Image by Silviu on the street
In This Article:
- How context determines meaning in every experience.
- Why seeing only part of the story leads to false conclusions.
- The role of perception vs. reality in shaping truth.
- How cognitive bias impacts our understanding.
- The connection between storytelling, interpretation, and conflict.
Context is Everything: Why Your Perspective Matters
by Paul Levy, author of the book: The Quantum Revelation
Every author knows that getting to the moment when you hand in your final manuscript to the publisher is a charged time, which oftentimes is when dreamlike stuff happens. I was literally within an hour of turning in the final draft of this book on the day of the deadline, mulling over the final issues I was dealing with, when something crazy happened. Keep in mind that the last, and newest (and therefore freshest in my mind) section that I had written was about quantum contextuality.
I had taken a break from writing to hop on my bike and go to the grocery store to get some food. I am biking back toward my house, and the car in front of me has its right signal on and is in the act of turning right.
I continue going straight as the driver turns right, and much to my utter amazement (and horror), in the middle of his right turn, evidently realizing he was going the wrong way, he decided to make a spontaneous U-turn to go left. As this was happening, it was one of those moments where time slows down and I remember thinking that not only could I not believe this was happening, but that I had never seen anyone do this before.
Being in his blind spot, I squeezed my hand brakes hard, and coming as close as I ever have in my entire life to getting hit by a car, barely avoided getting flattened. I screamed at the driver at the top of my lungs, who passed less than an inch in front of me. He drove off without stopping.
Another Viewpoint
At the very moment that this is happening, a guy who had just crossed the street and was walking the other way (with his back to what had just transpired), evidently heard my scream, turned around and saw a particular slice, a freeze-frame snapshot of what had just occurred—which to his mind looked like a car turning left into a bicyclist. This pedestrian immediately began screaming at me—berating me at the top of his lungs—that it’s my fault, that I’m to blame, that as a bicyclist I should never bike on the left side of a car.
Totally in the middle of the shock of what was now coming at me from multiple fronts, I turned (as the car passed in front of me) and began screaming—at the top of my lungs—at the pedestrian as, now in a state of complete overwhelm, I awkwardly tried to defend myself as best as I could from his attack, which continued unabated. Instead of going up and confronting him (which wouldn’t have gone well), I immediately cycled home. It was quite a scene.
Afterward I joked with some friends that, in a weird confluence of events, I had just had the unique experience of having an NDE (near-death experience) while being publicly blamed and shamed for it while it was happening. Either of these experiences by themselves would have been traumatic enough, but the combination of the two taking place together at exactly the same moment in time touched something really deep in me.
I won’t go into the (double) trauma of it all and all that it brought up in me psychologically. I see what happened as a moment where life imitated art. What had taken place was a perfect illustration of the main point I had been writing about in the contextuality section.
The idea of contextuality has to do with it being the context in which something is observed that informs the meaning we ascribe to the event. In other words, where we start the story creates the context for what we are observing, inspiring our interpretation of the event, which informs our behavior.
One Person’s Timeline and Perspective
Based on the particular partial segment of the whole experience that he saw—a car turning left into a bicyclist—the pedestrian connected the dots on the inkblot to fill in his blind spot and immediately interpreted what was happening as my fault. It didn’t occur to him that a different past event (the driver’s illegal U-turn) than the one he had imagined might have led to the same result that he was witnessing.
If he had seen the whole process instead of seeing just a fragment, he would have clearly realized that it was the reckless driver who was to blame. I can easily imagine that for the rest of his life the pedestrian will be convinced that he had witnessed an irresponsible bicyclist almost causing an accident, which would be a self-created delusion in which he entranced himself into believing that something was true—something in his mind that he saw with his own eyes—that wasn’t. I wonder how often we go about our lives doing something similar?
Instead of cycling away, if I had gone up to the pedestrian to try to process with him, it easily could have spiraled out of control into violence—violence was in the air. It felt as if he was willing to descend into violence to justify his viewpoint in order to keep his projection intact.
Species-Wide Madness?
This feels analogous to how people, groups of people—or nations—go to war with each other, all to protect their unconscious projections and keep themselves from looking at their own blindness. It all seems so crazy, and so unnecessary. It is truly a form of species-wide madness.
In writing this and telling my story, I am in the fortunate position of turning the trauma of it all—the experience deeply shook me up—into art. It has never been more clear to me that creativity is the medicine for the trauma of encountering wetiko. It really gets my attention that this happened so close to the book being completed, as if the universe wanted to offer me, before the deadline passed, a living confirmation of what I had been writing about.
Context—where we start the story, which inspires our interpretation and the sense we make of events in our lives—is everything.
Copyright 2025. All Rights Reserved.
Adapted with permission.
Published by Inner Traditions Intl.
Article Source: The Quantum Revelation
The Quantum Revelation: Awakening to the Dreamlike Nature of Reality
by Paul Levy. (2nd edition, revised and expanded)
Revealing the quantum nature of our world and ourselves, The Quantum Revelation shows how quantum physics has become a modern-day spiritual path for awakening and expanding consciousness with particular relevance for the challenging times we are living through.
Explaining the world-transforming effects of quantum physics, Paul Levy shows how discoveries in this field—widely considered the greatest in the history of science—can wake us up from the disempowering spell of the reductionist, materialist worldview, thereby helping to dispel the collective madness that has befallen our species. He explains how quantum physics helps us to consciously realize our vast evolutionary potential and awaken us to the malleable, dreamlike nature of reality, a realization that unlocks the creative spirit hidden within our own minds.
For more info and/or to order this book, click here. Also available as a Kindle edition.
About the Author
Paul Levy is a pioneer in the field of spiritual emergence and a Tibetan Buddhist practitioner for more than 35 years. He has intimately studied with some of the greatest spiritual masters of Tibet and Burma. He was the coordinator of the Portland chapter of the PadmaSambhava Buddhist Center for over twenty years and is the founder of the Awakening in the Dream Community in Portland, Oregon.
He is the author of The Madness of George Bush: A Reflection of Our Collective Psychosis (2006), Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil (2013), Awakened by Darkness: When Evil Becomes Your Father (2015) and The Quantum Revelation: A Radical Synthesis of Science and Spirituality (2018, updated and revised in 2025), and more.
Visit his website at AwakenInTheDream.com/
Article Recap:
Context is everything. The way we interpret reality depends on what we choose to see and where we start the story. Our perceptions create bias, influence meaning, and can even fuel conflict and misunderstanding. By recognizing the power of context, we can break free from false narratives and see the bigger picture with greater clarity.
#ContextMatters #PerceptionIsReality #PsychologyOfTruth #CognitiveBias #Storytelling
