Reality Is Not What It Seems: How to See the Illusion and Reclaim Your Mind

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Reality is not what it seems, no matter what your senses tell you. Your senses will insist that reality ends at what you can see, touch, hear, taste, and smell. And yes, your perception is real because you live within the constraints of your experience. However, your experience is distorted because your senses cannot perceive the deeper structures of reality. 

The truth is, your ‘reality’ is merely a survival-optimized interface, built on illusion rather than fact. It exists to help you navigate the world, not to show you the truth, but to help you survive. But by taking your perception at face value, you trap yourself in a prison of half-truths. 

Transformation begins when you accept that you are not who you think you are, and reality is not what it seems. 

You’re Lying to Yourself

Most people build their understanding of reality on the five senses. It’s how humanity has navigated the world for millennia. But it’s through these five senses, and mistaking them for absolute truth, that you become trapped in illusion.   

Every second, you receive around 11 million bits of information. But consciously? You process only about 50. The rest vanishes beneath awareness, processed subconsciously without ever reaching the light of day. 

Even now, as your eyes trace these words, your peripheral vision is filled with unnamed objects. Flickers of motion you rarely register consciously. Your fingers, wrist, and arm feel the weight of the device you’re holding, yet your awareness has moved on. 

A quiet cacophony of sounds swirls through your environment, unnoticed yet always present. Scents weave subtly through the air. Even the taste in your mouth, often ignored, hums faintly beneath your awareness. 

Yet for all their power, your senses are crude instruments, narrow portals in a storm of invisible data.  

Reality Is Not What It Seems: A Whisper Through Eternity

You think you’re seeing reality, but what you’re actually perceiving is a fragment so small it barely exists.

Take the electromagnetic spectrum, for example. You see only because light reflects off your surroundings and strikes the retina. Your brain then decodes that signal and constructs what you call vision.

You might be thinking, so what? But it matters because it reshapes everything you believe about reality. What you see is a mere sliver, the tiniest pinprick, of the vast electromagnetic spectrum. 

The electromagnetic spectrum spans 10²³ in wavelength, a number beyond comprehension. So, here’s a better way to picture it: If the entire spectrum stretched from Los Angeles to New York City, the range of light you can see would be the size of a peanut…rolling down a sidewalk in Manhattan. 

Or imagine watching a 24-hour movie and catching only half a second of it.

Bill Bryson stated:

But this isn’t just about sight. The illusion runs deep. It’s built into everything you think you know.

How Small Can You Go?

Everything you’ve ever touched isn’t what it seems. When you rest your hand on a table, it only stops because the atoms in your body and the atoms in the table are packed densely enough to resist passing through one another. Whether wood, stone, glass, or metal, it doesn’t matter. At scale, it feels solid. But zoom in far enough, and the illusion begins to break. 

At the subatomic level, everything changes. For instance, if an atom were the size of an SUV, its electron would be a grain of sand drifting nearly two miles away. That’s how much emptiness lies between the building blocks of all matter.

That’s a lot of space. In fact, there’s so much space that if you removed all the space from the atoms in our bodies, the entire human population could fit inside an apple. 

Now, consider color. You don’t actually see color; you see reflected wavelengths of light. The grass isn’t greener on the other side because “green” exists within it. It’s green because it reflects light in a frequency your brain translates as green. 

So, what does all of this mean? It means that your concept of reality isn’t solid. It’s not real. Instead, it’s a cascade of interpretations, an amalgamation of data filtered through sense, shaped by story.

The reality is your brain is extremely good at receiving data and translating it into something you can use to survive. It’s reason, logic, and pattern recognition. Not truth. Just survival.

The Brain Doesn’t Care About Truth; Only Survival

The human mind is remarkably adept at solving problems. Even as children, we begin forming patterns long before we’re taught to look for them. They build internal models of the world, subjective blueprints born from sensation and experience. But, they do it subjectively. 

Throughout your life, you’ve followed this same pattern. You experience something, filter it through the brain, your internal software engine, and build a model that quietly whispers, “When X, Y, Z happens, here’s what to expect.”

Once formed, those models are tucked neatly into the folds of your subconscious where they are quickly forgotten, yet quietly active. They’re running silently, unquestioned, never pausing to ask if they still serve your good. 

Most people assume they see the world objectively. But the truth is, you’re riddled with bias. Confirmation bias alone, your tendency to favor congruence over contradiction, shapes most of what you believe. You accept and remember what supports your views and discard what doesn’t. 

And that’s just one. Add negativity bias, in-group loyalty, the illusion of control, and fundamental attribution error, and you begin to see the pattern.

In the end, you believe the world works a certain way, simply because you’ve decided it does

You Don’t See the World As It Is. You Project It

Reality isn’t what it seems because what you call ‘reality’ is a projection of your own mind. It’s why the age-old question lingers: if a tree falls in the forest with no one to hear it, does it make a sound?

This question reveals the deeper illusion: Sure, your ears would register a thunderous crash, but sound is just frequency, a vibration. If nothing is there to receive or translate the signal, was there ever a sound at all?

Now apply this to your inner life. Your thoughts. Your emotions. Are your feelings the truth? Or are they just patterns, learned through experience and mistaken for reality?

The truth is that your brain fills in the blanks automatically and unconsciously. Even pain is not pure. It’s an interpretation of chemical signals filtered through memory, context, and story.

Consider an experiment: A subject places one arm behind a curtain, while a fake rubber hand is placed in front of them. When both the hidden real hand and the visible fake hand are touched in sync, feathered, pricked, tapped, the brain begins to transfer sensation to the rubber hand.

The subject feels what the fake hand experiences.

Their mind adopts the illusion as reality.

Meanwhile, the real hand, their actual body, registers nothing.

If your brain can be fooled so easily by sensation, something you usually trust without question, then what else have you misinterpreted? How many of your beliefs were created in moments of stress or pain, accepted as truth without being questioned? 

What you perceive is not raw truth, but a hallucinated blend of memory, meaning, and bias, all dressed up as reality.

Reality Is Not What It Seems and Neither Are You

If your perception is that limited, what does that say about your self-concept? Your identity? If your ‘self’ is built on false inputs, and reality is an illusion, then so is your identity.

Maybe the ‘truth’ you’ve come to accept isn’t truth at all. Maybe your limits aren’t real. What if the pain you’re feeling isn’t even based on what’s really there, but rather, it’s your interpretation of it? 

Everyone has a light side and a shadow side: a warrior and a victim, a truth-teller and a deceiver. You’ve felt this countless times, knowing there’s more inside you, yet you still settle for something far less. 

Somewhere, deep in the recesses of your mind, a part of you whispers that what you accept as reality is a lie, because it knows what you’re truly capable of. 

The harsh truth is that the only thing holding you back is fear. 

It’s the same thing that holds me back, too. Each of us holds limiting beliefs and doubts, rooted in fear, which stifles our ability to show up fully and live the life we know we’re meant for. And because of that, we struggle to pursue the dreams, desires, or goals we long to accomplish.

Some handle this fear better than others, but at some point, we all butt up against it. 

The question then becomes: Will you continue to accept your current version of reality, or start reframing it to live the life you truly want?

If you enjoyed this, read The Identity Crisis You Don’t Know You’re Having next. It goes deeper.

Until next time.

Josiah

For more information or resources, visit josiahthibodeau.com