How Humanity Shifted from Primary Consciousness to Unconscious Living

And Why This Is Reversible

We call ourselves conscious, yet we live most of our lives lost in thought about past and future. We think this is normal. It is not. It is a recent development in human history—and it can be undone.

What We Lost

Our ancestors—and every newborn child today—lived in what we can call primary consciousness:

• Fully present with what is

• No separation between self and world

• Direct, intuitive knowing without narrative

• The body feels what is right

• Connected to natural rhythms

This was not a primitive or unconscious state. It was fully conscious being—unbounded, open, immediate. Animals still live there. Young children too, until we train it out of them.

The Shift: When the Tool Became the Master

Somewhere in our evolution, our brain developed a remarkable capacity: the Default Mode Network (DMN). This network gives us:

• Self-awareness and autobiographical memory

• The ability to plan and imagine futures

• Language and complex social navigation

• The inner narrator that tells our story

At first, this was a brilliant tool. We could plan harvests, build civilizations, pass down knowledge. The DMN was meant to activate temporarily—for planning, reflecting—then quiet down, returning us to presence.

But then something crucial happened: the tool became the master.

The narrator—the voice in your head—became confused with who you actually are. Instead of using the DMN occasionally, we began living inside it permanently.

How It Happened

The shift was gradual, driven by civilization itself:

Agriculture: Future-oriented thinking became essential for survival

Property & ownership: Stories of ‘mine’ and ‘yours’ strengthened the sense of separate self

Written language: External storage reinforced narrative thinking

Education systems: Forced DMN activation from early childhood

Industrialization: Time became linear, measured, optimized

Digital age: Constant stimulation, 24/7 DMN activation

Each step moved us further from direct experience and deeper into the narrative about experience.

Living Unconsciously While Calling It Consciousness

Today, most humans spend their waking hours unconscious—not asleep, but lost in thought:

• Not in the present, but replaying the past or rehearsing the future

• Not directly experiencing, but narrating the experience

• Not feeling what the body knows, but believing what the mind thinks

• Not connected to nature, but separated by concepts and abstractions

The profound irony: we developed our brains to become more conscious, and in doing so, became less conscious. We gained the ability to think about reality and lost the ability to simply be with it.

The Cost of This Reversal

This shift from primary consciousness to DMN dominance has created systemic crises:

Mental health: Depression, anxiety, and trauma are DMN patterns run amok

Environmental destruction: No felt connection to nature = nature becomes a resource to exploit

Social fragmentation: Everyone trapped in their own narrative, unable to truly meet

Meaninglessness: The narrative self endlessly asks ‘what’s the point?’ while presence has no such question

Intergenerational trauma: We inherit each other’s DMN patterns without knowing it

The Evidence: Consciousness Exists Beyond the DMN

Here is the crucial insight that changes everything: consciousness is what remains when the DMN stops.

The evidence is overwhelming:

Near-death experiences: When the DMN shuts down, people report the most vivid, clear consciousness they’ve ever experienced—not less awareness, but more

Deep meditation: Brain scans show DMN deactivation. Meditators report heightened awareness, not diminished

Psychedelic states: fMRI confirms complete DMN shutdown during ‘ego dissolution,’ which users describe as expansive, boundary-less consciousness

Flow states: DMN suppression correlates with peak performance and presence

Coma survivors: Some report being ‘more present than ever’ despite no narrative thought

The pattern is clear: when the narrator stops, awareness doesn’t disappear—it expands. The DMN is not consciousness. It is the blockage of consciousness.

The Path Back: This Is Reversible

Primary consciousness is not lost. It is buried under the noise. Every moment you’ve ever experienced as ‘being in the zone,’ fully absorbed, without self-consciousness—that was it. You were touching it.

The reversal does not mean abandoning thought, language, or civilization. It means:

Recognizing the DMN as a tool, not your identity

Learning to deactivate it intentionally through meditation, nature immersion, creative flow, or simply being still

Allowing moments of pure presence without labeling, analyzing, or narrating

Using thought when needed, then returning to awareness

For Individuals

You can begin today:

• Spend time in silence without devices or goals

• Practice feeling instead of thinking

• Notice when you’re lost in narrative and gently return to what’s actually here

• Let presence become familiar again

For Society

We can raise the next generation differently:

• Stop forcing early DMN activation through overscheduling and achievement pressure

• Create space for unstructured play, nature contact, and simple being

• Value presence as much as performance

• Recognize that a child who is simply present is not wasting time—they are developing in the most fundamental way possible

The Choice Before Us

We stand at a crossroads. One path continues DMN dominance—more optimization, more narrative, more separation from direct experience. That path leads to more suffering, more disconnection, more crisis.

The other path returns to primary consciousness—not by rejecting our cognitive gifts, but by no longer being imprisoned by them. We keep the tools. We lose the tyranny.

This is not a return to the past. This is evolution completing itself—primary consciousness with the full capacity of the human mind, but no longer dominated by it.

The reversal is happening now. The question is only whether you will participate.

Mart Wijn France February 2026

Independent Consciousness Researcher & Unbounded Logic Practitioner