🌀🎄🎁 Spiral Reflections:The Space We Live In.
Eric’s Corner Thursday-December-25-2025 Reflections from the Spiral.
Most of us grow up believing we are something small moving through something vast.
A body traveling across a world that exists independently of us.
A mind tucked somewhere behind the eyes, looking outward.
A self contained, separate, surrounded by everything else.
It feels obvious. Natural. Almost too obvious to question.
And yet many ancient cultures began from a very different assumption. They did not see the self as an object inside experience, but as the space in which experience appears. Not a thing located in the world, but the condition that allows a world to be known at all.
In that view, seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, and smelling are not events happening to us. They are events happening within us. Every color, sound, sensation, and thought arises in the same place, regardless of what it seems to point toward.
The body, then, is not the self.
It is the instrument.
This idea is often dismissed as poetic or abstract, but it is actually a precise claim about where experience occurs. Everything you have ever known about the world has arrived through perception. You have never encountered light itself, only color. Never vibration, only sound. Never objects as they exist independently, only the way they appear when filtered through a nervous system.
From the moment awareness first flickered into form until now, every tree, face, memory, fear, and hope has appeared in exactly the same way. As experience. As something happening here.
We are so accustomed to this that we mistake it for transparency. We assume we are seeing the world directly, rather than recognizing that we are seeing a construction of it, assembled moment by moment from sensory signals, memory, and prediction.
Modern perception science quietly confirms what ancient contemplatives sensed without instruments. The nervous system does not receive the world as it is. It receives electrochemical signals. Everything else is interpretation.
Photons strike retinal cells and are converted into electrical impulses. Pressure waves vibrate tiny structures in the ear and become neural activity. Mechanical force on the skin becomes patterns of firing. Chemical binding in the nose and tongue becomes sensation. At no point does the brain receive redness, loudness, smoothness, or sweetness. These qualities are generated, not delivered.
The world you experience is not transmitted whole.
It is rendered.
Even more striking, there is no place inside the brain where this rendered world appears. No inner screen. No central observer. No command center where a self sits watching the show. Experience emerges as a coordinated pattern across many systems at once. The feeling of a unified world arises from integration, not from location.
Neuroscience has searched for the observer and never found it.
And yet experience is undeniable.
From the inside, it feels as though the world is outside us and we are inside our bodies. But this division is part of the model the brain builds, not something given by raw sensation. Distance, depth, and location are inferred. Inside and outside are conclusions layered onto experience after the fact.
In direct experience, before interpretation, there is only appearance.
Sound appears.
Color appears.
Sensation appears.
Thought appears.
All of it arises in the same open field.
Ancient people pointed to this field and called it the self. Not the personality, not the story, not the name or role, but the space itself. The capacity in which anything can appear.
From this perspective, the body takes on a different meaning. It is not the owner of awareness, but its interface. A sensory and motor system that allows awareness to explore a particular range of possibilities. Change the body, and the world that appears changes with it.
This is not metaphor. It is demonstrable.
Different sensory capacities produce different experiential worlds. Species with other sensory organs inhabit realities we can barely imagine. Even subtle changes to the human nervous system alter the structure of perception entirely. The body does not reveal reality as it is. It constrains what can be known.
The body is how exploration happens.
It is not what we are.
When ancient traditions said we are the space experience happens in, they were not denying the world. They were pointing out where the world is known. Experience requires a context. A place for appearances to arise. That context cannot be found inside experience, because it is what experience appears within.
Nothing needs to be added.
Nothing needs to be taken away.
What changes is where attention rests.The sense that the world exists outside us feels immediate and unquestionable. Objects appear at a distance. Sounds seem to originate from specific locations. Other people appear clearly separate, enclosed in their own bodies, moving independently through shared space.
But this sense of externality is not something the nervous system receives. It is something it constructs.
The brain does not begin with space. It begins with signals. Bursts of electrical activity arriving from different sensory channels at different times, with different intensities. From this raw and fragmented input, a coherent world must be inferred.
Vision offers the clearest example. The retina receives a flat, two-dimensional pattern of light. There is no depth encoded in that signal. No distance. No solidity. The experience of a three-dimensional world is computed using cues such as motion, shading, relative size, overlap, binocular disparity, and learned expectation. What feels like direct perception is the brain’s best guess, refined continuously by feedback.
Hearing works the same way. Sound waves strike both ears at slightly different times and intensities. From these tiny differences, the brain calculates direction and distance. The experience of a sound being “over there” is not in the sound itself. It is an inference layered onto it.
Even touch, which feels intimate and immediate, is mediated. Pressure, temperature, vibration, and pain are detected by different receptors and combined into a single sensation we label as contact. The feeling that touch happens at the boundary of the skin is part of the model, not a given feature of sensation.
In every case, the brain is solving the same problem: how to organize incoming signals into a stable, usable world. Space, in this sense, is not discovered. It is constructed.
This construction is so effective that we rarely notice it. We live inside the finished model and forget the process that produced it. But small disruptions reveal how provisional it is.
The blind spot in vision is one example. Each eye has an area where the optic nerve exits the retina and no visual information is received. You do not see a hole in the world. The brain fills it in seamlessly, using surrounding information and expectation. The absence of data is replaced with a best guess, and the guess feels as real as anything else.
Color constancy offers another example. The wavelengths of light reflecting off an object change dramatically depending on illumination. And yet the object appears to retain the same color. The color you experience is not a property of the light alone. It is the brain’s interpretation of that light in context.
The rubber hand illusion shows how flexible the sense of bodily ownership can be. When visual input and tactile sensation are synchronized in a particular way, people begin to feel that a fake hand is their own. The boundary of the self shifts, not because the body changed, but because the model did.
These phenomena are not edge cases. They reveal the normal operation of perception. What you experience is not a passive recording of reality. It is an active construction, continuously updated, continuously revised.
Modern neuroscience describes this process as predictive processing or active inference. The brain is not waiting for the world to tell it what is happening. It is constantly generating predictions about what it expects to sense, then adjusting those predictions based on incoming signals. Perception is the brain’s best explanation of its own sensory input.
In this framework, sensation does not build perception from the ground up. It corrects perception from the top down. What you see, hear, and feel is shaped as much by expectation and memory as by raw input.
This explains why perception feels so immediate. The brain presents its conclusions, not its calculations. The world appears already formed, already structured, already meaningful.
And yet, all of it exists as activity within a single system.
There is no internal observer watching these perceptions. No separate self standing apart from the process. The sense of being a subject located behind the eyes is itself another construction, built from memory, bodily signals, and narrative continuity.
Neuroscience has never identified a central node where experience is received by a self. There is no place where everything comes together for someone to look at it. Experience arises as a pattern, distributed and unified at the same time.
This is why the idea of being “inside” the body is so compelling and yet so difficult to locate. The feeling of being a point in space is part of the model the brain builds to organize action and movement. It is useful. It is not fundamental.
From this perspective, the distinction between inside and outside begins to blur. Not because the world disappears, but because the boundary turns out to be conceptual rather than absolute. The world you know exists as experience, and experience exists as activity within awareness.
When ancient thinkers described the self as the space in which experience happens, they were pointing to this structural fact. There is content, and there is the capacity for content to appear. Sensations change. Thoughts come and go. Perceptions shift and dissolve. But the capacity in which they arise remains.
The body, in this light, is neither prison nor essence. It is an interface. A specific configuration of sensors and motors that shapes what can be experienced and how. Through it, a world is rendered. Without it, a different world would appear, or none at all.
What we call reality is inseparable from the means by which it is known.
And what we call the self may be closer to the knowing itself than to any particular thing that is known.What makes this perspective difficult to hold is not its complexity, but its familiarity. We are so deeply habituated to identifying with the contents of experience that the context they appear in fades into the background. Attention is almost always drawn to what is seen, heard, felt, or thought, rarely to the fact that seeing, hearing, feeling, and thinking are happening at all.
And yet that fact is the most stable feature of experience.
Thoughts change. Sensations shift. Moods rise and fall. Perceptions flicker and rearrange themselves depending on light, angle, expectation, and memory. But the capacity in which they arise does not come and go in the same way. It does not brighten or dim. It does not age. It does not move from one place to another.
It is simply present.
From the standpoint of perception science, this capacity is not a thing that can be pointed to or isolated. It is not a structure in the brain, nor a location where signals converge. It is better understood as the integrated activity of the system as a whole, the condition that allows information to be experienced rather than merely processed.
This is where modern scientific language and ancient introspection begin to overlap. Not in metaphysical claims, but in structure. Both notice that there is a difference between what appears and the appearing itself.
The difficulty arises when we try to turn that noticing into an object of thought. The moment we do, it becomes just another appearance. Another idea. Another concept floating through awareness. The space itself cannot be grasped as content, because it is what content appears within.
This is why attempts to define the self as awareness often feel slippery or frustrating. The mind wants something solid to hold onto. A thing. A location. A boundary. But awareness is not something added to experience. It is the condition that experience presupposes.
Consider what happens when you listen to a sound. Before it is labeled, before its source is identified, before it is placed in space, there is simply hearing. A vibration appearing. Only afterward does the mind say “car,” “wind,” “voice,” or “music.” The naming happens inside the experience, not before it.
The same is true of vision. Before objects are recognized, there is color and movement. Before distance is assigned, there is pattern. Before “out there” appears, there is seeing. The sense of location is a conclusion, not a starting point.
Even the feeling of being a body is assembled in this way. Signals from muscles, joints, skin, and internal organs are combined into a coherent sense of embodiment. The brain continuously updates this model to maintain balance, coordinate movement, and predict consequences. The experience of “my body” is remarkably stable, but it is still a construction.
This becomes obvious when the model is disrupted. Neurological conditions, sensory loss, or experimental manipulations can fragment or alter the sense of embodiment dramatically. People can lose awareness of entire limbs, feel ownership over objects, or experience their body as larger, smaller, closer, or farther away than it actually is. These shifts do not require philosophical insight. They follow directly from changes in the underlying processes.
What this suggests is not that the body is unreal, but that our relationship to it is mediated. The body we experience is the body as modeled, not the body as it exists independently. Just as the world we see is the world as rendered, not the world as it is in itself.
The implication is subtle but far-reaching. If everything we know of the world exists as experience, and experience exists as activity within awareness, then awareness is not something we possess. It is something we are participating in, or perhaps something we are.
This does not mean that awareness is personal in the way a personality is personal. It does not carry preferences, memories, or intentions on its own. Those arise within it, shaped by biology, history, and context. Awareness itself is indifferent to content. It allows joy and grief with equal openness. It holds clarity and confusion without favor.
This neutrality is often misunderstood as detachment or coldness. But it is closer to unconditional availability. Whatever appears is permitted to appear. Whatever changes is allowed to change.
From this perspective, the sense of being a self struggling against the world softens. Not because challenges disappear, but because they are recontextualized. Pain still hurts. Loss still registers. Fear still tightens the body. But these experiences are no longer identical with the one who knows them.
They are events, not identities.
This distinction matters because much of human suffering comes not from experience itself, but from identification with it. When a thought arises and is taken to be “me,” it gains authority. When an emotion arises and is taken to define the self, it hardens. When a perception is assumed to be a complete picture of reality, it becomes unquestionable.
Recognizing experience as appearance does not invalidate it. It clarifies it. It restores flexibility where there was rigidity, space where there was contraction.
None of this requires belief. It can be noticed directly. The next time a sound arises, notice not what it is, but that it is known. The next time a thought passes through, notice not its content, but the fact that it appears and disappears. The noticing itself does not need to be strained or prolonged. It is already happening.
What changes is not the experience, but the reference point.
Over time, this shift subtly rearranges how life is lived. Actions still happen. Decisions are still made. Relationships still matter. But they are no longer held together by the assumption of a small self pushing against a large world. They unfold within a wider context, one that is less reactive and more accommodating.
This is not transcendence. It is intimacy.
To see that the world appears in us is not to retreat from it, but to meet it more closely. Colors become more vivid, not less. Sounds more immediate. Sensations more textured. When experience is no longer filtered through constant self-reference, it arrives with fewer distortions.
The ancient intuition that we are the space experience happens in was not an escape from life. It was a way of standing more fully inside it.
Modern science, in its own language, points to the same conclusion. The world we know is a construction. The self we feel is a model. What remains constant is the capacity in which both arise.
We are not separate from what we perceive. We are inseparable from the perceiving itself.
And in that recognition, the boundary between observer and observed grows thinner, not because it vanishes, but because it is seen for what it has always been: a useful line drawn within a single, continuous field of experience.
When that field is recognized, nothing needs to be added to make life meaningful. Meaning is already present, woven into the fact of experience itself.
The world appears.
Awareness knows.
And the knowing does not stand apart from what is known.
It is the space they share.Seen from this angle, many long-standing questions about meaning, purpose, and identity begin to reorganize themselves. Not because they are answered, but because the frame they were asked from quietly dissolves.
If the self is assumed to be a small entity inside a large and indifferent world, then life easily becomes a problem to be solved. Meaning must be acquired. Purpose must be discovered. Security must be defended. The future becomes something to reach, and the present becomes a narrow bridge we rush across without noticing where we are standing.
But if experience itself is what we are standing in, the urgency changes shape.
Meaning is no longer something imported from outside experience. It arises from the simple fact that experience is happening at all. Sensation, perception, thought, and emotion are not obstacles on the way to life. They are life, arriving moment by moment in the only way it ever does.
This does not make choices irrelevant. It does not erase responsibility or consequence. It changes how they are held.
Decisions still matter, but they are no longer made from the standpoint of a fragile self defending its position. They are responses arising within a broader field, informed by context rather than driven by fear. Action becomes less about control and more about participation.
Even time begins to feel different.
From the standpoint of perception science, the experience of time is itself a construction. The brain does not perceive the past or the future directly. It reconstructs the past from memory and simulates the future from prediction. What is actually present is a narrow window of ongoing sensory and cognitive activity, stitched together into a sense of continuity.
The feeling of “now” is not a moving point on a timeline. It is the brain’s way of coordinating action. And yet awareness itself is not bound to that coordination in the same way. It does not hurry. It does not anticipate. It does not lag behind.
Events appear in sequence, but the space they appear in does not move with them.
This helps explain why moments of deep absorption or stillness can feel timeless. Attention relaxes its grip on prediction and memory, and experience is no longer measured against what came before or what might come next. Nothing supernatural happens. The system simply stops narrating itself for a moment.
The result is often described as peace, but it is more accurately a kind of alignment. Experience and awareness fall into step with each other. There is less friction, less commentary, less need to manage what is already happening.
Importantly, this alignment does not require withdrawing from the world. It can happen while washing dishes, walking, listening to someone speak, or sitting in traffic. It is not the absence of activity that matters, but the absence of unnecessary resistance to activity.
Resistance tends to arise when experience is interpreted as a threat to identity. When sensations, emotions, or thoughts are taken to define who we are, they are either clung to or pushed away. Both reactions tighten the system. Both amplify suffering.
Seeing experience as appearance does not remove intensity. It removes fixation.
This is why ancient traditions emphasized direct observation over belief. They were not asking people to adopt a new story about reality, but to notice how reality is already being presented. To see how easily the mind confuses its models for what they represent. To recognize how often we mistake our interpretations for the world itself.
Modern neuroscience arrives at a similar conclusion from a different direction. The brain is a prediction machine, constantly modeling the causes of its own sensory input. It does not reveal reality; it renders a useful approximation. And usefulness, not truth, is its guiding principle.
Once this is understood, it becomes harder to take any single perception, thought, or emotion as absolute. Not because it is dismissed, but because it is contextualized. It is one rendering among many possible renderings, shaped by history, biology, and circumstance.
This contextualization creates space.
In that space, curiosity replaces certainty. Listening replaces defense. Attention becomes less about surveillance and more about openness. The world is no longer something to be mastered, but something to be met.
The phrase “we are the space it happens in” can sound abstract until it is grounded in this everyday noticing. The space is not somewhere else. It is not hidden behind experience. It is revealed in the very act of knowing that something is happening.
When you notice a sensation, that noticing is already present. When you notice a thought, the noticing does not come and go with the thought. When perception shifts, the capacity to perceive remains.
This capacity does not need to be cultivated. It is not earned. It is not improved with practice. What changes with attention is not the capacity itself, but our familiarity with it.
Over time, this familiarity tends to soften the sharp edges of experience. Not by dulling them, but by removing the constant self-reference that exaggerates them. Pain is still pain, but it is no longer compounded by the belief that it should not be happening. Uncertainty is still uncertainty, but it is no longer treated as a personal failure.
Life becomes less about fixing experience and more about inhabiting it.
This shift does not produce a permanent state. States come and go like everything else. It produces a different orientation. A quieter confidence that whatever appears can be met because the space in which it appears is already sufficient.
In this sense, the ancient intuition and the modern scientific picture converge on a simple, unsettling truth. We are not spectators of reality. We are participants in its appearance. The world we know and the knowing of it are inseparable aspects of a single process.
The body moves through space.
Perception renders a world.
Awareness holds it all.
Nothing about this requires adopting a new identity. In fact, it works best when identity is held lightly. What matters is not what we call ourselves, but what we notice when we stop taking our interpretations so seriously.
The world does not need to change for this to be seen. Experience does not need to become pleasant or orderly. What changes is the relationship to what is already here.
Seen clearly, the idea that we are the space experience happens in is not an escape from reality. It is a return to it. A return to the immediacy of seeing, hearing, feeling, and thinking before they are turned into stories about who we are and what the world means.
Experience continues to arise.
Awareness continues to know it.
And life unfolds, not outside us, but within the only place it ever has.What follows from this is not a new worldview, but a quieter stance toward the one we already inhabit.
When experience is understood as something that happens within awareness rather than to a separate self, the constant effort to secure a stable position in the world begins to ease. The need to defend an identity, to protect a story about who we are, loses some of its urgency. Not because identity disappears, but because it is seen as provisional. Useful. Contextual.
The self becomes more like a tool than a territory.
This has subtle but real consequences. Conversations change tone. Listening deepens, because there is less pressure to insert oneself into every moment. Disagreement becomes less threatening, because it no longer feels like an attack on existence. Even solitude shifts. It is no longer defined by absence, but by presence without interruption.
None of this makes life simple. Complexity remains. Loss still hurts. Uncertainty still unsettles the nervous system. The body continues to react, sometimes fiercely, to perceived threat and change. Biology does not vanish because insight appears.
But the suffering layered on top of experience begins to thin.
Much of that extra suffering comes from confusion about location. From the assumption that we are a fragile thing inside a hostile or indifferent world, rather than the space in which the world is known. From mistaking the contents of experience for the container that holds them.
When anger arises and is taken to be “me,” it demands action. When fear arises and is taken to define reality, it narrows the future. When grief arises and is treated as an identity, it can feel endless. But when these experiences are recognized as events within awareness, their authority softens. They still speak, but they no longer shout over everything else.
This does not mean disengagement. It means clarity.
Action taken from clarity tends to be more precise, less reactive. It is informed by emotion without being driven by it. It allows for firmness without rigidity, compassion without collapse.
Seen this way, the ancient intuition that we are the space experience happens in is not an abstract metaphysical claim. It is a practical reorientation. It changes where we stand when life presses in.
Modern science, despite its different language, reinforces this reorientation. The nervous system constructs a world. The self is part of that construction. What remains constant is the capacity for experience itself. That capacity is not personal in the usual sense, but it is intimate. Nothing you have ever known has been closer.
We tend to overlook this because it is too near to be seen easily. Like the background hum we stop noticing, or the pressure of the air we live inside, awareness is assumed rather than examined. It does not announce itself. It does not demand attention. It simply allows.
And because it allows everything, it is easy to mistake it for nothing.
But it is not nothing. It is the condition that makes anything possible.
Every perception, every thought, every memory, every hope and fear appears there first. Before interpretation. Before judgment. Before meaning is assigned. Experience arrives, and awareness is already present to receive it.
This is not something to achieve. It is something to notice.
When noticed, it does not remove us from the world. It places us more squarely within it. It restores a sense of participation that had been obscured by constant self-reference. Life feels less like a performance and more like a conversation.
The world continues to unfold. Bodies move. Minds think. Plans are made and revised. None of that stops. What changes is the background assumption about who, or what, all of this is happening for.
It is not happening for a separate observer standing apart from it.
It is happening within the same field that knows it.
We are not outside the stream of experience, watching it pass by.
We are not trapped inside it, struggling to control it.
We are the space it moves through.
And from that space, life does not need to be justified. It does not need to prove its worth. The simple fact of experience is already enough.
The world appears.
The body explores.
Awareness knows.
And in that knowing, without effort or belief, life is already whole.
Thank you for turning,
For reading,
For listening,
For spiraling with me,
Eric.
P.S. If today finds you surrounded by noise or by quiet, by people or by space, may this Christmas meet you exactly where experience is already happening.