out, the next thing will also die. So you can't survive if you just want to survive for yourself. You always have to make the whole thing able to survive.

So the very first change of mind has to happen, I think, in science: to not see things as separate and not investigate them separately. I mean, it's a very good approach to see how things function, because you take something out. It's like your body: you have a leg, and the point where you really notice it is when it hurts, or when you don't have it anymore. Then you have the appreciation. That's usually how science works: you take just a piece out. But actually, you examine the piece and not the whole. How this whole body works is very complicated, and you have to take the piece out, but look not only at the piece you took out. Look at the thing that is the whole.

And this relates to the human body, so we need holistic medicine. It relates to our ecology, our relationship to ecology and nature, and also how we are together as a community, as social beings, and the whole political system that comes behind it.

The next thing that has to be changed is really to make an education that allows people to grow, on one hand, for compassion and for freedom. We don't learn these values anymore. We learn how to be better and competitive, and hopefully to be better than your neighbor, which doesn't make any sense. We need much more cooperation. That's how civilizations grow. And as we grow, we need competition to re-examine ourselves and to position ourselves among each other: what are my talents?

But the way the school system is working right now, it's like you're making a machine of copies, where everybody has to do the same, and that's not worth it. We need people who express their individual talents. For that, some kind of competition as well. But actually the competition should be around who does the best, better cooperation.

I mean, this goes into religion or science or whatever. I think there's so much knowledge that we can grasp from our internet that we don't need to learn some new things by heart in our brain. We have to learn much more about our emotions, about how to use our mind. Probably not only learning by repeating, but how to get insight, how to have a perception. And this is also very much the Hindu yoga tradition, to master the body. This is actually something that is very much needed in the West, as much as the East needs technology and proper discipline on a technological and organizational side, to allow social security and stuff like that for social beings.

I mean, the paradigm [has to change] from the small "that's me and that's I, and I need this", to: how can we make this together? Another way to make it together. And even scientifically, it doesn't make any sense, when all spiritual traditions are talking about this, to have this narrow scientific mind that separates all the things. Just putting things apart, a part about a thought, and not finding anything, and putting things [apart again].

Ah, good question. For my grandchildren, I wish that I would tell them good stories that inspire. I think I had a granddad who told me a lot of good values and great stories. I have to follow this example, to be, at least for my grandchildren, a lover of stories, to be a granddad who really has time for them, who can teach them about life lessons. Give them some directions, so that they might remember me as someone who was a role model.

Thank you. Thank you.

Bye-bye.