I enjoyed this because it points toward a shift in perspective that I think is becoming increasingly important. We often imagine consciousness as something produced by the brain, but there is another possibility: that the brain participates in or shapes a reality that is already fundamentally experiential. Whether one ultimately agrees or not, exploring these alternative models opens valuable questions about the relationship between mind, matter, and experience. Sometimes progress begins not by collecting more data, but by becoming willing to reconsider the assumptions we started with.
Thank you, Jade. I always appreciate the way your writing invites people to question assumptions rather than simply replace one certainty with another. Those conversations are where some of the most interesting discoveries begin.
You might be interested in the work of Mario Crocco and Mariela Szirko. Different but related. Search for "On Minds' localisation' and 'Effects of Relativistic Motion on the Brain and its physiological bearing.' There is no hard problem. We encounter psyches as fundamental features of nature. Individual psyches....
I come at this whole thing differently as a Shamanic practitioner although I use the scientific notions to explore the mysteries sometimes. Also, I suffer from chronic sensation discomfort in my head that hasn’t been explained by medical science. All they have is hypothesis.
So, I ran my own little experiment on Quale and Qualia and got some sensory relief. The fact that it didn’t clear everything up says there is more to it. Maybe a lot more. Don’t know. I got a hit is my point that something is going on in that direction which no one will or should accept except me. My playground is the same one, AND I don’t have anything to prove. My interest is in what works.
Also, I will throw this out fwiw. It connects at a couple different points in your article.
In pre-Christian Celtic mythology, the "Oran Mor" is the melody that holds the universe together. According to legend, the world was sang into being. Those with spiritually attuned minds are said to still hear this harmony flowing through the natural world today.
That’s is just as elegant as the physics, as well as artistic, and wholistic.
Interesting article, and who knows maybe more helpful down the road.
No, I have not really felt compelled to do it as it is outside mainstream and that kind of experience can attract the wrong kind of person. Shamanism, especially these days, can be a bit of a target.
I gently floated a few things here as the ground seemed somewhat safe, stable, and honest.
Also, a good shaman and a shamanic practitioner understands things are more mystery than known and that it is real important to vet things from multiple angles over time if possible to validate things.
Shamans are the teachers and being one takes a special kind of person that I am not. You can get targeted, attacked, or even killed which is why I remain a practitioner.
My intent was to let you know that your inquiries have some validity and may be helpful.
An interesting perspective, Ben. I am referring of your fear of your own beliefs. I would love to take a look at your birth chart in order to see where this originates. Of course, talking about birth charts is like talking about Shamanism; welcome by many and ridiculed by just as many.
Your comments stood out to me as I come from a similar place, but at this point no longer care what others think. I assume I share a lot of the same, or similar beliefs, as you, but am also very interested in the topics that Dr Jade Teta writes about. All equally valid in my little world.
I think there is something worth exploring - if there is a fundamental field, and everything outside of it is an aspect of the field itself, then that suggests the hard problem isn't how we experience specific quale.
The answer to that question becomes we don't have qualia, we have one quale which expresses itself in different forms.
The hard problem would then become what causes that interchange between quale and qualia?
In my mind the interchange is a transformer. It transforms information from the fundamental field into a finite format, likely using geometry for a base.
That foundation is then strained by the mind to create forms, those forms reduce the fundamental field into specific physical properties which can be contrast against one another. This contrast produces the illusion of qualia from a single quale.
"Although I feel, and I could be a bumbling idiot that the idea quantum states cant occur in biology has already been proven. I have an article on that you cant read separately."
I'm hoping you meant to write that this article CAN be read separately...?
As a scientist and engineer, I love how you're grounding everything in a scientific and mathematical basis. We need that. Just because it's not proven yet doesn't mean that it won't be.
You might get a kick out of this segment from the introduction of a vintage copy of Elementary Lessons in Electricity and Magnetism by Silvanus Thompson, written in 1894 to describe the advances since the book's first edition in 1881. All of this seems carved in stone now, but there was a time when even the leading minds were skeptical of electromagnetism. Doesn't the tone of this sound remarkably like your own in the article above?
"The ideas of Faraday, as enlarged and developed by Clerk Maxwell, were in 1881 only beginning to be understood and appreciated outside a narrow circle. In 1894, thanks largely to the labours of Heaviside, Hertz, Lodge, Poynting, Fitzgerald, Boltzmann, Poincaré, and others, they are everywhere accepted.
"In 1881 Maxwell's electromagnetic theory of light - a conception not less far-reaching than the theory of the conservation of energy - was deemed of doubtful probability; it was not yet accepted by such great masters as Lord Kelvin or Von Helmholtz. Though adopted by the younger generation of British physicists, it needed the experimental researches of Hertz and of Lodge upon the propagation of electric waves to demonstrate its truth to their brethren in Germany, France, and America.
"Even now, after the most convincing experimental verifications of Maxwell's splendid generalization that light-waves are really electrical waves, many of the logical consequences of Maxwell's teaching are still ignored or misunderstood.
"It is still, to many, a hard saying that in an electric circuit the conducting wire though it guides does not carry the energy: that the energy-paths lie outside in the surrounding medium, not inside the so-called conductor..."
Even then they weren't entirely right, but science feels its way along, with experimental verification a necessity.
But to go in a different, NON-scientific direction, I think it's worth considering that what you're suggesting has been intuited and expressed by mystics and explored through many disparate world religions - the Great Spirit of indigenous traditions, the Ground of Being in Buddhist thought, etc. - too often reduced, literalized and personified as a god figure, but it's significant that humans (when they're not trained to disregard it) seem to have a deep, intuitive sense of a universal consciousness.
This resonates with a deeper architectural rule I’ve been mapping: consciousness doesn’t appear out of nowhere — it emerges when a pattern stabilizes itself against the pressures acting on it. In that sense, the brain isn’t generating experience so much as shaping the boundary through which experience becomes coherent.
As I’ve written elsewhere, identity is the coherence pattern that stabilizes itself against the field’s pressures, preserving its form as it navigates potential disruptions.
Your tuning, resonance, and criticality capture the same logic at a different scale: a system becomes conscious when its internal pattern holds together long enough for the field to express itself through it.
I am not a surfer, but I was thinking about surfing last night (hadn’t read this post yet). The particular thing I was trying to imagine is what it must feel like to “ride the barrel”. It’s often described as standing still while a tube of glass rolls slowly around you, or even appears to be static… and oddly, there is supposedly very little audible sound.
To me, that seemed like it could be the closest physical analog to what I’ve been calling a Moment: a temporary perfect alignment that seems to last forever while you’re in it, but was clearly all too short once you exit it and desperately try to remember what it actually was.
I was imagining this as a resonance, between you and your environment or you and other people. That seems to point to it being a process rather than a material thing, and importantly, it would most likely be only a temporarily stable process right at the edge, just before it collapses in on itself. (Assumption on my part, of course, but what I see in my mind is an SOC avalanche. **)
Anyway, that was my night. So, to wake up and find this waiting for me feels like much more than coincidence. Of course, when you’re inside a coincidence, it feels a lot like “omg, that was pre-ordained”.
I really enjoyed reading this. I will be thinking about it for a good long while.
(** I read the book Self Organized Criticality by Per Bak twenty-odd years ago and it really affected how I see the world.)
The radio analogy is one that I return to often. The music is not inside the radio. The radio does not compose the symphony. It simply tunes to a frequency that already exists. The brain as receiver rather than generator is not a new idea, but it is one that has never been adequately addressed by the materialist paradigm.
What you said about the tree stopped me. If awareness exists in degrees, then consciousness is not exclusive to humans. The tree responds, communicates, shares resources. Is this a primitive form of awareness? Or is it awareness expressing itself in a different form? Our definitions are still too narrow. We are still measuring everything by the standard of the human mind.
In my own work, I have come to see consciousness as fundamental and matter as a byproduct, and the body is an antenna. Not a late arrival in an already-existing universe, but the primary reality from which the universe emerges. Healing is not about fixing something broken. It is about clearing the distortion so that the signal can come through clearly.
The physicist John Wheeler called it the "participatory universe." The idea that consciousness is not something we possess, but something we participate in. That we are not separate observers of a world that exists independently of us. We are co-creators, participating in the collapse of probability into actuality.
This is not mysticism. This is the most rigorous framework we have. Quantum mechanics dismantled the machine worldview. It revealed that the observer is not separate from the observed. That the act of measurement affects what is measured. That the universe does not simply exist. It participates.
And this: "The analytical mind seeks certainty because uncertainty feels uncomfortable." That is the whole thing. The discomfort of not knowing is often the driving force behind the refusal to explore alternatives. But progress does not come from comfort. It comes from the willingness to sit with uncertainty.
Tegmark's argument is compelling, but it rests on the assumption that the brain is the origin. If the brain is a receiver, then the entire framework shifts. The question is no longer "How does the brain produce consciousness?" but "How clearly is the brain able to receive consciousness?"
I think that's exactly the shift that's beginning to happen. As long as we measure reality only through cognition, anything that emerges through embodied knowing gets dismissed as subjective. The nervous system isn't just reacting to reality. It is participating in how reality is experienced. Expanding our definitions may mean recognizing intelligence that isn't confined to thought alone.
The coda stopped me. Water surfing itself. The ocean organising an eddy of itself into a shape complex enough to feel the waves.
I surf, or used to. I recognised that image physically before I understood it philosophically.
I have also been sitting with an almost identical image from a different direction entirely. The Tao Te Ching describes individual consciousness as waves arising from the ocean of the Tao: distinct in form, identical in substance, never separate from the source for a single moment. I had been planning to develop this as a major post in my series. Reading your coda was a strange recognition.
The layer I'd add from the developmental psychology side: if the brain is a receiver rather than a generator, then the wound installed in early childhood isn't just shaping the prediction system (as the Stanicke et al. predictive processing work describes). It's narrowing the receiver's bandwidth. Determining which frequencies of experience get through. The mask the child builds to survive becomes the filter on the instrument.
Which reframes the work of emotional fitness entirely. Not reprogramming the prediction system. Widening the bandwidth. Restoring the receiver's original range.
I think that's where our frameworks are pointing at the same thing from different directions. Looking forward to our conversation.
Yes. Always love your thoughts. Another metaphor I love is music and each of us as a unique instrument. The conditioning phase of life (those deep seated emotional learnings) determine if we play in tune or out of tune.
The instrument metaphor takes me immediately to guitar strings and harmonics.
When you pluck a string it vibrates at its natural fundamental frequency but also at integer multiples of that, the harmonics. The timbre, the distinctive tonal quality, is determined by which harmonics are present and in what proportion. Two guitars playing the same note sound completely different because their harmonic profiles differ.
Now extend that to Keppler's receiver model. If the brain tunes into the field through resonant coupling, the brain's natural resonant frequency determines which modes it couples to. The primal wound doesn't damage the instrument. It retunes it. Shifts the fundamental frequency away from the original natural frequency toward a wound-calibrated one organised around threat. The instrument then couples to different modes of the field. It plays out of tune not because its design is flawed but because conditioning altered its fundamental frequency. The harmonics are all wrong.
Which means the work isn't building a new instrument. It's retuning the original one back toward its natural frequency. Not through force, forcing a string to a frequency it isn't resonating at produces noise, but through accumulated small corrections until the natural resonance reasserts itself.
And this explains something I've noticed clinically that I hadn't fully understood until your instrument framing landed. Music is a cheat code. It doesn't ask permission from the wound-calibrated filter. It doesn't enter through the front door the prediction system is guarding. It arrives through the body's own resonant response before the cognitive layer can intercept it. The strings in the chest vibrate in sympathy with the strings being played, and something surfaces that the filter had been successfully suppressing. Not magic. A bypass route. The mask learned to block direct emotional contact. It never learned to block the resonant frequency of a cello.
I think this is exactly where our frameworks meet. Looking forward to the conversation.
…. I’m not a music guy…. But that feels right…. And I think this is exactly what heartmath is getting at with their heart brain coherence. The heart is tuner
The heart as tuner lands precisely. And it connects to something I wasn't expecting.
In Taoist philosophy the heart isn't the heart and the mind isn't the mind. They're xin, heart-mind, the unified centre where thinking, feeling, and knowing converge. Zhuangzi speaks of xin zhai, the fasting of the heart-mind: emptying it of its habitual conditioning to make space for what is actually present.
If the heart is the primary tuner and HeartMath's coherence research documents what happens when the tuner is in or out of alignment, then xin zhai isn't a spiritual practice. It's the practice of bringing the tuner into coherence. Emptying the xin of the wound's chronic threat signal so the heart's electromagnetic field shifts from the erratic incoherent pattern back toward the smooth ordered one.
Which means the wound-calibrated threat response isn't just detuning the receiver. It's disrupting the primary tuner at the same time. The loop compounds at both ends.
And the path back isn't forcing the tuner into coherence, that's noise. It's the progressive emptying of what's producing the incoherence. Zhuangzi described that practice 2,500 years before HeartMath had the instruments to measure what it was doing.
I will go back to read this whole article because I love your work. But I'm jumping ahead to the comments to share that I also had such a dream.
I'd finished my treatments for breast cancer (at age 36) when I dreamed I was at a retreat with a psychic diagnostician. This was actually the second time I dreamed about her - the first time, she told me I was clear. In this dream, she stopped by my room before the retreat started, as we were now friends, and whole scanning my body, she touched me in the neck and armpit. "I'm finding something here, and here."
I panicked and asked her what I should do. She then proceeded to give me profound advice about how best to live my life, which I've taken to heart and tried to live ever since.
As it turned out, I didn't have a metastasis. But a few days later my mother called from across the country with the bad news that, eight years after her mastectomy, her own breast cancer had now metastasized to the lymph nodes in her neck and armpit.
Yes, i read, and accept, thae caveats you presented. Im only vaguely familiar with some specifics. Fascinating. Especially your remarks about anesthetics. In medical school, i was fascinated that "nobody Really knew" how the work
I've been cogitating on all this recently thanks to your excellent articles and the fascinating comments people are offering in response. Maybe I'm jumping the gun and you have plans to address this further on in the series, but it seems you hinted at something in your story of the dream at the beginning - i.e., the implications of all this beyond what can currently be proven by science.
If it's true that we're in resonance with the ZPF, can we intentionally tune our receiver to get a better signal? Can we increase our likelihood of accessing non-local knowledge through it somehow? Or do these "coincidences" come to us through random fluctuations over which we can have no control?
I'm hoping, not just to think about these fascinating ideas, but to live as if they're true and operative. Am I coloring outside the lines here?
You might be interested in the work of Mario Crocco and Mariela Szirko. Different but related. Search for "On Minds' localisation' and 'Effects of Relativistic Motion on the Brain and its physiological bearing.' There is no hard problem. We encounter psyches as fundamental features of nature. Individual psyches....
I enjoyed this because it points toward a shift in perspective that I think is becoming increasingly important. We often imagine consciousness as something produced by the brain, but there is another possibility: that the brain participates in or shapes a reality that is already fundamentally experiential. Whether one ultimately agrees or not, exploring these alternative models opens valuable questions about the relationship between mind, matter, and experience. Sometimes progress begins not by collecting more data, but by becoming willing to reconsider the assumptions we started with.
Thank you my friend
Thank you, Jade. I always appreciate the way your writing invites people to question assumptions rather than simply replace one certainty with another. Those conversations are where some of the most interesting discoveries begin.
You might be interested in the work of Mario Crocco and Mariela Szirko. Different but related. Search for "On Minds' localisation' and 'Effects of Relativistic Motion on the Brain and its physiological bearing.' There is no hard problem. We encounter psyches as fundamental features of nature. Individual psyches....
Thank you Paul 💪🏽
There are some lengthy essays in Spanish also….on a well known academic site. academia.edu
There are some lengthy essays in Spanish on http://Academia.edu
The hard problem is the veil of ignorance trapping us in dukkha; pierce the veil and a solution doesn’t need to be found; the problem loses meaning
I come at this whole thing differently as a Shamanic practitioner although I use the scientific notions to explore the mysteries sometimes. Also, I suffer from chronic sensation discomfort in my head that hasn’t been explained by medical science. All they have is hypothesis.
So, I ran my own little experiment on Quale and Qualia and got some sensory relief. The fact that it didn’t clear everything up says there is more to it. Maybe a lot more. Don’t know. I got a hit is my point that something is going on in that direction which no one will or should accept except me. My playground is the same one, AND I don’t have anything to prove. My interest is in what works.
Also, I will throw this out fwiw. It connects at a couple different points in your article.
In pre-Christian Celtic mythology, the "Oran Mor" is the melody that holds the universe together. According to legend, the world was sang into being. Those with spiritually attuned minds are said to still hear this harmony flowing through the natural world today.
That’s is just as elegant as the physics, as well as artistic, and wholistic.
Interesting article, and who knows maybe more helpful down the road.
Thank you! 🙏
Thank you for sharing that. Would love to hear more about your discoveries have you written on them
No, I have not really felt compelled to do it as it is outside mainstream and that kind of experience can attract the wrong kind of person. Shamanism, especially these days, can be a bit of a target.
I gently floated a few things here as the ground seemed somewhat safe, stable, and honest.
Also, a good shaman and a shamanic practitioner understands things are more mystery than known and that it is real important to vet things from multiple angles over time if possible to validate things.
Shamans are the teachers and being one takes a special kind of person that I am not. You can get targeted, attacked, or even killed which is why I remain a practitioner.
My intent was to let you know that your inquiries have some validity and may be helpful.
Thank you for sharing. Understood
An interesting perspective, Ben. I am referring of your fear of your own beliefs. I would love to take a look at your birth chart in order to see where this originates. Of course, talking about birth charts is like talking about Shamanism; welcome by many and ridiculed by just as many.
Thank you Catherine for your offer! I have an Astrologer. I do know where this originates.
Your comments stood out to me as I come from a similar place, but at this point no longer care what others think. I assume I share a lot of the same, or similar beliefs, as you, but am also very interested in the topics that Dr Jade Teta writes about. All equally valid in my little world.
I think there is something worth exploring - if there is a fundamental field, and everything outside of it is an aspect of the field itself, then that suggests the hard problem isn't how we experience specific quale.
The answer to that question becomes we don't have qualia, we have one quale which expresses itself in different forms.
The hard problem would then become what causes that interchange between quale and qualia?
In my mind the interchange is a transformer. It transforms information from the fundamental field into a finite format, likely using geometry for a base.
That foundation is then strained by the mind to create forms, those forms reduce the fundamental field into specific physical properties which can be contrast against one another. This contrast produces the illusion of qualia from a single quale.
Thank you for those thoughts. Gets me thinking
Pls share if you feel compelled:)
"Although I feel, and I could be a bumbling idiot that the idea quantum states cant occur in biology has already been proven. I have an article on that you cant read separately."
I'm hoping you meant to write that this article CAN be read separately...?
As a scientist and engineer, I love how you're grounding everything in a scientific and mathematical basis. We need that. Just because it's not proven yet doesn't mean that it won't be.
You might get a kick out of this segment from the introduction of a vintage copy of Elementary Lessons in Electricity and Magnetism by Silvanus Thompson, written in 1894 to describe the advances since the book's first edition in 1881. All of this seems carved in stone now, but there was a time when even the leading minds were skeptical of electromagnetism. Doesn't the tone of this sound remarkably like your own in the article above?
"The ideas of Faraday, as enlarged and developed by Clerk Maxwell, were in 1881 only beginning to be understood and appreciated outside a narrow circle. In 1894, thanks largely to the labours of Heaviside, Hertz, Lodge, Poynting, Fitzgerald, Boltzmann, Poincaré, and others, they are everywhere accepted.
"In 1881 Maxwell's electromagnetic theory of light - a conception not less far-reaching than the theory of the conservation of energy - was deemed of doubtful probability; it was not yet accepted by such great masters as Lord Kelvin or Von Helmholtz. Though adopted by the younger generation of British physicists, it needed the experimental researches of Hertz and of Lodge upon the propagation of electric waves to demonstrate its truth to their brethren in Germany, France, and America.
"Even now, after the most convincing experimental verifications of Maxwell's splendid generalization that light-waves are really electrical waves, many of the logical consequences of Maxwell's teaching are still ignored or misunderstood.
"It is still, to many, a hard saying that in an electric circuit the conducting wire though it guides does not carry the energy: that the energy-paths lie outside in the surrounding medium, not inside the so-called conductor..."
Even then they weren't entirely right, but science feels its way along, with experimental verification a necessity.
Yes CAN!! Is what I meant!! Thank you for catching that
But to go in a different, NON-scientific direction, I think it's worth considering that what you're suggesting has been intuited and expressed by mystics and explored through many disparate world religions - the Great Spirit of indigenous traditions, the Ground of Being in Buddhist thought, etc. - too often reduced, literalized and personified as a god figure, but it's significant that humans (when they're not trained to disregard it) seem to have a deep, intuitive sense of a universal consciousness.
It's not proof, but it's corollary.
100%... nothing new under the sun as they say
This resonates with a deeper architectural rule I’ve been mapping: consciousness doesn’t appear out of nowhere — it emerges when a pattern stabilizes itself against the pressures acting on it. In that sense, the brain isn’t generating experience so much as shaping the boundary through which experience becomes coherent.
As I’ve written elsewhere, identity is the coherence pattern that stabilizes itself against the field’s pressures, preserving its form as it navigates potential disruptions.
Your tuning, resonance, and criticality capture the same logic at a different scale: a system becomes conscious when its internal pattern holds together long enough for the field to express itself through it.
Thank you for reading Randy
I am not a surfer, but I was thinking about surfing last night (hadn’t read this post yet). The particular thing I was trying to imagine is what it must feel like to “ride the barrel”. It’s often described as standing still while a tube of glass rolls slowly around you, or even appears to be static… and oddly, there is supposedly very little audible sound.
To me, that seemed like it could be the closest physical analog to what I’ve been calling a Moment: a temporary perfect alignment that seems to last forever while you’re in it, but was clearly all too short once you exit it and desperately try to remember what it actually was.
I was imagining this as a resonance, between you and your environment or you and other people. That seems to point to it being a process rather than a material thing, and importantly, it would most likely be only a temporarily stable process right at the edge, just before it collapses in on itself. (Assumption on my part, of course, but what I see in my mind is an SOC avalanche. **)
Anyway, that was my night. So, to wake up and find this waiting for me feels like much more than coincidence. Of course, when you’re inside a coincidence, it feels a lot like “omg, that was pre-ordained”.
I really enjoyed reading this. I will be thinking about it for a good long while.
(** I read the book Self Organized Criticality by Per Bak twenty-odd years ago and it really affected how I see the world.)
Appreciate you reading and your thoughts.
The radio analogy is one that I return to often. The music is not inside the radio. The radio does not compose the symphony. It simply tunes to a frequency that already exists. The brain as receiver rather than generator is not a new idea, but it is one that has never been adequately addressed by the materialist paradigm.
What you said about the tree stopped me. If awareness exists in degrees, then consciousness is not exclusive to humans. The tree responds, communicates, shares resources. Is this a primitive form of awareness? Or is it awareness expressing itself in a different form? Our definitions are still too narrow. We are still measuring everything by the standard of the human mind.
In my own work, I have come to see consciousness as fundamental and matter as a byproduct, and the body is an antenna. Not a late arrival in an already-existing universe, but the primary reality from which the universe emerges. Healing is not about fixing something broken. It is about clearing the distortion so that the signal can come through clearly.
The physicist John Wheeler called it the "participatory universe." The idea that consciousness is not something we possess, but something we participate in. That we are not separate observers of a world that exists independently of us. We are co-creators, participating in the collapse of probability into actuality.
This is not mysticism. This is the most rigorous framework we have. Quantum mechanics dismantled the machine worldview. It revealed that the observer is not separate from the observed. That the act of measurement affects what is measured. That the universe does not simply exist. It participates.
And this: "The analytical mind seeks certainty because uncertainty feels uncomfortable." That is the whole thing. The discomfort of not knowing is often the driving force behind the refusal to explore alternatives. But progress does not come from comfort. It comes from the willingness to sit with uncertainty.
Tegmark's argument is compelling, but it rests on the assumption that the brain is the origin. If the brain is a receiver, then the entire framework shifts. The question is no longer "How does the brain produce consciousness?" but "How clearly is the brain able to receive consciousness?"
"Our definitions are still too narrow. We are still measuring everything by the standard of the human mind."
This!
I think that's exactly the shift that's beginning to happen. As long as we measure reality only through cognition, anything that emerges through embodied knowing gets dismissed as subjective. The nervous system isn't just reacting to reality. It is participating in how reality is experienced. Expanding our definitions may mean recognizing intelligence that isn't confined to thought alone.
The coda stopped me. Water surfing itself. The ocean organising an eddy of itself into a shape complex enough to feel the waves.
I surf, or used to. I recognised that image physically before I understood it philosophically.
I have also been sitting with an almost identical image from a different direction entirely. The Tao Te Ching describes individual consciousness as waves arising from the ocean of the Tao: distinct in form, identical in substance, never separate from the source for a single moment. I had been planning to develop this as a major post in my series. Reading your coda was a strange recognition.
The layer I'd add from the developmental psychology side: if the brain is a receiver rather than a generator, then the wound installed in early childhood isn't just shaping the prediction system (as the Stanicke et al. predictive processing work describes). It's narrowing the receiver's bandwidth. Determining which frequencies of experience get through. The mask the child builds to survive becomes the filter on the instrument.
Which reframes the work of emotional fitness entirely. Not reprogramming the prediction system. Widening the bandwidth. Restoring the receiver's original range.
I think that's where our frameworks are pointing at the same thing from different directions. Looking forward to our conversation.
Yes. Always love your thoughts. Another metaphor I love is music and each of us as a unique instrument. The conditioning phase of life (those deep seated emotional learnings) determine if we play in tune or out of tune.
The instrument metaphor takes me immediately to guitar strings and harmonics.
When you pluck a string it vibrates at its natural fundamental frequency but also at integer multiples of that, the harmonics. The timbre, the distinctive tonal quality, is determined by which harmonics are present and in what proportion. Two guitars playing the same note sound completely different because their harmonic profiles differ.
Now extend that to Keppler's receiver model. If the brain tunes into the field through resonant coupling, the brain's natural resonant frequency determines which modes it couples to. The primal wound doesn't damage the instrument. It retunes it. Shifts the fundamental frequency away from the original natural frequency toward a wound-calibrated one organised around threat. The instrument then couples to different modes of the field. It plays out of tune not because its design is flawed but because conditioning altered its fundamental frequency. The harmonics are all wrong.
Which means the work isn't building a new instrument. It's retuning the original one back toward its natural frequency. Not through force, forcing a string to a frequency it isn't resonating at produces noise, but through accumulated small corrections until the natural resonance reasserts itself.
And this explains something I've noticed clinically that I hadn't fully understood until your instrument framing landed. Music is a cheat code. It doesn't ask permission from the wound-calibrated filter. It doesn't enter through the front door the prediction system is guarding. It arrives through the body's own resonant response before the cognitive layer can intercept it. The strings in the chest vibrate in sympathy with the strings being played, and something surfaces that the filter had been successfully suppressing. Not magic. A bypass route. The mask learned to block direct emotional contact. It never learned to block the resonant frequency of a cello.
I think this is exactly where our frameworks meet. Looking forward to the conversation.
…. I’m not a music guy…. But that feels right…. And I think this is exactly what heartmath is getting at with their heart brain coherence. The heart is tuner
The heart as tuner lands precisely. And it connects to something I wasn't expecting.
In Taoist philosophy the heart isn't the heart and the mind isn't the mind. They're xin, heart-mind, the unified centre where thinking, feeling, and knowing converge. Zhuangzi speaks of xin zhai, the fasting of the heart-mind: emptying it of its habitual conditioning to make space for what is actually present.
If the heart is the primary tuner and HeartMath's coherence research documents what happens when the tuner is in or out of alignment, then xin zhai isn't a spiritual practice. It's the practice of bringing the tuner into coherence. Emptying the xin of the wound's chronic threat signal so the heart's electromagnetic field shifts from the erratic incoherent pattern back toward the smooth ordered one.
Which means the wound-calibrated threat response isn't just detuning the receiver. It's disrupting the primary tuner at the same time. The loop compounds at both ends.
And the path back isn't forcing the tuner into coherence, that's noise. It's the progressive emptying of what's producing the incoherence. Zhuangzi described that practice 2,500 years before HeartMath had the instruments to measure what it was doing.
I will go back to read this whole article because I love your work. But I'm jumping ahead to the comments to share that I also had such a dream.
I'd finished my treatments for breast cancer (at age 36) when I dreamed I was at a retreat with a psychic diagnostician. This was actually the second time I dreamed about her - the first time, she told me I was clear. In this dream, she stopped by my room before the retreat started, as we were now friends, and whole scanning my body, she touched me in the neck and armpit. "I'm finding something here, and here."
I panicked and asked her what I should do. She then proceeded to give me profound advice about how best to live my life, which I've taken to heart and tried to live ever since.
As it turned out, I didn't have a metastasis. But a few days later my mother called from across the country with the bad news that, eight years after her mastectomy, her own breast cancer had now metastasized to the lymph nodes in her neck and armpit.
Quite a coincidence.
Yes. Quite a coincidence. Or not... Thank you for sharing. Appreciate you Wendlyn
Yes, i read, and accept, thae caveats you presented. Im only vaguely familiar with some specifics. Fascinating. Especially your remarks about anesthetics. In medical school, i was fascinated that "nobody Really knew" how the work
THanks for reading David
I've been cogitating on all this recently thanks to your excellent articles and the fascinating comments people are offering in response. Maybe I'm jumping the gun and you have plans to address this further on in the series, but it seems you hinted at something in your story of the dream at the beginning - i.e., the implications of all this beyond what can currently be proven by science.
If it's true that we're in resonance with the ZPF, can we intentionally tune our receiver to get a better signal? Can we increase our likelihood of accessing non-local knowledge through it somehow? Or do these "coincidences" come to us through random fluctuations over which we can have no control?
I'm hoping, not just to think about these fascinating ideas, but to live as if they're true and operative. Am I coloring outside the lines here?
My theory is that is what heart coherence breath is essentially doing... "tuning the brain to better resonate with the field"
Woah ❤️
Appreciate you reading
Conscience before matter. Matter is the lowest form. Matter is light holding static .
I like the way you phrase that
You might be interested in the work of Mario Crocco and Mariela Szirko. Different but related. Search for "On Minds' localisation' and 'Effects of Relativistic Motion on the Brain and its physiological bearing.' There is no hard problem. We encounter psyches as fundamental features of nature. Individual psyches....
Sounds right up my alley
Great article . As a cameraman I have interviewed many scientists and neuroscientists.
I love this angle !
Glad you loved it Peter. Sounds like an amazing way to learn