It's ok to do spiritual research

The endless flood of information in consciousness research can paralyze you faster than any peer review. You read a paper on integrated information theory in the morning, stumble into a forum thread on non-dual awareness by lunch, and by evening you’re watching a random YouTube channel claiming consciousness is a controlled hallucination.

Each source feels urgent, each contradicts the last, and the subconscious panic sets in: if you admit you don’t know everything, someone will mock you for pretending to be an expert.

So you hoard tabs, skim without digesting, and quietly fear that real researchers will smell the impostor on you. The fear of being “found out” becomes a filter that lets in everything and integrates nothing.

The antidote is to stop trying to consciously hold the entire field in your head and instead build an external subconscious: your own living, searchable second brain. This is not another Notion template full of empty databases; it is a digital garden you actually tend. Every time you read something that makes you pause (whether it sparks awe, confusion, or anger), you plant it as a short atomic note. You ruthlessly summarize in your own words, link it to existing notes, and tag it with exactly three categories: the topic (e.g., “predictive_processing”), the type of experience it evokes or explains (e.g., “meditation_insight,” “psychedelic_report,” “dream_lucidity”), and the research reference itself (author-year or URL). Three tags is the magic number; any more and the system collapses under its own taxonomy.

ver months the garden begins to breathe. A note on Anil Seth’s controlled hallucination links forward to your personal experience of noticing the “blue” of the sky is constructed, which then links to a 2024 paper on perceptual filling-in, which finally loops to an old note titled “Why I stopped believing in qualia as primitive.” Walking these paths repeatedly turns mere reading into embodied understanding. The subconscious filtering you once feared (forgetting 90% of what you read) now works for you: what survives the pruning and relinking is what actually mattered. Your mind stops clutching at every new idea because it trusts the garden to remember on its behalf.

Eventually someone does mock you in a comment section or conference Q&A. You feel the old flinch, but this time you breathe, search your garden for the hook you need (“predictive_processing + skepticism + 2023-Bayesian_mechanisms”), pull the three linked notes that destroy their objection in two sentences, and walk away lighter. The endless knowledge is still endless, but it no longer owns you. You’ve moved the locus of control from a terrified ego trying not to look stupid into a calm, ever-growing lattice of ideas that you literally cultivate like a garden. The mockery bounces off because you the same way rain slides off well-tended leaves: the soil beneath is already saturated with understanding.