On the Utility of Finitude for the Neuroscience of Awakening

This essay provides a unique perspective on the human quest for meaning and transcendence by linking ancient philosophical concepts with modern brain research. It challenges the common belief that a state of “awakening” or “enlightenment” is a permanent, static endpoint. By using a light-hearted yet profound style, the text makes complex ideas from philosophy and neuroscience accessible to a broad audience. Ultimately, the essay suggests that the true value of life lies not in the attainment of an absolute state, but in the dynamic, adaptive process of living itself—a continuous, compensatory journey that defines what it means to be human in a world of constant change. It encourages readers to embrace impermanence as a fundamental and even necessary condition of existence, rather than something to be overcome.

He who seeks eternal rest will, in most cases, find only a tombstone. There is a certain irony in that we become enthusiastic about precisely that which can only guarantee our end. Thus, the desire for eternity in our lifetime becomes a beautiful form of compensation for our own finitude. The illusion of eternity is undoubtedly one of our most exquisite compensations for the inconveniences of our finite existence. It is the metaphysical equivalent of a good life insurance policy: one arms oneself against the uncertainties of the future by simply thinking them away. It is an attempt to outsmart human destiny by transforming time—that unforgiving stream—into an eternal, stagnant lake, where one can drift without current.

But it is this very yearning for an unmoving, unchangeable nirvana that raises questions. What if this desire to cling to a transcendent state is itself the source of suffering, as Buddhism so aptly describes with the term attachment (upadana)? This is a tragicomic paradox: the path to liberation becomes the ultimate bondage. We strive to fix a dynamic, fleeting moment of bliss to possess it forever. Yet, not least in the brain, this masterpiece of compensation, the fundamental law of things is revealed: what does not change is, in most cases, already dead. Unless, of course, it is a monument. For life, as we know it, is nothing but a continuous process of change, a constant balancing of deficiencies, a perpetual correction of errors. The brain itself is a master of this art; it is an organ of compensation par excellence. He who condemns it to eternal rest deprives it of what defines it: its tireless activity.

It is not our task to proclaim a new truth here. We are not architects intent on erecting an unshakeable philosophical system. Such an endeavor would only produce the next instance of systemic incompetence. The history of philosophy teaches us that every attempt to grasp the absolute is met by the next attempt to dismantle it. Just as scientific progress often arises less from new discoveries than from the failure of old theories, so too is thought a careful process, a meandering zigzag path of reason that gladly gets caught in the aporias of everyday life, only to unexpectedly pick up new trails in the trivialities of science.

So, we do not ask what awakening is as a final destination, but rather, what we need it for in the first place—and whether it is not the ultimate metaphysical compensation mechanism. This type of compensation is already known to our brain on a very basic level. Just as our perception tends to complete an incomplete figure from a few points in space into a familiar and complete shape, we try to assemble the chaotic world into a coherent whole. The desire to diminish our infinite longing is, in essence, the attempt to bridge the gap between our finitely graspable existence and our desire for the absolute. This phenomenon is the true subject of our consideration, for it reveals the human condition in its purest form: we are finite beings wrestling with infinite hopes and constantly dependent on compensation to bridge the chasm between dream and reality. For what is man, if not a machine for bridging gaps? A being that cannot live without the hope for more, without the comfort of a metaphysical insurance policy. This incompetence of our finite perception, which can never grasp the big picture, is at the same time the mother of all our creative efforts. It is the quest for the whole picture, even though we only see fragments. It is in this incompleteness that our drive to keep searching, thinking, and compensating is rooted.

We now turn to the world of thought of a man who knew, a long, long time ago, that things prefer to move rather than stand still: Heraclitus, the cantankerous Ephesian. His famous phrase, “Panta rhei” (everything flows), is more than just a poetic image of a river. It is a fundamental philosophical challenge to all those who seek their happiness in the rigidity of being. For in Heraclitus’ world, truth itself is not static. He spoke of Aletheia (Heidegger, 2000), or “unconcealment.” And where something is unconcealed, it must inevitably also be concealed again. Truth is therefore not an immovable mountain that one climbs once and for all, but a fleeting phenomenon that reveals itself to the hiker on the mountain path for only a brief moment before the mists envelop it once more. This constant interplay of revelation and concealment is, for Heraclitus, the fundamental state of the world, the basic law of becoming. The idea of a lasting awakening, a permanent state of seeing, is, from this perspective, nothing more than a philosophical error, a kind of mental shortsightedness that reduces the entire panorama of becoming to a single, rigid point. For what would a universe be like if everything were revealed once and for all? It would be a universe without surprise, without discovery, without the constant need to re-compensate.

And here the wisdom of failure reveals itself. A person who has recognized the illusion of a permanent Aletheia knows that he cannot hold on forever to what by its very nature vanishes. He recognizes failure as a necessary, indeed integral, part of human existence. This way of thinking, which understands impermanence as the norm, finds an astonishing parallel in the Buddhist doctrine of Paticca Samuppada, or “dependent origination.” Here, too, there is no substantialist metaphysics. All phenomena arise in dependence on other conditions. And the yearning for an eternal nirvana, a rigid endpoint, is just another phenomenon in this cycle. It is a tragic case of metaphysical gravity that, whether we want it or not, pulls us back into the cycle of Samsara—a programmatic mishap that we are all too happy to repeat. In this context we must also mention the concept of “Nunc Stans”, the standing present of Scholasticism. This godlike state, beyond past and future, is the intellectual construct of an eternity that is supposed to transcend the transient. It is the ideal of permanent rest, which is diametrically opposed to our Heraclitus-like understanding of the world. The true sage is therefore not the one who reaches a state of liberation and holds on to it, for holding on itself is the bondage—not just to things, but even to the idea of liberation. The path to liberation lies in the journey itself, not in the arrival. An awakening, in this reading, would not be an endpoint, but an intermediate state, a moment of breathing before one re-enters the river that carries us onward relentlessly. The yearning for a fixed self and an eternal place is, it seems, one of those philosophical puerilities that one should shed as reason matures. For reality is an unending construction site, and its true state is not a finished building, but a perpetual work in progress. It is movement itself, the continuous struggle against our own shortcomings, that makes us who we are—and this wisdom, that true being is not static but dynamic, is found both in the smoke of ancient philosophy and in the teachings of the Orient.

Our philosophical skepticism toward the absolute finds a highly prosaic, indeed organic, confirmation in the neurosciences: The brain itself is a master of incompetence-compensation. This concept, which posits that human existence compensates for its fundamental inadequacy through culture, science, and religion, finds a biological parallel in the brain. This grey, wrinkled marvel is not a static apparatus that passively maps the world, but a predictive machine. It is, as researchers tell us, constantly busy guessing the world. Its main task is not to capture reality but to minimize surprise (Friston, 2009). It ceaselessly constructs models and hypotheses (priors) about the causes of its sensory inputs and adjusts them as soon as an error occurs. One could say the brain compensates for its own ignorance of the world by simply predicting it.

If we now look at awakening from this perspective, it becomes a fascinating neurological event. It is not the attainment of a static being but a profound reconfiguration of the predictive system. The REBUS model (for Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics and the Anarchic Brain), developed by Robin Carhart-Harris and Karl Friston (Carhart-Harris & Friston, 2019), suggests that altered states of consciousness, reached through meditation or psychedelics, for instance, loosen the precision-weighting of our high-level, entrenched beliefs. To decipher this crucial term: precision-weighting is a neural correlate for confidence, or the strength with which the brain weights its own predictions. A high weight means the brain trusts its own internal models and ignores external sensory stimuli that contradict them. A low weight means the opposite: the brain opens itself to new sensory input, learns from it, and adjusts its predictions accordingly. One can imagine these priors as our ingrained, dogmatic thought-patterns, which the brain normally enforces with high authority. Philosophical attachment to an unchanging self thus becomes a neurologically rigid priority that loosens in such moments. In this state, according to the theory, the brain-self breaks free from its customary, rigid choreography. Imagine the brain, which normally plays with a precise score, for a moment throwing the notes into the air and beginning to improvise. Neural entropy, the degree of unpredictability and complexity of neural activity, increases; the brain becomes more flexible, unpredictable, and anarchic. It is as if one were to jumble the drawers of a notorious pedant’s dresser to show him that chaos, too, has a certain order.

This dynamic process finds its neurophysiological explanation in Georg Northoff’s spatiotemporal theory of consciousness (TTC) (Northoff, 2015). Imagine the brain as a conductor who is constantly trying to compose the infinite symphony of existence from the raw abundance of sensory impressions. For the conductor, the self is the orchestra, and he tries to keep the instruments in a hierarchical order that plays the music of the past and future. In this image of the orchestra, we can think of the Default Mode Network (DMN) as the conscientious concertmaster who tirelessly sets the tempo and brings the individual instruments together into a coherent melody of the self. It is he who constantly reminds us of who we are, where we come from, and what we should do next—in short, he creates the novel of our own life. The experience of awakening or the timeless present is, therefore, the phenomenal correlate of a dedifferentiation of the neural topography, where the functional distinction between the internally oriented DMN and the externally oriented sensory networks decreases. The concertmaster DMN loses his dominance; his voice is no longer the sole prevailing one. The rigid, hierarchical order of the brain that generates the continuous, temporal self is temporarily dissolved. This flattening of the hierarchy is the neural expression of ego dissolution, an experience that does not liberate us from time but shows us how much we construct time ourselves. Awakening is thus not a permanent being beyond time, but a moment in which we temporarily pause the novel of our own brain. It is as if one were to set down one’s self, this cumbersome piece of luggage of past, future, and self-attributions, on the ground for a moment. In this moment, the brain stops squeezing the infinite details of life into a consistent narrative of the self. It briefly sets down the self to dedicate itself to the immediate fullness of the present. The music of the orchestra becomes for a moment a single, overwhelming sound, where the individual instruments can no longer be distinguished—a fusion of subject and object, of inside and outside. It is the moment when the clock of the mind does not stand still but simply stops counting the seconds.

And here the fundamental paradox of the mind reveals itself: The brain cannot and does not want to remain permanently in such a state of dedifferentiation. A statically awakened brain would be, from a neurological perspective, pathological. It would lose its adaptability, its ability to learn new priors, and to react to the constantly changing environment. It would be a system situated on the edge of a subcritical or supercritical state—that is, those regions in which the dynamics become either too rigid or too chaotic to function meaningfully. The subcritical dynamic is like a hardened, inflexible structure, like a mind trapped in its habits. The supercritical dynamic, in contrast, is chaotic, uncoordinated, and incapable of generating stable patterns. Awakening is, therefore, not a state of absolute rest (subcritical) or pure chaos (supercritical), but an optimal, dynamic state at the edge of these two extremes, which allows for maximum flexibility. We are not conductors who should force the orchestra of the mind into a state of eternal ecstasy. For what good is an orchestra that can only play a single, albeit magnificent, piece? The score of life demands cautious probing, a zigzag path through unpredictable crescendos and decrescendos—and it is precisely here that our true competence in dealing with incompetence is revealed.

Another aspect that argues against the eternity of awakening is the energetic paradox of consciousness. Neuroscientific research, for example by Gerhard Roth and Georg Northoff (Northoff, 2015), shows that conscious processing is extremely energy-intensive. The brain, as a master of efficiency, activates consciousness only when it is truly necessary, i.e., in the case of significant or novel phenomena, to optimize long-term energy economy. The intense experience of awakening, this temporal dedifferentiation, is an energetically costly extravagance. It cannot be sustained permanently without overloading the entire system. The brain is a household genius of energy that cannot afford a metaphysical, perpetual buzz. For the economy of existence demands efficiency, not eternity.

What remains when the mists of eternity lift? The sober, yet no less fascinating, realization that awakening is not a permanent state but a dynamic process that challenges the traditional promise of an unchangeable nirvana.

First, it can be stated: Awakening is not a permanent triumph. It is, in the logic of Heraclitus and the neurosciences, the experience of the Nunc Stans, the timeless present. A moment of Aletheia, in which the dogmatic convictions of the mind (priors) temporarily give way. This is not an endpoint, but an optimal, if rare, state on the border between order and chaos.

Second, the yearning for eternity reveals the ultimate form of attachment: the tragic attempt to transform a fleeting moment of liberation into a rigid, unchangeable phenomenon. One can lure the mind out of its comfort zone, but one cannot force it to remain in anarchy forever. A statically awakened brain would be incapable of adaptation and would end in pathological rigidity. The irony is that the path to liberation is precisely not holding on.

And so, thirdly, it is shown that the return to change is not a defeat. The return to the Nunc Fluens—to flowing time, to everyday life—is a necessary and integral component of human existence. The awakening is the moment in which the truth of impermanence briefly unconceals itself, only to be concealed again. It is the game of Aletheia that teaches us not to be attached to our experiences—not even to the experience of imperishability. True salvation, in this view, is not an arrival, but an uninterrupted incompetence-compensation-competence that manifests itself on the zigzag path of life.