We are Surrounded by Our Own Consciousness

Interview with Hares Youssef

– Modern people live simultaneously in two worlds, as the world wide web has laid the foundations for a new world or a digital copy of our world. What we have become accustomed to considering reality has acquired its digital twin. Any object can be digitised and calculated. Any entity can find its counterpart in the virtual world. The digital environment has become a semblance of the world of Platonic ideas, where we locate the prototypes of all sensual things. We create digital copies on social media and have long been assimilated in both worlds. Can these worlds be perfectly synchronised? I am asking about synchronisation because I would like you to tell me how this idea is reflected in your book, GAIIA.

– “Time passes ‘on two feet’, each of which we call a second, or tanya (ثانيه) in Arabic. In Arabic time has two names: zaman (زمن) and vakt (وقت). These two processes suggest the birth of the word second or tanya. Physicists may want to dig a little deeper here. When I philosophically approached the process of synchronisation as a mechanism for the birth of time, I regretted that I had not studied physics. Still, deep reflections on the differences in meaning between similar words led me to find many coincidences that suggested that two copies existed behind the whole picture. One appears as the original when the second is a copy and vice versa: the second appears as the original when the first appears as a copy.

I see it everywhere and in everything. And most of all, I see it when observing my inner dialogue, when I can discover how my reflective instruments behave with my thinking apparatus. I understand how to tell the difference between ‘thinking’ and ‘reflection’, and I know where we get our attitude towards ourselves. And through my feelings, I have discovered that my attitude towards myself is shaped by my ego, because it is me who forms the connection between my two Selves - the copy and the original.

My knowledge of quantum physics is superficial. Still, when I read about the results of experiments that revealed that matter knows when it is being observed, I immediately returned to the interpretation of the word idrak (إدراك), which means ‘consciousness’, and thoroughly understood that idrak affects life. Not only that, it forms life. That is, idrak, our consciousness surrounds our world, and it is our inner world. The outside world is the world that has not yet come into idrak’s field of vision. We call it the ‘inner world’, the world of the soul, the world of the psyche, the world of metaphysics, the world of the subconscious. All this is one world - it is the world of the secondary meaning of time: the world of indefinite time, which surrounds consciousness. And we are surrounded by consciousness. And this, naturally, enables us to understand how independent, living, superior and powerful an intellect the brain is, making it even shameful to call it a ‘human brain’. It would be more fitting to call a person an instrument for the performance of its essential functions.

– For you, the concept of duality is a fundamental idea. You write that all things in the Universe exist in pairs, and ‘any object acquires its uniqueness only in symbiosis with its copy’; we all have our own inner ideal double, and it is through this double that we find the path to ourselves. But a mandatory requirement of this contact is, as you emphasise, transparency.

The principle of transparency is central to your philosophical, economic and scientific ideas. I don’t think I’d be mistaken if I were to say that transparency for you is the key to the complete transformation of human life?

• If we talk about transparency, we shouldn’t forget about enlightenment. A person can only become enlightened in conditions of transparency.

Transparency is a guarantee of sincerity and honesty. At any rate, anything done in the shadows cannot be done in transparency.Transparency ensures predictability. Predictability ensures that a person has no fear of an unknown future.

Transparency will completely change a person’s behaviour in society and society as a whole. For corruption, transparency is disinfection, which eradicates criminal intentions and corrects deviations in people’s behaviour with a low level of social responsibility. The effect of observation changes behaviour: before going out, a person takes a shower, dresses and tries to look good because he is under observation. Transparency guarantees the correct behaviour of any person.

Interviewed by Natella Speranskaya