I have a few follow-up thoughts on yesterday’s post. While my subjective description of feeling an internal activation after my Chicago experiences was accurate, I was mistaken about its novelty. Revisiting some older Fogknife posts reminds me that I have engaged in shifting my perceptive frame like this before—but, prior to that Chicago visit, I’d all but forgotten the fact.

Reading Max Tegmark’s Our Mathematical Universe in 2020 introduced me to a variant of block universe theory that posits all possible states of reality as extant and eternal. My post about that book described my exercises with seeing all living beings as fellow kinks in a universal five-dimensional fractal. Later that same year, after spending quite some time listening to Alan Watts books and lectures, I wrote how I experimented with drawing upon the metaphor of Indra’s Net to see myself and every other person as expressions of a unifying, underlying system, and how I found the effort challenging, and always only temporary. In retrospect, it’s clear that I didn’t so much learn a new skill in Chicago as resume a practice that I’d set down.

These two posts bookended my 2020, which feels like a lifetime ago. Soon afterwards, I disappeared into full-time work at a giant tech company for three years, obliging me to stop updating Fogknife regularly. I see now how this had the knock-on effect of shelving so many of these experiments and experiences. I’m grateful to my past self for writing about them in public before I forgot them—because I certainly did forget them.

I also wanted to note The Fraud by Zadie Smith, which over the most recent winter holidays I experienced as a phenomenal audiobook narrated by its author. There is a key moment where one character experiences an involuntary perceptive shift similar to the ones I described yesterday and in 2020—though from a different trigger, and with a subtly different outcome. After this character hears the unabridged life story of another protagonist—resulting in the entire middle act of the novel—she temporarily finds herself perceiving every person she meets on the street as a well of infinite depth, underneath their surface markers of ethnicity, gender, class, and momentary disposition. She struggles to hold onto this view for as long as she can, knowing that it will fade—that it has to fade, because the human brain’s evolved social functions are clearly optimized to see only those markers in other people. She knew that she could no more hold that mental model indefinitely than a person doing a handstand could decide to simply live upside-down from then on. The best she can do is write about it, while she can.