How Your Brain Builds Reality — and What Happens When Awareness Expands

What if reality isn’t something out there, but something your brain builds moment by moment?

In this episode of Integrated Wisdom, Tatiana explores the neuroscience of perception, prediction, and awareness - revealing how our consciousness doesn’t just observe reality, it creates it.

You’ll learn:

• The surprising truth about how your brain constructs your experience of the world
• How awareness acts as the bridge between neural processes and spiritual awakening
• Why expanding consciousness changes not just how you see life, but how life responds to you
• How participating consciously in your human experience is the deepest form of spiritual practice

This episode weaves together insights from neuroscience, psychology, and spirituality to illuminate a profound truth: the purpose of awakening isn’t to escape the human experience — it’s to participate in it fully, with awareness, choice, and love.

Whether you’re a therapist, seeker, or simply curious about how consciousness shapes reality, this conversation will expand your perspective and help you live with deeper agency and meaning.

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Intro and Outro music: Inspiring Morning by Playsound

Disclaimer: This podcast is intended for educational purposes only. It is not intended to be treated as psychological treatment or to replace the need for psychological treatment.

Transcript

Tatiana: 0:00

Welcome to the Integrated Wisdom Podcast. I am your host, Tatiana Da Silva, psychologist, spiritual educator, and founder of a body of work. Devote to lead others to remembering what we never truly forgot, that science and spirit were never separate. They are each in their own way, expressions of the same sacred architecture. This podcast is for the quiet revolutionaries, the therapists, the seekers, the spiritually discerning and scientifically curious who know that we are being called into a new paradigm for personal and collective transformation. Together we explore what it means to live a coherent. Soul led life drawing from psychology, neuroscience, epigenetics, energy medicine, and spiritual remembrance. These aren't just conversations. They are transmissions for those ready to return to what's true, to what's whole, and to what's quietly waiting beneath it. Hello and welcome to the Integrated Wisdom Podcast. So glad to have you join me today. Now, have you ever noticed how the world looks different when you're in love or when you're grieving the same room, same light, same faces, but somehow everything feels altered. That's not just our mood. It's perception, and it turns out that your brain isn't seeing reality. It's building it every moment. Today, that's what we're exploring. We're looking at what happens when awareness begins to outgrow those constructions. When the mind's model of the world starts to dissolve, just enough to let something larger in. This is the intersection of neuroscience and mysticism. Where the brain's predictive coding meets awakening. And so as always, let's begin with the science. Modern neuroscience, especially research around predictive processing, suggests that your brain is less like a camera and more like a prediction engine. So rather than passively receiving sensory input from the environment, it's constantly guessing what's out there. It's drawing on our memories, expectations, and prior beliefs to construct a version of reality that feels coherent. And so every sound, every sight, every emotional tone is filtered through that predictive map. Anil Seth, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Sussex. describes consciousness as a controlled hallucination, one that we all just happen to agree on, and so what you experience as the world. Is a synthesis. It's part sensory data and part brain generated story, which can feel very humbling when you think about it because it means that what we call reality is really an interpretation. Your brain edits for familiarity, for survival, for identity. And that raises the deeper question, what happens when awareness begins to notice the construction itself? From a cognitive perspective, expansion occurs when the predictive model loosens. So when you brain's grip on what it expects to see starts to soften, and sometimes this happens spontaneously, like in moments of awe, during experiences of deep meditation, in moments of profound love or loss. Uh, during those experiences, the default mode network, that region of the brain that constructs our sense of self will quiet down. And so in those moments, perception becomes more direct and less filtered. Research by Judson Brewer and others shows that when this self-referential activity decreases, people report feelings of unity, connection, and spaciousness. And so it's not just that consciousness expands, it's that the walls that divide us fall away. These invisible and made up ideas of division that we're separate entities from everything else around us dissolve completely. And so spiritually, this is the beginning of remembrance, right? It's the realization that our awareness is not just trapped inside our brain or this predictive model, but it's in fact what's observing it. It's what the mystics have always pointed to when they say, You are not your thoughts. You are the awareness in which the thoughts arise. Now, from a neuroscientific view, that's not poetic. It's accurate, right? Awareness happens prior to cognition. The brain builds models within awareness, not the other way around. So now. This is where the work of spiritual growth actually happens. Not in transcending the brain, but in becoming intimate with how it constructs our reality. When awareness expands, it doesn't erase the model. It just makes that model more transparent, more obvious to us. And so you begin to see how our thoughts will shape our emotions, how assumptions filter our perceptions, and how our identity narrows the field of possibility. And so the goal isn't necessarily to stop predicting, it's just to widen this model until we can include things like uncertainty, paradox, and wonder. Clinically, we might call this cognitive or psychological flexibility, the ability to hold multiple frames of reference without collapse. But spiritually, it's essentially awakening, right? It's living as awareness that's no longer confined by the map it made. It's that, that remembrance that we are not our bodies, that we're not the characters that we're playing. We are the soul essence within all of this that's, you know, experiencing, the world through this model. And with that in mind, I want to lead you through an embodiment practice. To really turn this from just the theory into direct experience. It's just a short, reflective practice that I call the three fields of perception. And so you can do this wherever you are, but obviously ideally somewhere that there isn't too much distraction and you can safely allow yourself to focus on this for the next minute or so, and it's totally up to you whether you have your eyes open or closed. But when you're ready and you're centered into your breath, I'm going to invite you to bring your attention first to the field of thought. Notice how your mind immediately begins to narrate, to analyze, to label, maybe might go a little gun shy at first as you first turn your attention to it, and it might stop thinking. But if you sit with that for a little, little while. Eventually the noise will start and so there's no need to stop this. Just see it as that one layer first, And then secondly, once you've got a good grasp of that, I want you to then shift to the field of sensation. I invite you to notice any temperatures that you're aware of, either in your body or in the environment around you. Some cold breezes or maybe some warm air. Anything that's coming into contact with your skin, any sensations of pressure, I want you to feel this pulse within your body and see it as raw data before your mind interprets it. We're not trying to make sense of what the sensation's saying. We're just becoming aware that that sensation exists. And this is a sensory field. It's direct, it's immediate, it's alive. And now I want you to widen even further to the field of awareness itself. I invite you to notice the space in which thoughts and sensations are happening. The part of you that can witness the thoughts and sensations you are experiencing taking that step back in that field, it, there is no movement or reaction. It just is psychologically, we call this your observing self, but spiritually it's often referred to as your higher self, and I invite you to just rest there. Not identifying with any single experience or sensation, but just sitting within the spacious knowing that holds it all. Just really stay here, anchored for breath or two. This is what it means in both neuroscience and spirituality, for awareness to expand. Not to add more content, but rather to recognize the context in which everything is happening. So as you move through your day, I invite you to remember that your attention is not neutral. Every time you direct it, you're shaping the scaffolding of your reality. The brain may build its predictions, but awareness chooses where to shine the light. And whatever you illuminate begins to grow. So I encourage you to, every now and then, check in and ask yourself. What am I feeding with my awareness right now? Because this is where expansion becomes creation. Every moment you choose to attend with presence, to beauty, to breath, to truth, to possibility, you're teaching your brain a new pattern, one that reflects the deeper intelligence of who you truly are. That's what's referred to in neuroscience as neuroplasticity, and in spiritual circles, one might call that mindfulness devotion presence. Both are pointing to the same living truth that consciousness evolves through attention So I invite you to notice, intentionally what you're giving your attention to. Notice the things that make you contract. Notice what opens you up. That's how you become the true driver of your life. When you find something that evokes wonder. Stay there a little longer. Let your awareness enjoy what expands it, because this ordinary, miraculous act of participating consciously in your own human life isn't separate from your spiritual path. It is the path. This is the purpose of our existence. Every conversation, every sensation, every breath becomes a site of awakening when you meet it with the fullness of awareness. And so if this conversation has resonated for you and you'd like to go a little bit deeper, I invite you to check out my Free Science of Spirituality micro course. It's a gentle entry point into this integration of neuroscience and the Sacred, and you'll find the link for the course in the show notes below. And so before I go, I just wanna leave you with one last thing. Remember that the world you experience is not fixed. It's being built in every moment that you are awakened to it. And that is why I always say you were never disconnected. Only waiting to remember. Until next time, bye. Thank you for tuning into this episode of Integrated Wisdom. It is my sincere wish that this episode may have intrigued and inspired you to reclaim your power and step into becoming more fully integrated spiritual beings. New episodes are published every second Wednesday, and I hope that you'll continue to join us as we dive deeper into what it means to live an integrated life. If this space has stirred something in you, I invite you to subscribe, share it with those attuned to this path, and explore the full body of work@integratedwisdom.com au. You can also find me on Instagram at Wisdom with Tatiana, where the conversation continues. Until next time, stay discerning, stay curious, and let this be your reminder. You were never disconnected. Only waiting to remember.