After I finished writing my last Substack, I kept coming back to this idea of certainty. How strange it is that the more we learn, the more we begin to understand just how much we don’t know.

And somewhere down that rabbit hole, my thoughts shifted from what we believe about the world to what we believe about ourselves.

Because maybe some of our greatest blind spots aren’t in what we think we know.

Maybe they’re in who we think we are.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately.

About self-awareness and emotional intelligence. Metacognition. Ego. Bias. Perception. The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and the strange fact that sometimes the person we have the hardest time seeing clearly is the one doing the looking.

Why some things about ourselves seem immediately available to us while others can remain almost completely outside our awareness.

And then I started thinking about how strange even that observation is.

Because surely, if I can recognize something in another person that they cannot recognize in themselves, the same must be true of me.

There must be things about myself that other people can see more clearly than I can.

That’s the rather inconvenient thing about a blind spot.

You don’t know it’s there.

So, naturally, here are some of the thoughts.

There is something fascinating about the distance that can exist between how we understand ourselves and how we actually behave.

We all carry an internal story about who we are.

We believe ourselves to be kind. Rational. Independent. Open-minded. Unbothered. Self-aware.

And perhaps we are.

But human beings are wonderfully complicated, and sometimes our behavior tells a story our conscious mind has not caught up with yet.

I think that contradiction is part of why I’m writing this.

Not because contradiction is evidence of hypocrisy, but because it reveals something much more interesting about being human.

We are capable of experiencing something without fully understanding that we are experiencing it.

We can be hurt without recognizing hurt.

Afraid without recognizing fear.

Defensive without realizing there is something we are defending.

We can believe something means very little to us while giving it an extraordinary amount of our thought and attention.

And none of this necessarily requires dishonesty.

That may be the most interesting part to me.

We can be completely sincere and still misunderstand ourselves.

Sometimes we genuinely believe the story we are telling.

Because the mind is not merely an instrument for discovering truth. It is also remarkably skilled at protecting the person who has to live with it.

And sometimes looking outward is simply easier than looking inward.

There is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately: metacognition.

Put simply, it is our ability to think about our own thinking.

But I think there is something almost profound hidden inside such a clinical definition.

There is something remarkable about the human mind. We can experience ourselves, and we can observe ourselves experiencing.

I can be angry, and I can notice myself being angry.

I can have a thought and then question the thought.

I can feel absolutely certain about what happened and still ask whether my perception of what happened is complete.

There is a small distance between the experience and the observer of the experience.

And I can’t help but wonder if much of what we call emotional maturity is built inside that distance.

Because there is what happens.

And then there is what happens inside of us because it happened.

We can feel hurt before we understand what the hurt means or where it came from.

We can feel threatened before examining whether a threat actually exists.

We can feel rejected before understanding what that rejection has come to mean about us.

But what interests me even more is everything that exists between an experience and our understanding of it.

Because we don’t encounter the world as neutral observers.

We encounter it through ourselves.

Through memory. Expectation. Fear. Experience. Identity. Upbringing. Old wounds. Beliefs we know we hold and probably many we don’t.

Which means there is the thing that happened, and then there is the person to whom it happened.

The perceived, and the perceiver.

And perhaps self-awareness begins when we become curious about the distance between the two.

Not simply, What happened?

But, What happened once it passed through me?

What did I assume?

What meaning did I give it?

Why?

What part of my interpretation belongs to the present moment, and what part may have arrived with me?

That doesn’t mean our perceptions are false.

It means they are ours.

And perhaps one of the more difficult forms of emotional maturity is learning to examine the lens without immediately distrusting everything seen through it.

At some point, if we are fortunate, we begin to catch ourselves.

Self-awareness doesn’t mean becoming so evolved that jealousy, insecurity, anger, embarrassment, defensiveness or fear disappear.

I’m not convinced that person exists.

It means developing enough interior space to notice what is happening before automatically turning it into a story about someone else.

There I am.

And then comes the question that has probably changed me more than most:

Why?

I talk a great deal about intelligence, but I sometimes wonder whether we have defined it too narrowly.

A person can accumulate enormous amounts of knowledge without ever becoming particularly curious about the person doing the accumulating.

We can learn languages, build businesses, understand complicated systems, memorize history, read philosophy and become extraordinarily competent in the world while remaining surprisingly unfamiliar with ourselves.

There is no contradiction there.

Knowledge and self-knowledge are different disciplines.

And unlike so many other forms of education, emotional development does not happen simply because time passes.

Age happens automatically.

Maturity does not.

We all arrive in adulthood carrying different emotional educations.

Some people were taught that difficult conversations were safe. Some weren’t.

Some learned that being wrong was part of learning. Others experienced being wrong as humiliation.

Some learned how to name what they were feeling. Others learned how to hide it.

Some were taught to examine themselves. Others learned, often for very understandable reasons, that looking inward was an unsafe place to go.

And then all of us enter the world together and begin expecting one another to possess skills we were never equally taught.

As an adult, I think about this constantly.

Because what appears obvious from one level of understanding may be completely invisible from another.

We rarely condemn someone for not knowing something they were never taught.

Yet when the missing knowledge is emotional rather than intellectual, our compassion seems to disappear.

We expect people to use tools simply because those tools exist.

Perhaps they have never learned them.

Perhaps they are learning them now.

Perhaps life will eventually teach them in a way no person ever could.

And perhaps there are tools I am missing too.

That last possibility is the one I try not to forget.

Because there is a seductive trap hidden inside self-awareness.

The more we learn about human behavior, the easier it becomes to believe we have somehow moved outside of it.

We learn about projection and begin seeing projection everywhere.

We learn about ego and become excellent at identifying everyone else’s.

We learn about emotional intelligence and quietly begin sorting people according to who possesses it.

And without realizing it, self-awareness itself can become another identity the ego protects.

I am the self-aware one.

Which is an interesting thing to be certain about.

Because if I genuinely have blind spots, I cannot know what all of them are.

If I knew, they wouldn’t be blind spots.

So perhaps one of the most convincing signs of self-awareness is not certainty about how self-aware we are, but the willingness to entertain the possibility that we are missing something.

That I could be right about someone else and still have something to learn about myself.

That another person’s behavior can reveal something about them without automatically making my interpretation of it infallible.

That two things can be true at once.

I can recognize behavior that is unhealthy and remain curious about the human being underneath it.

I can understand something without agreeing with it.

I can have boundaries without requiring contempt.

I can know that something is not mine to carry without needing to make the person carrying it beneath me.

There is a kind of humility in that which I find increasingly beautiful.

Not the humility of making ourselves smaller.

The humility of remembering how partial our view always is.

Maybe that is one of the reasons human relationships can be such extraordinary teachers.

Relationships place us in contact with parts of ourselves that solitude never has to confront.

Our need to be understood.

Our need to be liked.

Our need to be right.

Our fear of being wrong.

Our discomfort with rejection.

Our attachment to the version of ourselves we hope other people see.

And occasionally, if we can resist the immediate urge to defend that version, there may be information there.

This doesn’t mean accepting every judgment placed upon us. We still absolutely need discernment.

I think it means remaining willing to ask a question before dismissing a possibility entirely.

Is there anything here for me to see?

Sometimes the answer will be no.

Sometimes the answer will change your life.

Maybe wisdom is knowing the difference.

I’ve also started wondering whether understanding another person’s limitations might be one of the main forms of compassion.

There is a point at which expecting someone to respond with tools they do not possess becomes its own kind of suffering.

We keep waiting for an explanation they may not know how to give.

An apology they may not yet have the capacity to make.

A level of reflection they may never have practiced.

A conversation that requires an emotional language they do not yet speak.

And we remain bewildered when people continue meeting the world from the only place currently available to them and not how we see it.

There is a strange peace in allowing reality to be reality.

A person can only meet us from where they are.

And we can only meet them from where we are.

Different levels of awareness do not have to become a hierarchy of human worth.

Understanding where someone is does not require remaining there with them.

It just removes the need to dislike them for not being somewhere else.

There is tremendous mental and emotional freedom in that.

I believe this is also why I care so deeply about how we educate children.

The older I get, the less convinced I am that education can be measured only by what a person knows.

Of course I want my children to know things.

I want them to read difficult books. Understand mathematics. Study and love science. Encounter ideas that challenge them. Learn how to reason and how to recognize when reasoning has failed.

But I also want them to become students of themselves. Of the world.

To know that having an emotion and understanding an emotion are different things.

To notice defensiveness before building an argument around it.

To recognize that discomfort is not always danger.

To discover that being wrong does not make them stupid.

That changing their mind does not make them weak.

That another person’s success does not diminish their own.

That rejection can hurt without becoming hatred.

That they can question the story happening inside their own mind with the same rigor I hope they use to question the stories they encounter in the world.

Because what good is critical thinking if the only thoughts we never learn to question are our own?

That is what keeps bringing me back to the same place.

Education should give us more than information about the world.

It should give us the ability to encounter and meet ourselves within it.

Which brings me back to where I started in my last post.

Certainty.

I started by wondering what we might believe today simply because we haven’t learned enough to question it yet.

Now I’m wondering something more personal.

What do I believe about myself simply because I haven’t become aware enough to question it yet?

I don’t kno…

That’s the point.

There are things about myself I understand now that I couldn’t see five years ago.

Things I once defended that I understand differently today.

And if growth is real, there must be things about who I am today that I will understand differently five years from now.

I hope there are.

I would be far more concerned if there weren’t.

Maybe that is what humility actually asks of us.

Not that we doubt everything about ourselves.

Not that we accept every criticism.

Not that we endlessly excavate our flaws.

Just that we leave the door unlocked.

That we remain available to new information about ourselves.

That we notice when our behavior and our self-concept begin telling different stories.

That we resist the temptation to believe self-awareness is something we have achieved rather than something we practice.

And that knowledge alone was never the complete answer to ignorance.

Knowledge can tell us what we know.

Curiosity keeps us aware of what we might not.

The willingness to look again.

At the world.

At another person.

At ourselves.

Especially ourselves.

There is something deeply human about being unfinished. Remaining a forever student of existence.

Something strangely comforting about realizing that none of us has reached the final version of ourselves yet.

It allows me to look at another person’s limitations without needing to reduce them to those limitations.

And it allows me to look at my own without being destroyed by them.

We are all seeing through whatever degree of awareness we have available to us today.

Tomorrow may show us something different.

I hope it does.

Because maybe the goal is never to become the person who finally sees everything “clearly.”

Maybe it is to become the person who is never too certain to keep looking and learning.

And, I am.

But somewhere in the middle of reading it, while also working through The Fallacy Detective book with my kids, my brain started connecting the two.

Sagan spends a lot of time showing just how many times humanity has been incredibly certain about something, only to eventually discover that our understanding was incomplete.

For a very long time, we believed Earth was the center of the universe and that everything revolved around us.

But, why wouldn’t we have?

If you knew nothing beyond what you could see with your own eyes, it really does look that way. You’re standing still. The ground isn’t moving beneath you. Meanwhile the sun comes up, moves across the sky, and disappears again. The stars do the same thing.

Of course humans looked up and tried to make sense of it with the information they had.

We know differently now because we know more.

And THAT is the part I can’t stop thinking about.

What feels just as obvious to us right now because we don’t know more yet?

But that’s not really the interesting question to me.

The question I keep coming back to is:

What are we that certain about right now?

What do I believe today that someone 500 years from now would find completely absurd?

What have I never questioned because I don’t even realize there is a question to ask?

What feels like objective reality to me simply because I have never experienced anything outside of it?

That is what I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.

Being wrong isn’t particularly interesting

We’re all wrong about things.

Obviously.

We have incomplete information. We misunderstand things. We make assumptions. New information becomes available. Science changes. Our experiences change us.

Being wrong is part of being human.

What I find much more interesting is our relationship with the possibility that we are wrong.

Because those are two completely different things.

You can be wrong and curious.

You can also be right and have terrible reasoning for why you believe you’re right.

And I think we forget that second one.

A correct conclusion does not automatically mean the thinking that produced it was good.

This is something I’ve been thinking about constantly while doing The Fallacy Detective with my children.

We’re learning how arguments work. How fallacies work. How bias works. How easily language can make something sound convincing when the reasoning underneath it doesn’t actually hold up.

And naturally, once you start learning these things, you start seeing them everywhere.

But there is a trap in that too.

Because it is incredibly easy to become good at identifying bad reasoning in everyone else.

It is much harder to recognize it when the conclusion is something you already believe.

I think we misunderstand what critical thinking actually is because of that.

We throw around the phrase “critical thinker” constantly now. Everyone is THE critical thinker.

But 🫣 questioning authority does not automatically make someone a critical thinker.

Rejecting mainstream ideas doesn’t either.

Doing your own research doesn’t.

Being skeptical doesn’t.

Only reading and learning from biased information that falls in line with your belief or way of thinking doesn’t.

Having unpopular opinions certainly doesn’t.

Those things might be part of someone’s thinking process, but none of them tell me whether that process is actually thinking critically.

Because, how come I can question everyone except myself?

I can spend hundreds of hours researching something while only following information that supports the conclusion I already reached. To then further what I believe.

I can recognize propaganda from a group I distrust while being incredibly susceptible to it from a group I identify with.

I can demand peer-reviewed evidence for something I don’t want to believe, then hear a story that confirms something I already believe and accept it immediately.

And I can become so attached to the identity of being a “free thinker” that questioning my conclusions starts to feel like questioning who I am.

That last one is fascinating to me.

Because what happens when being a critical thinker becomes part of your identity?

What happens when you become certain that you are the person who sees through everything?

Wouldn’t that certainty itself deserve examination?

A question I am loving asking myself.

There’s now, one question that has really stayed with me through all of this:

What evidence would change my mind?

Actually think about it.

Pick something you believe strongly.

What would change your mind?

Not annoy you.

Not make you defensive.

Not make you go searching for a rebuttal.

What information, if you encountered it, would genuinely cause you to reconsider your position?

Because if the answer is honestly nothing, then I think we have to admit something.

We aren’t investigating that belief anymore.

We’re protecting it.

That doesn’t necessarily mean the belief is wrong.

You can protect a belief that happens to be correct.

But if there is no possible information capable of changing your conclusion, you are no longer using evidence to determine the conclusion.

You have already decided your conclusion.

Here’s another question:

Do I require the same quality of evidence for something I want to believe as I do for something I don’t want to believe?

Because I think most of us would like to say yes.

Even though not convinced we actually do.

When something challenges a belief we hold deeply, suddenly we question everything about it.

Who said this?

Where did they get the information?

Who funded the research?

Is there another explanation?

What context is missing?

But when something validates what we already believe, sometimes our standard changes completely.

A reel.

A screenshot.

A personal story.

A headline.

A person we trust or align with in our belief saying, “I looked into this.”

Immediate Share. Repost. Retweet.

And this is exactly why teaching my children about information bias and logical fallacy has been so important to me.

Knowing what confirmation bias is doesn’t make me immune to confirmation bias.

Knowing logical fallacies doesn’t stop me from using them.

Being educated doesn’t eliminate bias.

Being intelligent doesn’t eliminate bias.

Being able to identify bias in someone else definitely doesn’t eliminate mine.

Which means the most important place to look for it is probably the place I’m least naturally inclined to look.

At myself.

And then we added algorithms

This is where I think our current moment in history becomes particularly interesting.

Human beings have always sought information that supports what we already believe.

We’ve always formed groups.

We’ve always trusted some people more than others.

We’ve always been susceptible to fear, tribalism, status, authority and social pressure.

None of this started with social media.

But now we have systems learning what holds our attention and personalizing what we see based on THAT.

Think about what that does to a mind already prone to confirmation bias.

You interact with something.

You watch it longer.

You share it.

You search for more.

The system learns.

Then you see more.

And because you see more, it can begin to feel as though you are simply encountering more evidence.

Meanwhile, another person is doing exactly the same thing and being shown a completely different information environment.

Both people can sincerely believe they’re looking at reality.

Both can have screenshots.

Experts.

Stories.

Videos.

Communities of thousands of people saying, “Exactly.” “This.”

Both can wonder how the other person could possibly be so blind.

And then something changes.

We stop disagreeing about the information.

We start making judgments about the human being.

They’re stupid.

Brainwashed.

Sheep.

Crazy.

Ignorant.

Evil.

Uneducated.

And that is the part I have become increasingly uncomfortable with.

I don’t think understanding bias should make me feel superior to people who are biased.

I am one of them.

None of us started from zero

This might be the thought that has changed the way I see people more than anything else.

None of us chose where we began.

I didn’t choose where I was born. When I was born.

I didn’t choose the first language I heard.

I didn’t choose the first explanation of God or existence that was given to me.

I didn’t choose what the adults around me considered normal.

I didn’t choose which behaviors were rewarded.

I didn’t choose what frightened me as a child.

I didn’t choose what authority looked like.

I didn’t choose what I was told made someone good or bad.

By the time any of us becomes capable of seriously examining the world, we already have one.

And I think about religion with this all the time.

Imagine a baby born into a devout Christian family in Georgia.

Imagine another born into a devout Muslim family in Turkey.

Another into a Hindu family in India.

Another into a secular family somewhere where religion barely enters daily life.

None of those babies chose a worldview.

They were introduced to one.

but most think they were lucky enough to be born into the only correct belief system.

Eventually, each person may question it. Reject it. Deepen it. Modify it. Leave it entirely.

But surely the fact that geography, ancestry and family have an enormous influence over what human beings initially understand to be true should make us pause before assuming that we, uniquely, managed to begin from a neutral position.

I ask myself this often:

If I had been born somewhere else, to different parents, surrounded by different beliefs, how much of what feels obvious to me today would still feel obvious?

I don’t know. I assume none of it.

And I think admitting that is crucial.

It doesn’t mean there is no objective truth.

It doesn’t mean every belief is equally supported.

It doesn’t mean everyone is right.

It means I am a human being trying to understand reality through a human lens with a very small world view.

& So is everyone else.

This is where empathy entered the conversation.

Two people can experience the same event completely differently.

That doesn’t necessarily mean there are two objective truths.

It means there are two human experiences.

And those experiences are informed by everything that came before them.

What someone has lived through.

What they’ve lost.

Who they trust.

What they fear.

What information they’ve received.

What responsibilities they carry.

What their community believes.

What they have personally witnessed.

There have been moments in recent history when this was impossible not to see.

People could live through the same event and experience completely different realities.

One person could be terrified.

Another could feel almost no fear at all.

And it is tempting from either position to look across at the other and think:

How can you possibly feel that way?

But that question assumes they arrived at the moment as you.

They didn’t.

I don’t have to agree with someone’s conclusion to understand that there are reasons they arrived there.

And understanding those reasons don’t weaken my ability to think critically.

I actually think it strengthens it.

Because instead of reducing someone to a label, I become curious.

What do you know that I don’t?

What have you experienced that I haven’t?

What assumptions are you making?

And then the uncomfortable part:

What assumptions am I making?

I can disagree with someone and still recognize their humanity.

I can believe they’re wrong without believing they’re stupid.

And sometimes I can ask a question that has become almost impossible for me to un-ask:

What would I believe if I had lived their exact life instead of mine?

Maybe the answer is that I would still believe exactly what I believe now.

But I’m not nearly arrogant enough to assume that.

Personally, “I believe everything and nothing”

And I say this a lot.

I realize it probably sounds contradictory.

But I don’t really know another way to describe it.

I believe everything and nothing.

That does not mean I think everything is true.

It means I’m willing to entertain possibilities without immediately needing to adopt them as beliefs.

There are ideas I find fascinating that I don’t believe.

There are things I believe strongly that I am completely willing to reconsider.

There are things I once believed that I don’t anymore.

There are things I once dismissed that I now understand differently.

And there are an enormous number of things where my answer is simply:

I don’t know.

I love “I don’t know.”

I think we’re strangely uncomfortable with it.

We want conclusions.

We want labels.

We want to feel superior.

We want to be the smartest.

We want to be RIGHT

We want the answer. But only if it fits into our belief box.

Personally, sometimes I don’t have enough information.

Sometimes nobody does.

Sometimes I don’t care enough about the question to devote my finite attention to resolving it.

And sometimes something can remain possible without becoming something I organize my life around.

I’ve also become much less interested in consuming myself with things I cannot control.

That doesn’t mean I don’t want to understand them or that I don’t care.

It means curiosity no longer requires fear.

I can wonder about something without being consumed by it.

I can consider a possibility without handing it my peace.

And that’s part of what I mean when I say I believe everything and nothing.

I want my mind open enough that reality can surprise me.

But not so open that discernment disappears.

We have access to wisdom everywhere

There is another part of all of this that I cannot stop noticing.

We have an unbelievable amount of wisdom available to us.

Books.

Philosophy.

Religion.

Psychology.

Science.

Therapy.

Podcasts.

Lectures.

Quotes.

Reels.

You can encounter a profound idea while standing in line for coffee.

And social media has created this strange culture where we can collect those ideas publicly.

We repost them.

We quote them.

We send them to people.

We build entire identities around the ideas we agree with.

And I’ll see someone share something and think:

Do you realize this is talking about you?

😂

And then I have to stop.

Because there it is again.

The entire lesson.

Do I realize when it’s talking about me?

There is a huge difference between recognizing wisdom and integrating it.

I can learn the language of self-awareness without becoming self-aware.

I can talk about empathy and treat people terribly.

I can share content about critical thinking while refusing to seriously consider evidence against my own beliefs.

I can repost something about ego while using the post itself to demonstrate how evolved I am.

I can understand a concept intellectually and never once allow it to inconvenience me personally.

Knowing the words is easy.

Living them is different.

Maybe the real test of anything we learn isn’t whether we can recognize its truth when someone else says it.

It’s whether we can recognize ourselves when it’s talking about us.

You can repost every profound thing you’ve ever read.

But wisdom isn’t what you recognize enough to share.

It’s what you recognize enough to live.

There is Earth.

A tiny blue dot.

And every argument we have ever had happened there.

Every religion humanity has ever practiced.

Every political system.

Every scientific discovery.

Every conspiracy.

Every revolution.

Every person who was right.

Every person who was wrong.

Every person who was certain they were right while being wrong.

Every person currently convinced that everyone on the other side of some issue has lost their mind.

Every person we love.

Every person we judge.

Every person we will never understand.

All of us are here.

And I think that perspective does something to certainty.

Not truth.

Truth doesn’t become less important because Earth is small.

If anything, I think our responsibility to pursue it becomes greater.

But certainty?

That deserves examination.

Because humanity has been certain before.

We have been certain about our importance.

Certain about our place in the universe.

Certain about explanations that later generations completely abandoned.

And here we are again, with more information than any generation before us, still vulnerable to the same very human tendency to confuse the limits of our understanding with the limits of reality.

I don’t find that depressing.

I find it incredible.

There is still so much to know.

There is so much I will never know.

There are ideas I haven’t encountered yet that may change things I currently believe.

There are people I haven’t met who may completely alter the way I understand something.

There are probably questions I don’t even know to ask.

Why would I want to reach a point where I believed I was finished? That I’ve “done the work I’ve needed to do.”

I don’t want to spend this life becoming increasingly skilled at defending the person I already am.

I want to learn enough to change. Evolve.

I want to remain curious when certainty would be easier.

I want to be able to hold a strong conviction without needing the person who disagrees with me to be stupid.

I want to understand why I believe what I believe.

I want to notice when my own reasoning fails.

I want evidence to matter even when I don’t like what it says.

I want to encounter another human being and remember that I am seeing one moment in a life I have not lived.

And when I inevitably get things wrong, I want my attachment to being right to matter less than my desire to understand why.

Maybe that’s what these two completely different books have been teaching me at exactly the right time.

The Fallacy Detective has me thinking about how easily our reasoning can fail.

Pale Blue Dot has me thinking about how much humanity has yet to understand.

And together they’ve left me with a question I think I’ll probably carry for the rest of my life:

How do I know what I think I know?

Not so I can doubt everything.

Not so I can believe everything.

Just so I never become so certain of my own understanding that I stop being capable of expanding it.

Because I think there are few things sadder than having this entire human experience, with everything there is to learn, question, experience and understand, and deciding somewhere along the way that you already know enough.

I don’t want to be the person who is always right.

I’m not even sure that person could exist.

I want to remain a student of this life for as long as I’m lucky enough to be living it.

There is a difference between learning something and recognizing something.

Learning feels like acquisition. New information arriving from outside and being filed somewhere useful. Recognition feels different. It feels like something that was always there finally having a name. Like a door opening onto a room you somehow already knew…

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A school year was infinite. A summer was gone before it started. Christmas took forever to arrive. The distance between one birthday and the next was so vast it was almost incomprehensible.

Now think about this time last year.

It feels like last month for most of you, doesn’t it?

The older we get the …

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The Questions Nobody Would Answer

I never lost my faith.

You cannot lose something you never fully had.

What I had was performance. Years of sitting in pews, bowing my head at the right moments, saying the right words, trying to locate inside myself the feeling everyone around me seemed to have access to without effort. The “divine connection” to someone o…

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A state of knowing so complete it made everything I had ever questioned feel answered. A feeling of home so total it made every place I had ever lived feel like a waiting room.

I have only felt it twice.

Both times I was near death.

Between thirteen and my mid twenties I did what most people do. I tried.

I tried to fit the life I was living into a shape that made sense. I built things. A business. A family. A version of myself that could move through the world without constantly feeling the gap between what I knew and what I was supposed to believe. I went back to church. I sat in the pews again, older this time, and tried harder than I had as a child to feel what everyone around me seemed to feel without effort.

I still never felt it.

A state of knowing so complete it made everything I had ever questioned feel answered. A feeling of home so total it made every place I had ever lived feel like a waiting room.

I have only felt it twice.

Both times I was near death.

Read more

I was in the kitchen.

That’s the last thing I remember.

The next thing I remember is looking up at my mom and her best friend. Both of them crying over my limp body.

I didn’t know what happened or where I had just been.

What I know is that I came back and something was different. Not in any way I could explain at thirteen. Something had shifted in how I received information and I had no words for it and no one to ask.

Years later I heard the words near death experience and something in me went quiet in the way things go quiet when they finally have a name.

But at thirteen I had nothing. No framework. No context. Nothing they had ever talked about in church. Just a suddenly louder sensitivity to everything around me that I didn’t ask for and couldn’t turn off and I didn’t enjoy it at all.

A few months later I woke up with a feeling I couldn’t place. A heaviness. A dread that had no source I could point to.

I went to school anyway.

I was in 7th grade language arts when the classroom phone rang.

Before my teacher picked it up I knew it was for me. I knew it was bad. I knew exactly what was wrong. Not a feeling. A knowing. The kind that sits in your body like a fact before the world has confirmed it yet.

She picked up. Looked right at me.

“Amanda, go get your things. You’re being picked up.”

I went to my locker first.

I opened it and fell apart. Crying before I had been told a single thing. Crying over something I had no official reason to know yet. I stood there long enough to gather myself and then I walked to the front office.

It wasn’t my mom. It was her best friend. Her face confirmed everything I already knew.

My mom was pregnant. That sentence had taken years to become possible. Years of asking and being told no, and then somehow it was finally happening. A baby boy. The first boy in a family of nine girls between siblings and cousins.

I had wanted him with an intensity I still don’t have the right words for.

His name was Christopher.

And just like that he was gone.

I knew it before I walked through that door. I knew it when the phone rang. I knew it standing at my locker falling apart before anyone even confirmed it.

There was no version of that I could say out loud. No way to explain it that didn’t end with me being the problem.

So I filed it. Next to the gap. Next to the compulsive thoughts. Next to the dreams that kept coming true.

Every drawer full. Nothing labeled.

Here is what nobody talks about when they hand a child a religion. The church taught me that everything sacred lives outside of you. That God is up there and you are down here and the distance between you is the entire point. Pray outward. Look outward. Wait for something external to confirm what is real.

But nothing in my experience thus far had worked that way.

Everything kept coming from inside. The knowing before the phone rang. The dreams that became Tuesdays. The feeling in my body that something was wrong before the world caught up to confirm it. None of it arrived from outside me. All of it arrived from somewhere I couldn’t locate or explain.

So I said nothing. To anyone. For many years.

I sat at desks and in pews and went through the motions while I carried this completely alone because there was no one to tell and no framework I had to explain it. Just this intense knowing that reality was not what I was being told it was and having no idea what to do with that or why.

What that kind of weight looks like from the outside is attitude. Defiance. A girl who won’t cooperate.

I became, by every official record, difficult.

The systems I moved through tried to hand me a story and I kept setting it down. Not deliberately. My body was simply rejecting what it didn’t recognize as true. The narrative. The approved version of reality. All of it landing wrong in a way I couldn’t explain and couldn’t stop feeling.

The NDE made that louder. Christopher then made it undeniable.

When something becomes undeniable in you the world responds.

What they did with me next is its own story. The labels. The rooms. The attempts to categorize something that didn’t have a category. That’s coming.

What I want you to sit with first is this.

I was thirteen years old. I had just been somewhere I couldn’t explain or understand and come back and things were different, how I felt was different, what I saw was different but, I was being handed a framework that had never once matched my actual experience of being alive.

And I had no language for any of it.

It took me many years to find the language. I had to build the framework myself, piece by piece, from reading, research, becoming obsessed with quantum physics, deep diving into recovered ancient texts and consciousness research and then hearing other NDE stories, accounts of thousands of people across centuries who kept describing the same thing from completely different directions.

What I found is that nothing that happened to me was random. Not the gap. Not the kitchen floor. Not the knowing. Not the rebellion. Not the confusion. Not any of it.

There is now a framework that explains all of it.

And that is what I created this space is for.

The personal thread was never the point. This was always the prequel.

What comes next is the framework I put together to make it all make sense.

Amanda

I said the years between four and nine are gone.

That’s true. But there is one exception. One memory that survived everything else that didn’t.

I was six years old. My whole family was at Wednesday night Bible study. My parents had driven separately since my dad came straight from work. After the service ended, my sister got in the car with my dad and I got in with my mom.

My mom was getting in the car with me when my dad pulled up behind us. She went to his window and they were talking. I don’t remember what was said. Whatever it was made me decide to get out and ride home with him instead though. Something ordinary, something small enough that it didn’t leave a mark on its own. But I got out of my mom’s car and got in with my dad and sister instead.

We drove off and I remember feeling bad that I had left my mom alone.

On the way home that night, a young drunk driver ran a stop sign and hit her on the passenger side. He was killed immediately. That point of impact was the seat I had just been sitting in.

My mom survived, barely. When the emergency personnel arrived, while in and out of consciousness, she told them her daughter had been in the car with her. She never remembered me getting out. They searched the wreckage for my body for over thirty minutes.

I wasn’t there. I was in my dad’s car. Alive because of one sentence I can’t remember.

I have thought about that a lot over the years. A split second decision. My dad pulling up, saying something, me deciding to move. Nobody planned it. Nobody knew what was coming. I don’t know exactly when I found out the full shape of it. I just know that at some point it landed, and something in me filed it quietly, next to the other things that didn’t have a container yet.

That is the one memory I have from the years between four and nine. Not continuous consciousness. Not a childhood I can trace. One moment from inside a period that is otherwise blank.

It has always struck me that the memory that survived is the one where I almost didn’t.

The next memories I have started up again once we moved to a new home, around nine. I don’t remember arriving into them. I just remember again, the way you don’t remember falling asleep, only that at some point you are awake.

What I came back to did not feel normal. There was something happening in my mind that I had no name for and no framework to hold. I would be trying to think, trying to just exist inside a normal moment, and something would force its way in. A compulsion to scream letters and numbers in my head, in sequences I couldn’t control, over and over, like a requirement, like the price of being able to think at all. I didn’t tell anyone. I had no language for it and no reason to believe anyone else would either. I just knew it was happening and I was terrified and I begged and prayed, with the same sincerity i looked for but could never locate inside the church walls, that it would stop.

Eventually it did. I don’t remember when. I just remember that at some point it was gone, the same way it had arrived. Without explanation. Without understanding.

What replaced it was much quieter. I started dreaming things that would then happened. Not dramatic things, not visions or warnings. A conversation, word for word. A specific car passing at a specific moment. Small ordinary slices of life I had already watched from inside sleep before I lived them awake. I filed it under whatever adults called déjà vu because I had no other understanding for it. I never told anyone about those either.

I was raised Seventh-day Adventist. I didn’t not believe what everyone else around me did. I just couldn’t feel what everyone around me seemed to feel. The connection, the presence, whatever it was they were describing. I sat in those pews and went through the motions and assumed it would arrive eventually, the way understanding always seemed to arrive when you were young enough that adults still knew more than you did.

After my mother’s accident, the church did what institutions do when a story doesn’t fit the narrative they need. I don’t remember the specifics. I do however, remember my mother’s face when she heard them talk about the accident. The way she absorbed something that should never have been said to a woman who had nearly just died and had done nothing wrong. I was just a child. I had no theology, no critique, no language for what I was watching. I just had my body. And my body said something is wrong with the narrative they are telling.

That knowing, the gap between the official version and what I could feel was true, was not new.

It was just the first time I had internal evidence.

I was nine, then ten, then eleven. The dreams kept coming. Small prophecies filed under nothing, witnessed alone, told to no one. The framework kept failing to fit. Something was assembling itself in me, slowly, without my understanding or permission.

I didn’t know what it was building toward.

I would find out at thirteen.

Amanda

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The Last Memory Before the Gap

I am four years old.

I am wearing my favorite purple ballerina outfit. The kind with the hard tulle tutu. with plastic dress up heels.

I remember that day with a clarity that makes no sense given everything else I have forgotten.

My bedding had light purple florals on the comforter. Stuffed animals scattered across it. Intentionally chaotic. Every one of them in exactly the right place.

It was my world. Small and complete and mine.

My grandparents had come in from out of town.

I remember the energy of that. The particular electricity of people you love arriving. The way a house shifts into a different frequency when they walk through the door.

My grandfather brought me something.

A book.

A Hardcover. Not small. Not thick either. Somewhere in between. The cover was burnt orange. The color of something very old. It smelled the way only books from another era smell. Dry, dense and layered, like it had absorbed decades of air and was slowly releasing them back.

It was a book of world maps. From the 1920s.

I do not remember how I know that. I just do.

I don’t remember the title. Or the specific map I was looking at.

What mattered was what happened when I opened it.

A wave moved through my entire body.

Not a feeling exactly. Something larger than a feeling. A recognition so complete it had nowhere to go inside my small nervous system except everywhere at once.

A gut wrenching knowing that I was in the wrong place.

Not the wrong room. Not the wrong house.

The wrong place. The wrong reality. The wrong everything.

I tried to explain it to my grandfather. I looked up at him with this enormous thing moving through me and could not make it make sense. How could I. I could barely hold it myself.

I took the book into my bedroom because I knew I was overstimulating everyone.

I laid down on my floral bed, surrounded by my dolls and stuffed animals, inside my small but confusing world.

And I fell apart.

Not the way children cry when they are tired or scared or want something.

The way something cries when it understands loss at a level it was never supposed to understand at that age.

A grief so total it could only come out as screaming.

I was asking. Begging. To be taken back. To wherever I had come from. To wherever I belonged.

To where I was supposed to be.

Nobody could take me there. Nobody in that room even knew what I was asking for.

And that was the last memory I have for a very long time.

Whatever that version of me understood in that moment, she took it with her when she left.

The next memory I have surfaces somewhere around age nine.

The years between are simply gone. Not foggy. Not fragmented.

Gone.

I have spent time with people who work in spaces that attempt to explain gaps like this. What they have told me about those missing years I am not ready to put into words yet.

I am not sure you are ready to receive it yet either.

We will get there.

What I can tell you is this.

That moment in the purple ballerina outfit was not a child having a tantrum. It was not confusion or overstimulation or a bad day.

It was a consciousness recognizing that it had arrived somewhere it had not chosen.

I did not have language for that then. I did not have language for it at thirteen either, when something else happened that made that afternoon feel like a preview.

I have the language now.

That is what this space is for.

The grief that moved through me on that floral bedding was the first data point in a framework that would take me thirty years to fully assemble.

I did not know that then.

I just knew I was somewhere I did not choose and I did not know how to get back to where I belonged.

It turns out the way back is not a place.

It never was.

— Amanda

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I have always known.

Not learned. Not discovered. Not awakened into.

Known.

That I was different. That everything around me was connected in ways the people around me couldn’t see. That the doctrines and certainties being handed to me as truth were someone else’s truth, not mine.

I was born already questioning the nature of reality.

And then, at 13, I died.

And everything I already knew became undeniable.

I don’t remember the moment itself. I do know my soul left my body.

What I understand now, I couldn’t have handled then.

I left. And then I came back. Different.

When I came back, something had shifted in a way I had no language for.

I knew things.

Death before it arrived. Life before it was announced. The specific weight of something wrong inside someone who hadn’t yet felt it themselves. And it kept expanding, quietly, without my permission, until I could feel the texture of a person’s pain before they opened their mouth. The heaviness they carried. The sadness they had learned to smile over. The darkness living just underneath the surface of someone who looked completely fine.

I felt all of it. All the time. Whether I wanted to or not.

I eventually withdrew. I rebelled. I was fourteen, carrying the weight of everyone’s energy with no understanding of what it was or how to protect myself from it. No one handed me a framework. No one told me this was even a thing that could happen to a person. I just felt everything, all the time, and had nowhere to put any of it.

I found myself drawn to animals and bad decisions. One gave me something clean, something honest, energy that didn’t carry the noise humans did. The other numbed me just enough that I could stop feeling everything else for a little while. From the outside it all looked like rebellion. From the inside it was the only way I knew to survive what I was carrying.

And then one morning I just knew something terrible was going to happen.

And it did.

It broke a piece of all of us. But I was left carrying something none of them were. The weight of having known before it happened.

How do you explain that? How do you carry that? How does a teenager hold the burden of knowing and have nowhere to put it?

I didn’t know yet. So I just broke instead.

For a long time I thought something was wrong with me.

I questioned everything. Authority. Religion. Academia. The rules nobody could explain but everyone expected me to follow. Things that were taught as truth never felt like truth in my body. And the more I questioned, the more alone it made me feel, because the world around me had answers that fit neatly inside boxes and nothing I was experiencing fit inside anything.

I didn’t choose to think differently. I simply always had.

And no matter how many times I tried to silence that inner knowing, it kept pulling me back.

It wasn’t until years later, in a completely different kind of experience, that I understood what had actually happened to me when I was 13.

I was shown it. From outside my own body, I watched the whole thing, and I understood with a clarity that bypassed every logical framework I had ever built, that I had been my own guardian angel. In that moment I was everywhere at once, and the version of me that was watching was me. An older me. A me that already knew how this all unfolded. I wasn’t being saved by something outside of myself. I was being held by myself, across time, from a place I hadn’t reached yet.

There have been two more experiences since then. Both at the lowest points of my life. We will get there. But not yet.

I needed to make sense of what I already knew inside myself. So I did what made the most sense to me. I read everything I could find. Hundreds of books, lectures, QHHT sessions, documentaries, near death experience stories. Any and every thread that pointed toward what I was feeling. I even read declassified CIA documents. I was simply trying to decode the system I was living inside of.

Some of my favorites: The Gita. The Gene Keys. The Biology of Belief. The Holographic Universe. The Ethiopian Bible. The Dead Sea Scrolls. The Emerald Tablet. The Upanishads. The Pyramid Texts. The Tao Te Ching. The Kybalion. The Gospel of Thomas. The Nag Hammadi texts. Ramana Maharshi. Sri Nisargadatta. Power vs. Force. The Map of Consciousness. Stalking the Wild Pendulum. Dying to Be Me. The Mind Illuminated. Eastern Body Western Mind. The Untethered Soul. The Power of Now. Quantum physics. Neuroscience. Epigenetics. Hermetic law. Vedic astrology. Human Design. Ancient oral traditions across civilizations. And so much more.

I was not searching for someone to tell me what to believe. I was searching for the people who had already seen what I had seen and found a way to describe it.

Not one book. Not one translation. Not one cultural lens. Not one life view.

Because truth has never belonged to a single page.

I read every sacred text the way I read all ancient wisdom. Allegorically. Symbolically. As layered transmissions from people who were trying to describe something that language was never fully equipped to hold. Every tradition, from the oldest Pyramid Texts to the excluded gospels to the Vedic seers to the mystics of every lineage, is pointing at the same thing. The same fundamental truth hidden inside different languages, different metaphors, different centuries.

To reduce that to one box and argue about the shape of the box is to miss the entire point.

And here is what all of it, every page, every tradition, every moment of sitting with something I couldn’t yet explain, eventually collapsed into for me:

We are not who we think we are.

Not by accident. We have been shaped across generations, across lifetimes of survival, conditioning, inherited belief, and borrowed identity, slowly formed into something the world could hold. Something smaller. Something quieter. Something more explainable than what we actually are.

This is my theory. Built from lived experience, backed by lots science, ancient wisdom, and a knowing I have carried since before I can remember.

What I am going to share in this space might challenge the framework of reality you were handed. We are going to explore time, consciousness, the oldest texts on earth, what quantum physics and ancient mystics agree on, the body as a field, and identity as the most sophisticated illusion ever constructed.

You may disagree with some of it. You may feel resistance. That’s okay. Stay curious anyway.

Because the unbecoming doesn’t require certainty. It only requires the willingness to look.

I don’t know what you’re carrying. But something in you decided to keep reading.

That wasn’t an accident.

Neither is what comes next.

Welcome.

— Amanda