1. The Call
On December 8, 2014, I wrote a note in a private VKontakte group. That note may have been the beginning 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)
At the time, it was just a note. I no longer remember exactly what made me start recording these things. Perhaps it was because adults’ answers never really satisfied me: they lacked coherence, and logical clarity had always mattered to me.
At some point, it turned into a simple rule: whatever I encountered, I tested for internal consistency. I remember one of those episodes clearly. I was seventeen when I came across this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsLFFWeANHo
Today it seems a little naive to me. But back then it was my first encounter with Daoism. A few weeks later, my future wife gave me the Dao De Jing. That same copy is still on my desk.
I had no idea 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 are not, publicly available.
Perhaps all of this would have remained nothing more than a pile of digital fragments. But a year ago, one moment changed everything. I met a person and listened to him speak for some time. Quite quickly I noticed something strange: the structure of his reasoning almost completely matched the system I had been assembling in my notes for years.
It was the same map — only he stood further along it. That was the first time I saw that these notes did not merely describe reasoning. They described a way of living.
The year that followed felt strange. It was as if I had spent twelve years collecting scattered fragments and then suddenly saw the whole picture at once. The accumulated material snapped into a single system. What had once looked like separate observations began to arrange itself into a comprehensible structure.
Then a simple fact emerged. For all twelve years, I had been writing about the same thing. It was an irreversible insight.
2. Initiation
At some point, the notes themselves ceased to be the main thing. I became immersed in the process itself. It felt like a gradual shedding of what was unnecessary. Psychotherapy loosened old knots, satsangs opened new parts of the map, and somehow all of it kept leading to the same point: layer by layer, what had once seemed important kept 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 move toward zero. But not zero as emptiness or negation — zero as the point from which everything arises. And at that point what appears is not a void, but another mode of perception: presence.
I had encountered that state before, but back then it was fragmentary. It would appear and disappear. Over time it began to arise more often and remain longer. People who practice meditation describe something similar, but it turned out that this state can arise even without meditation itself.
At a certain point, I reached a strange and almost indescribable threshold. Observation began to analyze observation. I suddenly found myself inside a metacognitive loop. Until you encounter it directly, it sounds harmless. From the inside, it feels very different. Thoughts try to understand thoughts, and each new level of understanding gives rise to the next.
The mind, which was supposed to explain what was happening, could not solve the problem by its very nature. The problem was recursive. If a solution existed, it had to lie beyond 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, and interpret what is happening. In the other, life is felt as direct experience.
Then something happened that cannot be explained logically. It was 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 it no longer defined what was happening. It was a very simple yet radical shift of position: I am the one above 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. What I arrived at had already been described long ago: Laozi, the Buddha, and other traditions of observing consciousness pointed to it well before me. The novelty is not in the experience itself. Historically, such experiences were either fixed within religious traditions or drifted into esotericism.
The novelty lies in the attempt to assemble a modern, secular, and reproducible language for this experience.
In recent years, another important shift has taken place. Artificial intelligence has begun to be used in neuroscience to analyze massive datasets of the brain, and neural implants and technologies for mapping neural networks are emerging. The state of presence is not a metaphor, but a concrete neurophysiological regime of the brain.
What used to be considered a purely subjective experience is gradually becoming an object of scientific observation and modeling. Research into consciousness is turning from a purely philosophical topic into a domain of direct scientific inquiry. And yet a gap still remains between those layers.
There is still no place where philosophical traditions of observing consciousness, contemporary science, and living practice are assembled into one coherent system — a place where presence is simultaneously understood, studied, and transmitted as a reproducible human skill.
This is where my old habit of writing everything down unexpectedly turned out to matter. All those years I was recording practically every step. Only recently did it become clear why. Those twelve years were not just note-taking. I was assembling a research corpus.
Only recently have tools appeared that make it genuinely possible to work with such a volume of material. Language models and AI agents have made possible what previously would have required an entire research team. This is how Post-Ego emerged.
4. Freedom
At a certain point, something very simple became clear. The mere appearance of Post-Ego as a research project solves nothing. One can gather material, build a model, and write thousands of pages. And in the end it still comes down to one blunt question:
Buddhism has already said almost everything on the ontological level. The Daoists said it even earlier. To add one more interpretation of awareness would simply increase the noise.
That is why I am proposing a qualitative shift: to move 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 such a shift possible. That task is described in detail in Mission.
People who come into contact with this level of experience may live in different countries and intellectual environments. But they have no shared space in which that experience is recognizable without religious overlays or spiritual noise. They have no frame within which both what is happening and one another can be recognized.
The internet makes possible something that was once almost impossible: the creation of an environment in which such people can find one another directly. In that sense, the corpus published on this site is merely 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.