Waking Up In The Matrix

Please note: This may contain explicit language. What is reality? What is the matrix? What's the difference? This episode explores the true nature of what we call reality and the difference between subject, object, dualism, and oneness. It invites us to the deeply open and playful state of questioning what we think we know in order to free ourselves from the tight grip of perceptions, history, and personhood.

Transcript

Wake the Fuck Up,

The podcast that mingles mindfulness,

Buddhism,

Brain science,

Evolutionary biology,

And real authentic human experience.

Welcome to Wake the Fuck Up.

Hello,

Hello,

All you amazing humans floating out there in the ether,

And welcome to this episode of Wake the Fuck Up.

I'm your host,

Tiffany Andrés-Myers,

And today's episode is all about reality.

And I love that ingrained inside this word is the word real.

What is real?

What is reality?

Every single moment we are operating based on the ingrained assumption that what we are perceiving is reality,

Right?

So this episode is all about flipping that assumption on its ass and coming to understand that what we really see,

Feel,

Hear,

Smell,

Taste,

And think about reality is probably not reality at all.

Maybe I'll title this episode The Matrix because I think that movie is profound for a number of reasons,

But one of the biggest things that I realized later as an adult,

I'm aging myself here,

But this movie came out when I was a little bit younger,

And as I got older and started working with mindfulness and meditation,

Like the freakiness of thinking,

Hey,

We could actually be living in the matrix,

And then the recognition,

Oh shit,

Like whether we're sitting in gel pods,

You know,

Being run by machines or not,

Essentially we are living in the fucking matrix because what's happening is that our brain becomes the machine that is creating this picture of reality.

Every single moment of every single day we are in taking information and turning that information into what we call our real world.

What I hope to do in this episode of exploration and curiosity and a bit of playfulness together is unravel the difference between what's real and what we interpret as reality and maybe grant you and even a reminder to myself a little bit of empowerment in knowing that perhaps every moment is more like a blank canvas,

That we have the ability to paint through intention,

Through perception,

Through curiosity and being willing to change our mind,

That instead of showing up to each moment with like,

Let's call it a pre-painted canvas,

We really can show up with something that's totally open to being created in the way in which we desire.

So maybe I'll start here with a little bit of a fun example that I think speaks to exactly what I mean about this idea of reality versus,

You know,

Some matrix style creation in which we're,

I believe,

Actually living.

And the example that I want to use is psychedelics.

But here's what I want to offer about psychedelics.

If you think about the way someone on acid or LSD or mushrooms is going to interpret the environment around them versus somebody that's not on psychedelics,

They're wildly different,

Right?

If you put a tripping person and a sober person in the same environment,

The experience that they are going to have is going to be radically different,

Right?

And the interesting part of this thought experiment,

If you will,

Is that both of these individuals are experiencing the exact same stimuli,

Right?

The stimulus coming from the environment itself is the exact same.

And yet what we experience through,

You know,

The experience of a psychedelic or not being on a psychedelic is only different based on the brain's interpretations of those stimuli.

So which one is reality,

Right?

Why would the brain's interpretation off psychedelics be any more real than the brain's interpretation on psychedelics?

And for the most part,

I think the reason we decide what reality is is that it's a shared experience.

We can agree upon in a certain way what's real,

Right?

But maybe that means that if you put a group of 10 people on psychedelics in a room and one person who's not,

Then what's reality?

Because the agreed upon and shared reality is probably going to be more similar for the people who are tripping than the person who is not.

And so I offer this thought experiment just as an invitation to really begin to get curious about what it is that we call reality.

What is real?

What is the experience that we're having and how can we tease apart and differentiate our experience of reality from reality itself?

And embedded in that little bit of separation,

That one eighth of an inch between us,

Our perception and awareness of what's happening and even the separation between the awareness of what's happening and the input that's coming in to create that experience in that space is that sense of empowerment.

Because there is really where we have the capacity to start getting curious,

To start getting playful and to start reimagining how we are and how we engage with every single moment.

So another example of this is that anyone and everyone who's listening to this episode is going to hear the same words,

The same tone of voice.

They're getting the exact same stimulus from listening,

Right?

But every single one of you is going to hear completely different things and get and garner completely different experiences out of listening.

Why is that?

Why is it that we can put 50 people in a room,

All of them engaged in the same presentation and each person is going to walk out with different things that struck them as meaningful,

They will have heard completely different things.

I mean,

This is what drives those conversations in therapy where the therapist says,

I hear you saying,

And I often find in those situations my response is like,

No,

That's not what I said at all.

So what's really happening here?

Let's dig in just a little bit.

And I want to start with some fun information that I heard a couple of years ago.

And I want to be really open here that since I first heard this gathering of information,

There have been different numbers and different versions of this that have come out within the scientific community.

And so I want you to use the numbers I'm going to express kind of lightly,

But you can use them in general to paint a picture,

Right?

So it doesn't matter if it's 3 million or 2 million or 4 million,

And it doesn't matter if it's 200,

000 or 50,

000 or 400,

000,

That'll make sense in just a moment,

You'll get the general gist and I'm going to use the numbers that I first became familiar with.

So here's what I want to offer.

At any given moment,

There are around 3 million bits of information in the external and your internal environment that could be informing our picture of reality,

Right?

Through our sense organs,

Through sight,

Smell,

Sound,

Taste,

Feeling,

Touch,

Right?

All of these senses are perceiving bits of information both outside of your body and inside of your body every single moment.

And so the,

You know,

Again,

Kind of an arbitrary number,

But the first number I heard to describe this experience of reality is there are about 3 million bits of information in any given moment that we could use to paint our canvas of reality.

Now here's the cool part.

I'm going to let you kind of guess and I alluded to it a second ago,

How many bits do you think we're actually using?

If there are 3 million available,

How many do you think we use at any given moment?

Well,

The number that I'm going to give you is about 200,

000.

And again,

This is just the number that I heard when I was first reading about this information.

200,

000 bits out of 3 million.

Now 200,

000 is huge.

I've actually heard some reference closer to 20 or 50,

000,

Which would be an even smaller percentage.

But let's say these numbers are averagely correct,

All right?

200,

000 out of 3 million bits is only about 7% of the available information.

So moment by moment,

We are determining our experience of reality,

Whether we're happy or sad,

Content or discontent,

Whether we're in joy or boredom,

Based on 7% of available information.

Where does that other 93% go?

What I'll argue here,

And this comes from my experience as an evolutionary biologist and a little bit of knowledge around neuroscience,

Is that our human brains are attuned to unconsciously filter.

And of course,

We absolutely need this capacity of our brain.

Can you guys imagine just for a second what it would feel like if we're only using 200,

000 bits,

7% of the available information?

Can you imagine how tired you would be after you wake up in like five minutes if you had to process all 3 million bits of information moment by moment?

We'd be fucking wasted literally like a minute and a half after we opened our eyes.

So this capacity to filter out unconsciously the things essentially that are irrelevant means that we can move through our days moment by moment and not be completely overwhelmed.

But how do we decide,

Or more likely,

How does the brain decide what 2.

8 million bits of information get tossed out the window and what 200,

000 we actually use to paint our picture,

Our canvas of reality?

And here's where evolutionary biology comes in.

Essentially all your brain cares about is you surviving and making it to tomorrow,

And it cares about everything that's relevant to this story of you.

So I wanted to do this episode after we talked about selfhood,

Which we did in the last episode,

So that we have this playful idea already of what it means to be a self,

An I,

Or a me,

Versus just a person who is,

Who is alive in every single moment.

But your brain is self-referential,

Right?

So everybody that's listening to this podcast,

The things that you are going to take away are the things that are meaningful to your historical,

Me-relevant story of you,

As well as everything that might or might not be related to your experience of survival,

Right?

Making it till tomorrow.

So moment by moment,

When we have these 2.

8 million bits of information that are getting filtered out,

We're basically filtering out everything that's irrelevant to those two things.

Anything that is not powerfully positive or powerfully negative,

So it falls mostly in that neutral category,

Gets thrown out the window.

Everything the mind can conceptualize,

So like,

As we're driving down the road,

There might be buildings and cars and trees,

But we don't really need to look at every single one of those.

Our brain instead just goes car,

Car,

Car,

Tree,

Tree,

Tree,

Building,

Building,

Building,

And essentially,

We're in the fucking matrix.

We are just driving through a street that's populated with conceptual cars,

Conceptual buildings,

And conceptual trees,

And we're not actually seeing the shit that's right in front of us.

It's insane.

I challenge you all.

The next time you're walking down the street,

The next time you walk out of your front door,

If you have a tree in your front yard,

Look at the tree.

When was the last time that you actually looked at the way the branches arched and moved away from each other?

If your tree has leaves,

What do those leaves look like?

What does your grass look like?

Is it a uniform system of grass,

Or are there different species growing amongst one another?

As I ask this question,

Do you know the answer?

Right?

And so I say this to say,

This is one way in which we filter out from those three million bits to 200,

000 bits is,

Is this powerfully positive,

Powerfully negative?

Does it relate to my survival?

If it's neutral,

We're just going to create a concept of it,

Right?

And this is how we filter our experience.

All right?

Now here's the power in this,

Is that as we start to recognize that we're constantly filtering,

We gain the power to bring our attention to those 2.

8 million bits that are getting ignored.

Not all of them in every moment,

But we can become aware that what's currently on our wheel of awareness could be much more vast or much more playful than what comes in naturally.

So I want to translate this idea of moving from three million bits to 200,

000 bits moment by moment and offer this idea of the filters of perception.

Alright?

And so I like to imagine this kind of like every single one of us human beings is walking around with like these filter goggles.

Alright?

And some of us walk around with maybe the people I would say based on this podcast called Wake the Fuck Up,

You know,

Maybe there are some people walking around and their goggles are pretty clear,

Right?

They're seeing kind of a full picture of reality.

They're woke,

If you will.

And then there's some people walking around and everything's in sepia tone or that filter on Snapchat that makes everybody look really beautiful like takes out all your blemishes and you know your skin is super smooth and there's a subtle glow to everything.

I imagine there are some people that are walking around with those goggles.

It's almost like no matter what's in front of them there's a sense of love and connection and appreciation,

Right?

And then there are some people that walk around with that grunge filter where everything's a little bit dark and the edges are kind of burnt and you know it just it looks completely different for every single one of us.

And I think it's a paradigm shift to be willing to let go of the idea that what we're seeing,

Hearing,

Perceiving is really a mini snapshot that we take of a whole that we're never gonna really see and not just see but fully experience.

Like if we can believe,

Trust,

Play,

You know I invited us in the second episode like please don't trust anything I tell you.

Take these words out into your life,

Into your world,

Wear them,

Try them on,

Have the experiences and come to your own sense of what's true,

Right?

And I hope that truth is what benefits your life experience,

What drives you to be the kind of human being that you want and to have the kind of life that you want,

Right?

So if we can paradigm shift or at least play with the paradigm shift that reality quote unquote is bullshit and that we're creating our reality every single moment based on the goggles that we choose to put on moment by moment,

Right?

Let's say we arrive to a moment and we're wearing our grunge goggles,

We can pause in that moment and go I'm ignoring 2.

8 million bits of information,

What the fuck else is here?

Pause,

Feel your feet on the ground,

Feel your breath in your body,

Notice the colors that you're surrounded by,

Feel the textures that are adjacent and accessible to you,

What is the smells and the tastes,

What's alive in your body?

Wake up to the fullness of that moment and that doesn't mean try to take in all 2.

8 million bits that have been ignored but it means if I'm only looking at 200,

000 and this moment feels shitty,

What does it look like to open up to those other 2.

8 million bits and how does it feel when I arrive to that reality instead of the one that came naturally?

And this is a piece that I would love to encourage as well.

What comes naturally to us is not defining of who we are.

It isn't who we are or any more than what reality is to just arrive in a particular way.

This is the power of mindfulness is that how we arrive in one second doesn't have to be the end of the way we show up to that moment.

So I would love to invite you as we play with this idea of reality,

Of breaking our conceptualization of what's real moment by moment to investigate your own filters.

What are your filters of perception,

Your filters of reality?

Not just moment by moment but like do you wear a particular set of goggles most of the time?

What might it look like to grab the goggles off somebody else's face and wear theirs for a while?

Like how playful and fun could it be to just turn to a friend in any given moment and go what's reality like for you in this moment?

I think that we'll find should we ask those questions of each other our realities look way different than we expect.

We might agree on the concepts that we've been hardwired to,

Colors,

Shapes,

Patterns,

Word labels for particular things.

But without pointing to those things for each other our pictures,

Our canvas,

Our image of reality often look so different than the person next to us.

So this episode is an invitation to break your own concepts of reality to step out of the paradigm that what I think and feel,

What I see and hear,

How I'm interpreting this moment is right,

Is correct,

And is better than what somebody else thinks,

Feels,

Hears,

Interprets.

Like what might it be like to be willing to be curious about another person's reality and opening our hearts and our minds to the possibility that some other version of reality is just as valid as the one that comes naturally to us?

How free can we become if we're willing to accept that in any given moment that's tough or difficult I might be able to reinterpret it in a way that doesn't hurt so much?

Thank you all so,

So much for listening to this episode.

I think this is a really playful one and one I love to remind myself of in the times that I feel stuck or tight or when life feels monotonous.

If you have any curiosities or thoughts,

I would love to hear them.

Thank you all so much for being here,

For listening,

And I look forward to sharing the next episode with you soon.

Peace.

Reviews

Good stuff to think about. I walk through this reality on autopilot a lot of the time.

Thank you 🙏