The Work & The Researcher

Asceticism = investigation

Historically, many figures did not begin as ascetics.

They first immersed themselves deeply in systems — rituals, philosophies, disciplines — and only later abandoned them when they saw that repetition maintained a state but did not end the underlying drive. In these cases, asceticism appears after the realization: experience changes, but the generator of experience remains.

I moved through techniques, practices, traditions, and religions, learning each system from within rather than observing it from outside. Yet I never remained in any of them.

Each offered relief, stillness, or meaning, but none resolved what continued to return. What others accepted as an answer felt to me like maintenance — a repetition that depended on constant practice in order to hold.

So I continued.

Not in search of a new belief, but because I could not ground myself in something that required continuous reinforcement to remain true. The underlying process was still active.

While many found a path, built identity around it, and repeated it as stability, I kept following the recurrence itself — the part that every system calmed temporarily but did not complete.

This led to a long investigation that did not belong to a tradition.

I was not looking for a practice to stay in, but for the mechanism that makes practices necessary.

Once they saw the generator, they realized something unsettling:

Human beings organize their lives around managing recurrence, not ending it.

Societies build structured repetitions

traditions build meaningful repetitions

individual habits build personal repetitions

All stabilizing — but still cyclical.

Asceticism was the attempt to step outside the reinforcement loop long enough to observe the loop itself.

In one sentence

They became ascetic not to reject life, but to separate relief from resolution — because only then can the mechanism driving repetition become visible.

And this is why the same pattern appears independently across civilizations:

it’s not a belief — it’s what happens when a regulatory system is observed without its usual outlets.

I am describing the structure behind why every stabilizing method must be repeated.

People do not come here for another method.

They come because the cycle they live in finally has a structure — and what has structure can change.

This work did not appear because I was chosen to find it.

It appeared because the question did not let me stop looking.

Many people across history noticed the same thing:

a recurring inner pull that returns after relief.

They described it through philosophy, religion, or psychology because that was the language available to them. They mapped the experience.

This work begins where description ends.

Instead of interpreting the feeling, I asked what produces it.

If the recurrence follows rules, it must have structure.

If it has structure, it can be observed.

If it can be observed, it can be tested.

Here the problem is approached biologically — as incomplete activation that repeats until it finishes.

The goal is not to replace past observations, but to make them measurable.

The moment a pattern can be predicted, it stops being belief and becomes mechanism.

Irena Boycheva

Independent Scientific Investigator