On Sonder, Consciousness, and Staying Curious

I’ve been pretty quiet on here lately. My initial spark of creativity and inspiration seemed to have waned under the pressure I started to put on this project.

I’m currently reading Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert (great recommendation from the Telepathy Tapes), and Elizabeth talks about how inspiration needs space to breathe. When we demand perfection or financial success from it, we put it under strain that it does not respond well to.

I could feel my own creativity and inspiration receding once it felt the weight of my self-imposed expectations.

So with that in mind, I’m going to try to take Defining Sonder a little less seriously. Not because I don’t care, but because I want to stop caring so much that it kills the project before it really gets off the ground.

Elizabeth shared a quick quote from a woman she once met:

“We all spend our twenties and thirties trying so hard to be perfect, because we’re worried about what people will think of us. Then we get into our forties and fifties and start to feel free when we decide we don’t care what anyone thinks. But you won’t be completely free until your sixties and seventies, when you finally realize this liberating truth—nobody was ever thinking about you, anyhow.”

I’m leaning into that energy as I head into the new year.

So I want to start again here, by sharing a blog I wrote a few weeks ago but never published.

Over the past few months, I’ve been reading books that continue to stretch how I think about what Defining Sonder could and should be.

Infinite Awareness: The Awakening of a Scientific Mind by Marjorie Woollacott (another Telepathy Tapes recommendation) is one of them that really challenged many of my default assumptions.

I started Defining Sonder thinking mostly about psychology, storytelling, and human connection, but lately it has expanded to include consciousness, the Self, and what might lie beneath our everyday experience.

Sonder is the realization that every person you meet carries a life as full and complex as your own. Each of us arrives in this moment with our own history, experiences, emotions, family stories, and biology, all of which shape how we see the world.

From the beginning of this project, the idea that we all experience the world differently, based on our own inner systems and unique consciousness, felt profound enough. It made my world feel more textured, and it softened the edges of judgment to make room for more empathy.

But lately I’m wondering if sonder points to something even deeper.

As I read more about what consciousness is and what scientists still don’t know about it, my curiosity continues to sharpen.

Woollacott’s research, along with work in contemplative neuroscience and even some quantum hypotheses, raises the possibility that consciousness might not originate in the brain. To be really clear here... she suggests it originates somewhere beyond the brain... an external source.

Therefore, she states that our brains are likely not the source, but rather, a receiver, processor, and filter localizing something much larger.

If that’s true, or even conceivable, then each person’s inner world is not entirely separate. It is obviously personal and shaped by experience, but maybe not isolated. Maybe we are all drawing from the same underlying field of awareness, filtered through our own unique lives.

The metaphor I keep returning to is light passing through a prism. The source stays the same. The colors change based on the angle.

I’m not claiming certainty here. I’m following a question because it feels worth following. Neuroscience doesn’t agree on what consciousness is. Quantum physics is often misapplied. Spiritual traditions use different languages to describe oneness. But what stands out to me is the overlap among disciplines that rarely speak the same language.

Psychology tells us we each hold a private inner world.

Neuroscience tells us perception is constructed.

Spiritual traditions suggest all things are connected.

Some theories in physics hint that separation may be less solid than it appears.

I think sonder might sit at the center of all of this.

At first, sonder helped me see the difference, that each person carries an invisible world of their own, but now I’m starting to notice sameness beneath that difference. If consciousness is shared and experience is the filter, then connection becomes more than empathy; maybe it becomes recognition.

What if truly seeing another person is, in some small way, an act of remembering something about yourself? What if the distance between us is thinner than we think? And what if other people aren’t obstacles, but openings into the same awareness we all emerge from?

I’m not asking these questions as a believer. I’m asking them as someone who is curious and willing to sit with the uncertainty of it all.

And that's really what I want Defining Sonder to be right now... not necessarily an answer, but a practice of asking better questions.

So how does this show up in real life?

Well, I think it starts with slowing our perception down. Noticing when we assume we already understand someone. Catching how quickly the brain reduces a person to a label or a single moment.

It also continues with wonder.

What might this person be seeing that I’m not?

How has their experience shaped this interaction?

What might we share beneath the surface?

And really, I'm hoping it leads to compassion, not as sentiment, but as a reasonable response to uncertainty. If we emerge from the same source, filtered through different lives, then to me, compassion makes the most sense.

I’m still exploring these ideas, and I’m letting them interrupt the version of Defining Sonder I thought I wanted to initially build.

In doing that, I’m grateful to be learning about the flow of creativity, too.

Both creativity and connection seem to close down under pressure. Both open up when there’s room to ask questions without demanding conclusions.

So this is me loosening my grip. Writing before everything is clear. Letting curiosity lead instead of control. Trusting that the work knows where it wants to go, even when I don’t.

And for now... that feels like enough.

Thanks, Elizabeth Gilbert.

With love,

Dre