When I listen to brilliant minds like Michael Levin and Karl Friston discussing the self—not as a fixed entity, but as a dynamic, evolving process—I’m struck by how resonant their ideas are with the spiritual truths I've long held dear. The language may differ—"Markov blankets," "variational free energy," and "counterfactual prediction"—but the essence feels deeply familiar. It’s the ancient intuition that the "self" is a fluid dance between past and future, spiraling in the eternal present, searching for meaning.
Friston describes the self as a kind of inference machine, constantly updating its beliefs in order to minimize prediction error. In his words, “all my belief updating and all my self-organization is literally driven by prediction error.” In other words, it is the mismatch between what I expect and what I experience that propels my becoming. That dissonance—the holy itch of not knowing—fuels both scientific discovery and spiritual awakening.
This recalls the words of Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, who once said, “All you need is to stop searching outside for what can be found only within.” That stopping, however, does not mean stagnation. It means resting in awareness, in the now, even while our personality structure is ever-changing, shaped by karmic impressions and worldly stimuli. Awareness is the silent observer, while the ego—like Friston’s predictive model—is busy constructing stories about the world.
Michael Levin introduced a particularly poetic notion: the self as a “self-telling story”—a recursive process where we’re constantly being shaped by engrams (information structures) from our past selves, even as we send messages to our future selves through our present actions. I find this both scientifically beautiful and spiritually profound. It echoes what Paramahansa Yogananda wrote: “The soul is bound to the body by the silver cords of desires. Cut those cords by right action and God-remembrance.” Our present actions—conscious or unconscious—are messages in a bottle to our future selves, shaping the arc of our incarnation.
But who is the self that observes this drama?
Friston insists that the self is a narrative, a tool for stitching together experience across time. In deep meditation, I have seen this story unravel. The idea of “me” dissolves, and what remains is the silent witness. Adi Shankara reminds us: “You are not the body, nor the mind. You are the Atman, ever free, eternal.” Neuroscience now whispers a similar truth: that selfhood may not be essential to biological organization, but an emergent property of systems capable of modeling their futures.
And what of noise? That ever-present buzz that Friston defines in two ways: either as true randomness (as in quantum fluctuations) or as prediction error (the surprise of not fitting our model). Michael Levin suggests that noise may also be a font of creativity, a source of novelty. Here, I hear the cosmic lila—the divine play—of Lalleshwari, who sang:
“I Lalla, entered through the garden gate of mine own mind and saw Shiva there, playing with Shakti.”
Creativity emerges in the gap between what is and what is expected. The Divine reveals itself not in certainty, but in the flowering unpredictability of life. That unpredictability is not an error—it is a doorway.
Friston also asks whether the self must include the ability to imagine counterfactuals—to mentally simulate possible futures and choose among them. This ability, he suggests, may distinguish authentic agents from mere reactive organisms. In my own spiritual path, I’ve seen this as the dawning of viveka—discrimination—taught by Shankara as the beginning of liberation. When I can imagine my future not just as dictated by karma, but as chosen through intention, I take my first step toward conscious evolution.
All of this brings me back to a core tenet of my spiritual journey: that consciousness is primary. That what we call "the universe" is a theater in which the soul unfolds its lessons across lifetimes. That, in Yogananda’s words, “Each one of us is the expression of a cosmic drama that must return to the Author.”
What Levin and Friston discuss in the language of Bayesian inference and Markov blankets, I experience as a mystical process: the soul co-creating its destiny, ever free to change the story it tells itself, provided it awakens to the fact that it is the storyteller.
To those of you who find inspiration in both science and spirituality, I invite you to explore this dialogue for yourself. The full video is available here: The Self and the Brain | Friston & Levin
And if this fusion of neuroscience and nonduality resonates with you—if you, like me, feel the call to reconcile the wisdom of the sages with the insights of the lab coat mystics—join the conversation. Leave a comment, subscribe to my newsletter, or reach out with your own reflections.
We are, after all, stories telling themselves.
And I, in this moment, am grateful to be telling this one with you.
— May 12, 2025 (Bill)