Your biggest problems and deepest fears all have one thing in common: they feel incredibly real to you, right now. This is part of what makes them problems and fears, to begin with.
But this happens to be both the lock on your prison cell, and the key to your freedom.
In order to understand that we’ll first need to go a bit deeper and understand how your mind makes sense of your experience, in the first place.
We’ll need to understand why it is that some things feel more real to you than others, at all—how it is that in one moment you can be totally lost in a nightmare, and in the next, write it all off as “just a dream.”
It all begins with perspective. And not in the way that you think.
The way we use the word “perspective” today has been heavily influenced by the post-enlightenment, western ideology in which we were raised. Even if you wouldn’t identify with this kind of thought, there is no escaping the untold ways in which your very thinking has been shaped by it. This is simply the world you are born into.
Most of the time, we use the word “perspective” to mean a “collection of beliefs” about the world. If I were to ask you for your perspective on something, most of the time I’m asking you to share what you believe to be true in a particular situation.
This is a byproduct of being brought up in a culture that unconsciously maintains that the world is best understood as a collection of facts, true statements, and reason.
This idea is so deeply rooted in our culture, that you probably don’t even recognize it as culture. You just think that’s the way the world is. You think that “science” is a self-evident way of going about the world, without recognizing that the Scientific Revolution was just that at one point: a revolution.
This has massive implications on how we conceptualize and deal with problems.
A Different Kind of Knowing
So what do I mean by “perspective”?
We live in a society today that is obsessed with what we’ll call “propositional knowing.” This is the knowing of facts. This is the knowing of things that can be true or false. It comprises most of what we are concerned with in our education system.
But there are actually 3 other ways of knowing, 1 of which we’ll get into today. For anyone interested in exploring the others, I highly recommend the work of John Vervaeke. You can check out his series on YouTube “Awakening from the Meaning Crisis”, or search “The 4 Ways of Knowing by John Vervaeke”.
I’ll probably be covering more of his work in future content. Quite frankly, I think he’s one of the greatest minds of our time and his work deserves more attention.
The other way of knowing that we’ll be discussing today is “perspectival knowing”. This is knowing what something is like. It’s not about truth. It’s like knowing what “redness” is like, or knowing how it feels like to win a championship…it’s knowing what if feels like to “be you” in a given moment.
Now, is “redness” true? Is the feeling of victory true? What about what it’s like to be you?
These are almost nonsense questions, precisely because we understand that the way something is “like” is not a matter of true or false—it simply is.
Now that we have a baseline understanding of “perspective” means in this context, we can explore how it is that we use perspectives to piece together our reality.
World Building
Your ability to shift and see the world from multiple perspectives is your ability to evaluate reality. You look at the world from different angles to sort between what you consider “real” and what you consider “illusion”.
Your entire life hinges on your own perception of reality. And your perception of reality hinges almost entirely on one mechanism: cross-validation.
Let’s take your 5 senses (excluding the others for now). First off, there’s 5 of them, and for good reason. Because we can think of each of your 5 senses as a perspective—a way of interpreting and experiencing the world. And all perspectives have blind spots.
This means that each of your 5 senses is liable to being fooled. Or more likely, you are more liable to being fooled if you rely on any just any one of them. And that’s why you tend to rely on all 5, as often as you can.
Now to be clear, I’m making some generalizations and creative explorations on top of John Vervaeke’s work, that shouldn’t be confused for his own philosophy.
Let’s take a look at a real-world example to clear things up:
We’ve all experienced this: you’re certain that you heard someone call your name, but then you turn and look, and there’s no one there. You look around for a second and eventually conclude that you just “must be hearing things”.
Your ears told you one thing, but none of your other senses could concur—so you write it off as illusion.
But on the contrary, if you can experience something with all 5 of your senses…it feels very real. That’s actually why we think numbers are so reliable. You can see 6 of something, hear something 6 times…or even remember 6 different things.
Number don’t appear to be an artifact of any one way of interpreting the world. And when something continues to exist regardless of how we look at it, we deem it to be real, reliable, and true.
Schizophrenia is actually a very compelling case for this. There are those with schizophrenia that experience visual, auditory, and tactile hallucinations all at once. It becomes incredibly difficult to convince these people that they are in fact hallucinating, when so many of their senses are “in agreement.”
And that leads us to our next question.
Where Things Go Wrong
What happens if we turn this mechanism on its head? What happens if you only have one perspective, instead of many? In our previous example, this would mean having only 1 of your 5 senses.
If you only have your sense of hearing, how are you to tell when you are “just hearing things” that aren’t actually there? Without the benefit of your eyesight to cross-validate your experience with, it becomes much harder to tell what is real and what is illusion.
And that’s only half of the picture.
Because if you have only 1 perspective, you don’t really have a perspective. That one perspective just becomes your entire reality. And without out a way to tell when your perspective is distorting the world, it doesn’t feel like distortion at all.
In essence, without being able to determine otherwise—everything feels real. Everything feels reliable. Everything feels true.
And this is the essence of your personal hell.
Fear and Anxiety
In life threatening situations, people often report being “frozen in fear.” Very often this is meant quite literally. Our bodies tense, our gaze fixes on threat before us, and we become unable to speak or move.
But this animal instinct echoes far beyond our mere physiology. It has parallels in our psychology too.
Fear massively reduces the number of perspectives we’re willing to take in a given moment. Because in the presence of an actual threat, there may be a limited number of perspectives that we can afford to take, truly.
When the tiger is in front of you, there’s only 1 perspective that matters: don’t die. It’s not time for philosophy. It’s not time for contemplating. It’s not time for questioning whether the tiger is real. You assume the odds are not in your favor.
But do you spot the paradox here? As you become more afraid, you lose your ability to shift into different perspectives, and with it your ability to cross-validate your perspectives. Everything begins to feel more real, your fears included. And as your fears begin to feel more and more real, you begin to feel more and more afraid.
It’s a downward spiral headed south of heaven, fueled by two mutually amplifying mechanisms:
- You feel afraid because your fears feel real, and:
- Your fears feel real -because- you feel afraid
Now the key to your freedom lies in that second point, which is often entirely overlooked for the first. We don’t tend to question why our fears feel so real. We just reason with ourselves that we wouldn’t be afraid if they weren’t in fact real.
But this is a farce. And this logical trap leaves us in a very precarious situation: we become unable to convince ourselves that our fears are not in fact real. It becomes very difficult for us to see a world in which we are “wrong” about what we are afraid of.
In effect, we are frozen in the face of our fears—and we can’t take our eyes off of them. We can’t even blink.
And so our only option is to figure out what to do next in the face of these inconvenient realities that we can’t seem to change.
The Way Forward
But lucky for us, there is another way. And it has to do with that second mechanism: our fears feeling real precisely because we’re afraid.
If a lack of perspective makes everything feel real—even illusion—then a wealth of perspective can do the opposite.
If we can get ourselves to inhabit another perspective, even for just a moment, we can gain another angle from which to better understand how exactly our fear is distorting reality for us.
Like trying on multiple pairs of sunglasses.
After seeing the world through multiple different lenses, you have a better understanding of how each of them colors the world in their own little way.
A deeper understanding emerges through the contrast of differing perspectives, and the ability to move between them.
By recognizing the ways in which your own fear is distorting your own reality, some of those fears may lose their claws entirely. Once exposed for the illusions they are, it can actually become difficult to slip back into those same places of fear.
It’s like the transformation of a regular dream into a lucid dream. Once you are aware that you are dreaming, your nightmare ceases to be a nightmare at all.
This is how you break free from the prison of your own mind.
The Modern Landscape
For most of us, life isn’t a matter of tigers hiding in dark. Our problems are so far abstracted from the pressing physical threats that haunted our ancestors in every waking moment.
Now this isn’t to say that we don’t have problems and things to be afraid of. But rather that our fears are more often born in the mental landscape, and can be conquered there likewise.
You aren’t afraid because your fears are real.
They feel real because you’re afraid.
It’s sort of like saying that you feel hungry because your stomach feels empty. But that’s a little off the mark. Because that feeling of your stomach being empty—that is hunger itself.
It’s not a causal relationship. It’s an identity relationship. Fear isn’t something you’re experiencing as the result of some negative reality. That entire experience is fear itself. Said another way, being right and being wrong both feel exactly the same in the moment. This thought will be incredibly freeing to the right minds and genuinely missed by the rest.
But once you’ve had the epiphany, it’s hard to go back. The first step towards freedom is realizing that you’re in chains.
Your mind is sabotaging you. See through the illusion and break free from the prison of your own mind.
All the best,
— David Kennedy