It’s only the things around you that decide whether you are right side up or upside down. I remember visiting some caverns around the Grand Canyon, where deep under the earth, they turned off all the lights, leaving ultimate blackness, to help us understand how someone trapped down there would go crazy, losing track of whether they were on the ground or on the ceiling. In that kind of blackness, you quickly lose track of your ability to tell where you are in space.

It’s the same if you are falling. If you see the ground pulling closer and closer to you at a rapid rate, then well, pull the rip cord or you’re fucked. But if you are falling, but not actually toward anything, it’s really kind of just a version of flying.

Memory has no past

Our memories and stories of the past have little to do with the past. They are mostly about the present context from which we call them back into life. There is a fun read on this called Pieces of Light by Charles Fernyhough that illuminates recent science on the topic, but it doesn’t take much more than some keen and experimental self-awareness to uncover how true this is in practical terms. The past changes as we change around it. Things we think of as foundational facts can easily turn into smoke, slip away, and become other things entirely. The past doesn’t quite exist, and if it does, it certainly doesn’t matter unless we need it to.

But the future doesn’t have any legs either. Anything I can project for my future can only be constructed from what I know right now. And I don’t want a future that traps me into reliving lives I already know. I want a future of expansion – into concepts and ways of being I can’t yet imagine.

So with no valid past and no compelling future to tend to, life inherently gets invented minute by minute. And the only sources of unfiltered truth are in the moment. And for my money, the only useful inputs for decision making are nuggets of unfiltered truth.