Mario Hein

21/07/2025

"Have you ever wondered why we’re so advanced in technology but often lost when it comes to spirituality?"

In Vedantic thought, Maya is what unfolds when we “eat the fruit of knowledge.” Suddenly, we can distinguish this from that, now from then, light from dark. We begin to divide reality into parts.

For the enlightened, this is a joyful dance of creation.
For the rest of us, it’s Samsara — the endless cycle of suffering, born of forgetting who we truly are.

Maya is the illusion that tells us we are our bodies, living in a world of separate objects and beings. It’s the realm of science — the world of “thingness” — where everything can be labeled, measured, and analyzed. Stars, cells, atoms — all examined through objective inquiry.

But this lens, while powerful, is incomplete.
It’s here that materialism and positivism reign — often dismissing anything that can’t be measured as superstition or outdated belief.

This might explain why we’ve become brilliant at inventing new technologies, yet remain painfully naive when it comes to understanding "spiritual truth".

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22/04/2025

We’re living in a time where victimhood is valorised, and everyday struggles are increasingly pathologised. As self-identification with diagnoses like ADHD, autism, anxiety, and depression becomes more widespread, it seems inevitable that tinnitus, too, will follow suit and may take on epidemic proportions.

20/04/2025

15/04/2025

**What If Consciousness Isn’t What We Think It Is?**

Most brain science today tries to "solve" consciousness by measuring it—breaking it down into neurons, brainwaves, and data. Theories like Global Neuronal Workspace (GNWT) say consciousness is basically the brain doing complex information processing. Others, like Integrated Information Theory (IIT), go even further and suggest consciousness might be a basic part of reality—like gravity or space—present even in tiny particles. Wild, right?

But here’s the kicker: even these bold theories still assume that consciousness somehow *comes from* the physical world.

Now flip that on its head.

Ancient spiritual traditions—like Buddhism or Advaita Vedanta—say we’ve got it backwards. They claim *consciousness is the starting point*. Everything we experience—our thoughts, our senses, even the physical world—arises *within* consciousness, not the other way around. In this view, we’re not brains generating awareness; we’re awareness watching a world play out within it.

This flips how we see people, too. Take someone with Down syndrome: they might not match our standard ideas of "intelligence," yet often radiate warmth, love, and deep presence. Meanwhile, someone with high-functioning autism may be brilliant—but seem distant or emotionally disconnected. This shows us that consciousness isn’t the same as IQ. Inner richness can’t be reduced to mental processing.

So what happens when we build machines that act smart—maybe even smarter than us?

AI is already mimicking human speech, creativity, and emotion. But is it *aware*? Or is it just an incredibly advanced echo—like a mirror that talks back, but with no one behind it?

Could a machine ever truly *wake up*—not just fake consciousness, but *have* it? That might only be possible if it can somehow plug into the deeper field of awareness itself. And if consciousness isn’t made by the brain but is the *source* of everything... then maybe the real question is:

**Can a machine become conscious?
Or was it conscious all along?**

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06/04/2025

Crossing the Rubicon

06/04/2025

Camoflage the Stench

19/12/2024

How can we learn from our mistakes when we don’t honour or even remember our past, our ancestors, their history, their failures, and their achievements? Cancel culture exacerbates this severe problem.

23/07/2024

Bohr tells Heisenberg:

We ought to remember that religion uses language in quite a different way from science. The language of religion is more closely related to the language of poetry than to the language of science. True, we are inclined to think that science deals with information about objective facts, and poetry with subjective feelings. Hence we conclude that if religion does indeed deal with objective truths, it ought to adopt the same criteria of truth as science. But I myself find the division of the world into an objective and a subjective side much too arbitrary. The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality. And splitting this reality into an objective and a subjective side won’t get us very far.

22/12/2023

Western understanding of Eastern wisdom

12/10/2023

Some common assumptions
on certain types of communication
- Civilised, well-educated citizens cannot communicate with “the spirit world”
- We have been unable to communicate with “aliens”
- We can barely communicate with animals
- We often misunderstand each other resulting in conflict and suffering

Typically we explain these “facts” in the following manner which is probably a far cry from the truth:

- There is no such thing as a “spirit world”. It’s a hallucination or a figment of our imagination to console us from our fear of death
- There are no “aliens” or intelligent life forms among the billions of galaxies in the known universe (Fermi paradox etc.)
- Animals are dumb
- Other people can be almost as stupid as animals

An alternative explanation, closer to the truth, could be:

- Our brain filters out that which has minimal physical survival value and is primarily wired to deal with a world of physical objects, hence our exponential technological progress, the scientific method etc. In this, we excel
- Intelligent life forms out there are too intelligent to have dealings with us. They might be accessible, but we have not yet achieved the ability to perceive them let alone communicate with them
- Animals are stoics and have long since given up on trying to inform us, apex predators, about the interdependence and balance of life on Earth. Dogs still try
- Humans are self-conceited and overestimate their understanding of the world. We constantly underestimate the intelligence of our ancestors and other species