Waking Up From Your Perception Box
“We do not see reality as it is. We are shaped with tricks, and hacks, that keep us alive.”
“We are touchingly prone to mistaking our models of reality for reality itself.”
“The world in our heads is not a precise replica of reality.”
Courtesy Warning
Certain knowledge, practices, and tools alter our mind’s grip on reality. For some, this is disturbing. An example is here, and more stories chronicled here. However, this often precedes the most important and meaningful experiences in one’s life. Being fully informed of these possibilities is important.
What does “Waking Up” feel like? I recorded a conversation with someone exploring exactly this, here. There are thousands of stories out there, once you look. More conversations are scheduled and will be published soon.
Introduction
In 2015 I created this doodle after experiencing a flash of insight. MY reality or perception of the world is often radically inconsistent with others. And so is everyone else’s. This was the first sign of “waking up”, not only to this fact, but a great mystery. I’ve been exploring ever since.
9 years later I discovered the science of predictive processing and our “perception box”:
This guide is based on modern science and cognitive theory. It requires no specific teachers, no unverifiable beliefs, no systems, no dogma, no financial commitments. It uses consensus research to reveal the misleading nature of our minds. This is not merely information, it’s a journey to embark upon yourself. Who are you, truly?
Why Wake Up?
Why wake up? Every human alive undeniably lives deep inside a brain which turns out to be a wild and confounding maze. Solving this maze is very hard. But it is most certainly possible.
The average person can discover and sustain an incredible way of being even despite the most apparently terrible things in the world. It comes from a place of understanding, and acknowledgement of an open mystery, one beyond the reach of science.
The first step is understanding a few key terms, which can be used to orient to not only this guide, but anything you might read, consider, or experience outside of it.
Key Terms
- Objective Reality — the world as it truly exists — which can never be directly known or experienced — we can only know our brain’s representation. Also known as “the ineffable”.
_ - Perception Box — our brains filter sensory input from objective reality down to bare essentials, and generate our own bespoke reality — identity, perceptions, feelings, emotions, assumptions, and beliefs. This is equally a miracle and a hidden source of confusion and potential suffering. Also known as predictive processing.
_ - Brain Constraint — The difference between your perceived reality, or perception box, and objective reality.
_ - Default Reality — a way of experiencing life / self / consciousness without awareness or understanding of brain constraint and subconscious manipulation. A person fully identifies with (or contracts around) contents of consciousness, feelings, impulses.
_ - Meta Reality — a way of experiencing life / self / consciousness with some awareness and understanding of brain constraint and subconscious manipulation. A person identifies both with consciousness itself, in addition to its contents. Identification with contents — identity, feelings, and impulses, is relaxed. Behavior is influenced accordingly.
_ - Waking Up — the lifelong process of moving from Default toward Meta Reality. In other words, a commitment to study one’s awareness, identity, motivations, and behavior. Most often facilitated with one or many Pointers — such as contemplation, observation, and medicine. Characteristics might include collapse of identity, cessation of habits. Also known as, awakening, enlightenment, self-deconstruction, spirituality, or “the moon”.
_ - Pointer to Waking Up — A tool, teaching, or practice that facilitates realizing meta reality, or “waking up”. A reference to the Zen metaphor: “A finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. The finger is needed to know where to look for the moon, but if you mistake the finger for the moon itself, you will never know the real moon. The teaching is like a raft that carries you to the other shore. The raft is needed, but the raft is not the other shore.” — Thich Nhat Hanh
_ - This Guide. This guide is not a pointer — it is a pointer of pointers. It aims to warn about traps, and eliminate confusing, predatory, and unnecessarily mysterious pitfalls of this experience. It describes in concise, verifiable, everyday language what waking up, aka, “the moon” is, and what pointers are. Finally, it is a menu of trusted and reliable pointers — those which are mostly free of jargon.
Spoiler: Burn This Guide 🔥
The Science of Perception Box and Brain Constraint
References:
Bruce Hood, Neuroscientist — Self Illusion
Andy Clark, Cognitive Philosopher — The Experience Machine
Anil Seth, Neuroscientist — Hallucinating Reality
Kati Devaney, Neuroscientist
Christof Koch, Neuroscientist — (above clip)
Brain constraint is the ultimate paradox — the one that underwrites all human experience and suffering. How do we know what we’re NOT seeing? How do we know our unknown unknowns — feelings, perspectives, and possibilities.
Imagine you and a friend are playing a virtual reality game together. The goal is to collect gems. Your VR headset, for some reason, cannot see red gems, but can see blue ones. Your friend’s VR headset cannot see blue gems, but can see red ones. This is strange. You don’t even realize blue gems exist until your friend describes what they see, and vice versa.
This is very much like real life. Except the VR glasses are our own brains and minds, and the gems are emotions, feelings, intuitions, perceptions, and instincts — unique to us. Everyone has a similar-yet-different version of reality. It is impossible to know how your reality reconciles with everyone else unless you can take the time to study.
Consider the following seven quotes, spanning cognitive science, philosophy, and literature — each of which alludes to this phenomenon.
The truth is, there is more information “out there” in objective reality than our brains and minds can possibly process and reveal to us. Our brains subconsciously perform a miraculous trick of taking whatever small information they can — sights, smells, touches, sounds, memories, and extrapolating, or predicting, the rest, into the woven movie of our reality. A very complicated guess.
This is ingenious, but also impoverished and flawed. This is the sinister part. It’s impossible to know or see the flaws in our prediction because we are living inside of it.
Going through life with zero awareness of these constraints and flaws can be considered “Default Reality”.
Further Scientific Evidence of Default Reality’s Tricks
Brain constraint is only one facet of Default Reality’s subconscious illusions. Consider the following scientific evidence, of the brain manipulating our experience, in ways we cannot possibly see or control.
- Confabulation
- Our brain can subconsciously lie. It can construct plausible-yet-sometimes-bogus stories to explain apparent circumstances. We cannot see this confabulation process or control it. We merely experience the story as a thought. This has been demonstrated most vividly in split-brain patients.
- Brain Damage and Behavior
- Brain damage can drastically alter our identity and behavior. In a troubling suicide note, Whitman wrote about the impulsive violence and the turmoil he was experiencing prior to killing 14 people. His note also requested research about his behavior. An autopsy revealed a sizeable tumor in the region of his amygdala.
- Visual Manipulation
- Our brain can subconsciously warp colors, based on what it estimates they are as opposed to what they actually are in objective reality.
- Sugar Cravings
- Our brain will crave sugar long after eating food — not because of the pleasurable taste we experience and consciously want more of, rather, because neurons in the gut detect the presence of glucose (fast energy) — and urge us toward more.
- Physical Pain Perception
- Our brain can subconsciously alter how painful something feels based upon what consciousness is focused on — even when the pain stimulus is constant.
- Brain Constraint
- The brain grows more constrained as we age and gain experience. Children are better at solving certain abstract problems than adults, because their minds are more open and flexible.
- Broad Scientific Evidence of Self Illusion
- Neuroscientist Bruce Hood explores this comprehensively in — The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity.
Each example reinforces apparent truth: everything we see, feel, think, and understand about self and world — is created and manipulated by the brain in ways that are completely hidden and unintuitive — and therefore — demands investigation.
“Waking Up” — How?
If Default Reality means living life where one is fully deceived by brain constraint and subconscious manipulation, Meta Reality is living where one attempts to discern and coexist with it. “Waking up” is the process of understanding and experiencing Meta Reality.
The phenomenon of Waking Up has been known for centuries. Only recently has science produced a strong basis to explain. This is definitely both good and bad. Good because there are practices and guidance that are centuries old. Bad because there is also baggage of erroneous, dogmatic, overly complicated, and sometimes magical ideas, which can be predatory and/or delusional.
The aim of this guide is to stick to only the most conservative, scientifically compatible, yet powerful resources available today.
These resources vary — they can be a practice, a concept, a metaphor, an allegory, or medicine. Each resource is a sort of Pointer, or “Finger Pointing at The Moon”. “The Moon” being waking up, and the “Finger” being something that attempts to reveal part of it.
“A finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. The finger is needed to know where to look for the moon, but if you mistake the finger for the moon itself, you will never know the real moon. The teaching is like a raft that carries you to the other shore. The raft is needed, but the raft is not the other shore.”
Thich Nhat Hanh
Pointers👉🌕
(Ways to Wake Up)
- See How You See
- Self-Supported Low Dose Psychedelics
- Waking Up App
- Deconstructing Yourself
- Wherever You Go There You Are
- Wake Up Now
- The End of Your World
- Why Buddhism is ‘True’
- Nothing to Grasp
Practical Advice
There is no one way. There is no right way.
In my experience:
It is possible to awaken to the misleading nature of your own reality. Not just intellectually, but felt. This can radically influence attitude toward life, in a way that brings peace and ease, even alongside seeming chaos.
It is impossible to say you’ve “done it” once and for all. It is impossible to compare exactly with other people. It simply starts feeling and making more and more sense over time. Look for small signs. Patience is by far the greatest virtue.
You can explore by yourself. Gurus and traditions are often a trap. The wisest teachers will help, while also insisting they aren’t needed. Nobody will be able to confirm you’ve done “it” or not. It unfolds mostly on its own. It happens subtly and vividly, over time. When in doubt, relax. Linger in stillness. Let no answer be the answer. All the while, carry water, chop wood.
How It Feels
“Well — how did I get here?”David Byrne
Waking up can feel as David Byrne describes — suddenly taking inventory of life and seeing it as an alien landscape — no longer able to fully relate to the winds that carried you here. After starting to notice one’s worldview implode, the following transient questions, observations, and urges may arise sporadically:
What now? (Nothing)
The world is screwed… (Yes, but also not)
Who can I talk to? (Nobody)
I am spiritually complete! (Shrug)
Am I spiritually complete? (Shrug)
Is everyone “waking up”? (Probably not)
Spirituality island (Don’t get stuck)
I must share this (This doesn’t work)
Ego thaw, not ego death (Let it unfold)
Indifference
Personal epiphanies -> Other’s epiphanies
Peace
Gradually the urgency of these things relaxes. “Carry water, chop wood”, as they say. Meaning, even in midst of inner upheaval, simply go about life moment by moment, that is really it. Returning to this frame repeatedly tends to make any extraneous worry and thoughts seem nonsensical, or at least less dire. Curiosities resolve on their own schedule.
Burn This Guide — All Guides
“Ramana Maharshi puts it simply: Teachings are like a stick used to stir a fire and keep it burning. Once the fire is raging and needs no tending, you can throw the stick into the flames and let it burn as well.”Stephan Bodian
Continued: [Let’s] Carry Water Chop Wood?
Work In Progress
This guide is a work in progress and will be enhanced continuously. This guide by far aligns with the majority of content and aspirations for anti-rebel.org.
After all, to rebel is to push back against the world. This is the opposite. To zoom out — as far as possible from it — and reflect.
Enjoy the Open Mystery
We can only know one thing for certain. We are conscious. We have no idea why, or how, or where consciousness comes from. Yet this is our essence. Every day is an opportunity to explore.
Originally published at https://anti-rebel.org on March 11, 2024.
