Turn The Handle

I don’t want to spoil the ending, but I think you deserve to know. Our experience with reality, as it turns out, is rarely served straight up. It comes mixed with the room you’ve spent a lifetime furnishing with your experiences, fears, beliefs, and whatever other shit you picked up along the way to cut the burn so it’s easier to swallow.

Your brain has spent it’s lifetime building a room for you. It is your constructed self. It’s a good room. Theres nothing wrong with it per se. It’s not some dank basement with a toilet closet in the corner and guy named Pete asking if you’ve seen his cigarettes. Honestly, it’s pretty nice.

You’ve taken the time to decorate. There are family pictures and art hanging on the walls. A nice bookshelf filled with the classics along with your favorites. Vinyl is playing softly in the background occupying the silence. Coffee is brewing. Your chair is waiting on you to plop down. The fridge and pantry is fully stocked. And like every high quality space, you have a junk drawer filled with shit you refused to throw away because you know someday you’ll scour feverishly for a ketchup packet after the drive thru attendant forgot to drop it in your bag.

You’ve create a life in this room. Everything has it’s place. You know what will happen when you say certain things. And what happens when you don’t. There are no unknowns. Meticulously designed so you know what parts of the room are safe and which parts have removed all levels of comfort.

And along the way you came to understand, or were told, that the door to exit was locked.

Perhaps you tried it once when you were 10 and someone yelled at you about the dangers that awaited outside the walls. Myths were passed down for generations setting the stage for what occurs when someone crosses the threshold. Or you watched someone leave and and were told stories about what happened to them on the outside.

If you’re like many of us, you were told what was on the other side.

Danger. Failure. Rejection. Hell. Disappointment. Loneliness. Judgment. Being misunderstood. Losing your family. Losing your identity.

So, naturally, you lost the allure to twist the door handle. And over time the door stopped being a door at all. It just became a decorative piece of the wall.

I think this is where we live.

And before your brain starts to tell you that this may be one of those pieces of writing motivating you to smash your fucking ego and become enlightened in three weeks, pump the brakes.

This isn’t it.

I don’t even know I have a handle on what enlightenment even means. Hell, most days I’m fighting to decipher why I walked into my kitchen to grab something I can’t remember.

What I am incredibly curious about is far more ordinary and perplexing.

If you start asking the question “how much of what I call reality is reality?” things can get bizarre. Weirdness creeps in because your brain is not waiting on reality to happen. It is constantly scanning and predicting. All day. Every day. It has logged all the information it’s learned from your life and uses those experiences (and how you interpreted them) to make the best assumption about what will likely happen next. This process is incredibly useful when you’re trying to ward off a predator in 2031BC. It’s far less useful when you’re 45 years old and your nervous system is trying to decode an ambiguous email from your team leader as if a fucking tiger just walked into your office.

You know the feeling.

Sending a difficult text that generates no response for days. Your brain isn’t your wise advisor sending you the message, “Well this is interesting. We are waiting on sufficient data.”

Instead, what you receive is something more closely to, “What the hell is wrong?”

Then it starts mounting evidence. Assembling boxes on boxes to drop off at your office to sort through at a later date. The assumptive thoughts begin to create a whirlpool. The vortex pulling you closer to the central core.

“They’ve never waited this long to return a text.”

“I knew they wouldn’t take this well.”

“Of course they aren’t going to respond. They don’t respect me enough for an answer.”

“I’m screwed.”

You’ve started making funeral arrangements for your relationship but it’s still very much alive and well.

This is the machinery behind the scenes cranking output. It has kept people alive for centuries. But there is a problem. Eventually we are unable to recognize the distinction between a prediction and the thing being predicted. Because of this you experience the prediction as reality. Over your lifetime, these occurrences are the framing of the walls you live in.

Let me break it down like this.

You have an experience. Big, small, somewhere in between. You interpret said experience. This interpretation creates meaning. The meaning created gets woven into your identity. Your identity shapes your expectation. Expectation directs your attention. Attention will influence your actions. The action now creates a new result which is just another experience. Along this pattern, your interpretation creates a worldview, a perspective. You’re not simply experiencing the world for what it is. You are experiencing the world through everything that happened before.

This is the construction process of the room you find yourself living within. And as life has gone on, you have become very good at living inside it. So good, in fact, that you no longer notice that you’re in a room of your own design. You just call it me.

This is what fascinates me.

You would likely say, “That’s just who I am.” with certainty.

Really?

Is it?

Or is that something you learned to become?

Is your happiness you? What about your anger? Your ambition? The internal need to be needed? Is your definition of success you? How about your religion? Politics?

Or…

are those pieces of the construction you’ve been carrying around for so long that you stopped to notice their hand in building your walls? Have you considered who handed you the lumber? Who encouraged you or guided you to stay true to the plans?

And the bigger question.

Who’s plans did you use to build your room? Were they yours to begin with?

If you want me to answer for you, I can’t. I don’t know. I’m simply curious because I’ve asked myself these questions.

Honestly the thing that pisses me off about certainty is that it keeps us stuck and we love it.

You will find yourself accepting any explanation if it means you don’t have to sit under the discomfort of not knowing. You’ll thank someone for a mediocre, juvenile answer over an open question that potentially leads you to consider. You’ll accept a belief that leaves scars on your soul over the uncertainty that scares you. You’ll even find yourself defending an idea you inherited from someone you never met as though you personally fought alongside them in the trenches.

This is one piece that intrigues me about spirituality. Because you can build a conception of the Divine that fits neatly, perfectly inside your walls. You take this magnanimous, unknowable, potentially infinite thing (whatever it is) and reduce it to a manageable set of rules and dogma. Once you do this, things are set. You know what God wants. What God doesn’t want. Who’s in. Who’s out. What’s sacred. What’s dangerous. What counts and what doesn’t.

And when something threatens the walls of your room, your construction,

well… you exile it.

Because according to your model, that’s not God. It’s wrong. Heresy. Worldly. It’s not how we do things. That’s definitely not what the Bible says and therefore not what our tribe believes.

And just like that you’ve done your job to protect the structure. You have stood strong and protected the walls. You’ve probably even convinced yourself that you’re protecting God. Which is the bit I find darkly humorous. The idea that the infinite needs a bouncer to hold the rope. As if the Divine requires you stand at the door, with clipboard in hand, determining which people, beliefs, practices, and experiences are legitimate enough to allow through the door.

“Sorry consciousness. Sorry meditation. Nope. Not on the list. Looks like you’ll have to wait outside. We don’t have you down. We are at our capacity.”

Seriously. This is where we are at?

If there is something Divine. Something underneath all of this that connects our consciousness, meaning, existence, or whatever language you want to use for the thing we can’t quite put our arms around, why would you assume our little human conception of it contains the entire thing inside our walls?

Wouldn’t there be remnants outside the walls of our room?

Why wouldn’t there be both things we understand nor can explain?

This is where this can get a tad uncomfortable. Because if you’re actually willing to entertain the idea that more lies outside you’re room, you will have to become willing to be wrong. I’m not talking about being wrong in theory. I mean really wrong. Like you totally missed it - wrong. Wrong about the things you care about. The things you’ve built your identity around. How you’ve interpreted events in your life. The beliefs you grew up with. What you’ve sacrificed for. The things you told yourself with the utmost certainty were right.

Considering the willingness to be wrong is a different kind of uncertainty. It’s beyond intellectual. And your brain hates it. The walls aren’t there to only keep things out. They exist to keep you intact. This is something we often miss.

Your constructed self isn’t an evil dictator sitting behind your eyes plotting ways to keep you imprisoned. It is serving a purpose. To protect you. Over the course of your life it has learned what caused pain. Where you got approval. Times you were rejected and by whom. What made you feel valuable. It remembers the smell of the room, the song playing in the background, the temperature. It remembers it all and then builds a model. A very sophisticated model. And when the world out there threatens the walls of the room, the system alarm does it’s best Lost In Space impression screaming “Danger Will Robinson!”.

The funny thing is, it does this even if the thing outside isn’t necessarily dangerous. Because it decides what it can't explain as to be dangerous. Change. Uncertainty. Loss. A new friendship. And the most catastrophic danger to the system - What if I don’t know who I am anymore?

That’s real fear. Visceral.

You can survive losing an argument or having your opinion proven incorrect. Losing identity hits different. Because if you are no longer the person you thought you were, then who are you?

If you are not the successful one, the athlete, the strong one, the spiritual one, the peace maker, the leader, the one who keeps all their ducks in a row. Then who are you?

This is one of the reasons why I don’t think self awareness is as simple as we make it sound. It’s quite trendy to throw around the term self awareness like it’s a key part of your personality. I wonder if the people who say they’re self aware, are actual aware. Or are they just good at being able to describe themselves. Because there is a difference.

You can identify your patterns and yet still be under their thumb. This is the part scrubbed from the self awareness brochures. You can spend a lifetime fighting to understand yourself by tracing the wiring back through marriage to college to high school and back to childhood. Figuring out which wound produced which scar creating which defense mechanism, which relationship gifted you with your particular flavor of distrust. You will learn the vocabulary. Projection. Avoidance. Attachment styles. Hyper vigilance. Trauma. You may even be the person who is absolutely unbearable at dinner because of all the podcasts you’ve consumed.

Then, when the moment arrives and someone you love doesn’t call you back or a coworker looks at you the wrong way on the wrong day, there you are, standing tall deploying every fucking defense mechanism in your arsenal while simultaneously patting yourself on the back for being so damn self aware.

Ego is a spectacular piece of internal engineering. Provide it with enough information and it will utilize it against you. It will grab an insight and create camouflage. It can, and will, transform self awareness into just another performance, a second identity, one more thing you’re good at. I’ve known people so refined at explaining why they are the way they are that the explanation is actually where they’re hiding.

These days I’m not as interested in the idea of simply “knowing myself”. Knowing yourself is useful, but knowledge does not lead to transformation. You can have an in depth knowledge of how the machinery works but still allow it to drive the car. The work that is more difficult is catching yourself in real time.

The brain helps you hear the story before you’ve even finished putting it in writing. The fear arrives and you notice how quickly your mind will build an air tight case for why the fear isn’t fear but wisdom. You’ll be able to notice the sudden need for controlling an outcome that is yet to transpire. You deeply desire the version of reality you see to be true, and therefore you will stack a mountain of evidence to accommodate it. If you’re lucky there may be a moment where you don’t immediately believe any of it. You’re able to stop and listen to the familiar hypnotizing hum of the machinery.

That is the moment that interests me. When you slow down and just listen to the hum.

Not because this is your first step to enlightenment. It’s not. You’re still going to get pissed off at people who don’t know how to maneuver through four way stops. The inclination for people to like you will likely remain. Insecurities will not vanish. Resentments can still grow and fester. Your nervous system fluctuates and at times will continue to survive like a skittish animal.

The difference is, there now exists a pocket of space between the experience and the person experiencing it.

A few millimeters between a spark and gasoline.

This space is where choice is possible.

The walls of your room didn’t spontaneously disappear. You are able to see them again. It’s the act of seeing the thought without becoming the thought. You allow the emotion to exist without it immediately becoming your instruction manual. A belief can be recognized without mistaking twenty five years of familiarity for ownership. Just because the belief has been a good roommate doesn’t mean it owns the place. Those millimeters between you and the machine generating the hum is where you will discover your opportunity to decide what happens next.

This sweet spot is where the world becomes interesting again.

You will have questions that seem to continue to pop up when you thought you’d already tabled the issue. Experiences you won’t be able to describe with words and you’ll love the mystery of it. People will challenge, and at times, irritate you when they manage to expose a belief you didn’t realize you were living by. Moments of beauty that land like a feather but feels like a canon ball to the stomach forcing you to consider the circumstances. An idea sparked from a conversation with a person you once convinced yourself had nothing to teach you.

None of these things are answers. They’re a match struck in a pitch black room.

Sadly, we are remarkably skilled at pouring water on the matchbook.

You’ll explain things away. Minimize. Rationalize. Find flaws in the messenger so you can discount their voice making them an exception to the rule, the very reason the experience doesn’t quantify. The brain prefers a familiar prison to an unfamiliar open landscape. It is a survival skill passed down through generations.

So when something ends up being delivered that disrupts the feng shui, you have a decision to make. You can sit the package back outside on the front porch, close the door and return to the version of reality your room provides. Or you can cut the tape on the box and be curious about this mystery item, resisting the urge that it doesn’t fit unless you immediately decide what it means to keep it.

Being curious remiss of discernment is not wisdom. It is gullibility with better marketing.

Please don't fall into the trap of turning your ear to every asshole with a social media presence who claims to have decoded the secrets to consciousness. You also don’t need to toss everything in the garbage because someone challenged a belief you feel certain about. A building on fire is still a building on fire and the thought “I’m practicing being open” is an absurd reason to stay inside.

Discernment is crucial. You sharpen this ability through points of contact with reality. You can learn to recognize the difference between intuition and fear, curiosity and a compulsive need to chase something. Between an idea that is worthy of examination and an idea that is delivered with supreme confidence but is actually bullshit. You are not discerning when you decide nothing can be known.

Discernment is achievable when you become willing to examine what you think you know.

This practice requires a different type of humility. You will need to be able to hold a belief strongly enough that it means something to you while still being willing to look at it from different vantage points, tolerating the uncomfortable space where you don’t know what comes next. Most will rush to fill the void because uncertainty can feel like failure. It is not. Uncertainty is simply what happens when you are paying attention.

The phrase “I don’t know” is a remarkably honest, vulnerable place to reside.

This phrase holds power. It isn’t an abdication of thought. Nor is it weakness. It doesn’t mean you believe everything or you don’t have conviction. It just means you’ve lost the need to pretend the map and the territory are synonymous. You can stand there, observe, and keep investigating without having to conjure an answer to make yourself feel comfort.

This, to me, is where curiosity transforms into something more serious than a fascination with new information. Curiosity isn’t about an endless pursuit of devouring new ideas, collecting perspectives like trinkets, or finding your newest exotic framework to tell your friends about. It is simply your willingness to suspend the innate nature to be right just long enough to see what is there. In the space between.

In those spaces, judgment whispers, “I know what this is.”

But curiosity says, “Let me look again.”

There is, and should be, room for both. You don’t need to lose judgment. You need it to navigate the world. But curiosity is what keeps you from shrinking it.

The work is the difficult piece. The goal is not to tear down every wall you’ve spent your life building. Some walls serve a purpose. Some are bearing heavy loads. The work is to determine which ones you’re standing behind, why they were built in the first place, and whether they’re protecting you or simply keep you from going somewhere.

There is also the process of stepping toward the door without pretending as though you know what’s on the other side. You will carry things with you. Bring skepticism with you. Bring your experiences. The lessons paid in full, the scars, the failures, the things you got right and the things you were once certain about that turned out to be spectacularly wrong. Whatever you carry, you must go.

You may discover that the thing you were afraid of really was as bad as you assumed. But you could also discover something you never could have imagined from inside the walls. Something larger. Stranger. More complex. More alive. Something magnificent.

The purpose isn’t to find some way to guarantee which one you’ll find.

It is to become the kind of person who is willing to take the risk to find out.

The truth is, no prediction is reality. They’re just predictions. Masterful imaginations of the brain. Stories your mind has written about what might happen based upon everything it thinks it already knows. Sometimes they’re useful. Necessary even. But don’t forget they’re still just stories. You can analyze them. You can get to the root of it. Find the origin. You may discover that the one thing you were absolutely certain about was, in fact, bombastically wrong.

When this happens and the wall of certainties comes crashing down, but you don’t have to rebuild. There’s no need to gather bricks, tossing them in the wheel barrow so you can restart construction of an even more prodigious explanation for why you were right all along. You actually have the freedom to stand there for a moment and say, “Well that’s interesting how that all came crumbling down. I was wrong. What did I miss?”

If you can ask that question with the intention to listen, it holds the ability to keep you alive. When you do it, you are no longer standing your ground to defend the room you’ve constructed. You’re studying it.

As time passes you will likely find yourself standing on the cusp of a realization - the door you’ve spent years, decades for some, assuming was locked like a medieval castle gate has always been cracked open. Your hands may tremble reaching for the handle. Of course. Its natural. Think about it. You have spent the bulk of your existence being told what’s safe, what’s dangerous, what people like you do, what people don’t do, the type of person you are and the most pressing - what kind of person you must never be.

You stand there staring at the dust dancing in the sun beaming through with your hand on the handle. The questions whirling in your brain “Do I really know what’s on the other side if I pull this door open?”

The answer. You don’t know. You can’t. You haven’t step foot outside yet.

That’s the predicament.

Opening this door and taking a step into the unknown could cost you something. Maybe a relationship. You career. A belief you were handed during childhood. Even a version of yourself that has been collecting rent for the last 28 years. Or you discover the very things you’ve been chasing were not actually yours, you were gifted the chase by someone else. A person in your life handed you the blueprint to life and you never considered it was their design, not yours.

What I have discovered is the place I was warned about outside is strikingly beautiful and sublimely terrifying. The place I had been living that people declared to be the safest residence was causing something inside my soul to slowly decay. Smothering the breath of life so gradually I didn’t realize I was withering. I’ve learned what furniture is necessary and what needs to be set on the curb marked “free”. My conception of God that I was handed, and taught to follow, had very little to do with encountering and exploring the joyous mystery of it all. It was more related to a well organized description of what people were comfortable believing. There was no room for the Divine to outgrow language because that road never ran out. We always had a way to explain.

The other possibility you won't often hear about is the fact that you might discover nothing. You may spend years becoming more aware and arrive at no grand cosmic revelation. No secret door illuminates itself on the mountainside. No celestial choir serenading you from the heavens. You can become deeply self aware and become a more intelligent narcissist.

The ego does not stay inside the room when you cross the threshold outside. It tags along for the journey and the first chance it gets, it builds a boutique hotel for you. It’s the act of being spiritually self obsessed. You have gained the terminology. You record and post your morning ritual. Hell you even launched a podcast about it. You now have an opinion you don’t hesitate to share regarding everyones nervous system and spiritual health.

This is why I don’t believe our goal should be to leave the self. The self is useful. You need it. You need to know your preferences. Values. Boundaries. Personality. You need enough identity to make it through a shitty Tuesday.

I want to know myself well enough to restructure the architecture I’m living inside. Not just adorn the cozy nooks with better decor. I want to know what built that wall. What that wall originally protected me from. What it cost me. What it continues to give me and what it silently prevents me from observing. The machine is what I’m interested in recognizing while it’s currently running rather than waiting until its off and I’m slumped over in the aftermath searching for ways to explain why it all happened the way it did. More than anything I try really fucking hard to catch it in real time so that I may question it.

I don’t want to smash it into a thousand pieces and destroy it.

I simply want to question it.

For a while now I’ve had this visual of an old cup of coffee. It was once excellent coffee. It carried me through some difficult mornings. But at some point I had been sipping on the same damn cup for so long I didn’t realize the cup was filled with yesterday and wonder why nothing new gets poured.

So

I poured it out.

I looked at what I’d been carrying. Keep what deserved a place. And let the rest go.

Then I moved. I walked.

Not toward the allure of certainty. I walked away from the need for it.

I stepped across the threshold into the vast unknown outside the walls I built and followed the breadcrumbs, resisting the urge to assume where they led. I want just enough skepticism to filter through the bullshit and enough humility to recognize that the things I don’t understand aren’t automatically false.

It could all be nonsense.

It could be beautiful.

It might be dangerous.

Or perhaps

its something I don’t yet have language to explain

Regardless. I’ll look. Listen. Observe. Question. Pay attention. And if what I discover asks me to change my perspective, I want to hold the capacity to change without feeling like a piece of me died. This more than certainty, feels like freedom.

The moment I was able to entertain questioning my belief system, especially when it came to spirituality and the Divine, I had to become particularly careful. Because the moment God, mystery, consciousness, or whatever it is that lies beyond my little fence I could explain, is brought into the equation the ego has a tendency to get excited about building another barrier.

We all love barriers. What usually happens is five minutes after the barrier is up, we are hanging a sign. Declaring who comes in, what counts, and what type of people are definitely doing it all wrong and therefore can not enter the premises.

That way of living with barriers no longer peaks my interest.

I’m more interested in the possibility that whatever the Divine is, my understanding of it is incomplete. I have to keep in mind that I am a human being attempting to comprehend something that exceeds the instrument doing the understanding. I love the way comedian Pete Holmes talked about it. He said, “We are like characters in a book looking for evidence of the author inside the book. But the author isn’t in the book. It’s like Harry Potter looking for J.K. Rowling at Hogwarts.” He goes on to say, “And the greatest evidence of an author isn’t in the book. The greatest evidence of the author is the book.”

We’ve built these walls that once served a purpose. Some still do. We can spend a lifetime searching for God inside the walls but find the fullness of the Divine you will not.

The Divine is not a problem to solve. I don’t think it lives comfortably inside the walls at all. You have likely spent excessive amounts of time protecting a minuscule, coherent version of something that was never meant to be understood. You’ve domesticated mystery, robbing it of its teeth. Given it a set of rules and dogma, built a room around it and congratulated each other for having found God.

But there are things outside the room.

Ideas.

Beliefs.

Questions.

Experiences.

People.

Suffering.

Joy.

Heartache.

Celebration.

Things you were taught to disregard.

Things you were told were impossible.

Things your vision can yet see.

Following the breadcrumbs won’t guarantee answers. But they will lead you farther from the certainty of the answer to which you once clung. Perhaps thats enough. When you find yourself standing at the open door, staring into the wonder, you don’t need to know what awaits anymore.

I’ve discovered I don’t need a guarantee that stepping outside will lead to happiness, wisdom, wealth, deeper spirituality or any other bullshit I have a tendency to attach to personal growth. I simply need to know that the door is there. That it exist. That I can leave at any time. Opening my eyes to see I’ve been standing at the door in my darkest times with my hand on the handle. And despite all I’ve been taught and told, it is unlocked.

So I turn the handle.

And I walk outside.