To “Go Deep” is to Go Through Your Noise

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We humans are a mesh of so many things. One of them is that we are an antenna that attracts ideas that float in our connection with reality. Ideas come to us, and we do not know where they come from. Our beliefs, our personal history, our present emotions – they all fine-tune our body as a receptor antenna of ideas; but ideas are not ours, we make them our own.

My professor Stuart Horn once said that “God was outside the physical realm, He was completely something Other, but everything was sustained in Him at every moment. At the same time, we are to be fulfilled by Him to become who we were meant to be from our beginning.” So, when we look for meaning, He is the ultimate meaning. We are open to the whole of reality through our body and consciousness; however, we can only take one drop at a time – down, drop a drop, from that immense ocean – we cannot hold more than a drop at a given time. Our life unfolds idea by idea, as each one drops in our ocean.

I need to build on an idea I discuss in another article, The Frame Problem. In it I disentangle the very intricate concept of “perception complexity”. We are confronted with such complexity while attempting to live, that we tend to simplify things and fall short on the wondrous quality of reality. That’s what I explored in The Frame Problem: how our mind’s need for clarity reduces what we actually perceive.

If you haven’t read the article, please do, it will be a wonderful introduction for the ideas I am drawing in this article.

The simple idea that can change everything upside-down

The reason why we don’t see reality as it is but as we are (Anaïs Nin) is that reality is infinite; every one thing or person or situation has innumerable amounts of information and dimensions to it. There are innumerable frames or layers that go profoundly inward, others extremely outwards; there is even an incalculable dimension to meaning and how there are collateral, opposed and reversed contexts to it – then there is: “there are billions of minds in our world understanding each one thing.”

But throughout all that multiplicity there is unity.
“Why is there something rather than nothing?”
— Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

So how is it that we humans have access to all this? How did it all begin?

In mammals, nature impels them to mate, group and have social interactions that help them increase their chances for survival. They are relationally interconnected and that makes the world of difference. I know there are instances when tragedy befalls them as happens to us humans; a hurricane hits, drought devastates the land, earthquakes take our ground’s certainty from under us… but more commonly than not, their world provides for them. They are equipped with everything they need to orient themselves and “be fruitful and multiply.” (Genesis 1:28)

For us humans, however, to follow our instinct is just not enough. In the course of evolution, we became capable of peeling the frames of reality and discover three fundamental things about us in relation to reality: I am vulnerable, the world is separate from me and I with it all; I recognized that the “who” I am now, tomorrow could not be, and time became a concept. The resolution for all these nuanced factors was the foundation of sacrifice; we learned that we needed sacrifice to strengthen who we were.

I am not totally sure if our sense to sacrifice towards the structure of reality came before or after our recognition that we needed to sacrifice to become more, develop skills and grow resilient; in other words, did we realize first we needed to sacrifice to change or we needed to sacrifice to reality for it to help us change?

All of it is a sophisticated way of saying our instinct was captured by identity; and then it became core to our survival, or we could say: where instinct once guided survival, identity now navigates meaning. Identity fundamentally judges, discriminates – uses the animal instinct to build around it what the Self senses it needs for security, certainty and solace – mostly because through the perception of identity we separated ourselves from all, and attempts to discern a path forward.

What separates us from everything?

The question is stubborn, Are we separated from everything? On the subatomic realm, there are no divisor-lines anywhere, atoms and subatomic particles interconnect without any border regulations or separation. Our identity and self-perception ensure that the “I” I call me is separate from the keyboard I write this article with; I can even say there is scientific evidence to corroborate this – it is plain and evident – you could say. However, am I only a body with emotions, a history and an identity? Why then can my actions cause social and relational shock-wave effects outside of me?

“Layers” is the answer – there are layers to peel-off out of every reality and it goes infinitely inward, outward and relationally – like waves on a pond that a stone has been dropped upon. Out of all agents in the universe – unicellular beings all the way up the ladder to mammals – humans are the most complex and multilayered beings ever existed.

We have a concept for multilayered dynamic systems that interact with integral unison and synergetic interchange of cycles, and are interdependent and balanced within all their parts: we call them ecosystems! We humans are an ecosystem within ourselves and at the same time we are interconnected with everything. That is why we developed our brains to handle consciousness. Notice I said “handled” not “have” consciousness. It is not ours; it flows through us. We model it with our beliefs, our decisions, our self-perception or identity, and the ideas we decide to accept as our own.

Interesting, it is like our brains’ intelligence was trained by the layers of reality’s ecosystem, in the same manner as we are doing deep-learning training to AI. Who trained our intelligence?

To make things more complex, all my layers seem to be interconnected and share with all other layers of other beings and – I am not really sure if I can include objects and situations – since I can sense and impact much more than just people or animals with my actions. Maybe the layers I think are mine, or what I call “me” are not mine, but I shared with the complex reality that I am a part of.

You can rightly think: What has this guy smoked?

You see for the longest time I’ve been trying to grasp who God is? How can I fit Him into reality – my reality? But he is not another category of reality, he is not another agent in our shared reality, that moves and acts with the rules of engagement of reality: time-space continium and forces of nature. He is Wholly Other… but my attempts to sift reality down to its most basic building blocks dismantled reality’s illusion – and rebuilt it through humble comprehension. Then I am naked from pretensions of what matters and what doesn’t, and I can be open to those ideas that can truly change me:

Knowing and loving God
is our greatest privilege;
and being known and loved
is God’s greatest pleasure.

You see, we understand reality and our place in it through stories. In fact to make sense of all the complexity of reality, we make ourselves protagonist of a never-ending story in our inner dialogue. In attempting to understand God, I needed to explain reality and myself in it – and something extraordinary happened – He changed my story. He transformed and uplifted my inner dialogue. The layers that revealed me showed who He is and how He has been at work in preparing me to live fully.

It’s like I was trying to build a puzzle without a reference picture, the puzzle of who I am. I was trying to draw my reference picture with the stories of my inner dialogue. The more I focus outside, either to understand Him or others, to learn about Him or others, the picture became clearer, and I began to feel settled in my bones.

He was the picture I was looking for… He wasn’t another part of the story. He was the storyteller, waiting for me to listen.