What We Have Forgotten

On the awareness we are born with — and why we lose it

We are born with the most advanced navigation system evolution has ever produced. A system that can guide us through life without any trouble at all. It reads faces, senses tension, registers danger before it becomes visible, and it connects you effortlessly with everything around you, and it doesn’t even come with a manual, because it is a natural system and it simply works.

Now imagine that someone slowly un-teaches you that system by writing a manual full of directions and rules that will from now on determine the route of your life, without you having to think about it, it becomes a kind of autopilot.

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The first two years

A newborn child does not think, because there is no foundation yet for thinking, but it certainly does experience. It recognizes a number of things that were already present in the womb, mothers heartbeat, the sound of voices, energetic connection, but everything else is entirely new to a baby and will slowly find its way to registration through repetition: voices, sounds such as music and laughter, faces, touches, and so on. Here the right hemisphere is fully at work: open, holistic, but all of this without words.

This is not a preliminary stage of “real” consciousness. This is consciousness. The foundation on which everything rests. The child knows no “good” or “bad.” There is recognition, experience, and there is intensity. Tension is tension, warmth is warmth. So there is no story yet, no judgement, no “I” experiencing it. Only experiences in the moment.

Then come the words

Somewhere around the second year, the left hemisphere begins to gain ground. Language arrives. Parents try to get their children to talk as soon as possible, because that does have its advantages. Right now the child can’t say anything back, and you do want to know what is going on in that little mind. And of course we want them to understand what we have to say and to grasp everything we want to teach them so they can make their way through the world and through life as well as possible. We feel this responsibility, and over the generations it has almost taken on a competitive element.

But our words simply have far more impact than we realize, and the biggest problem is that we have only recently begun to discover what that impact truly is.

Children have started life with experiences that all find their way through the right hemisphere. As soon as language makes its entrance, the left hemisphere begins to join in, and that is the part that receives ever more attention. Education really piles on top of that, because there are all kinds of rules you have to follow, and in most forms of education there is also a competitive element that certainly does not promote a life based on direct perception.

Because we see our parents as people who know almost everything, there is trust, and so we follow almost all of their “advice” and directions. Even when it doesn’t always feel right, but we receive so much targeted information that quite quickly we no longer compare everything with the raw experiences we gain ourselves, and instead follow the route that parents, education, and other outside influences bring with them.

So every word is a frame placed over raw experience. The child learns that the experience itself is not enough, that an interpretation must be placed on top. And slowly, unnoticed, the center of gravity shifts from feeling to labeling, and from experiencing to explaining.

The child that hears “how special you are” suffers invisibly. The suffering lies in the dependency on the story. It learns that it must be someone in order to be loved.

And so the ego begins. Not as an enemy, not as a mistake, but as a by-product of love given through words instead of through presence.

Twelve years of unlearning

Then comes school, an entirely left-hemispheric system. Sequential, analytical, linguistic. For the next twelve years the child is rewarded for labeling, categorizing, and reproducing. What the right hemisphere does, seeing patterns, feeling the whole, knowing intuitively, does not count as knowledge in most educational systems. It does not appear on the report card, yet it ought to be one of the core subjects.

After school comes society, which rewards the same things: productivity, articulation, analysis, opinion. “Feeling” becomes something unreliable, too soft, really something on the side, but not a foundation.

And so the system we are born with, that direct, wordless, knowing-everything-at-once, gets buried under layers of learned material. It is not gone, but it is overruled by knowledge that has become the basis of our lives. Unfortunately, there is nothing natural about this any more.

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The voices we call “I”

What most people experience as consciousness, that constant thinking, analyzing, commenting, is not who they are. It is the left hemisphere presenting itself as the driver of our vehicle.

The inner voice that says “I’m not good enough” or “I have to work harder” or “what will they think of me”, these are not natural reactions or thoughts. They are caused by material from outside: parents, teachers, culture, advertising. Third-person content posing as first person.

Everything you identify with, your beliefs, your self-image, your fears, your ambitions, has come from outside. You walk around with it and think it is yours.

The moment you truly see that, it loses its grip, and you can be freed from it.

What the “primitives” already knew

There are communities in this world that never went along with what we call development. Tribes in Africa, South America, Australia that are regarded by us as primitive because they are largely uneducated and cannot join the conversation when it comes to our worldly experiences. But when it comes to survival, I would personally rather follow them than someone with a phone in hand and no signal. They still use our original skills, the ones we traded in for modern life. Which has also made us completely dependent on all these aids.

The Aboriginal Australians send their young people into the outback. Months, relying on themselves, no map, no weapon, no instruction manual, only the skills their body already knows. Navigating by stars, reading tracks, knowing when the weather is about to turn. Not based on a weather app, but through connection with nature.

The Lakota send their adolescents into the wilderness for a Vision Quest. Alone, fasting, silent. No words, no story, waiting until direct knowing speaks.

What all these rituals have in common: they take the child away from language, culture, and narrative and push it back into pure experience. They knew: growing up is not about knowing more, but about staying more deeply connected with what you already know.

What makes those tribes “primitive” in our eyes is exactly what keeps them mentally healthy. What makes us “civilized” is what makes us ill.

The oldest technology

For hundreds of thousands of years, humans survived not by thinking but by feeling. Reading an environment as a single whole. Registering danger before it becomes visible. Knowing without steps. The body as compass.

This is not mysticism. This is biology. The right hemisphere — holistic, non-verbal, lightning-fast — is the oldest and most proven survival technology we have. Every animal species has it. So do we. We have simply started to ignore it.

We traded it in for spreadsheets, meetings, and social media. And we call that progress. While collectively we become ever more stressed, anxious, and unhappy.

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No way back is needed

The good news: there is nothing to achieve. There is nothing to learn. There is nothing to repair.

The consciousness you were born with is still there. Undamaged. It is merely drowned out by an endless stream of learned thoughts, judgements, and stories you mistake for your own.

It is as if you are sitting in a room with a hundred radios on, and you think the noise is your thoughts. All that is needed is to see that none of those radios are yours. You don’t even have to turn them off. The moment you see that the sound is not yours, you are already no longer bound by it.

There is no path to consciousness. There is only the recognition that what you carry with you is not yours. Not the negative things. Not the positive things. None of them.

What remains is what was always already there.

One question

If everything you believe about yourself , every judgement, every fear, every self-image, and every ambition, has come from outside…

Are you not curious what or who lies beneath it? Because who are you then, without all of that?

Not as a philosophical question. As a direct experience.

Perhaps you don’t need to think about it. Perhaps you only need to stop thinking and experience what is already there.