Where Is The Treeness? 🍂

LIFE ON URTH - Episode 112

The World You Inhabit

You don’t live in the physical world.

At least not directly.

You live in an experience of the world. Colors, sounds, warmth, meaning, memories, hopes, fears—everything appears within consciousness. Whatever the universe is made of beyond that is fascinating, but it isn’t the world you wake up in each morning.

Modern science has been zooming in hard, revealing that beneath our familiar world of tables and people lies a soup of vibrating fields. That might not be the end of it, but one thing is clear: Whatever ultimately exists “out there” doesn’t resemble the neat world we perceive.

Instead of a quantum soup, consciousness presents us with a version of reality that we can actually navigate. It’s a useful interpretation.

That distinction may sound philosophical, but I think it’s one of the most impactful ideas I’ve ever encountered. It changed how I think about perception, about myself, and about the stories I still sometimes mistake for reality.

Before the Story

Everything I’ve described so far can remain a purely intellectual exercise.

You can agree that the world is an interpretation, nod politely, and continue your day exactly as before. That’s what I mostly do as well.

But every now and then, I remember to pay attention, to notice what experience is actually made of. Not what I think about it, but what is immediately present. Colors. Sounds. Pressure where my body touches the chair. The breath at the tip of my nose. Every single one of them appears in the same place: consciousness.

It also contains anxiety, excitement, political opinions, memories of your first kiss, the smell of coffee, and the voice in your head reading these words.

Everything appears in this bright space of awareness, changes, and disappears. Remembering this can make the difference between automatically acting out old beliefs when strong emotions arise, and the freedom of observing even unpleasant situations as changing fields of energy.

Drawing Borders

The world doesn’t come with labels attached.

“Tree.” “Sky.” “You.” “Me.”

Those are concepts we use to carve reality into manageable pieces. They’re so deeply ingrained that it’s almost impossible to imagine the world without them.

Take a tree 🌲

From a distance, it seems like a clearly defined object. Let’s start stripping away things. Is it still a tree without the leaves? Sure, the tree-ness isn’t in the leaves alone. Is it still a tree without the bark? Without the roots? Without the branches?

Even though the tree-ness can’t be found in any of these elements, when taking them away, eventually the tree stops being a tree. The same is true for cars, companies, and purely mental phenomena like the self.

Concepts allow us to compress an overwhelming reality into something we can navigate. Without them, there would be no language, no civilization, no reminders list to ignore.

But zoom in far enough and every sharp border dissolves into relationships and processes.

Another Way of Seeing

I’ve been posting on Substack daily for a while. This note received a bunch of attention and sparked some interesting discussions in the comments:

One reader asked something very interesting: “If there are no absolute borders, why do I experience myself as a separate individual?”

Because that’s the type of experience evolution stabilized.

Seeing yourself as a distinct person, surrounded by other distinct objects, is an extraordinarily useful way to navigate the world. It helped our ancestors survive long enough to become our ancestors.

But usefulness isn’t the same as necessity.

Meditation has hinted at this for thousands of years. Psychedelics demonstrate it in a matter of hours. Without the outside world changing in the slightest, the world you inhabit can become almost unrecognizable. The sense of self can dissolve. Time can stretch or disappear. The boundary between “me” and “everything else” can soften into something much less obvious.

Nothing about the underlying reality changes, only the interpretation arising in consciousness.

I don’t know if these altered states reveal an ultimate truth, but they definitely reveal something important: our ordinary experience isn’t reality itself. It is one stable and useful interpretation of a reality that is richer than our minds usually allow us to see.

The Stories We Inhabit

If concepts allow us to navigate the world, they also determine which world we inhabit.

Take two people walking into the exact same room. One immediately notices the people who seem to dislike them. The other notices familiar faces and opportunities for conversation. The physical environment is identical, yet their world of experience couldn’t be more different.

The same is true inwardly.

“I don’t deserve this.” “Nobody understands me.” “I’m too old.”

These aren’t objective features of reality. They’re interpretations that have become so familiar they feel like facts.

This is why psychological flexibility matters so much.

Therapy rarely changes the world around us. More often, it changes the relationship we have with the stories through which we perceive that world. The moment we remember that a thought is something appearing within consciousness rather than an unquestionable description of reality, new freedom emerges.

Concepts are tools, and tools can be replaced when they no longer do the job.

Better Stories

At this point, it’s tempting to conclude that every interpretation is equally valid.

I don’t think that’s true.

Some interpretations make us more curious. Others make us more rigid. Some bring us closer to reality, others trap us in stereotypes, dogmas, and narratives that generate unnecessary suffering. In psychotherapy, that’s exactly what we’re trying to change: the stories through which reality is experienced, the frameworks guiding our thoughts, emotions, and actions.

I like Sam Harris’ argument that once conscious experience exists, there are objectively better and worse ways for it to unfold. A world of creativity, connection, and love is preferable to one of fear, hatred, and despair. We may never draw a perfect moral map, but that doesn’t mean all maps are equally good.

We can recognize the illusory nature of concepts without abandoning them. Instead, let’s remember they are tools and meet them with curiosity. Question them. Refine them. Let go of the ones that are no longer useful and strengthen the ones that move us towards the peaks of the moral landscape.

✒️ Quote of the Week: “Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.” -Henry David Thoreau

🎧 Song of the Week: El Beso Del Árbol, LŪKA - EDEN

📖 Article of the Week: Morality Never Escaped Nature

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?

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All the best,

Adrian / Urth

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