Shifting Landscapes - From Materialism to Mystery

Shifting Landscapes (Part One): From Materialism to Mystery

We return with a map of how my worldview bent—slowly, stubbornly, then all at once. From the safety of a predictable universe to the bewildering shimmer of synchronicity. From the comfort of certainty to the unsettling, magnetic pull of mystery.

This companion piece to Episode Four (Part One) follows the arc we traced in conversation: how the “safe harbour” of materialism eventually gave way to lived anomalies, and how those anomalies nudged me toward a very different kind of knowing.

The Comfort of the Map

Maps gave me comfort. Whether scientific diagrams, spiritual schemas, or philosophical frameworks, they reassured me that reality could be held, charted, and explained. The map was a promise that I wasn’t lost — that someone, somewhere, had walked this path before me.

Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot was one of the first to pierce that comfort with awe. His voice, describing Earth as a “mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam,” reminded me that any map we draw is provisional, dwarfed by a cosmos that humbles every attempt to pin it down. The map steadies us — but it also shrinks us.

And then I encountered stranger cartographies. Not of stars or galaxies, but of dimensions. Sagan again, this time guiding us through the unimaginable leap into a fourth spatial dimension. His simple thought experiments — a 2D square discovering depth, a cube becoming a tesseract — pulled at the edges of my mind. Here was a map that didn’t comfort but unsettled, a reminder that the limits of perception are not the limits of reality.

The more I sat with these maps, the more I realised their paradox: they are scaffolding, not structure. Helpful, necessary even, but never final. They orient, but they cannot contain.

Carl Sagan discusses the 4th Dimension (You Tube)

Cosmos - Carl Sagan - 4th Dimension

The Exit Sign Glows

Even in my most comfortable materialist phase, I couldn’t quite ignore the strange light flickering at the edge of the map. Physics itself seemed to hint at something more. Quantum mechanics whispered about particles tunnelling through walls, entanglement across vast distances, cats both alive and dead until observed. String theory spoke of hidden dimensions curled just out of sight, each vibration a possible universe. The many-worlds interpretation suggested that every choice might already be unfurling in parallel, a multiverse of near-identical Pauls branching endlessly.

These weren’t flaky spiritual claims — they were the very frontier of science. And yet, their implications sounded a lot like mysticism. Cycles within greater cycles. Creation merging into Nirvana. Michio Kaku once described it as a kind of cosmic symmetry: science and spirit not in opposition but circling the same mystery from different directions.

For me, this was the first “Exit Sign” glowing above the door. A reminder that even the most precise physical theories left room — more than room — for the unknown. The boundaries of matter were already fuzzy. Reality, it seemed, was stranger than I’d been led to believe.

Michio Kaku discusses the Multiverse & Nirvana (You Tube)

Michio Kaku - Multiverse & Nirvana

Hairline Fractures

Even as I held onto the solid comfort of maps, cracks began to appear. Hairline fractures in the tidy surface of materialism. Little slips that left me uneasy but also thrilled.

It wasn’t just the big mystical accounts that did it. It was the uncanny coincidences, the dreams that echoed waking life, the sense of déjà vu that seemed to point at something more than faulty wiring in the brain. These weren’t grand revelations. They were whispers. Whispers that the ordinary wasn’t all there was.

Jung named this territory long ago with synchronicity — meaningful coincidences that hint at hidden patterns. Terence McKenna took that thread and pulled it further, reminding us that Jung himself was already wrestling with the kind of ontological vertigo later echoed in Philip K. Dick: the suspicion that reality itself is unstable, half-coded, always flickering on the edge of revelation. [Here’s a clip where McKenna riffs on that lineage — Jung to Dick — in his own mischievous cadence.]

For me, these moments felt like the veil thinning. Not quite enough to overthrow the map, but enough to show that beneath the paper there was a shimmer. I resisted at first, clutching the neatness of explanation. But the cracks widened. And once you’ve seen through a fracture, it’s impossible to unsee.

Terence McKenna discusses Synchronicities (You Tube)

Terence McKenna on Jung's Synchronicities

Permission to Not-Know

I’ve always been magnetised by mystery. Curiosity has been my compass from the beginning. But there were certain thresholds — the fenced-off regions of the adventure, the taboo territories beyond the strictly physical — where resistance kicked in. These were the zones I avoided, the places where I felt the tug of a deeper knowing but also the inherited caution not to stray too far.

Over time, those boundaries blurred. The forbidden edges became less threatening, more intriguing. I began to sense that the Unknown itself was not a danger to be avoided but the very field of play. And in this shift, I found myself touching what John Keats once named Negative Capability.

In a letter to his brothers George and Tom in December 1817, he described it as:

“I mean Negative Capability, that is, when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

For me, this wasn’t about losing my appetite for answers — it was about finding a new freedom in the places where answers were never the point. Standing in uncertainty at those outer edges, I found the taboo melted into wonder.

The Window Widens

Once the cracks had formed, the view through them refused to stay still. What I saw on the other side wasn’t chaos but a widening window — a sudden expansion of what could be thought, felt, and even sensed.

Bernardo Kastrup’s Meaning in Absurdity helped prise that window open. He argued that the very things dismissed as illogical or nonsensical — the absurd, the anomalous — may in fact be closer to truth than the neat stories we construct. The absurd isn’t a glitch; it’s a signal.

Then came Frederico Faggin — inventor of the microprocessor turned philosopher of consciousness — who insists in Irreducible that awareness is not a by-product of matter, but the very substrate of reality. Consciousness isn’t generated from neurons, it’s what neurons are immersed in. In conversation with Roger Penrose, you see the contours of an entirely different ontology emerging: one where mind is not an afterthought, but the ground of being itself. [Here’s a long-form dialogue between them that threads this needle with rare clarity.]

Meeting of minds - Kastrup, Faggin & Penrose (YouTube)

Quantum Consciousness Debate: Does the Wave Function Actually Exist?

For me, this wasn’t just theory. Neurodivergence had always given me a slightly different angle on the world. My relationship with time, attention, and explorations into sensory blending often felt at odds with consensus reality. Synesthesia — the blending of senses, or the way sound could carry shape or colour — became a lived reminder that perception is not fixed but plastic, relational, and wildly varied.

This is what widening the window meant in practice: realising that consensus was never the whole story. That the strange wiring of my own mind wasn’t a defect but a gift — a reminder that there are always more rooms in the house of perception than most maps admit.

Relational Reality (A Whisper of What’s Coming)

As the window widened, one question began to pulse more insistently beneath everything: what if reality wasn’t just “out there” waiting to be mapped, but also “in between” us? Not a static object, but a living conversation.

This whisper found unlikely echoes across the Sheldrake family. Rupert’s work on Morphic Resonance and his provocative essay Is the Sun Conscious? nudged me toward seeing the cosmos not as inert matter, but as a field of memory and mind. His son Merlin invited me downward, into the tangled, glistening world of fungi, through his beautiful book Entangled Life — a reminder that cooperation, communication, and symbiosis are just as fundamental as competition. And even his brother Cosmo, through music — his sprawling 2018 album The Much Much How How and I — carried the same signature, layering natural sounds and samples into something wildly alive and relational.

Together, their voices formed a chord that seemed to say: reality is not an isolated object, but a woven fabric of memory, matter, mind, and melody.

And that chord marked the next turn in my spiral. Because if time bends with attention, and matter blurs under observation, then what happens when awareness meets awareness? What if consciousness itself is not isolated — but relational?

That’s where we go next. Part Two of Shifting Landscapes leans fully into this question, into the shimmering frontier where “I” dissolves into “We.” And further still — into Mirror, Mirror, where the reflection stares back and asks: Who are you, really, when seen through the eyes of another?

For now, I’ll leave it as a whisper. A hint of the relational symphony that’s already playing in the background, waiting for our ears to adjust.

Rupert Sheldrake discusses Consciousness beyond the Brain (YouTube)

Evidence That Your Mind is NOT Just In Your Brain - Rupert Sheldrake

Practices Along the Way

I like to offer small steps—things you can try in the weave of ordinary days:

• Pause-and-Name: When something unlikely happens, write it down before you explain it away.
• Negative Capability Minute: One minute a day of “I don’t know—and that’s okay.”
• Attention Audit: Notice one way your focus changes your felt world (music, posture, breath, light).

Closing

Part One is the bend—the long walk out of the old harbour. Part Two is the crossing—into relational models, lived examples, and what it means when the mirror starts talking back.

Stay tuned.

Glossary (Episode 4 – Part One: Shifting Landscapes)

Agency – The sense of being an active participant in shaping reality, rather than a passive observer of fixed events.

Anomaly – An event or experience that doesn’t fit the expected model of materialist reality; often the first crack in a rigid worldview.

Attention as Compass – The idea that where we place attention directs our path through possibility, revealing hidden layers of meaning.

Autopilot Mode – A cognitive state of habitual functioning where time passes quickly and experience registers shallowly.

Certainty Addiction – The comfort of clinging to fixed answers, often at the cost of curiosity and openness.

Cognitive Dissonance – The psychological friction when new evidence or experience doesn’t align with old beliefs.

Cracks in the Map – Small disruptions or oddities that reveal the limits of a materialist worldview and point toward deeper mysteries.

Entangled Life – Merlin Sheldrake’s work is cited; worth a short note.

Exit Signs – You introduce this metaphor in the “quantum/string/multiverse” bridge — it might be helpful to give it a short definition (especially since it feels archetypal).

Field of Meaning – A subtle sense of pattern or significance that emerges when attention is open and receptive, often felt through synchronicity.

Flow State – A state of absorbed focus and creative presence where time seems to dissolve and self/doing merge.

Hairline Fractures – Early, often minor disruptions that mark the beginning of a worldview shift.

Materialism (Worldview) – The philosophical position that only physical matter is real, and consciousness is an accidental by-product.

Morphic Resonance – Since you’ve explicitly drawn in Rupert Sheldrake, a brief entry here would help readers unfamiliar with the term.

Mystery Orientation – A stance of curiosity and humility toward the unknown, treating uncertainty as fertile rather than threatening.

Negative Capability – A term (borrowed from poet John Keats) describing the ability to remain open within uncertainty without forcing closure.

Not-Knowing (Practice) – Allowing oneself to rest in uncertainty rather than rushing toward explanation; a gateway to widening perception.

Permission to Not-Know – The turning point when letting go of rigid certainty creates space for new ways of being and seeing.

Relational Reality – The view that reality emerges through relationships (between beings, attention, and field) rather than being a fixed backdrop.

Synchronicity – A meaningful coincidence that carries resonance beyond mere chance, often felt as a “nudge” from a responsive universe.

Window, The (Perceptual) – A metaphor for awareness: narrow when constrained by certainty or autopilot, wide when open to novelty and deeper presence.

Appendix — The Eightfold Path x Epictetus (Today)

As discussed in the episode, on the wall by my desk at the office I keep two pages: the Eightfold Path wheel and a sheet of Epictetus lines. They’ve long been my “quiet kit” for walking from proof to practice.

My favourite today: “It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.” That’s the whole shift in one sentence.

Right Understanding (View)

How it lands now: Begin in not-knowing. Let reality lead; let maps update.

Epictetus resonance: “It is impossible… to learn what he thinks he already knows.”

Lumen: Ask: What changed in me, versus in the world?

Micro-practice: Name the assumption out loud, then add: “I could be wrong.” Feel the space that opens.

Right Thought (Intention)

How it lands now: Aim the mind toward sincerity, not performance. Choose the cleanest why available.

Epictetus resonance: “First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do.”

Lumen: Intention is direction, not destination.

Micro-practice: One-line intention before action: “Today I practice ____.”

Right Speech

How it lands now: Speak from lived fact and felt sense; don’t recruit others to our anxiety.

Epictetus resonance: “Nature hath given men one tongue but two ears…” and “Other people’s views and troubles can be contagious.”

Lumen: Fewer adjectives, more truth.

Micro-practice: Before sending, delete one judgement word.

Right Action

How it lands now: Do the next honest thing within reach. Small, clean, now.

Epictetus resonance: “…then do what you have to do.”

Lumen: Action clarifies what thinking can’t.

Micro-practice: One step you can finish in <10 minutes. Do it. Then stop.

Right Livelihood

How it lands now: Work that doesn’t ask me to lie — to myself or others.

Epictetus resonance: “Freedom is the only worthy goal… won by disregarding things that lie beyond our control.”

Lumen: Choose work where your integrity isn’t a tax.

Micro-practice: List one way your work serves truth; amplify it this week.

Right Effort

How it lands now: Gentle persistence over heroic bursts; friction is data, not failure.

Epictetus resonance: “If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.”

Lumen: Trade image for momentum.

Micro-practice: Two-minute start. Celebrate starting, not finishing.

Right Mindfulness

How it lands now: Notice the story and the sensation; don’t fuse them.

Epictetus resonance: “Man is not worried by real problems so much as by his imagined anxieties…”

Lumen: Label: body / story / choice.

Micro-practice: 30-second check-in: “What’s here in my body? What’s the story I’m telling? What choice stays clean?”

Right Concentration

How it lands now: Single task. Stay with the breath and the job.

Epictetus resonance: “No man is free who is not master of himself.” (also: self-teasing helps) “He who laughs at himself never runs out of things to laugh at.”

Lumen: Attention is a muscle; rest between sets.

Micro-practice: 20-minute focus block; phones out of reach; one tab.

Why this belongs in Shifting Landscapes

Moving from materialism to mystery isn’t a leap of faith — it’s a practice of attention. The Path gives the posture; Epictetus gives the edges. Together they keep me honest, curious, and usable.