A Short Guide to Waking Up

“We do not see reality as it is. We are shaped with tricks, and hacks, that keep us alive.”
Donald Hoffman

“We are touchingly prone to mistaking our models of reality for reality itself.”
Maria Popova

“The world in our heads is not a precise replica of reality.”
Daniel Kahneman

“We are never seeing what’s “really there”. Instead, human experience is part phantom — the product of predictions.”
Andy Clark

Courtesy Warning

Certain knowledge, practices, and tools alter our mind’s grip on reality. For some, this is disturbing. An example is here, and more stories chronicled here. However, this often precedes the most transformative and meaningful experiences in one’s life. Examples of this here. Being fully informed of these possibilities is important.

Introduction

This doodle was created in 2015 after experiencing a flash of insight: MY reality or perception of the world is often radically impoverished inconsistent with others. And so is everyone else’s. This was the first sign of “waking up”, not merely to this fact, but an endless mystery.

David Chalmers Sharing Descartes’ Evil Demon

This phenomenon is the basis for Plato’s Cave Allegory, Descartes Evil Demon, Truman Show, The Matrix, Buddhism, most of spirituality, and innumerable metaphors and guidance spanning all human cultures and history. These analogs are not the point, they are merely helpful in establishing that “waking up” has been around for as long as we can see. The difference today is we have science to understand its basis.

9 years after this doodle, science corroborated my experience with “predictive processing”, or described below as “perception box” by neuroscientist Christof Koch. (one of many descriptions herein).

This guide is rooted in modern science and cognitive theory. Though at the same time, it raises questions about our existence that cannot be penetrated by science. While it has explanatory power, it yields to questions we can only wonder about together.

This requires no specific teachers, no unverifiable beliefs, no systems, no dogma, no financial commitments. It uses consensus research to reveal the misleading nature of our minds. This is not merely information, it’s a journey. Who are you, truly?

WHY Wake Up?

“These minds of ours – these outrageously powerful tools that creation has given us – I’m not sure we know how to use them wisely. They are all over the place… reaching for meaning, narratives, making stuff up, tearing things down – it’s a wild place.“
BJ Miller

Profound relief.

Consider this account from Jason, when he finally realized he was free. (full interview here)

Additional “waking up” stories are being collected, here.

Every human alive undeniably lives deep inside a brain which turns out to be a wild and confounding maze. Solving this maze is very hard. But most certainly possible.

The average person can discover and sustain an incredible way of being even despite the most apparently terrible things in the world. It comes from a place of understanding, and acknowledgement of an open mystery, one beyond the reach of science.

The first step is understanding a few key terms, which can be used to orient to not only this guide, but anything you might read, consider, or experience outside of it.

What IS Waking Up?
Key Terms.

Objective Reality – The world as it truly exists – which can never be directly known or experienced – we can only know our brain’s representation. The ineffable. The absolute.

Perception Box – Your brain’s limited representation of reality. This representation is a “guess” of what is most likely, based upon conditioning or past experiences, memories, beliefs, traumas, habits. Known scientifically as predictive processing. Also subject to subconscious manipulation and distortion.

Brain Constraint – The difference between your perceived perception box and objective reality.

Related: Your Reality Is Not ‘True’

With brain constraint established, we can understand what waking up means:

Default Reality – A limited way of experiencing life / self / consciousness – without awareness or understanding of brain constraint and subconscious manipulation. A person fully identifies with (or contracts around) contents of consciousness, feelings, impulses.

Meta Reality – An expanded way of experiencing life / self / consciousness – with some awareness and understanding of brain constraint and subconscious manipulation. A person identifies both with consciousness itself, in addition to its contents. Identification with contents – identity, feelings, and impulses, is relaxed. Behavior is influenced accordingly.

Waking Up – The lifelong process of discovering your brain constraint – moving from Default toward Meta Reality. In other words, an ongoing commitment to study one’s awareness, identity, motivations, and behavior. Most often facilitated with one or many “Pointers” – such as contemplation of philosophy, science, journaling, meditation, psychedelics, and spirituality. Characteristics might include collapse of identity, cessation of habits, intuitions of unity. Also known as, awakening, enlightenment, self-deconstruction, spirituality, nonduality, or “the moon”.

Finally, we have “pointers” – tools that facilitate waking up:

Pointer to Waking Up – A tool, teaching, medicine, book, app, or practice that facilitates meta reality, or “waking up”. “Pointer” is a reference to the Zen metaphor:

“A finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. The finger is needed to know where to look for the moon, but if you mistake the finger for the moon itself, you will never know the real moon. The teaching is like a raft that carries you to the other shore. The raft is needed, but the raft is not the other shore.”
– Thich Nhat Hanh

This guide is not a pointer – it is a pointer of pointers, and a modern context to make sense of them. It aims to eliminate confusing, predatory, and unnecessary pitfalls of this experience.

Related: Finding Your Own Way

The Science of Perception and Brain Constraint

References:
Bruce Hood, Neuroscientist – Self Illusion
Andy Clark, Cognitive Philosopher – The Experience Machine
Anil Seth, Neuroscientist – Hallucinating Reality
Kati Devaney, Neuroscientist
Christof Koch, Neuroscientist – (above clip)

Brain constraint is the ultimate paradox – the one that underwrites all human experience and suffering. How do we know what we’re NOT seeing? How do we know our unknown unknowns – feelings, perspectives, and possibilities.

Imagine you and a friend are playing a virtual reality game together. The goal is to collect gems. Your VR headset, for some reason, cannot see red gems, but can see blue ones. Your friend’s VR headset cannot see blue gems, but can see red ones. This is strange. You don’t even realize blue gems exist until your friend describes what they see, and vice versa.

This is very much like real life. Except the VR glasses are our own brains and minds, and the gems are emotions, feelings, intuitions, perceptions, and instincts – unique to us. Everyone has a similar-yet-different version of reality. It is impossible to know how your reality reconciles with everyone else unless you can take the time to study.

Consider the following quotes, spanning cognitive science, philosophy, and literature – each of which alludes to this phenomenon.

“Each of us believes himself to live directly within the world that surrounds him, to sense its objects and events precisely, and to live in real and current time. I assert that these are perceptual illusions … Each of us lives within the universe – the prison of his own brain.”
Vernon B. Mountcastle, 1975

“The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion. Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself… to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is.”
Iris Murdoch

“All you’ve got to go on is streams of electrical impulses which are only indirectly related to things in the world. Perception has to be a process of informed guesswork in which the brain combines these sensory signals with its prior expectations or beliefs about the way the world is to form its best guess of what caused those signals.”
Anil Seth

“The world in our heads is not a precise replica of reality; our expectations about the frequency of events are distorted by the prevalence and emotional intensity of the messages to which we are exposed.”
Daniel Kahneman

“We are never simply seeing what’s ‘really there,’ stripped bare of our own anticipations or insulated from our own past experiences. Instead, all human experience is part phantom — the product of deep-set predictions.”
Andy Clark

“We are touchingly prone to mistaking our models of reality for reality itself, mistaking the strength of our certainty for strength of evidence, thus moving through a dream of our own making that we call life.”
Maria Popova

“We do not see reality as it is. We are shaped with tricks, and hacks, that keep us alive. The theory of evolution presents us with the ultimate dare: Dare to recognize that perception is not about seeing truth, it’s about having kids.”
Donald Hoffman

“What should science of consciousness explain? Experiences of the world – sights, sounds and smells, the multisensory, panoramic, 3D, fully immersive inner movie. The conscious self – the experience of being you or being me. The lead character in this inner movie, and probably the aspect of consciousness we all cling to most tightly.”
Anil Seth

The truth is, there is more information “out there” in objective reality than our brains and minds can possibly process and reveal to us. Our brains subconsciously perform a miraculous trick of taking whatever small information they can – sights, smells, touches, sounds, memories, and extrapolating, or predicting, the rest, into the woven movie of our reality. A very complicated guess.

This is ingenious, but also impoverished and flawed. This is the sinister part. It’s impossible to know or see the flaws in our prediction because we are living inside of it.

Going through life with zero awareness of these constraints and flaws can be considered “Default Reality”.

Further Scientific Evidence of Default Reality’s Tricks

Brain constraint is only one facet of Default Reality’s subconscious illusions. Consider the following scientific evidence, of the brain manipulating our experience, in ways we cannot possibly see or control.

Confabulation
- Our brain can subconsciously lie. It can construct plausible-yet-sometimes-bogus stories to explain apparent circumstances. We cannot see this confabulation process or control it. We merely experience the story as a thought. This has been demonstrated most vividly in split-brain patients.
Brain Damage and Behavior
- Brain damage can drastically alter our identity and behavior. In a troubling suicide note, Whitman wrote about the impulsive violence and the turmoil he was experiencing prior to killing 14 people. His note also requested research about his behavior. An autopsy revealed a sizeable tumor in the region of his amygdala.
Visual Manipulation
- Our brain can subconsciously warp colors, based on what it estimates they are as opposed to what they actually are in objective reality.
Sugar Cravings
- Our brain will crave sugar long after eating food – not because of the pleasurable taste we experience and consciously want more of, rather, because neurons in the gut detect the presence of glucose (fast energy) – and urge us toward more.
Physical Pain Perception
- Our brain can subconsciously alter how painful something feels based upon what consciousness is focused on – even when the pain stimulus is constant.
Brain Constraint
- The brain grows more constrained as we age and gain experience. Children are better at solving certain abstract problems than adults, because their minds are more open and flexible.
Broad Scientific Evidence of Self Illusion
- Neuroscientist Bruce Hood explores this comprehensively in – The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity.

Each example reinforces apparent truth: everything we see, feel, think, and understand about self and world – is created and manipulated by the brain in ways that are completely hidden and unintuitive – and therefore – demands investigation.

“Waking Up” – How?

If Default Reality means living life where one is fully deceived by brain constraint and subconscious manipulation, Meta Reality is living where one attempts to discern and coexist with it. “Waking up” is the process of understanding and experiencing Meta Reality.

The phenomenon of Waking Up has been known for centuries. Only recently has science produced a strong basis to explain. This is definitely both good and bad. Good because there are practices and guidance that are centuries old. Bad because there is also baggage of erroneous, dogmatic, overly complicated, and sometimes magical ideas, which can be predatory and/or delusional.

The aim of this guide is to stick to only the most conservative, scientifically compatible, yet powerful resources available today.

These resources vary – they can be a practice, a concept, a metaphor, an allegory, or medicine. Each resource is a sort of Pointer, or “Finger Pointing at The Moon”. “The Moon” being waking up, and the “Finger” being something that attempts to reveal part of it.

“A finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. The finger is needed to know where to look for the moon, but if you mistake the finger for the moon itself, you will never know the real moon. The teaching is like a raft that carries you to the other shore. The raft is needed, but the raft is not the other shore.”
Thich Nhat Hanh

Pointers👉🌕
(Ways to Wake Up)

^{(return to: a short guide to waking up)}

Practical Advice

There is no one way. There is no right way.

In my experience:

It is possible to awaken to the misleading nature of your own reality. Not just intellectually, but felt. This can radically influence attitude toward life, in a way that brings peace and ease, even alongside seeming chaos.

It is impossible to say you’ve “done it” once and for all. It is impossible to compare exactly with other people. It simply starts feeling and making more and more sense over time. Look for small signs. Patience is by far the greatest virtue.

You can explore by yourself. Gurus and traditions are often a trap. The wisest teachers will help, while also insisting they aren’t needed. Nobody will be able to confirm you’ve done “it” or not. It unfolds mostly on its own. It happens subtly and vividly, over time. When in doubt, relax. Linger in stillness. Let no answer be the answer. All the while, carry water, chop wood.

How Waking Up Feels

The impact on people’s lives can be extraordinarily positive. I started an interview series specifically to explore this – Varieties of Waking Up.

Episodes are actively being recorded and published here.

Below is more characterization of what this feels like:

“Well – how did I get here?”
David Byrne

Waking up can feel as Vervaeke and David Byrne describe – suddenly taking stock of life and seeing it as an alien landscape – no longer able to fully relate to the winds that carried you here. After starting to notice one’s worldview implode, the following transient questions, observations, and urges may arise sporadically:

What now? (Nothing)
The world is screwed… (Yes, but also not)
Who can I talk to? (Nobody)
I am spiritually complete! (Shrug)
Am I spiritually complete? (Shrug)
Is everyone “waking up”? (Probably not)
Spirituality island (Don’t get stuck)
I must share this (This doesn’t work)
Ego thaw, not ego death (Let it unfold)
Indifference
Personal epiphanies -> Other’s epiphanies
Peace

Gradually the urgency of these things relaxes. “Chop wood, carry water”, as they say. Meaning, even in midst of inner upheaval, simply go about life moment by moment, that is really it. Returning to this frame repeatedly tends to make any extraneous worry and thoughts seem nonsensical, or at least less dire. Curiosities resolve on their own schedule.

A fresh perspective emerges, and endures, always evolving…

Finding Your Own Way

“Ramana Maharshi puts it simply: Teachings are like a stick used to stir a fire and keep it burning. Once the fire is raging and needs no tending, you can throw the stick into the flames and let it burn as well.”
Stephan Bodian

“When you have reached the opposite shore, you do not carry the raft on your back, but leave it behind.”
Alan Watts

“I can write no more. All that I have written seems like straw.”
Thomas Aquinas

“If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.”
Linji Yixuan

Imagine you are given a map of the wilderness. You study the map for weeks. With photographic memory – know every twist and turn and location of trails and streams and rocks and mountains.

But then, you actually go spend months in the wilderness. You know the sights, sounds, smells, and develop intimate awareness of the forest at different times of day and seasons – all constantly changing. The map was helpful to get you oriented, but your first hand experience is now most fundamental – there is no substitute.

Similarly, “pointers” help you orient to your mind. Many are based upon the experiences of other people. They might prescribe specific practices, values, concepts, tools, techniques, and rituals – to help you glimpse reality differently. Some work more or less for certain people, based up on their particular minds and experiences.

All pointers are merely the map, never the territory itself. The territory being objective reality, or the absolute, or the ineffable, which, can never be perfectly symbolized or known.

The ultimate connection to the truth is within. It does not need to be brokered or validated by any guru, teacher, book, or expert.

On the other hand, to the extent we can use collective sense-making tools such as science and psychology, to understand ourselves and relate to each other, we should. In this subtle way, science is distinct from pointers. Though again, science can’t answer life’s deepest questions. Nor can science prescribe values and ways to live.

In terms of values and behavior, we must rely upon intuition, reasoning, and cooperation, in conjunction with waking up.

Continued: [Let’s] Chop Wood, Carry Water

Comparison With Spirituality and Religion

Long before science and brain research, humans intuited and explored the essential mystery of who we are. We can admire the aim and insights of these traditions without explicitly adopting them nor shunning them. This agnostic convergence of essential ideas is known as the “Perennial Philosophy”. This “essence” is compatible and consistent with everything in this guide.

Work In Progress

This guide is a work in progress and will be enhanced continuously. This guide by far aligns with the majority of content and aspirations for anti-rebel.org. After all, to rebel is to push back against the world. This is the opposite. To zoom out – as far as possible from it – and reflect.

You can be notified of updates here.

Enjoy the Infinite Mystery

We can only know one thing for certain. We are conscious. We have no idea why, or how, or where consciousness comes from. Yet this is our essence. Every day is an opportunity wonder and explore.