or Federico Faggin’s Awakening

I was glued to Federico Faggin’s autobiography. It echoed some aspects of my own life that has been much more in the noise, than in the coherent high lights of efficacy , a life that makes a difference.

Amidst his superbly impressive contribution as a computer and physical scientist his life is much more notable, not just because it records an awakening experience, but because of where that experience arises and how it is held. I would just like to bring your attention to Frederico’s own words on the relationship between conceptual and direct experience from his autobiography: Faggin: The Hard Problem of Consciousness

This is not the story of a seeker who turns away from the world, nor of a visionary who abandons form for revelation. It is the story of a man whose life had already been shaped by constraint, responsibility, and precision — and for whom recognition did not dissolve those conditions, but quietly re-tuned them.

Faggin’s early life and career are marked by a particular discipline of mind. Microelectronics is an unforgiving domain: abstractions must survive contact with silicon, fabrication cycles impose long delays between intention and result, and errors propagate relentlessly. Business, at the level he operated, adds further pressure — decisions affect livelihoods, capital, and trust over long horizons. These are not environments that reward fantasy or dissociation. They cultivate endurance, accuracy, and the ability to hold complexity without premature closure.

Yet this mastery of form does not protect him from existential saturation. At the height of worldly success, he finds himself inwardly hollow. The dissatisfaction he describes is not melodramatic; it is almost mechanical in its inevitability. The system has reached the limits of what it can compute. Meaning, purpose, and value — these cannot be derived from optimisation alone. What is striking is that he does not immediately reach for consolation, ideology, or distraction. Instead, he allows the dissatisfaction to be felt. This willingness to remain with the unresolved is already a form of inner honesty.

From a light Mahamudra perspective, this phase can be read as a mind fully proficient in sem — operating mind, modelling, planning, controlling — encountering its own boundary. The faint “point of light” he reports, perceived even at the depths of despair, is not yet insight, but neither is it belief. It is closer to a residual luminosity: awareness not yet recognised, but not extinguished by conceptual closure.

The awakening itself arrives without preparation and without symbolic scaffolding. It is sudden, embodied, and unmistakably experiential. He does not reason his way into it; it overtakes him. The descriptions are vivid but restrained: love of overwhelming intensity, luminous presence, the collapse of subject and object, the certainty of direct knowing. He is careful to note that the experience is not inferred, not believed, but known — and known with a force that exceeds intellectual certainty.

What matters most here is not the content of the experience, but the relationship between experience and thought that follows. Faggin’s conceptual insight is fast — exceptionally fast — but it is not dominant. He reaches for metaphors (“substance,” “love,” “particle and wave”), then immediately loosens his grip. He repeatedly signals the inadequacy of language, the relativity of “reality,” the danger of misunderstanding. Thought circles the experience, but does not capture it.

This restraint is not hesitation; it is accuracy. It suggests an awareness already functioning as a regulator — allowing concepts to arise, but preventing them from hardening into identity or system. In Mahamudra terms, one might say that awareness is already beginning to set the boundary conditions for thought. Thinking remains sharp, agile, and useful, but it no longer claims final authority.

Equally important is what does not happen afterwards. Faggin does not withdraw from his responsibilities. He does not announce a doctrine. He does not reorganise his life around the experience as an exception to be preserved. Instead, he lives what he later calls a “double life”: outwardly continuing as a CEO and chairman, inwardly engaged in inquiry and integration. Journalling becomes a quiet connective tissue between these domains.

This period is best understood not as division, but as containment. The experience is not allowed to collapse into explanation, nor is ordinary life dismissed as lesser. Integration proceeds slowly, over years, even decades. From a Mahamudra perspective, this looks less like a peak state than the beginning of familiarity — not formal practice, but a gradual re-patterning of meaning and value under ordinary conditions.

Perhaps the most telling aspect of the biography is Faggin’s eventual decision to speak. He knows the difficulty of communication. He anticipates scepticism and distortion. He offers metaphors precisely to show their limits. And yet he chooses to testify. This is not evangelism. It is closer to an ethical gesture: a sense that withholding the experience entirely would be another form of distortion.

There is an echo here of the Buddha’s hesitation after awakening — the recognition that what has been seen cannot be transmitted intact, and yet may still serve as a direction for those with “little dust in their eyes.” Faggin does not present himself as a teacher. He offers no method. He simply describes what occurred, how it reorganised his life, and where his inquiry continues.

Seen in this light, Faggin’s story is not about transcendence escaping form, but about recognition occurring under constraint — and remaining in dialogue with it. His life in microelectronics and business did not obstruct awakening; it conditioned a mind capable of holding it without collapse. His experience did not abolish thought; it placed it in service to something prior.

The result is a biography that feels trustworthy not because it convinces, but because it refuses to conclude. Experience remains primary. Concepts remain provisional. Meaning remains open. And life — ordinary, responsible, demanding life — continues as the field in which recognition quietly works.

That may be the most instructive aspect of the story: not what was seen, but how carefully it was allowed to remain alive.