Obsidian Essay] Why Consciousness: Coming Out of the Cave

A note on why this section finally exists — and why it took so long.

I have been writing about consciousness for most of my life.

Not here. In handwritten journals. In folders on my local hard drive that no one has seen. In notes taken across sixty countries I have visited — most of them for pilgrimage reasons, to connect with sacred sites, with nature, with civilisations whose ways of organising life and meaning I wanted to understand from the inside.

It actually started much earlier than that.

At age four, I was obsessed with the questions: why are we here? what happens after death? I developed my own theory and presented it to my parents. That question went unanswered — but it never left. It kept guiding my life path in a persistent way. Then in university, sitting in the middle of the NYU library in New York City, I read every religious, psychological, and spiritual text I could get my hands on, trying to find an answer, or at least a better question. And then life took over. Work took over. The middle of Wall Street is not exactly an obvious place to keep exploring the meaning of existence. It has taken me much longer than I had hoped to return to this — but here I am.

Two questions have followed me everywhere, for as long as I can remember.

1. BEST GOVERNANCE: The first: how do humans govern themselves? — not abstractly, but practically. What does the best governing practice actually look like at the scale of a nation? What does a just and great leader look like — and what is the embodiment of that character and archetype? Perhaps influenced by my father, a government official and diplomat, and by my ancestors who served in government and ruled dynasties, this question has been with me from the very beginning. I grew up watching it from the inside.
2. PURPOSE OF LIFE: The second question is harder to put on a CV: why are we here, and what is the purpose of a human life? Not as a philosophical exercise. As an urgent, recurring, personal question that has shaped every single second of my life. (I should note that among the mainstream people, this question used to be NOT cool until Elon Musk made it cool.)

These two questions — the outer and the inner — are the twin engines of everything on this site. They just haven't always been visible as a pair.

For a long time, I didn't dare share the second one publicly.

The fear was real: that I would be misunderstood, or worse, dismissed — a person in finance, with serious capital to deploy and serious institutions to answer to, writing about consciousness and sacred sites. I also didn't fully trust my own thinking yet. Whatever I was working through in my teens and twenties felt not fully formed, and thus not worth sharing with the world — it would only inevitably embarrass me.

But something shifts as you approach four decades on this planet. You accumulate enough variations of the same experience — enough cultural identity dilemmas, enough full cycles of ups and downs in life, enough acute awareness of your own body and mind — to notice which things in you simply have not changed. The questions that followed me at four are still following me at nearly forty. They are just more articulate now.

There is also something I have learned about myself that belongs in this section: I fall within the roughly twenty percent of the population identified as highly sensitive persons — acutely responsive to sensory stimuli: visual, auditory, tactile, smell. I am also an empath. This is not separate from my intellectual or professional life. It is the substrate of it. It shapes how I read a room, how I hold information, how I experience the world at a level that no dataset fully captures. It took me a long time to stop treating this as a liability to be managed and start treating it as what it actually is: a way of knowing.

But perhaps the most honest reason this section finally exists is this: I am writing for the next generations.

My family's jokbo — Korean genealogical records — traces our lineage to the 9th century on my father's side, and to 57 BC on my mother's. The last Joseon dynasty maintained official recorders who documented the king's daily life in extraordinary detail for five hundred uninterrupted years. Because of these records, I can reach across centuries and access the texture of my ancestors' lives — their dilemmas, their decisions, the conditions they navigated. Human conditions, it turns out, are not so different across time. The questions recur. The terrain shifts; the interior weather does not.

I am the beneficiary of people who wrote things down. Who trusted that their experience, faithfully recorded, would be useful to someone they would never meet.

This series is my version of that. Notes from sixty countries and four decades of asking the same two questions. Spiritual reflections that have been living in private folders for years. Honest accounts of what I have understood — and what I am still working out — about what it means to be conscious, to be alive, to be here, to be human.

There is one more thing that finally pushed me out of the cave: other people.

For most of my life, I was deeply self-absorbed with questions re: purpose of life — and not in a healthy way. I was a self-righteous moral snob, looking down on everyone, including myself, with the harshest possible standard of perfection (the world of IDEA as Greek philosophers put it). I was observing the world from a sealed interior. I wasn't really curious about other people's inner lives because I was too busy trying to solve the puzzles of the Universe!

I should also admit: for the longest time, I seriously considered becoming a nun. Essentially, I have been living like a monk in a suit in finance. The mountaintop was genuinely appealing. It has only been recently that I finally let go of that dream and came to terms with it. And what I have arrived at instead is almost the opposite — a decision to be here, fully embedded in human conditions and human civilisation. Not in the mountaintops. Here, in this messy, ugly, beautiful, uplifting, dirty, clean, and yet lovely and blissful human life. If I can maintain peace in this human condition, it would be a far superior exercise than achieving that peace in the Himalayas.

That started to crack after the pandemic. Humanity went through its own collective reckoning — a moment of recognising what is simply not working anymore. And then, almost simultaneously, AI arrived into the collective consciousness as something plausible and real in a way it hadn't been before. Something shifted. I started, for the first time, to hear other people coming out of their own spiritual closets — sharing their experiences, their journeys, their private questions. Mentors of mine. People in finance, in academia, in government and policy, at the UN. People whose professional identities, like mine, had kept this part of their interior life firmly out of view.

And what I am learning — slowly, and with some surprise — is that these questions are not reserved for monks in the Himalayas. They are universal. The urgency of why are we here does not belong to any particular tradition or vocation or level of withdrawal from the world. It belongs to all of us. It has just taken a particular moment in history for more of us to say so out loud.

And now, more than ever, with the help of AI, I am genuinely excited to explore the untapped parts of consciousness and decode, together, the meaning of life. I am inviting you to come with me on that journey.

Coming out of the cave. Finally.

I hope you find something useful in it. And as always — your own experiences, references, reflections, and suggestions are more than welcome.

With much love and light,

EJ Elena Shin — London, 2026