The White Wall ◻️

Published about 13 hours ago • 3 min read • Consciousness

LIFE ON URTH - Episode 110

The Theatre Of Perception

I’m currently working on a project called The Realm, an interactive website to lay out and play with my personal mythology. It currently consists of six areas, two of which opened their gates in the last weeks:

The Ocean of Being explores the original state of consciousness, pure and borderless. It’s the origin and destination of everything.

The Thought Forge hints at the process of creating something from everything. It’s where potential is forged into stable form.

Explore The Realm

I’ve been talking about these topics for a while, but never in narrative form. It feels a lot like the world-building I do for my fiction, only it’s based on psychology and philosophy rather than geography and politics.

The next area to be unveiled in The Realm is called The Theatre of Perception. It addresses another central idea of my personal world-building: our experience is a fancy interpretation of reality.

The White Wall

You’re not looking at a white wall. You’re seeing a white wall as an interpretation of the photons hitting your retina. Modern science has revealed that there’s no wall or color at all if we zoom in far enough.

The molecules don’t have a color. The light waves reflected from them don’t have a color. The electrochemical signals traveling from your retina to your visual cortex also don’t have a color.

Yet here it is, the white wall we all know: opaque, haptic, undeniable.

I vividly remember the realization that color exists only in consciousness, and not “out there.” At first, it was intimidating to look at the world through this new frame. Everything previously rendered as known and safe suddenly became deeply mysterious. Turns out it makes a big difference whether there’s a “real” wall or just my interpretation of the molecular ocean around me.

This view opened the doors to an entirely new relationship with the world. The feeling of being an isolated meaty organism in a mostly dead universe was transformed almost instantly.

Instead, I began inhabiting an organic little sphere of bright experience, in which everything appears: the wall, my meaty body, flowers and their scent, all my dreams and sorrows. They differ only in conceptualization, not in experiential substance. Phenomenologically, everything is alive because everything is me.

The Treachery of Images

After early mammals lost some of their color vision due to their nocturnal lifestyle, some primates regained it about 30 to 55 million years ago. Thanks to those far ancestors, today we have flowers, sunsets, and lush landscapes as reliable sources of beauty and awe - AND tigers aren’t quite the nightmarish predators they seem to be for other animals 😱

The growing scientific understanding of our evolution and the brain has kindled the idea that the experience of color is the same as the electrochemical processes in the brain. But that’s like confusing the painting of a wooden pipe with an actual wooden pipe.

While the processing of sense data in the brain is clearly connected to our experience, they are not the same. How we get the bright redness of a sunset from neurons firing in the brain is still a complete mystery.

The visual field is only one layer in the bright circumstance of consciousness. Everything appears there: sound, taste, smell, bodily sensations, even emotions and thoughts. Like characters stepping in and out of the light on a theatre stage, the elements of consciousness appear, transform, and disappear.

It’s not a random dance; it follows a choreography that can be studied and understood. The lessons can be applied to consciously improve the world, rather than blindly following whatever automatic patterns and strategies one has picked up to deal with life's hardships.

Here is the absolute gist of it: Suffering is a reminder to pay closer attention. Meet it with courage and curiosity to reap the biggest rewards life has to offer.

✒️ Quote of the Week: “In an age of constant movement, nothing is so urgent as sitting still.” -Pico Iyer

🎧 Song of the Week: Our-Fi - Cuando Se Siente Como

Now I’d love to hear from you!

Did something in my writing catch your attention?
Was there an idea you found particularly intriguing?
Or is there a question that’s been on your mind related to these topics?

Just reply to this email or write to me at mail@urth.blog 👈

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All the best,

Adrian / Urth

Can’t wait until next week’s edition? Check out my essays.