What's The (Un)Known? 🌁

LIFE ON URTH - Episode 105

I’ve been talking a lot about the known and the unknown lately. But what exactly are they?

The world unfolds as a landscape within consciousness.

Part of this landscape is geographical.
It contains rooms, roads, trees, cafés, mountains, and chairs.

But another part is emotional.
It contains hopes, fears, goals, memories, desires, and relationships.

These two layers are deeply intertwined.

There aren’t Objective Objects

Look at a chair. Take in your perception of it as a whole.

The chair you see isn’t only a thing. It is a place to sit.

You can feel its texture just by looking at it. Your mind instantly calculates how far away it is, whether it is occupied, and different ways you could move there and sit down.

Now think of your favorite café.

Notice how the image comes bundled with a route. Your imagination already contains a map of how to get there. There might also be an emotional tone attached to it, depending on whether you want to go there or not.

The point is that we are organisms with a constant navigation problem. And that is how we perceive the world: as a place to navigate, to act.

The difficulty is that reality is infinitely more complex than we can ever understand. No organism can keep track of everything. Evolution, therefore, had to find a way to compress reality into something manageable.

Not a perfect representation. A useful one.

My favorite models suggest that we solve this problem by dividing consciousness into three fundamental categories:

The known
The unknown
The self

The self is the navigator.
The known is wherever your actions reliably produce the expected outcome.
The unknown appears whenever there is a mismatch. Whenever the map no longer represents the territory.

The Unknown

The unknown is not simply information you don’t have. It is the experience of unpredictability.
It is the emergence of the infinite chaos that’s usually kept at bay by a working map.

A strange noise in the house at night.
A difficult conversation.
A diagnosis.
Losing a job.
Getting a job.

Anything that places you beyond the borders of your existing map. Geography doesn’t have to change for the unknown to emerge. A hungry snake suddenly crawling out from under the bed would make your room a different place than it was ten seconds ago, in a very real sense.

Because uncertainty can contain both danger and opportunity, the unknown always carries a strange duality.

It is the place where dragons live.
But it is also where treasure is found.

Writing Online

I shared more than 100 episodes of Life On Urth online. At the beginning, this was unknown territory for me, and I felt that.

The biggest spike in tension came when I started sharing the newsletter outside the bubble of family and close friends. The fear of judgment, of being cringed at, of not having anything useful to say - it can be crushing, if not for the content as such, then at least for the authenticity in it.

There was no central narrative that I could use to structure new texts, so each week felt like a wrestling match with the keyboard.

But eventually patterns and routines started to emerge. I found themes that reliably spark my interest and feel valuable, at least for myself. It’s like the dragons retreated, and I was rewarded with treasures, some of which I could not have foreseen. That’s because not all treasures are material.

The Real Landscape

Most of the landscape we navigate is not made of mountains, forests, and roads.

It is made of people.

Other people are the largest source of meaning in our lives. They are also the largest source of unpredictability.

Every friendship.
Every conflict.
Every romance.
Every community.
Every conversation.

The unknown enters our lives primarily through other human beings, and it has been like that for millennia. Our systems for detecting the unknown are fine-tuned not just for lurking predators but also for our relationships.

Our Social Reality

You know exactly how it feels when the unknown emerges in a relationship. A text message that makes your stomach sink. A first date where you feel like the whole world is watching you. An event with a group of strangers you don't know how to talk to yet.

A mismatch between social reality and our maps of it can feel life-threatening, and rightfully so. From an evolutionary perspective, it was just yesterday when our lives were actually still in danger if our tribe didn’t accept us.

Exclusion from the group is not “just” a psychological threat. It’s always been a real threat, and our systems are tuned accordingly.

But what’s been essential for survival until yesterday might not be as functional in an environment that has shifted as significantly as ours. To not be at the mercy of these ancient and mostly automatic systems, it’s useful to understand their fundamental structure.

The Eternal Questions

We create our maps by asking three eternal questions:

Where am I?
Where should I go?
How do I get there?

Each of these questions is filled with our beliefs, fantasies, goals and dreams about ourselves and the world - creating a map that’s essentially a prediction of what we expect to happen next. That might be what consciousness ultimately is: A GPS for a finite being moving through an infinite world.

We constantly compare this map with data collected from the world. A match confirms our predictions and strengthens our current answers to the eternal questions.

A mismatch indicates a mistake in our answers. It’s important to know that there are different levels of mistakes, and hence mismatches of different urgencies.

With a small mismatch, it might be sufficient to adjust your approach (“How do I get there?”).

But a deep mismatch can invalidate the entire map (“Where should I go?” or even “Where am I?”). People, including you and me, will go to great lengths to protect the integrity of their maps - meaning it’s really important to get your fundamental stories right.

Journaling ✍️

What are your current answers to the three eternal questions? 🌁
Try answering on different levels:

This week vs. this life
Academically vs. creatively
With people around you vs. with yourself

✒️ Quote of the Week: “Life is an experimental journey undertaken involuntarily.” -Fernando Pessoa

🍿 Video of the week: How Do You Recognize An Enlightened Being? - Sadhguru

🎧 Song of the Week: Stan Kolev - Listen (Austin Petitt Remix)

Now I’d love to hear from you!

What answers came up to the journaling questions?
Did anything else catch your attention?
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.