Yesterday morning, while having coffee, I did something I normally do not do.
I opened a video.
It showed a man who had been killed by a security guard and two delivery workers after the guard considered him suspicious.
The first thing that came to mind was not a philosophical response, or an attempt to rationally understand what I was seeing.
It was a reaction.
Anger.
A sense of injustice.
And almost immediately, thoughts began to appear:
How can this happen?
These people need to be held responsible.
Someone needs to do something.
For a few minutes, I simply stayed inside that experience.
Then I noticed something that interested me even more than the reaction itself.
The video had ended.
I was still sitting in the same place, with the same coffee in front of me.
Nothing around me seemed particularly different.
But I was.
Not dramatically.
I was still me.
But something had changed in the way I was in that moment.
My attention was different.
My body was different.
Certain thoughts were more available.
And that was when I started wondering what exactly had happened between that video and me.
What exactly reaches us?
We often talk about reality as if it were simply there in front of us, complete and ready to be perceived.
But perhaps our experience does not happen exactly that way.
When I watched that video, I did not simply receive “reality”.
My eyes received images.
My ears received sounds.
My system recognised people, movements, expressions and actions.
My memory participated.
My history participated.
What I understand as violence, injustice, danger and suffering also participated.
I did not simply see bodies moving on a screen.
I saw a man being attacked.
I recognised violence.
I interpreted intention.
I imagined suffering.
I judged what was happening.
And from all of that emerged the experience I was having in that moment.
This does not mean that the world only exists when we perceive it.
The event existed independently of me.
The point is something else.
What I experienced of that event was not a perfectly neutral copy of the world.
It was the way that event had been perceived, organised and interpreted by me.
Perhaps every human experience happens, to some degree, in this encounter between what exists and the system experiencing it.
We do not receive the world completely “raw”.
We encounter it through our senses, our history, our body, our expectations and our memory.
And from that emerges what we experience as reality.
An experience does not end when the event ends
When the video ended, the experience did not disappear with the image.
Something remained.
This is what I am calling an internal state.
I do not mean anything particularly abstract by that.
An internal state is simply the way I was organised in that moment.
My body.
My attention.
My emotions.
The thoughts that appeared more easily.
The things I was more sensitive to.
I was still me.
But I was not organised in exactly the same way I had been a few minutes earlier.
Then a question came to me:
If someone came to talk to me at that moment, would I respond exactly as I would have before watching the video?
Probably not.
Maybe my tone would be different.
Maybe I would have less patience.
Maybe I would interpret something more harshly.
Even without consciously noticing it, what I had just experienced would already be part of how I met the next moment.
We do not restart from zero every time something new happens.
Every new event meets a system that already arrives in some condition.
Now place another person in the scene
Imagine that, immediately after the video, someone walks into the kitchen and starts talking to me.
That person does not simply encounter “Felipe”.
They encounter Felipe in that moment.
And I do not simply encounter “another person” either.
I perceive their tone.
Their expression.
Their words.
Their posture.
The context.
And I organise all of that inside my own experience.
Then I respond.
But my response does not end with me.
It becomes part of what the other person is experiencing.
My tone reaches them.
My expression reaches them.
My words reach them.
Maybe they notice that I am tense.
Maybe they think I am irritated with them.
Maybe they become defensive.
Maybe they ask whether something happened.
And then their response comes back to me.
Now there is a new situation.
A situation that did not exist before our interaction.
And I now have to perceive, interpret and respond to that situation too.
This is where things become more interesting.
Because an interaction does not seem to be only two people expressing things that were already completely formed inside each of them.
The interaction itself begins producing new conditions while it happens.
My experience influences my response.
My response becomes part of their experience.
Their response becomes part of mine.
And little by little, a dynamic emerges that neither of us carried fully formed before the conversation began.
We see this all the time.
A conversation begins lightly and becomes tense.
Another begins awkwardly and, after a joke, everyone relaxes.
A sentence opens a space that did not exist before.
Another closes it.
A silence changes the meaning of what was just said.
And often no one consciously decided to produce that atmosphere.
It emerged.
The interaction began building itself while it was happening.
Perhaps there is something between “my reality” and “your reality”
When two people interact, each person continues to have their own experience.
I still perceive from where I am.
You still perceive from where you are.
But something important is now happening between us.
I become part of what you are perceiving.
You become part of what I am perceiving.
My response changes what you encounter in the next moment.
Your response changes what I encounter in mine.
So part of what we are experiencing is happening in the relationship itself.
A conversation may be the simplest example.
It does not exist in full before it begins.
My first sentence changes what can happen next.
Your response changes the situation again.
A question can open a possibility.
An attack can close one.
A gesture can completely change the direction of the interaction.
The shared reality of that conversation is being produced while we are talking.
And perhaps this does not happen only in conversations.
Now increase the number of people
If this dynamic happens between two people, what happens when we place ten people together?
A hundred?
A thousand?
A family.
A classroom.
A company.
A stadium.
A protest.
A city.
Each person is perceiving, interpreting and responding.
But every response also becomes part of what other people are perceiving.
An anxious person can change the atmosphere of a room.
A very calm person can do the same.
Laughter can spread.
Tension can spread.
A behaviour can begin to feel acceptable because other people start repeating it.
An expectation can emerge and, once it exists, begin influencing the decisions of everyone participating in that situation.
Perhaps this is how a collective atmosphere begins to emerge.
Not because everyone is feeling exactly the same thing.
And not because some mysterious collective mind is controlling everyone.
But because people are continuously entering one another's experience.
And from those interactions, something can emerge that no individual produced alone.
An atmosphere.
An expectation.
A tension.
A shared way of interpreting what is happening.
And once it emerges, it can begin influencing the individuals who helped create it.
Perhaps this is why different environments bring out different forms of ourselves.
Not necessarily because one of them is false.
But because what surrounds us participates in how we are in that moment.
And we also participate in what surrounds other people.
So perhaps there is a larger question here
If what we perceive participates in the experience we live;
if that experience changes how we meet the next moment;
if our responses enter the experience of other people;
and if, when many people interact, shared realities can emerge and begin influencing the individuals again...
then perhaps we are not simply living inside a finished reality.
Perhaps we are also continuously participating in what it becomes.
This does not mean that we create all of reality.
We do not choose the laws of nature.
We do not choose everything that happens to us.
We do not control everyone around us.
But there is a part of the world that is continuously being changed by how we respond to it.
Something I say can change your next minute.
Your response can change mine.
A decision made by two people can create a relationship that did not exist before.
A decision made by thousands can change a city.
And that was when an image came to me.
The bridge
Imagine that we are walking across a bridge.
Behind us, the road is already paved.
Those things have already happened.
The experiences.
The choices.
The responses.
The consequences.
We can look back.
We can try to understand what happened more clearly.
We can reinterpret our own history.
But that part of the road has already been built.
Ahead of us, however, the path is not completely finished.
This does not mean that we have infinite freedom.
There are limits.
There are conditions we did not choose.
There are other people.
There are events that simply arrive.
There are possibilities that will never be available.
But there are also things that have not happened yet.
Responses that have not been given.
Conversations that have not taken place.
Relationships that do not yet exist.
Paths that may open or close depending on what happens now.
And then something happens.
We perceive.
We interpret.
We respond.
Our response becomes part of the environment.
Other people respond.
And what was once only a possibility begins to take form.
Little by little, the next part of the bridge is paved as we walk across it.
Perhaps this image best captures what I am trying to understand.
Maybe we do not simply walk through reality.
Maybe, together, we continuously participate in what it is becoming.