Room Keys to Reality

[00:01] Rachel: Welcome to the Cosmic Inn. I’m Rachel, your host and tour guide today. Let’s get real about reality. The way we perceive reality isn’t an accurate representation of what’s happening around us. When you understand what it is and how you construct your unique interpretation of reality, it opens up a world of possibilities you didn’t know existed.

[00:31] I talk about reality a lot, so what better way to kick off episode two in our journey this season through the foundations of manifestation with talking about what reality is. What are the keys to reality as human beings experience it? In this episode, I’ll talk about what you, me and the universe is made of at the fundamental level. How we interpret everything around us through physical and mental filters, and how our minds make predictions when creating our reality. And hopefully by the end of this episode, you’ll have a better idea of how you’re interpreting your life so you can start to modify your everyday experience and how you approach your dreams and goals.

[01:18] Make sure you get notified when the next episode drops by following or subscribing to the podcast on your favorite player. I want to give a big thank you to our guest pass holders. Your support makes this podcast possible. If you’ve got a guest pass, check out the bonus material for this episode where I’m sharing my thoughts on whether you and I are real. Like, am I this disembodied voice you’re listening to an illusion that your mind creates as a reflection of you. Are we all extensions of one consciousness? Or is this just a big computer simulation and we’re all NPCs just bopping around? *laughs

[01:57] This bonus video is unfiltered, so I’m just giving you my thoughts as they are from my decades of digesting a bunch of info on this, so come check it out. If you don’t have a guest pass, grab one at cosmicinn.ca for instant VIP access to this episode’s bonus video, all the past bonuses and upcoming episodes as they drop. But let’s get into Room Keys to Reality.

[02:25] Let’s start with a definition, because you know, so we’re on the same page here. Reality is how we perceive what exists, and exists is a loaded word. Something exists if it interacts with other things or is the result of an interaction. As human beings, we’re limited to perceive things that happen in spacetime, which means the interaction occupies three dimensional space and changes over time. If something exists outside of spacetime, like outside our universe or adjacent to this dimension, we wouldn’t be able to perceive it. Hopefully right away you can see that there is a limitation. If something needs to interact or is the result of an interaction, and it’s not those things. We don’t even perceive it as existing. And I’m going to get into, like, the limitations that we have in how we sense what’s going on around us at all times.

[03:24] But first let me clarify what the result of an interaction is and then I’m going to go into what things that interact are. Something that’s a result of an interaction is an emergent phenomena when two or more things influence or affect each other. But it only exists because of the connection, exchange, or relationship between those things at that moment. Here are some examples, like sound waves or water waves. They’re just vibrations moving through a medium. So it’s the result of something interacting, like throwing a rock into water. Shadows are just a spot where light got blocked by something. So that’s a result of an interaction. Ecosystems, like forests or coral reefs, they’re the result of interactions of plants and animals and microbiome in their environments to create living systems. But ecosystems don’t exist outside of those interactions. Another good example is chemical reactions. Molecules interacting and transforming into something new like baking bread, combining flour, water, salt, and yeast plus heat causes a chemical reaction to turn those ingredients into bread.

[04:42] So those are all things that are a result of an interaction. They don’t exist independently without something happening. And especially when you consider things like complex systems or chemical reactions, there’s lots and lots of things that are springing forth into existence because of interactions.

[05:03] Let’s talk about things that interact. Obvious stuff like anything that has mass. Okay? The ingredients for the bread we made and the bread, the rock we threw into the water, and the water. You, me, trees, microscopic things like viruses, big things like the earth, stars. Any object you can see right now or think of across the entire universe. These are all things we know are there because they have mass and they interact with the electromagnetic spectrum. I’ll talk about that spectrum later but it includes light, which is what we see with our eyes. But all of that, all the planets and stars and galaxies and everything on them in the entire universe, only accounts for 5% of the known universe. 27% of the universe is considered dark matter. But it’s not dark or matter. We assume it’s matter because it has a gravitational effect on things we can see. But we call it dark because it doesn’t emit, absorb, or interact with light or electromagnetic radiation.

[06:13] So we as human beings can’t see it with our eyes or instrumentation. But we’re assuming it’s there we can see it’s having an effect on that 5% that we do know is there. 68% of the universe is dark energy, which isn’t actually dark or energy. It’s just the name we’ve given to whatever we think is maybe causing space to expand faster and faster. If space is expanding as predicted, over time, it’ll stretch space so much that all the stars in the night sky will disappear because their light won’t be able to reach us. But that’s not for another hundred billion years and by then the sun will have already died and consumed the Earth anyway. So, you know, no need to stress about it.

[07:02] So 95% of the entire universe, we can’t see it or touch it, and we don’t know what it is. Which is why I laugh when someone says, I’ll believe it when I see it. Because what you can see may only be 5% of what’s out there. I mean, that’s mind bending already to think that there’s all this stuff out there that we don’t comprehend already, just right out the get go. Let’s talk about what all that stuff is made out of. Everything is a form of energy, interacting, flowing, changing forms and shaping everything we see and touch, including all the objects around us. The building blocks of every object, whether it’s a table, a planet, your phone, or your body is made of the same things arranged in different combinations.

[07:53] Let’s take a look at your body, for example. You already know your body is made of organs and tissues which are made of microscopic cells that are a collection of fluid and organelles. If you get down smaller than that, you’ll see those are made of molecules, which are chains of atoms. And that’s what all those objects in the universe are made out of. Different types of atoms. And atoms are made out of a nucleus and electrons. An electron isn’t made of anything smaller. It’s just an electron, which is a bundle of energy with a small amount of mass that hangs out in a cloud of probability around the nucleus. It’s considered a quantum particle, which I’ll describe in a moment. That cloud it’s in is called an atomic orbital. It’s considered a cloud because we can’t pinpoint where the exact location of the electron is, only where it’s likely to be in that haze of probability.

[08:55] And what’s really cool is when the electron gets excited or relaxes into a different atomic orbital, it doesn’t pass through like you would. One sequential step at a time. It disappears from space and reappears in the new location. That would be like if you went from one room in your home to another without passing through the doors, the hallway, not even floating through the walls. You just disappeared from the room you’re in and reappeared in the next room. It’s called a quantum leap, and you may have heard that term misappropriated as a technique for manifesting.

[09:32] I have a later episode where I talk about manifestation myths and misconceptions, and this is one of them but let’s get back to the atom and quantum particles for a sec.

[09:43] First of all, just take in for a moment that your body is made of atoms, which includes electrons that are disappearing from space and reappearing elsewhere. Your body is doing that right now.

[10:00] That’s wild.

[10:02] The nucleus in the atom can be broken down further into protons and neutrons, and those are made of quantum particles called quarks, gluons, and some other things and that’s the smallest we can go. That’s what a quantum particle is, the smallest unit of energy that makes up everything in the physical universe. This is partially where we get the saying everything is energy. But not everything in the universe is made of atoms or the many quantum particles that make up atoms, like dark matter and dark energy, we don’t know what they are. There’s other quantum particles too, including electromagnetic radiation, which are made of photons, and I’ll leave it at that because, you know, this isn’t an episode about quantum particles really but I do want to tell you some cool things about them. Quantum particles don’t behave like normal objects we’re used to, like the electron not needing to pass through space to get from one place to another.

[11:02] When we experiment with quantum particles, they have wave particle duality, which means they can act like a wave, like the ripples on the surface of a pond after you throw a pebble and like a particle, which would be like that single pebble you can throw. Normally in everyday life, objects can cause waves or oscillate because of waves, but they’re not both an object and a wave at the same time. Another weird thing about them is their properties are probabilistic and undetermined until measured. Their properties are things like their position, the direction they’re spinning, or their axis or momentum. I said axes, axis. *laughs

[11:46] Let me give you an analogy. If I have a six sided die, there’s a one in six chance of it landing on any one number when I roll it. A quantum particle in an unmeasured state is like that unrolled die. The property you want to measure exists as all possible outcomes at the same time. Once I make a measurement, it’s like rolling the dice and seeing what the outcome is. But the particle isn’t the number it lands on before the roll. It’s all the possible numbers and none of them at the same time.

[12:23] A measurement is just an interaction that causes an outcome. Because a measurement involves an observation, it opens up a whole bunch of questions about consciousness and alternative realities. There’s a bunch of weird and counterintuitive things about quantum particles, but we don’t have time on this episode to get into all of it. The point is, this is what your body and all other objects around you, the planet we’re standing on, this is what it’s made of. And it’s how we see because light is made of quantum particles. Every quantum particle has an associated quantum field.

[13:04] Quantum fields are an invisible and continuous backdrop that stretches across the universe where quantum particles appear, interact, and disappear as an excitation of the field. I say they appear and disappear, but really what I mean is the fields are where energy flows and shapes particles and objects because there’s this rule in the universe called conservation of energy, which means energy isn’t created or destroyed. So when a particle appears or disappears, it’s really just changing forms. So the energy is conserved either as another particle, radiation, or another form of energy. Which is why you’ll hear me talk a lot about how energy is just constantly flowing and changing forms, because that is what it’s doing. I’ll give you an example. Our sun is a massive ball of hydrogen and helium, which are atoms. The core of the sun has so much pressure and temperature that it causes the hydrogen to fuse into helium.

[14:08] That process releases gamma rays and heat. Already we’ve got an example of energy changing forms. Heat, which is a form of energy, hydrogen fusing into helium by changing its nucleus so it’s no longer hydrogen, It’s a different kind of particle and we’ve got the release of a gamma ray. Those gamma rays are absorbed and re emitted as lower energy photons like ultraviolet and visible light through countless interactions with solar plasma. That process can take tens of thousands of years. Eventually, those photons shoot out of the sun, traveling through space in all directions. Some of them land on Earth, and some of them land on the leaves of trees or blades of grass or algae in the sea or your potted plant by the window.

[15:00] The plants are living creatures with specialized cells that capture the photon and use the energy packet power a series of chemical reactions. They take carbon dioxide molecules from the air and combine it with water to make sugar, which releases oxygen as a byproduct. The oxygen goes into the atmosphere, which is what we breathe to aid our own cellular metabolism and we can keep going with this, right? The sugars in the plant can be consumed by other organisms and animals. The plant may die and be decomposed, where its matter returns back into the soil.

[15:37] Anything and everything in the universe is energy constantly transforming into something else and it’s all happening as a result of interactions in the quantum field. There’s a bunch of quantum fields but because they interact with each other, the collection is often just called the field and you’ll hear me call it that a lot. I’m going to talk more about the field in the next episode called Check Into the Universe, so I’ll just leave it at that for now.

[16:05] We’ve got these objects we can see which are made of quantum particles, and quantum particles are excitations in the quantum field. So we can say that you and everything that exists is an excitation of the quantum field or a result of excitations interacting. How do we get from these weird quantum particles interacting in quantum fields to the objects we see and touch like our body? We don’t fully know reality as we experience it might be an emergent property of countless quantum interactions. Sometimes I think of everything as like fuzzy, energetic knots in spacetime, like a coagulation of energy that’s together for a period of time until it’s been degraded by the flow and force of all energy constantly floating around. That’s kind of abstract, but maybe that helps. For this next segment, think of everything you see and interact with as excitations in the quantum field, where energy is constantly flowing and changing.

[17:15] Are we really seeing what’s out there? The answer is no. Our minds don’t perceive reality directly. Instead, our biological body can only take in so much information, and then our brain takes that limited information to build a recreation of what we assume is out there, filtered through our experience, knowledge, and beliefs.

[17:42] Let’s talk about those filters. We have biological filters and mental filters. Our biological filters are senses and brain processes that take in information from the environment or how I like to think about it. They take in information about the current configuration of the universe by interacting with excitations in the quantum field. And if you stick with me for further episodes of this podcast, you’ll get more and more of a sense of what that means.

[18:14] Your senses are on a spectrum, right? Like everybody’s sensory abilities Are unique. Like some people are colorblind or vision impaired. Someone’s hearing might be getting worse. Maybe someone has paralysis in one of their limbs, so it no longer feels a cut or a bruise. Everyone’s different. So when I’m saying seeing or hearing or whatever, I realize not everyone senses everything the same way. So our biology acts as a filter and I’m just going to go through some of the senses and how they kind of work. Our eyes interact with photons on the electromagnetic spectrum, which is a range of electromagnetic radiation, which are photons of energy traveling through space in waves made of electric and magnetic fields oscillating perpendicular to each other. I just said a lot of fancy words, but you’ve heard of them. They’re X rays, gamma rays, microwaves, infrared, ultraviolet, radio waves. Those are all electromagnetic radiation. They’re made of photons of energy vibrating at different frequencies. On the one end you have gamma rays, which are short wavelengths with high energy. And on the other side of the spectrum, you have radio waves, which are long wavelengths with low energy.

[19:40] Humans see a narrow band of this spectrum. We only see visible light, which is somewhere in the middle, and it makes up about 0.0035% of the entire electromagnetic spectrum. So let that sink in for a second, because remember before I said everything that we can see and comprehend is only 5% of the known universe and then of that, where we’re only able to perceive 0.0035% without specialized equipment. Obviously we have specialized equipment for the rest. So we’re not even seeing 99.99% of what’s already limited in what we’re able to perceive. I mean, just like, come on, this is just wild, and this is a human thing. The range that we see at other animals can detect wavelengths invisible to us. Like bees can see ultraviolet light. Snakes detect infrared, like body heat they use that to locate warm prey. And we can build detectors that pick up electromagnetic radiation and convert it into something we can interpret. Like radios convert radio waves into sound, or X ray machines take that information into a picture we can use to look at our rib cage or our broken leg or whatever. But even though we can see light, it’s limited.

[21:24] Humans perceive reality within a specific field of scale. We don’t see things too small, like the face of an ant, or too large, like the curvature of earth, and we can only see so far in the distance. Our perception is limited to a very narrow range of sizes. It’s what some people call the human scale. Even when we Conceptualize things. We do it at the human scale, like a photo of a galaxy. A galaxy is mind bogglingly large, but we pack it into a photograph we can pick up with our hands or view on a screen. We can use a microscope to expand the scale of something microscopic, like a single cell to a size our eyes can observe. So even when interacting with things small or large, we scale them up or down to the human scale to comprehend them so our eyes are limited. I’m actually going to talk a little bit more about how they are limited, but let’s talk about sound.

[22:36 ]Sound starts as a vibration so something physically moves like my vocal cords are moving. The vibration of the movement causes nearby particles in a medium. In this case it’s air, but it could be water or walls or so many other things. It causes them to move back and forth and that vibration creates pressure waves that travel through the medium. Our ears or physical sensors pick up those pressure waves. That information is sent to the brain, and the brain makes an interpretation of what those oscillations represent and maybe you’ve heard that auditory illusion, Yanny or Laurel, which is using the exact same sound wave. So the oscillation of the air molecules is the same, but you’ll hear Yanny or Laurel, because it’s not about the oscillation, oscillations, it’s about how your brain interprets them. Well, it is the oscillations, but it’s the oscillations and how your brain interprets them. In the case of our ears, it’s a limited frequency, so between 20 and 20,000 hertz. But actually our skin, bones and organs can pick up lower and higher frequencies, like a rumble in your chest when you stand in front of a subwoofer at a concert. Those would be frequencies lower than 20 hertz and sometimes higher frequencies can feel like a tingling sensation. But this range, again, is a human thing. Dogs can hear much higher frequencies and react to, you know, like high pitched whistles.

[24:16] Mice communicate at high frequencies, so they’re having whole conversations that we don’t hear. Elephants and whales communicate at low frequencies, below that 20 hertz, that infrasound, which we as humans can’t detect, but they can travel for hundreds and sometimes thousands of kilometers in the case of ideal underwater conditions. So whales can talk to each other over vast distances and there’s so much sound happening all the time that we ignore a lot of it. I don’t know if you’ve ever been watching TV and someone asks you something and you’re like, huh? Like what? Like you just did not hear them because you’re focused on the tv, you’ve tuned out the other sounds. I once I worked at a retail place, and it would get very busy and you had to take people’s information when they were checking out. So I would very often be like, asking them to repeat themselves because I couldn’t hear them. So I thought there was something wrong with my hearing. I went and did a hearing test, and the guy tested my ears, and he told me, you have really great hearing. In fact, you hear at a higher range than normal. So actually, I can hear dog whistles. He said, maybe you’re just not paying attention. That hit me so hard but I’ll talk more about this limited capacity and that how that attention part works.

[25:54] Let’s get into taste and smell. Our sense of taste and smell is limited. Compared to other animals, we only have five basic tastes we can detect and if you want try to guess what those are, you can pause the podcast or I’ll give you, like, a moment. Okay. The five basic tastes are sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami. Did you get them all?

[26:25] Our smell receptors go beyond that to detect odor molecules from organic compounds like esters, which give us the sweet, fruity, and floral smells. Aldehydes, which range anywhere from pungent and harsh like formaldehyde, to citrusy to soapy or waxy and terpenes. And if you smoke cannabis, you know what terpenes are. These are like pine or earthy smells. We can also smell inorganic compounds like ammonia in cleaning products or chlorine in a pool, and ozone from photocopiers but here’s what’s interesting about it. Our olfactory receptors in our nose are sensitive to molecules that can bind to them, which are triggering the sensation of smell but for a molecule to trigger a receptor, it has to be volatile, which means it’s able to evaporate and enter the air. The molecular weight has to be small and it has to be lipophilic, which means it dissolves in fat like substances. Plus, the receptors themselves need to be tuned to recognize the shape of the molecule. So hopefully already you’re picking up this concept that if a compound isn’t volatile, small, or lipophilic, we’re not smelling it. It doesn’t mean it’s not there. We’re just not perceiving it.

[28:01] Flavor is the combination of these inputs of the taste and the smell, along with texture and temperature. It’s not so much that we’re actually detecting what something is when we smell and taste it, as if our brain is calculating from the chemical composition, we only take in what our receptors are able to perceive as a jigsaw puzzle, then our brain assumes what it is based on the combination of those receptors. It’s why we’re able to fake foods like plant based meats, or synthetic fruit flavors, or artificial vanilla. Because it’s not about the chemical combination, it’s about how our mind perceives the information from our senses. It’s also why some people prefer cold beer over warm temperature beer. They’re both beer, but depending where you grew up or your disposition, one may taste better to you. As I’m editing this podcast, I realize I said warm temperature beer. I meant to say room temperature beer. If you like warm temperature beer out of the inn, stop the audio. No, I’m just kidding. You can stay, come back, it’s fine. But I did mean to say room temperature beer versus cold beer.

[29:23] Let’s talk about touch. The sense of touch works through specialized receptors in the skin called mechanoreceptors which detect pressure, vibration, texture and temperature, but only above certain thresholds. Like we have mites and bacteria all over our body, but we don’t detect that. It’s too small to sense. And they’re moving, they’re crawling around there. We don’t know, we don’t feel it and thank goodness too. When our receptors are stimulated, they send signals through the nervous system to the brain, where the information is processed and interpreted as sensations like pain, softness, warmth, what have you. For most of us, receptors adapt to sustained, unchanging stimuli and stop sending signals to the brain about it. Like atmospheric pressure is constantly bearing down on us. We’re getting crushed by the atmosphere but we edit it out.

[30:32] If you’re in tune with atmospheric pressure, you may be able to sense the change of pressure, which can be a predictor of rainfall. So it could actually be a useful skill to not tune it out. Have you ever put glasses on your head and then you can’t find it? You’re like, where are my glasses? It’s because you’ve edited out the feeling of the glasses. It was just a consistent feeling that your brain just went, oh well, we don’t need to process this. The brain also filters out irrelevant sensory input to avoid overwhelm. Like the clothing on your skin. If you’re neuro spicy, your brain might not filter this out for certain fabrics or fits, which is why you may prefer certain clothing and also why I don’t force kids to wear certain clothes because this Filtering may be underdeveloped or highly sensitive when you’re still growing. And I think it’s the same reason why when we get home after a tough day, we want to put on some chill out clothes, right? We want to just like flub out in something comfortable that takes less effort for our brains to process.

[31:44] All this pre editing of what’s around us helps us focus on changes in our environment, like a sudden gust of wind or a sharp object or bumping into something as we walk. It’s not just touch as a sensation that gets filtered or stops sending signals, all of our senses do this. I’ll tell you a very real experience I had with this that I didn’t know at the time was my brain editing out sensory overwhelm. By the way, do not try this at home, okay? It’s a stupid thing to do. Don’t do it. There was this church on one of the main streets of my neighborhood when I was a teenager. At night, they turned on these bright lights on the lawn that shined up onto the facade of the building to like light it up. Be like, look at us. If we were walking along the street at night, we’d run up onto the lawn, crouch down in front of these lights and stick our faces, like right into it and stare into the light for like 20 seconds so that, like, all we’re seeing is this bright light shining in our eyes.

[32:56] Then we’d walk back onto the street and all the streetlights and lights from passing cars would be purple. So we called it Purple City. And it wasn’t until years later that I realized what was happening, why that worked. Our eyes were bombarded with yellow light. So much so that our brain just decided, this is a lot. I’m not going to process it. It’s still coming in to the brain. But the brain’s just like, nah, we’re good. This is a lot. And then it turns down how much of it shows as part of what we’re perceiving in reality. Even after we stop staring into the light, the effect on the brain was still happening. So that when we went back into the night, the points of light were being edited and processed as purple. So everything looked purple for probably like 30 seconds or so. After learning that that your brain edits constant stimuli, I was like, ****, what else are we just being constantly bombarded with to the point that we just edit it out and our brain doesn’t even render it.

[34:19] Besides our brain just editing stuff out, we have limited receptors. So whether seeing, touching, smelling, whatever we Have a limited number of receptors to do this. And I’ll just give the example of the eyes. We have photoreceptors in our retina with millions of rod cells that detect low light and grayscale and cone cells that detect color so already we only have so many points Where a photon can interact. I mean, there’s millions of them, but still there’s many more photons in our environment that just we wouldn’t be able to process because we only have so many places where they can be processed at. And then our pupils regulate the amount of light that enters to the eye by dilating and contracting. Also, squinting does this too. Of all the light that does enter the eye, most of it is absorbed or scattered so only 10% reach the photoreceptors and those photoreceptors can only respond To a finite number of photons at a time.

[35:31] So extremely bright environments or fast changing light sources might overwhelm them causing us to miss some light information. It’s also why you can shine a bright light in someone’s eyes and they can’t see you anymore. They’ve been bombarded with photons, and they can’t distinguish objects within that blast of information. But we also need a minimum threshold of light to be able to distinguish as well and you’ve probably heard this before that, you know, cats can see better in the dark than humans can. It’s because they can see with less light input Than what we can. And that’s true for other creatures as well, especially nocturnal creatures. On top of that, our eyes are only focused on an area that we’re directly looking at, meaning we’re ignoring most of the light in our periphery or outside of our light line of sight, so we’re not even processing that information.

[36:29] Of all this limited information we’re getting from everything that’s within us and around us, we now have to interpret it. And for that, we have our mental filters. Our brain looks for patterns to make sense of the information that’s coming in. And there’s a really good reason for that, which I’ll get into. Since we’re getting a small fraction of what’s out there, Our brain is filling in the gaps through assumptions.

[36:58] I haven’t been to a movie theater in a while, but they used to have a game before the movie where they’ll show a pixelated image of someone that will slowly become less pixelated until you recognize who it is. At some point, you’re like, oh, it’s Will Smith. Even if the image is still very distorted this is your brain recognizing a pattern.

[37:21] Having done a lot of design work myself, I’m always really fascinated with the lowest threshold of shapes. Something needs to be to be recognized as representing an object. Emojis are a good example like think of a circle with two dots and a curved line. Those are only like four little bits of information but we’re interpreting that as a face with a smile so there’s very little information there. But our brain fills in the gaps and makes an assumption that it’s a smile. We do this when we’re reading as well. It’s how people read really fast. They’ve just gotten good at making all the assumptions between the keywords, so they. We automatically just edit out the fillers in between but we still understand the message, and that’s because our brain is filling in the gaps.

[38:13] Patterns are helpful because they allow us to act quickly by identifying potential threats or opportunities with very little information. Like a knock at the door around dinner time is probably a solicitor wanting us to sign up for internet or a charity asking for donations but a knock at the door at 1am Danger, right? We don’t need any more information than the sound of the knock and the time to make an interpretation of the situation. At dinner, we’ll just open the door to see who it is but at night we might call out, who is it or hide, make sure the other doors are locked.

[38:55] Patterns don’t just help us figure out what’s going on at any given moment. They also allow us to predict new circumstances because we live in a world of cause and effect. Energy is constantly changing and rearranging into new forms and systems. We need to be able to predict what will happen if something is done or not done. Because the future is shaped by the momentum of the present, the mind needs to make assumptions about what will happen next in order to survive the environment, which is to say the constant flow of energy, we have to predict what is this going to turn into.

[39:40] Patterns also allow us to use less power or energy to process information and to send information as well. So if we’ve stored a pattern, like a fractal of a larger concept, we don’t need to process every single piece of information that may be accessible to comprehend what it might be. We can chunk it and extrapolate into what it is. And I say less power because literally you’re using less brain power because you’re not computing every single piece of information. Your mind is jumping to conclusion because that’s quicker than processing all the information that’s available, or waiting for information to be available. But also delivery requires less energy because information in whatever form, visual or auditory or touch, requires energy to create and deliver. Like when we tell stories, they capture concepts that are understood beyond the limited use of words.

[40:43] Here’s a one sentence story to illustrate my point. The old gardener whispered to the seed, the darkness you fear is what makes you grow, and buried it beneath the soil.

[40:56] I used 22 words there, and it took my body energy to do that in vibrating my vocal cords, forcing air out of my lungs. There was also energy exchange with the environment because talking creates heat as well. It also releases water vapor and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and the microphone had to pick that up. The data had to be stored in order to recreate the sound. Those 22 words, that’s also a form of energy but you got a lot more out of that because your brain filled in what wasn’t said in a way that’s unique to you. Like maybe you pictured the gardener or what it meant to say the darkness you fear or what the soil feels like. I didn’t do that with my words, your mind did that. And that’s very convenient because I didn’t have to spend the energy or store the energy or re release the energy for you to pick all that up. That’s incredible, and we’re doing this all the time. Metaphors, art. If I tell you we’re going to see the latest Batman movie, you already have a really good sense of what it’s going to be about. I just have to say batman, say no more. Except maybe you want to know the director and who’s playing Batman and who the villains will be. So how do we build patterns?

[42:29] We have neurons in the brain, our heart, our gut, and some other places which are cells that generate electrical signals and communicate using chemical neurotransmitters at their synapses. The synapses are gaps between neurons where electrical signals are passed or converted into a chemical message. These single cells create neural pathways, which are groups of neurons that trigger rapid communication through a series of neurons when stimulated. But I don’t mean to imply that neurons are all directly linked together like a chain. Some are, but pathways can stimulate different regions of the brain and clusters of neurons without being directly connected.

[43:18] For example, the smell of a certain perfume lights up the region of the brain associated with smell, which strongly connects to memory related areas and might trigger a memory of your grandmother.

[43:30] While the smell and memory regions aren’t linked in a single chain they are part of a network that allows them to influence each other.

[43:39] You’ve probably heard the saying, neurons that fire together wire together. There’s a really good practical reason for this because it strengthens automatic behaviors and rapid interpretation. For example, when you first start riding a bike, you have to focus on balancing, pedaling, steering, and braking, all as separate tasks. Each action involves different groups of neurons firing over time. As you practice, these neurons form neural pathways that allow the actions to become automatic. Now, when you get on a bike, you just start to pedal, and it stimulates the entire pathway, engaging all the necessary neurons to balance, steer, and pedal seamlessly without really thinking of it.

[44:32] A famous example is Pavlov’s Dog, where this scientist named Pavlov did an experiment with a dog where he would ring a bell before giving it food, and eventually just ringing the bell would cause the dog to salivate. The neurons that would activate at the sound of a bell ringing became wired with the neurons to get ready to eat. You can use this to your advantage, which I’ll get into in other episodes. But some examples might be creating a ritual to prepare yourself for certain activities or actions. You may already do this, like stopping at a coffee shop before work might be a way you engage your brain to get ready to go to the office.

[45:19] Habit stacking is another way, because you’ll train your brain to flow through a sequence of events.

[45:27] Visualizations strengthen pathways so that when you do take action, your brain and body carry out the actions more smoothly because you’ve wired the behavior together in your imagination. Athletes do this all the time, it’s part of their training. But there’s a downside, because you may wire pathways together that don’t have ideal outcomes. Like maybe your partner criticizes you on how you do the dishes because it’s not how they would do the dishes and without even thinking, you might feel defensive, as if you’ve done something wrong and you feel uncomfortable. That could be tied to a neural pathway created in your childhood. When your parents were frustrated at you because of something you did or didn’t do to their liking, you got in trouble.

[46:19] Now, even though the situations are completely different and maybe your partner isn’t even mad, they’re just expressing their needs, that pathway lights up and your brain jumps to the same conclusion. I’m being criticized. I must be in trouble. That’s bad. I don’t like it.

[46:36] Another downside is bias, where you favor one perspective or outcome or group over another, usually in an unfair or prejudiced way or stereotypes, which are oversimplified. And generalized beliefs or assumptions about someone or group of people based on limited characteristics like gender, skin color, age, occupation. It completely ignores individual differences and complexity and nuances. You’re not getting the full picture of someone or something because your patterns have already jumped into a conclusion that builds an interpretation of whatever information you’ve been given, but it can be flat out wrong or incomplete enough that it’s a problem. A big problem for a lot of people is navigating change because our everyday experience is shaped by neural loops, patterns of thought and behavior we tend to repeat, change can disrupt our mental flow. When change happens that we don’t choose, like being laid off, relocating unexpectedly, or partner leaving, it interrupts the familiar patterns our brain relies on, creating discomfort. Even when we actively seek change, like starting a new career, finding a new home, or leaving a partner, it can still feel uncomfortable because our brain prefers the familiarity of well established sequences over the effort and uncertainty of creating new ones.

[48:13] The good news is, patterns are flexible and changeable. You can rewire them to build new ones. Here are some of the ways that they are created. Repetition, which is repeated action or repeated stimuli and outcome. Like listening to Pink Pony Club a zillion times until you know every lyric and breath. Aassociation, which links related pieces of information like if it’s raining outside, you hear a loud boom, you associate it with thunder or you hear a loud boom like thunder but it’s not raining, you’re associating with something else. If it’s dark at a certain time of year, I’m thinking fireworks. But if you’ve served in the military or lived in an area where there’s been heavy munitions or bombs, you may think something else. You don’t even know what the boom is. It’s just caused a pathway to fire into a pattern based on association.

[49:20] Repetition feels like an obvious one for creating neural patterns, but I feel association is underappreciated, especially when creating habits or transformation. You can trigger new neural pathways by linking them to something you already enjoy or do consistently. Like if you want to meditate, you could associate it with your morning routine by meditating for five minutes right after you brush your teeth. That’s habit stacking, and I mentioned that before or if you want to practice self love, you could sing a love song loudly in the car as you as if you’re serenading yourself.

[49:57] The one I use is actually I Like that by Janelle Monae if you want to try that one. Or you could, repeat some affirmations as you dance to your favorite Tunes. Over time, when you dance, you’ll associate dancing with a form of self love. The key is to intentionally pair the new behavior or thought pattern with something familiar or rewarding so your brain naturally strengthens the connection over time. By creating these associations, you can make new habits and thoughts and behaviors feel easier and more enjoyable, ultimately rewiring your neural pathways in a way that works for you.

[50:36] Another way we build this is biological wiring. So we’re hardwired to recognize patterns for survival. It’s an evolutionary trait that helps us identify threats and opportunities but it’s not just a universal unchanging thing for all humans at all times. Like we tend to think of evolution as happening over eons and generations. It’s more fluid than that. It’s shaped not only by long set evolution over tens of thousands of years, but also by what we inherit directly from our parents and genetic expression shaped during our lifetime.

[51:13] So it’s a very active process because our genetics are shaped by environmental and social influences like stress or trauma and even disease. The implications of that are deep. Like to think about the effects colonialism must have had on the last several generations in the epigenetics for indigenous people. Resident schools were still active in my generation. They’re closed as of the mid-90s. But land appropriation, systemic violence and foreign occupation is still happening today. That’s traumatic as individuals and a collective people and that’s going to build people’s filters how they perceive the world. And these kinds of traumas are happening all over the world, all the time in different regions.

[52:03] It can feel like we’re a bit powerless in this process because there’s a hereditary environmental and social aspect to our biological wiring but awareness of that can be helpful in understanding our behavior and accepting ourselves where we’re at. And we’re not completely powerless we can take care of our mental and physical well being as well as our environment and communities to minimize the effects where possible.

[52:29] Patterns are also shaped by societal norms and shared knowledge.

[52:34] Especially what you receive as a child. When your brain is soaking things in like a sponge and rapidly building these patterns so you can interact with the world. You’ve just been thrust into. Cultural and social transmission through communication and shaped social behavior where the patterns and beliefs our parents or communities teach us become part of how we see the world. It’s also how we communicate. Like, I don’t know if you’ve ever driven in a different country, but the road signs are different. Those road signs I’m familiar with in my city are my patterns and When I go somewhere else, if the signs are too different, I don’t have a reference base. And it makes it harder to drive because I’m trying to interpret the road signs at the same time as, you know, operating a vehicle I’m not familiar with and navigating to places I’ve never been before. So, like which road do I turn on? It’s a lot.

[53:39] Learning new things and interacting with other cultures and questioning our belief systems or assumptions can build new neural connections or weaken ones that don’t serve us. Driving in a new country is actually good for me. It feels uncomfortable, but, you know, don’t avoid it. Patterns are shaped by our experiences and memory. Like what happened when we did this or didn’t do that, when we said that to this person, how’d they react?

[54:08] Those are shaping our patterns and influencing our future behavior. And one way to modify the patterns are to have new experiences and to not allow past experiences to influence an attempt at having a new experience and trying it a different way or trying it again and expecting a different result.

[54:32] Another way we build patterns is through imagination and hypothesis. So visualizations I mentioned already not only with habit forming, but also planning. I built a table in my laundry room and I visually did all the steps before even buying any materials. And I would draw it out and think about what would go where and how it would be put together. There was lots of visualization before I was even comfortable starting that project.

[55:00] Our creativity is another way we create patterns by predicting or assuming connection between unrelated things like conspiracy theories or art or imagining clouds as shapes. This is a skill that you can develop. I find developing your creativity can unlock a broader interpretation of the world because you learn to make connections between seemingly unrelated things, which makes your perception of reality less rigid and narrow and more fluid and inclusive. It’s also really good for problem solving and having more fun in life. Yay, creativity.

[55:42] So our patterns are only as good as our experience and our knowledge, whether it’s conscious or subconscious or encoded in our biology. Past experiences and learned knowledge or behavior influence how we link information and interpret what we perceive. And I’m going to get more into that in episode six but hopefully you’re getting the gist that we’re processing everything through filters and building patterns based on our programming. We exist in this field of energy and we’re getting a very narrow sliver of information as input.

[56:20] You would think our brain takes all the limited sensory information and just projects it in our minds as it looks in the environment, like our Brain is the inside of a building, and our eyes are windows. What’s outside the window or outside our body is just there, and we’re seeing what’s there but what actually happens is our brain reconstructs the information by processing the sensory inputs, which are those biological filters, through a complex network of neurons which includes those mental filters.

[56:55] When our senses are stimulated, it’s converted into electrical signals that travel via nerves to the brain, where different regions process and interpret the data. Like when your eyes send signals to the visual cortex, it reconstructs an image of the photons it’s detecting, using patterns, colors, motion, and depth.

[57:16] Other sensory input is also processed, like sound, touch, and smell, to gather further information for clarity and confirmation. And the mental filters, like the prefrontal cortex and memory centers, contribute to the data by adding context, meaning, and associations. It’s the combination of these things that creates a picture of what it is that you’re interacting with. So your brain doesn’t directly show you the world as it is. It builds a mental model based on the input combined with your past experiences, expectations, and beliefs. It’s the reconstruction we perceive as reality but it’s actually a filtered interpretive map, not an objective picture of the universe.

[58:06] So what you see only looks and feels like what it looks and feels like to you as an individual human being. If you and I were in the same room and we both looked at a chair. The chair exists as energy occupying space in time. Photons of light hit the chair and scatter around the room, which are picked up by our eyes. That sensory input is converted into an electrical signal and our brains each independently construct a mental image of the chair. Even though we’re both looking at a chair, or I can say we’re both detecting an excitation of the field, we’ve interpreted that excitation independently. You might ask, why do we both see a chair? It’s because we share a biology so our processing is very similar. And we both know what a chair is and the function of a chair.

[59:03] But if one of us is really into interior design, we might notice things about the chair the other didn’t like. The style or the designer, the materials and the quality of construction. So the chair we reconstruct may have more meaning and depth. If one of us has a mental health or neurological disorder that causes hallucinations, we’re having an episode. We may reconstruct the chair in our minds with someone sitting in it. Neither of us are actually looking at the chair as it is. We’re receiving sensory information and we’re both separately processing that sensory information to reconstruct our interpretation of what the data is telling us.

[59:50] We’re incapable of knowing how someone or something else interprets the same information or the same energy, the same objects, like a bat uses echolocation. We might imagine what that’s like, but our imagination is still just us making an interpretation based on our personal assumptions. We’ll never actually know what it’s like for the bat as it consciously interprets the world.

[01:00:18] What I imagine a bat feels like is going to be different from how you imagine what a bat feels like. And there are things that we flat out make up, like color, for instance, doesn’t exist. It’s a construction of the mind. A red rose outside of your consciousness interpreting that rose is not red.

[01:00:40] Nothing in the petal is red. Light strikes the petal and most of it is absorbed but the frequency of energy we associate as red is scattered. And that’s what our eyes pick up and our mind interprets it as red. But the red you see is different than the red someone else would see because of variations in our filters and interpretation. And other living creatures don’t see red at all, at least not how we see it.

[01:01:09] Some creatures don’t even pick up that frequency of energy, like the bat. So it’s not that they’re not seeing red, the color. They’re not getting those photons as information in the field. And it just highlights again how there’s things happening all around us all the time that we’re not even aware of because of how we perceive the environment, because of how we reconstruct our perceptions.

[01:01:38] Some other things we make up, like gender roles, don’t exist as inherent truths. There are social constructs that have different definitions depending on who you’re speaking to. Money holds the value it does because as a collective, we’ve decided it does. Its value is a shared belief, not an inherent property. And everyone has a very different interpretation about their relationship to money as well as their knowledge and their experience with it.

[01:02:08] Water isn’t wet. Wetness is a subjective experience based on sensory inputs of temperature, pressure, and movement and the sensation can be faked. You’re not interacting with objects or complex systems as they truly are. Instead, you’ve reconstructed a small slice of information from the energy those objects and systems output through your filters to build an interpretation of them in a way your mind can comprehend.

[01:02:43] But there’s another weird thing about this, and this is my last point of this episode, so thank you for sticking with it.

[01:02:52] We don’t take all the information as is and reconstruct it. Your mind has another shortcut to save power and make faster reactions. Your brain makes predictions about what to anticipate and only notices the differences. The brain doesn’t passively take in all sensory information a hundred percent as it’s delivered and received by our senses, and then reconstructs reality from scratch piece by piece. Instead, it actively generates predictions about everything. How our body should feel, how our environment should look, how our workday should go, how a conversation will flow. Anything we’re interacting with as a conscious being is constructed in our mind based not by the sensory information we’re getting from the environment, but on prior experiences, patterns and expectations and then our senses collect information on the discrepancies.

[01:03:56] The predictions our minds make are compared to incoming sensory data. And any discrepancy, which is like a prediction error, is highlighted for attention and further processing. Let me give you an example, because that’s like a big piece to chew. If you’re in your home, your brain is sending out predictions about what to expect. Let’s say you lift the kitchen area clean, all the dishes cleaned and put away. Later you come in and notice a glass on the counter.

[01:04:28] It’s not that you’ve walked into the kitchen and was hit with the image of the kitchen which your brain had to reconstruct. Your brain was predicting what your kitchen should look, smell, feel and sound like, including a clean countertop. But the sensory information comes back with a difference. This discrepancy catches your attention and updates your brain’s prediction. So you notice the glass, wash it and put it away, and then go find whoever left the glass and say, hey, clean up after yourselves.

[01:05:03] It’s personally why I think there are some people who don’t seem to notice mess. I think it’s because their brain is not interpreting it as a discrepancy. That’s just my personal theory. I did not fact check that. Another example I love is when you’re peacefully by yourself and are startled when there’s a loud noise, like maybe something fell off the wall and you jump like ah! It’s because your brain is thinking there’s no reason to anticipate a sudden change. So the discrepancy is startling versus if you were on a construction site, you wouldn’t jump or think twice about a loud noise because the noise pollution is consistent and expected.

[01:05:52] We do this predictive discrepancy thing because it’s energy efficient and speeds up our reaction times. This really just seems to be the motto of the mind, right? Like lazy and energy efficient. Because imagine if every time I looked around my room, my brain needed to take in all the sensory information to reconstruct the room. Photon by photon, sensory input by input, every single moment.

[01:06:21] I wouldn’t be able to think and it would take an enormous amount of energy to do that every single second. And it doesn’t really make sense, right? Like if you’ve already taken in the information of, let’s say, what your home looks like, why would you need to do that again every single day that you wake up.

From walking in the woods and there’s a rustle in the bushes?

[01:06:43] If my brain is needing to process the trail, the ground, the wind, the sunlight in the trees, the individual bushes, every leaf on the plants and on the ground, every single twig, every noise from the creaks of the trees to the call of the birds, and every gesture like the steps I’m taking in the breath and blink because your eyes need to be moist.

[01:07:05] I’m using a lot of attention just to process any one moment brain. It’s taking too long to interpret the environment. And the rustle in the bushes I haven’t even processed yet turns out to be cocaine bear and I’ve been mauled to death before my brain can even catch up.

[01:07:21] Knowing your brain is making predictions based on your expectations and your ability to recognize discrepancies. Hopefully you can see how this has a huge impact on how you navigate the world. Like if your brain can’t predict a situation, it feels super uncomfortable. Like if you’re going to start a business but you’ve never been an entrepreneur before, you have no basis for predicting or some of your predictions may seem really scary and you’ll want to avoid them because you don’t know what to do, or social situations where you don’t know anyone. You have no pre existing patterns for any of these people.

[01:08:00] Your brain has these huge gaps it’s going to have to fill and that may show up as anxiety or hesitation or awkwardness or bias or traveling to a new country that’s unfamiliar to you, where maybe the culture and the language is different.

[01:08:17] You’re processing enormous amounts of information because the patterns in your mind aren’t pre existing and there are tons of discrepancies.

[01:08:26] The same things happen at a new job, right? It can feel really overwhelming because there’s just so much information to process.

[01:08:35] But the other thing is, is if we’re not conditioned to see the discrepancies, we don’t see them at all. And this shows up in expertise like a seasoned IT professional may be able to spot a problem much more quickly or even anticipate a problem more quickly than somebody brand new. Their mind is actually analyzing and anticipating their systems differently than somebody who is inexperienced in analyzing and predicting those systems.

[01:09:09] I feel like I could just go on and on and on, but this was already so much to go over and we could get so much deeper and we will on certain points in subsequent episodes on the podcast. But what I want you to take away is that reality is a very narrow slice of a constant flow of energy and information that our mind reconstructs into a coherent experience shaped by sensory input and assumptions about what we expect to perceive in that sea of energy.

[01:09:44] In our next episode, we’ll reflect on the interconnectedness of all things and explore how you are the universe experiencing itself in space time and that understanding that can make a powerful difference when creating the life you want.

[01:10:04] I hope you enjoyed your stay at the Inn today. If you like this, please follow and or subscribe. Leave a Review say something nice See you next time at the Cosmic Inn.