1. The Call
On December 8, 2014, I posted a note into a closed VKontakte group. That note, most likely, was the starting point of this entire project.
“Stop looking for answers on the outside — everything is already inside… only when I’m here and now do I really live… the warrior acts, the fool reacts.”
(2014-12-08, id 1)
Back then it was just a note. I no longer remember what exactly made me start recording them. Maybe it was the fact that adults’ answers never really satisfied me: they lacked coherence, and logical clarity has always mattered to me.
At some point it turned into a simple rule: whatever I encountered, I tested for internal consistency. I vividly remember one of those episodes. I was seventeen when I found this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsLFFWeANHo
Today it feels naive. But back then it was my first contact with Daoism. A few weeks later my future wife gave me the Dao De Jing. That very copy still lies on my desk.
I didn’t yet know that twelve years later these notes would grow into an archive of more than 12,000 observations — thoughts, phrases, insights, and attempts to describe what was happening inside experience. I always wrote them for myself. Those notes have never been, and still aren’t, publicly available.
Maybe it all would have remained just a pile of digital fragments. A year ago, one moment changed everything. I met a person and listened to his reasoning for a while. Very quickly I noticed a strange thing: the structure of his arguments nearly mirrored the system I had been assembling in my notes for years.
It was the same map — he just stood further down the path. That was the first time I saw that these notes do not simply describe reasoning. They describe a way of living.
The following year felt strange. As if for twelve years I had been collecting scattered fragments, and then suddenly saw the entire picture at once. The accumulated material locked into a single system. What had looked like separate observations began forming a comprehensible structure.
Then something simple surfaced. All twelve years I had been writing about the same thing. It was an irreversible insight.
2. Initiation
Eventually the notes stopped being the main point. I plunged into the process itself. It felt like gradually shedding the unnecessary. Psychotherapy untied old knots, satsangs opened new parts of the map — and for some reason all of it kept leading to the same thing: layer by layer, what once felt important was falling away.
I once tried to explain it to my wife and she said:
“You just want to take everything down to zero.”
That sentence turned out to be unexpectedly precise. In a sense everything really does collapse toward zero. But not zero as emptiness or negation — zero as the point everything arises from. And in that point what shows up is not a void but another mode of perception — presence.
I had encountered that state before, but in those days it was fragmentary. It appeared and vanished. Over time it started visiting more often and staying longer. People who meditate describe a similar experience, yet it turned out that this state can emerge without formal meditation.
At some point I reached a strange, almost indescribable threshold. Observation started analyzing observation. I suddenly found myself inside a metacognitive loop. Until you hit it head-on it sounds harmless. From the inside it feels different. Thoughts try to understand thoughts, and each new level of comprehension generates another one.
The mind, the instrument that was supposed to explain what was happening, by its nature could not solve that task. It was recursive. If a solution existed, it had to be outside the mind.
That was the moment of choice. That was when I decided to meet presence for real — not as an idea, but as a way of being.
In a stable form, presence feels almost like uninterrupted meditation. It is as if there are two completely different regimes of experience. In one you live inside the mind: thoughts explain, compare, interpret what is going on. In the other, life is felt as direct experience.
Then the thing happened that cannot be explained logically. As if two separate systems suddenly merged into one.
There used to be: life inside the mind.
Now there was: the mind inside life.
The mind remained an instrument but no longer defined what was happening. It was a very simple yet radical shift of position: I am the one in charge of the mind, not the other way around.
3. Return
The most important part began not at the moment of the shift but after it. There is a Zen saying:
“Before enlightenment — chop wood, carry water.
After enlightenment — chop wood, carry water.”
That’s all you need to know. Awakening doesn’t change the world. It changes the position you inhabit when you meet the world.
There is nothing uniquely “mine” in this experience. Humanity described what I reached long ago: Laozi, Buddha, and other traditions of observing consciousness pointed to it well before me. The novelty isn’t in the experience itself. Historically such experiences have either been captured within religious traditions or have drifted into esotericism.
The novelty is in the attempt to assemble a modern, secular, reproducible language for that experience.
In recent years another shift happened. AI began to be used in neuroscience to analyze massive datasets of the brain. Neural implants and technologies for mapping neural networks are emerging. The state of presence is not a metaphor but a concrete neurophysiological regime.
What used to be considered purely subjective is slowly becoming an object of scientific observation and modelling. Research into consciousness is turning from a purely philosophical topic into an area of direct empirical study. And yet there is still a gap between those layers.
There is no place where philosophical traditions of observing consciousness, contemporary science, and lived practice are assembled into one coherent system — a place where presence is understood, studied, and transmitted as a reproducible human skill.
This is where my habit of writing everything down unexpectedly mattered. All those years I was logging every step. Only recently did it become clear why. Those twelve years were not just note-taking. I was building a research corpus.
Only now have tools appeared that actually allow us to work with such a volume of material. Language models and AI agents made possible what previously required an entire research team. This is how Post-Ego appeared.
4. Freedom
Eventually a very simple thing became obvious. The mere appearance of Post-Ego as a research project solves nothing. You can gather material, build a model, and write thousands of pages. And it still comes down to one blunt question:
Buddhism has already said almost everything on the ontological level. The Daoists said it even earlier. Adding yet another interpretation of awareness would only increase the noise.
So I am proposing a qualitative move: to transfer awareness from the sphere of spiritual experience into a secular cultural form. A form that can be recognized. A form that can be transmitted.
The task of Post-Ego is to become the bridge that makes this move possible. The mission is spelled out in detail in Mission.
People who touch this level of experience may live in different countries and intellectual environments. But they lack a shared space in which the experience is recognizable without religious overlays or spiritual noise. They lack a frame that lets them recognize both what is happening and each other.
The internet makes something possible that used to be almost impossible: building a space where such people can find one another directly. In that sense, the corpus published on this site is just a point of recognition.
If you know what this is about — you are already inside.
https://t.me/post_ego
Saṅgha is the next level of this game.