Obsidian Essay] Why Consciousness: Coming Out of the Cave

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

"My real work is not simply succeeding. It is becoming myself publicly." - me.

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

In handwritten journals, though. In my mental note. Inner dialogues in between. In notes taken across sixty countries I have visited. I have to admit though - most of my trips have been for pilgrimage reasons or business trips; but the main intention was always 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. Thankfully, both of my parents are deeply philosophical and practical at the same time; they weren't dismissive of these questions (after all, I am the product of their merging!), but my dad more into science and my mum more into spirituality and art. I received some balanced views, but weren't satisfactory. That question went unanaswered; they themselves haven't figured it out yet. So, it kept guiding my life path. Since then, I developed a habit of turning to books for more knowledge and answers to my questions. 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 (such a lovely distraction for my midterm and final essays!), trying to find an answer, or at least a better question to ask. 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 to do this publicly — but here I am.

Two questions have been shaping my life.

1. BEST GOVERNANCE: The first: What is the best universal law for governance? 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? This question has been with me from the very beginning. I grew up watching it from the inside; public service, diplomacy, and politics, but I wasn't convinced that I was seeing the best version of the system. HUMANS CAN DO BETTER.
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? This was 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, meaning of life, 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 (Just had my birthday last week). You accumulate enough variations of the same experience to start to see the patterns — 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, and I have the confidence to own it more with conviction.

There is also something I have learned about myself that belongs in this section: I fall within the roughly twenty percent of the population called highly sensitive persons (it's slightly different from ADHD or Autism) — but we are the people who pick up stuff from others and from our surroundings easily and therefore need more downtime to recover from all that battery usage; because our brain and nervous system are acutely responsive to sensory stimuli: visual, auditory, tactile, and smell. Imagine running in six engines at full force like military surveilance alert mode 24/7. You see more, you feel more, you hear more, and you smell more than other people. How tiring! I am also an empath. This is not separate from my intellectual or professional life. It shapes how I read a room, how I hold information, and how I experience the world. It took me a long time to stop treating this as a liability and a big secret to be managed and start treating it as what it actually is: a gift. A way of knowing and absorbing the information that others easily miss.

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 57 BC. The last Joseon dynasty maintained official recorders called 'Sa Gwan' 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. After all, I am their descendents and my DNA makeups are of theirs, inheriting all the quirks and gifts. Plus, free will.

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

This series is my version of that. Notes from sixty countries and four decades of asking the same two questions. Life-long research in a way. 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, and 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 desperately looking for a role model. In my 20s, I came across Matthieu Ricard - who is a French molecular geneticist turned Tibetan Buddhist monk. His autobiography had a profound impact on me - and I could see a lot of myself in him. So, I started to follow his journey and footsteps. I was deeply self-absorbed with big puzzles of life, but not in a healthy way. Looking back, I was such a self-righteous moral snob, looking down on everyone, including myself, with the harshest disdain for imperfection and lack of purity among humanity. My ideal world was the world of IDEA as Greek philosophers put it. I was observing the world from a sealed interior (the world of black and white dichotomy; no grey area). I wasn't really curious about other people's inner lives because I finally ran out of patience and had zero expectation on humanity, and 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. After much debate for a couple of decades, 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.

So, that was a decision during the pandemic. I also noticed, 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. 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, reflections, and suggestions are more than welcome.

With much love and light,

EJ Elena Shin — London, 2026