The Unfinished Investigation
The Unfinished Investigation
A Journey Through Mind, Silence, Self and Suffering
This is not a record of conclusions.
It is a record of an investigation—and of conclusions that sometimes survived the investigation and sometimes did not.
I began systematically recording my meditation observations in October 2021, but the search itself began much earlier.
Long before those dated notes, there were years of reading, questioning, science, literature, poetry, yoga, pranayama, kundalini practices, dreams, lucid dreaming, yoga nidra, meditation and an often-unsystematic search for what I loosely thought of as truth.
I moved through different teachers, traditions and explanations. At different times I found ideas compelling that I would later question. Sometimes an experience produced a conclusion. Years later, the same investigative process turned upon that conclusion itself.
The observer became something to observe.
The controller became something to investigate.
Even ideas such as awareness, silence, Self, consciousness, free will, karma and compassion changed meaning as the investigation continued.
I do not want to rewrite those earlier stages from my present understanding.
If I believed something strongly in 2005, 2021 or 2024 and question it today, I want both voices to remain visible.
That change is part of the investigation.
This blog therefore is not intended as a spiritual teaching, a philosophy, or a claim of attainment.
It is an evolving record of one person's attempt to look carefully at mind, consciousness, suffering and the experience of being alive.
The investigation continues.
How to Read This Blog
There are several paths through this record.
The Preludes look backward, toward the years before my meditation journey became systematically documented.
The numbered chapters follow the central investigation approximately chronologically from 2021 onward.
The Side Investigations follow particular questions—dreams, sleep, awareness, science, thought, perception, literature and meditation—across different periods of my life.
They overlap.
That is unavoidable.
A real investigation rarely proceeds chapter by chapter.
Before the Documented Journey
Much of this period is still being reconstructed from old blogs, reading records, poems, essays, notes and memory. I would rather leave gaps than fill them with a story created retrospectively.
Prelude A — The Reader and the Questioner
Before formal meditation
Before meditation there were books.
Science, mathematics, literature, philosophy, fiction, poetry and arguments about ideas all contributed to a mind that was already asking questions long before those questions became explicitly spiritual.
Coming soon
Prelude B — Entering Meditation
Beginning around the early 2000s
The Tao Te Ching, The Tao of Physics, cosmology, yoga, hatha yoga, pranayama, kundalini yoga, yoga nidra, dream analysis, lucid dreaming and meditation gradually moved the search from reading about reality toward experimenting with experience itself.
Coming soon
Prelude C — Surfing for Truth
The less-documented years before 2021
There was no single path.
Science and spirituality, meditation and dreams, literature and philosophy, different teachers and different traditions appeared and disappeared.
I was essentially surfing through possibilities while repeatedly returning to one question:
Where is the truth in all this?
Coming soon
The Documented Journey
Beginning in 2021, the record becomes much more detailed. Contemporary notes allow me to see not merely what I remember today, but what I actually wrote when a particular realization or question was alive.
1. I Began as a Seeker — 2021
The documented journey begins with questions about Self, God, consciousness, awakening and the teachings of different traditions.
“Who am I?” increasingly becomes a personal investigation rather than an abstract philosophical question.
2. When Thinking Reached Its Limit — 2022
My analytical mind encounters a peculiar problem: the investigator is trying to investigate itself.
Silence begins to appear not simply as peace, but as a possible instrument of inquiry.
3. The Mind-Created Universe — 2023
Attention shifts toward perception itself.
How much of what I call reality is sensation, memory, recognition and interpretation?
What happens when experience is observed before the mind immediately converts it into a story?
4. I Thought I Found the Watcher — 2024
As thoughts, emotions and sensations were observed changing, something seemed to remain as the observer.
For a period, the idea of a witnessing consciousness appeared to provide an answer.
Coming soon
5. Then I Looked for the Watcher — 2025
Eventually the same investigation turned toward the observer itself.
Who is watching?
Can the watcher be found independently of thoughts, perceptions and the thought “I am watching”?
Coming soon
6. Buddhism Changed the Question — 2026
Instead of searching for something permanent behind experience, I began looking more seriously at impermanence, non-self and emptiness.
The question gradually shifted from:
What remains unchanged?
to:
Is anything independently existing there at all?
Coming soon
Where the Investigation Led
These investigations emerged from the chronological journey but began crossing yearly boundaries.
7. Nothing Happens Alone
Dependent co-arising, conditioning, causality and the increasingly difficult question of whether there is an independent controller standing outside the causal process.
Coming soon
8. Continuity Without a Permanent Self
My changing investigation of rebirth.
Instead of beginning with “Do I believe in rebirth?”, the question becomes:
What exactly continues even from one moment of this life to the next?
Coming soon
9. Compassion Without Being the Controller
Bodhicitta and compassion created another unexpected question.
Can I sincerely wish to reduce suffering without quietly assuming that I am the person who can control another person's transformation?
Coming soon
10. Learning to Look Before Thinking
An idea encountered years earlier returns with greater significance: the mind as a photographic plate.
Receive first.
See what actually happened.
Allow interpretation to come later, when it is needed.
Coming soon
Side Investigations
Some questions have accompanied the main journey for many years. They cannot honestly be assigned to a single chapter.
S1. Dreams Before Meditation
Childhood experiences around the boundary between waking and sleep, naturally occurring lucid dreams and experiences that preceded deliberate meditation practice.
Coming soon
S2. Learning to Remain Conscious in Dreams
From spontaneous lucid dreaming to deliberate experimentation: recognizing the dream while dreaming, experimenting with control, and later questioning the need to control it.
Coming soon
S3. Yoga Nidra and Conscious Sleep
Experiments with yoga nidra and the transition from waking into sleep.
Can awareness continue when ordinary waking thought disappears?
Coming soon
S4. Tibetan Dream and Sleep Yoga
My experiments with ideas from The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep: what appeared experientially useful, what I could observe directly, and what remained a traditional claim.
Coming soon
S5. When the Dreamer Became an Observer
Over time my relationship with dreams seemed to change.
Fear, desire and the urge to manipulate the dream sometimes gave way to observation.
Did meditation change the dreams—or merely my relationship with them?
Coming soon
S6. Is Awareness Present in Deep Sleep?
A difficult investigation into waking, dreaming, deep sleep, consciousness, awareness and memory.
If I have no memory of an interval, what can I honestly claim about awareness during that interval?
Coming soon
S7. Thinking, Overthinking and the Silent Mind
For a long time I associated silence with stopping thought.
That understanding gradually changed.
There may be an important difference between clear thought arising when necessary and automatic, repetitive thinking that takes over consciousness.
Coming soon
S8. The Mind as a Photographic Plate
Can an event be received before it is named, judged and interpreted?
This question appeared early and continues to influence my present experiments with silent observation.
Coming soon
S9. Meditation Outside Meditation
Relationships, work, irritation, desire, disagreement, speech and ordinary daily activities increasingly became the real laboratory.
A peaceful meditation session is one thing.
What happens when another human being disagrees with me?
Coming soon
S10. Science Meets Meditation
I have never wanted spiritual investigation to require abandoning scientific skepticism.
Lucid-dream research, neuroscience, perception, the default mode network and consciousness repeatedly entered the investigation.
Where does science illuminate experience?
Where does it remain silent?
And where does spiritual interpretation go beyond the available evidence?
Coming soon
S11. Experience Is Not Explanation
This distinction became increasingly important.
A meditative experience can be completely genuine as an experience while the metaphysical explanation attached to it may still be wrong.
What did I actually experience?
What did I conclude from it?
Those are two different questions.
Coming soon
S12. Poetry, Literature and the Search for Truth
Poetry and literature were never completely separate from this journey.
Long before meditation became central, reading, writing and arguing about literature were already challenging conventional ways of seeing.
Perhaps another kind of investigation had already begun.
Coming soon
A Note About the Evidence
One reason I am attempting this reconstruction now is that much of the journey left traces.
There are old blogs.
Books and reading records.
Poems and essays.
Personal notes.
Dream records.
Meditation drafts.
A WhatsApp meditation group containing dated observations from 2021 onward.
And later, long conversations in which I repeatedly investigated experiences, questioned conclusions and sometimes changed my mind.
Where contemporary material exists, I want to give it priority over present-day memory.
Memory reconstructs.
A note written during the experience sometimes tells a very different story.
I expect therefore to discover contradictions.
I want to preserve them.
Where I Am Now
I no longer regard spirituality primarily as a search for a final answer.
For me it has increasingly become an investigation.
What is actually happening?
What part is perception?
What part is thought?
What conditions produced this?
Where is the controller?
Where is the observer?
What do I actually know from direct experience?
What have I merely interpreted?
And perhaps the most important question appears whenever the mind says:
“Now I understand.”
I ask:
Can I look again?
The person writing this today is not the final authority on the person who wrote something yesterday.
Today's understanding may itself become tomorrow's object of investigation.
So there is no conclusion to this page.
Only a current position in an unfinished journey.
The investigation continues.
Last updated: July 2026
Comments
Post a Comment