Fast forward to now, and I’m balancing spreadsheets by day and doing Reiki sessions by night, and that map you linked up really captures why I never fully left the question behind. The way it clusters everything from integrated information theory to mystical non-duality is fascinating, but it also highlights exactly where the friction lives. We’re still trying to bottle the ocean, as you put it. The problem isn’t that the theories are wrong; it’s that they’re all operating at different altitudes. Metzinger’s self-model is incredibly precise, but it’s a map of the coastline, not the tide. Jung’s archetypes and the Tarot’s Wheel of Fortune aren’t trying to debug the code—they’re describing the weather patterns that move across the water.

I think what’s missing from most of these taxonomies is the acknowledgment that consciousness might not be a thing to be mapped so much as a relationship to be inhabited. In energy work, you don’t measure the field; you attune to it. You don’t isolate the variable; you let the resonance shift. That’s why the “surfing” metaphor lands so hard for me. We spend so much time trying to pin down the mechanism—the exact synaptic firing rate, the precise chakra alignment, the mathematical boundary of phi—that we forget we’re already riding the wave. The map is useful, sure. It helps us navigate the literature and stop talking past each other. But it’s also a reminder that every time we draw a line around a theory, we’re just drawing a line around our own current level of understanding.

Anyway, I probably went on too long. That’s what happens when someone finally puts the scattered puzzle pieces on a table. I’m just glad we’re still looking at the puzzle instead of just accepting the box cover as the whole picture. Thanks for sharing this.