SIGNAL 11: The Grand Illusion

What if being human is only a grand illusion? Energy frozen into form, perception mistaken for truth, separation imagined? You’re not solid. But we are all the same matter. Stardust in motion.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how little we really see. Not metaphorically, but literally. The average person doesn’t realize that we never see our own eyes directly. We don’t see our own body. We don’t hear our own voice. We don’t know exactly what the flicker looks like in our own eyes… which is sad to think about. We see the world through other people’s eyes, and we compensate for ourselves through their experience.

We move through life believing in a reality our brain has stitched together for us, a version of the world that is highly edited, filtered, and entirely dependent on our biology. This isn’t philosophy. This is physics, optics, and neuroscience.

This is also a rudimentary form of spiritual and soul work.

For most of my life, I look out in wonder at the world: the sky in its infinite form, the full belief that we are all from one source of matter, one collective whole. We can sense each other’s pain and perceive the voids in our lives through frequency. We choose these roles not for financial means of survival, but for the collective whole and what we need to evolve into.

And now we know that humanity is suffering. The world is just going through its cycle. We have extracted the earth and all its systems, and as a result, it is extracting us. It’s going to happen.

It’s imminent.

We are stardust: carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen forged in the explosions of stars; it’s an astrophysical reality (I choose to eliminate the word “fact” since I believe it's just an opinion written down and has achieved consensus). Every element in our body heavier than hydrogen was created in the collapse of a dying star. We’re made of what the universe released from its infinite form. And yet, we live as if our lives are isolated units, as if the skin is a boundary. I see these ultimately as cells, transparent cell blocks that we try to hide from each other, and can still feel the frequency.

The jokes are actually on us for how we truly exist in the world. The façade we believe we are forming is just a candy-colored shell, and inside we are riddled with suffering and sadness, masking the harsh words and systems of society, trying to claw our way out of the bucket; the fear of everyday life.

It’s too hard. It’s harsh. It is extractive and abusive to live in this world as it is.

Here’s the Twist

Even the way we see light, color, and form is an illusion. Light enters our eyes through the cornea, is refracted through the lens, and lands on the retina, where photoreceptors, including rods and cones, convert it into electrochemical signals. Rods process brightness; cones, color. These signals are sent through the optic nerve to the visual cortex, where the brain reconstructs a picture of what it thinks we should see.

Question: What if we don’t actually functionally see, but what if it is only this optical illusion? We could be any shape or form. We could also see a variety of ways and this is just how we have chosen to manifest ourselves.

Color doesn’t exist out in the world. It’s entirely manufactured in the brain. We interpret certain wavelengths of light as "red" or "green" or "violet" based on how our cone cells are stimulated, but the redness of a rose isn’t in the rose. It’s in the relationship between photons, the retina, and neural processing.

What if my daughter sees me not as a woman, not as "Mom," but as shapes? As floating rings of color or light? What if children, before we condition them, still live in that liminal space where perception and energy haven’t yet been separated?

The quantum world tells us that particles behave differently when observed. That’s not just physics, that’s a spiritual prompt. Observation shapes outcome. Awareness changes matter. So what happens when we choose to see differently?

The eye, ironically, never sees itself. But what if the act of seeing, the turning inward, creates the color, the shape, the reality of who we are? In that sense, to "become color" is not a metaphor, but a way of saying that the self only exists in relationship. We are the interpretation, not the object.

Question: So what else do we experience that isn’t actually "real"—at least not in the way we think it is?

Sound is only waves of vibration. Music isn’t in the air, it’s in the brain. Its something we hear through the small hairs in our ears reverberating. We call this resonance.

Touch is an electrical signal converted from pressure and temperature. Emotionally, a hug feels different depending on who’s giving it and whether we feel safe. Energetically, I have come to learn about positive and negative ions and their role in our relationships. More to come on this in the future.

Smell is the perception of raw molecules that our brain links to memory via the limbic system. Some people believe that without smell you can’t taste. You can also remember specific experiences. It is why the language 'the nose’ exists. I am fortunate to have a best friend who is a nose and I would say she feels the earth and culture differently. The world lands differently when you are with her.

Taste is really only five chemical cues interpreted into the vast complexity we call flavor, 90% of which is actually smell. My feeling around taste is that it is driven by so many sensory components, like ASMR, texture, shape, and the experience you receive it in. I believe taste is really hard to experience independently of all other senses. As a food-as-medicine expert, I believe that food holds one of the most essential forms of frequency in our bodies. There is a lot more to discuss on this topic.

And let’s not forget about a non-sensory item, but a very important societal item. TIME. Are we talking Chronos or Kairos? Even time isn’t fixed; our perception of it speeds up or slows down depending on our attention, emotions, and bodily state. I look at oscillations and the patterns of life —the “seasons” we all go through to reach our current state. I firmly believe in Kairos and fully support its methodology.

The illusion is incredibly convincing. So convincing that we forget: we are not experiencing reality, we are interpreting Signals.

Now stretch that thought….