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What if I told you that you’re not seeing the world clearly?

Not metaphorically. Literally.

Right now, you’re not seeing these words. You’re seeing your mind's prediction of them.

That’s not poetic mysticism. It’s neuroscience.

See, your brain isn’t a camera. It doesn’t record objective reality.

It filters it. Edits it. Reconstructs it.

Billions of sensory signals flood your system every second. As this data moves through the various regions of the brain, less and less gets passed on.

Your mind selects, filters, and compresses that flood of experience—through the lens of memory, expectation, and belief—into a narrow stream of meaning.

What remains? About 50 bits of information.

And that tiny stream?

That’s what you call reality.

But it’s not reality.

It’s a map. A model. A mental rendering stitched together by memory, emotion, bias, and belief.

You don’t see what’s true. You see what your mind lets you see.

Imagine this: you’re in a dark room, and five friends come in. 

Each describes a different part of the outside. 

From their limited descriptions, you start to imagine what it might be like.

Then you layer that with your own memories, beliefs, and expectations.

You wouldn’t be seeing the outside—you’d be building your version of what you imagine it’s like out there, right?

Well, that’s exactly what it’s like for your brain—tucked safely in the dark, protective casing of your skull.

It takes fragments from your five senses and assembles a composite—an internal rendering of the outside world and that’s what you're looking at.

Take a moment…  become aware, your brain right now is rendering a composite experience. 

Ok, we know matter is made of vibrating atoms.

And the speed of those vibrations shapes how solid something feels.

When you pick up your coffee cup, you’re not feeling the cup directly. You’re feeling your brain’s interpretation of pressure sensors.

You complete the experience of ‘coffee cup’ with the rest of your senses, like your eyes, which pick up the photons bouncing off it—reflections of light that your brain turns into shape, color, and form.

And voila.

Just like that, the experience of ‘coffee cup’ comes alive.

Ok this might be interesting, but why does this ‘matter’? Pun intended.

Well, if your brain is rendering its version of what we call physical reality, imagine how it's fabricating what we call ‘us’?

Which is a non physical entity.

Even modern psychology agrees personality doesn’t exist.

They say it comes into existence in reaction to a stimulation—it could be: you seeing something, someone saying something or even you thinking something.

But what is it that comes into existence?

Your default opinion to the stimuli! (your projected bias)

That’s why two people can witness the same moment and walk away with entirely different stories.

It’s why you might hear someone’s words and react with pain, while someone else hears the same words and feels nothing.

This isn’t a flaw; it’s just how we’re wired.

But if you don’t know that the mind is a filter (not a truth generator) you’ll keep mistaking your interpretations for facts.

You might think someone’s glance means judgment.

You’ll hear “I’m busy” as “I don’t care.”

You’ll assume failure means you are a failure.

And then we act from those assumptions.

Withdraw.

Lash out.

Abandon our own intuition to chase someone else’s validation.

Not because it’s true.

But because your mind made it ‘feel’ true.

You’ve ‘identified’ yourself with the filter—collapsed the awareness and the filter into one.

Stop for a second.

This is always happening. Take that in. The experience of your life comes from this interpretation of the world.

And we just let it.

Imagine this: what you call ‘you’ is mostly an identity shaped by conditioning in the first 25 years of your life.

And it lies there dormant… until something appears for it to react to. Then it wakes up, ready to defend its position.

Next time you're in a conversation, watch this in real time.

As your friend speaks, notice—you're not fully listening. Your mind is already rummaging for its angle, shuffling through stored opinions to defend its position.

It's asking “is this something I already agree with?”

“If not, here’s why…”

And the next thing out of your mouth is usually just an old opinion you dug up to validate a rigid position.

A built-in reflex—less about listening, more about reinforcing.

So what do we do with this?

We stop trusting every thought.

We stop giving so much power to our mental commentary, and start developing a relationship with the part of us that is consistent no matter the nature of the dream.

The part that sees the thoughts.

The part that’s aware. The observer. The part of us that doesn’t change, even as everything else does.

Once this clicks, and you begin to develop a third-person perspective.

You can hold that awareness even in the middle of a conversation.

You begin to see it in real time.

The mechanism resurrecting, running its conditioned response… and yet you remain.

Unmoved. Steadfast.

No longer pulled into the performance.

From that elevated perspective, you’re no longer tethered to the past.

You can respond, not react—free from its grip, and contribute in the way the moment actually calls for.

This is how you break free from the prison of inherited belief.

If you want to live with more freedom, you have to be willing to let go of the cage we grip to for safety.

But first—you have to realize it’s a cage.

The thoughts you defend.

The identity you protect.

The rules you live by without ever questioning. None of it is who you are.

So which part is actually you?

The part that steps back, watching everything from a distance. 

That part is constant. 

That part doesn’t panic.

That part isn’t trying to prove anything. It simply is.

And when you live from that place, things soften.

You don’t take things personally—because there’s no central persona left to defend.

You remember that just because your mind says something, doesn’t mean it’s true.

Have you ever done this?

*Sent a message… hours pass—no reply.*

You don’t really know what happened, but the mind jumps in: Are they upset with me? Did I do something wrong?

Pause.

What if none of that’s true? You’re not reacting to them at all—but to a story your mind made up, stitched together from old fears and past wounds?

If you're going to make up a story, why not make it a kind one?

You can take a breath.

Feel your feet on the ground.

Return to presence.

That’s where clarity lives.

Not in the mind, but in the space beneath it.

Until next time,

Paul Vincent

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