The Antenna, Not the Broadcast

How to loosen the filtering that keeps us in one reality

For me, there are many moments when the walls of reality feels thinner. Those moments come more and more often, nowadays. Moments when I sense - know - that there is more happening than I can perceive. A place, a time of day, a feeling in the body. Yesterday, in my bedroom, my eyes falling on my potted orchid. The sun falling in golden slants through the window. Time, standing still.

A deep knowing.

There is more. Much, much more.

That feeling. You know what I mean, I think.

Can you feel it now? This is more around us than we were built to catch. It’s beyond that which we have been taught.

They say the electromagnetic spectrum runs from gamma rays to radio waves. It’s an almost incomprehensibly vast range of energy. It moves through and around us at every moment. The human eye only perceives about 0.0035%. of it. A mere sliver. Radio waves are pouring through our bodies right now. They carry entire broadcasts. And, yet, most of the time, we don’t know it.

They tell us that ultraviolet light is all around us. Bees see it but we don’t. Our dog can hear frequencies we’ll never register. Sharks sense electrical fields in the water the way we sense a friend enter a room.

But our instrument - our awareness - is tuned to a narrow band. Everything outside that band goes unregistered, at least by our conscious awareness.

The brain doesn’t make the mind

Almost every contemporary person carries an assumption. Most assume that the brain generates consciousness. Neurons fire, chemistry happens. Somehow, somewhere between thought and feeling and the experience of being, you come out the other end, the way heat comes out of a flame.

We know that brain states and mental states are correlated. Damage a certain region and we lose a certain capacity. Stimulate another and it produces a certain sensation. But we don’t have an explanation of how electrical and chemical activity become felt experience. Why does information processing feel like something? This is called “the hard problem of consciousness.”

But there has always been another way to explain things. Instead of the brain makes consciousness, it’s: the brain filters consciousness. It’s a generator, not a receiver.

William James was one of the founding figures of modern psychology. He compared the brain to a prism. It doesn’t create the light, it bends and narrows what’s already there into a visible band.

A generation later, Henri Bergson made the same case. He argued that the brain’s job is to limit consciousness down to what’s useful for staying alive. He said that memory and mind are larger than anything the brain alone can be shown to hold. Aldous Huxley said something similar. He saw the brain and nervous system as a “reducing valve.” They let through only the trickle of something much vaster.

Plato placed the “rational soul” in the head. It was something the body houses. It’s a seat where a consciousness that already exists, elsewhere, can reside. It stays in contact with what he called the “Eternal Forms”. The brain, to Plato, was receptive, not productive.

Perhaps you’ve witnessed things that affirm this. Maybe you’ve had an experience of inexplicably vivid perception. A moment of “downloading” an idea whole rather than building it piece by piece. An altered state where the filter loosened.

Our whole body thinks

Apparently, our gut contains something researchers now call the “second brain”. The enteric nervous system. They say that roughly 500 million neurons line our digestive tract. These run their own reflexes and their own decisions. They are largely independent of the organ in our skull. Our heart has its own intrinsic nervous system too. And long before we ever had the word for it, our body already knew how to catch a ball, keep balance, or feel danger in a room. We know things before our conscious mind has assembled a single sentence.

There is a form of knowing that moves through the whole body, all the time. It is mostly beneath our consciousnes awareness. Thought is received through many points of contact. It isn’t manufactured in one central factory behind our eyes.

We’ve all experienced the knowing of the body before the mind caught up. A gut instinct. A physical sense of something before we had words for it.

One signal, but many stations

If the brain is a receiver, the next question is: a receiver of what? James, Bergson, and Huxley described a larger field filtered into a human experience. Huxley called it “Mind at Large”. If that field is genuinely vast - infinite, perhaps - there’s no reason to assume it holds only one version of events.

A radio sits in a field where many stations are transmitting at once, and locks onto one station at a time. Change the dial, and an entirely different program plays. The other stations don’t stop existing while we’re not tuned to them. They’re there, broadcasting, waiting for the dial to move.

Our dial selects one channel out of many. One timeline, one chain of cause and effect. It’s held in place because it’s the one our instrument is currently tuned to receive.

That would mean the felt sense of “this is reality, this is how things are” isn’t a discovery about the world. It’s a report on our current setting rather than an objective fact.

This is an infinite field but we have an instrument built to let in only a fraction of it.

Our filtering defines the tiny percentage of possibility we’re currently experiencing.

Maybe there have been moments when your filtering has loosened. Perhaps you’ve glimpsed a different timeline or possibility. A strong sense of “it could have gone completely differently here.”

A dream or a synchronicity.

A knowing.

Why the filter exists and why it can loosen

The filter is not something to be broken through recklessly. Indeed, if you have suffered from any form of psychosis or clinical mental illness, I advise you to discuss these things with a health care professional. Be gentle with yourself. Go slow. Many have broken through the filter too suddenly and gone awry. Ripping the veil away with brute force is not desirable. We see this with psychedelic substance abuse. My own father was one such case, but that is a story for another time.

If our nervous system let in the full 100% of the light and sound, we would not be able to function. Huxley was explicit about this. The full, unfiltered Mind at Large would be more than we could bear. We need a narrow channel in order to walk across a room, hold a job, raise a child. We need to keep a single coherent thread of our life’s narrative going for reasons of survival. Not all of us can be holy men sitting in a cave.

If you’ve had “spiritual awakenings” - I know many of you have - then you know. It’s hard to keep taking out the trash and cooking dinner if your mind is completely unmasked to the All.

But “necessary for function” is not the same as “fixed forever.” The dial can gently move. Indeed, it moves all the time. In dreams, illness, grief, peak experience. In the strange lucid window some people experience at the very end of life. A dying brain sometimes has a burst of clarity that has no mechanistic explanation. But it fits a filter model. Damage to the receiver doesn’t damage what’s being received.

Why loosen it?

Why would we want to loosen the grip at all, when the narrow channel is what lets us function? Because the narrow channel was built for survival, not for expasion. Most of us are no longer in pure survival mode, even if our nervous systems haven’t caught up.

When the aperture opens, we’re no longer limited to our default frequencies. Decisions stop being forced choices between two known options. Wider possibilities become available to us. Creativity blossoms. Old identities - the fixed, rigid version of who we are and what’s possible for us - soften enough to let something new in. We grow in ways our previous bandwidth couldn’t have allowed.

Moving the dial on purpose

If our current reality is a tuning rather than a fact, then what narrows the aperture, and what widens it?

What narrows it:

Fear

Certainty

A rigid grip on a single fixed identity

Lack of change or growth

Conformity

All are a tight fist around one station. They are perhaps useful, on some levels, for defending against threat. But a closed fist can’t receive anything new.

What widens it:

Deep rest and relaxation

Awe, which interrupts the sense that we already know what’s here

Stillness long enough for the usual railguards to go quiet

Surprise

Asking questions, rather than affirming answers

Exposure to the arts and new ideas

Time in nature

Creative expression

Any deliberate practice of frequency selection. Choosing, on purpose, rather than defaulting to our habitual channel

What else is possible?

Tonight, before sleep, don’t review your day or plan tomorrow. This re-grips the same station we’ve been on since morning. Instead, ask this question: What else is possible? Then, let the question go without trying to answer it. Don’t try to solve it or journal a conclusion. Let the question sit as you fall asleep.

Without expectation, throughout your days, keep asking the question, what else is possible? Notice, over the following days, whether anything shifts. Perhaps a decision suddenly has more than the previously obvious choices. Maybe your emotions recalibrate, or an idea arrives whole instead of built. Something arrives or something leaves.

You may notice concrete shifts. Or, it may simply be a sense of loosening the grip on a fixed idea of reality. A new sensation of expansiveness or freedom. It doesn’t need to be dramatic. It may be a changed decision or an unexpected opening. Perhaps it’s a retexturing of feeling. A knowing.

We’re the antenna, the dial isn’t locked, and a lot more is possible.

---

If you enjoyed this article, you may be drawn to read my book, A Map of Secret Rivers: How to Navigate Timelines. It began as a year and a half of transmissions and became a practical manual for this work.

For those called to deeper work, I also offer Timeline Navigation Coaching.

For a full index of my articles and offerings, please see here.

The paid tier of this Substack now also includes The LifeUnloop 30 Day Challenge as a solo challenge to dissolve your own loops. Many have called LifeUnloop life-changing.

Interested in the tarot? Check out my latest project here (still in development).