Parallel Frames: Perception & Cognition

"The light is freedom from the frame that keeps everyone else on the jungle floor.”

There are countless ways humans try to find their place in the world. Like life in a jungle, we adapt, we climb, and we move through darkness in search of conditions that let us survive. Some reach the canopy and live in warmth and abundance. Most do not. The incorrect frame is the stories that narrate our existence: politics, policy, spirituality, personality, character, religion, and moral theories of right and wrong. The correct frame is simpler and older than all of them. Life is trying to thrive. That is all that is happening here.

Zoom out. Zoom in. Flip the perspective forward, backward, sideways. Strip away culture and story and compare us to every other living system we can observe. The pattern is the same. Organisms move toward conditions that sustain them. They test, adapt, fail, and try again. Humans are not exempt from this process. Our Egos blind us from the truths right in front of us because we wish to make more meaning of what our minds are comfortable with seeing, and what it can process. we simply narrate it.

When we compress all of our explanations down to their essence, what remains is this: we are reaching for the light. Even when we misunderstand what the light is, and even when the path we take guarantees we will never reach it because that is what our mind can or will see, do, and know. The real key is to know what the light is so we know what to look for and how to find it. The light is not worship. The light is not filling the void of an unresolved insecurity with external approval or control. The light is right under our nose yet so far away. The path to the light is pain inside our minds unraveling the parts of it we hide from ourselves so that we may resolve what governs us that we cannot see or hear in our thoughts.

The moment when the mind turns inward and begins to unravel the parts of itself it hides from, the moment when the forces shaping our behavior—fear, insecurity, imitation, unresolved pain—are made visible, we may find the light by stepping outside those frames of reality and into another invisible to those inside them; we may finally see what has been steering us without our awareness and free ourselves from that frame. This frees us from the people who direct us with frames and narratives within them that empower them with our coherence and attention. We end them instantly and all their attention once we see outside the frame we live. We escape the bond that makes us controllable by those whose purpose is defined by the narratives they continue within a frame. That is the purpose of the light. It is to be free from each other's desires and purpose, to instead find our own outside those frames other people live entirely.

Command of the mind allows to remove emotion so that we may control what we bite down and focus on, and choose to instead form a new frame not following the social animals around us in their feeding frenzy reaching amongst each other for what they think is the light that will let them thrive. Once the world goes quiet around us and we react to nothing, the light starts to shine through in a peaceful quiet those whose minds are too noisy from emotion and reaction cannot hear or see.

The light is freedom from the frame that keeps everyone else on the jungle floor, freedom from the purpose, identity, and narratives others requires us to participate in to live. The light is freedom from carrying the burdens others do because of the frames they are trapped in within their minds. This is the light. After we have this, everything else is ours in the real world around us. We can step into frame dimensions invisible to those around us, maneuvering around them and beyond them like a time traveler skipping the cost of the speed of light through parallel frames.

Once we reach this state, the world opens to us in a different way; the path and frame needed to understand the purpose of the light becomes clear. We begin to move through it laterally rather than vertically, like we are stepping into a parallel universe, our frame. We see paths others cannot see. What previously had meaning now has none, and unlocking our grip to choose what we value is freedom from frames that imprison us. We may now step around conflicts rather than into them. We operate in dimensions that feel invisible to those still struggling upward through noise and pressure.

The critical question, then, is not how to climb, but what the light actually is.

It is not worship.

It is not spirituality.

It is not politics and morals.

It is not status.

It is not approval, dominance, or the filling of an internal void through control or recognition.

The light and the frames required to perceive it are closer to us than our right hand is to our left—yet for some, they are as distant as another galaxy. This is not because they are unreachable, but because we cannot inhabit another world line while remaining blind to what our own biology refuses to see, hear, or acknowledge. The mind lives inside constraints it did not choose. The limits of perception, identity, and ego define what feels real and what remains invisible. We do not fail to reach other possibilities because they do not exist. We fail because the architecture of the mind filters them out before they ever enter awareness. To break free from this is to find the light. It is the ultimate red pill.