What follows is not a new theory of the brain, and it is not an attempt to re‑label neuroscience in spiritual language. It is a simple structural observation: perception, identity, and meaning do not run continuously. They are rebuilt, again and again, from a brief moment of quiet before thought, story, and self take hold.
Neuroscience already knows this. It just doesn’t usually speak from the centre where it happens.
The brain does not receive reality in a smooth stream. It predicts. It prepares. It anticipates. What we experience as “seeing the world” is the brain’s best current guess, continuously corrected by sensory input. This predictive process runs in cycles, not lines. Each cycle updates what is expected, what is relevant, and what belongs to “me.”
Between these cycles there is a tiny pause — not something noticed, not something entered, but a reset. In that moment, prediction drops out altogether. Perception forms without inheritance. Nothing is refined. Nothing is improved. The world appears again, already whole.
This is where the model begins.
Before identity, before narrative, before the sense of a personal observer, there is a moment of organisation without a story. Awareness is already present, but it has not yet been claimed. This is not mystical. It is simply the brain doing what it does best: re‑establishing a baseline from which perception can stabilise.
The sense of “now” arises here, not as a concept, but as a functional alignment. Sensory signals, bodily states, and predictions briefly agree. Nothing is being interpreted yet. Nothing is being explained. Experience is simply assembled.
Only after this does the narrative arrive.
Whatever has already come together as a whole before the reset is absorbed intact into the next one. The system does not remember parts; it re-forms as the new whole it already is. What carries through is the coherence of the self as it stood in the moment before the reset.
The brain’s storytelling networks — memory, identity, meaning — step in to explain what has already happened. The sense of a self appears retrospectively, stitching continuity across these resets. This narrative shell is not a controller. It is an interpreter. It does not guide perception forward; it smooths perception backwards. It reflects on the newly formed whole and registers how it differs from the last, giving rise to the sense of “this is me now.” The narrative shell re-maps the newly formed coherent whole against the previous coherent whole.
When this shell becomes too dominant, it interferes with the reset. Prediction does not need correcting; it simply needs to be allowed to fall quiet. When it does not, the same interpretations are carried forward again and again, giving the impression of continuity where there is only repetition. Predictions harden. The same interpretations are reused. The same emotional and bodily tensions return. What was once a flexible update loop becomes a closed circuit.
This is how habits form. This is how identity feels solid. This is how time begins to feel heavy.
The body plays a quiet but crucial role here. Tension patterns, posture, breathing, and proprioceptive signals all bias prediction before thought appears. The brain does not predict in isolation. It predicts with a body already leaning one way or another. These embodied signals stabilise perception, but they can also lock it into repetition when they remain unchanged.
None of this requires belief. It is simply how a living system maintains coherence.
When the reset completes cleanly — without prediction rushing back in to explain itself — perception is simply clear. Not heightened. Not special. Undistorted. The world appears without friction, because nothing extra has been carried across. Not special. Not elevated. Just undistorted. The world appears without friction. The sense of self becomes lighter, sometimes barely noticeable, because it is no longer needed to hold things together.
This is often described as peace, presence, or clarity, but structurally it is something simpler: the system is returning to baseline without residue.
Seen this way, what is often called awakening or insight is not a peak state, nor the result of accumulated understanding. It is the moment interference ends. The system does not move forward. It stops carrying what was never needed. It is not an achievement. It is the absence of unnecessary carry‑over. The brain–mind resets and stays reset.
Nothing dramatic needs to happen after that. Life continues. Thought continues. Personality continues. But they arise on top of a stable centre instead of compensating for its absence.
This model does not compete with neuroscience. It rests inside it. Readers familiar with contemporary brain science may recognise a family resemblance to predictive processing and the work of Karl Friston, whose models describe the brain as a system of continuous optimisation that minimises surprise in order to remain viable. The alignment is deliberate, but the emphasis here is different. It does not ask science to accept a new mechanism, only to notice the one already there — the quiet reset that makes perception possible in the first place.
Where Friston’s account describes an always‑running optimisation, this framework draws attention to something quieter that happens inside that process: a brief release before prediction re‑asserts itself. The brain does not only refine its models; it repeatedly re‑seeds them. From the inside, this feels less like improvement and more like relief.
When that reset is no longer interrupted, experience becomes ordinary again.
The reset clears what is unresolved; it preserves what is whole. When coherence holds, the reset happens without being noticed, and the NOW remains intact.
Life proceeds from one complete moment to the next.
The reset removes only what cannot stabilise.
What is whole is never lost.
Nothing in this process involves the annihilation of the self from one moment to the next. What changes is not existence, but distortion. What remains is the coherent self appropriate to that moment.
And ordinary, it turns out, is enough.
The framework described above does not introduce new mechanisms. It aligns with existing neuroscience while offering a structural description of how perception and identity repeatedly re-form.
Related work in neuroscience:
- Karl Friston — Predictive Processing / Free Energy Principle
Friston, K. (2010). The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory? Nature Reviews Neuroscience.
2. Libet-style readiness potential (decision before awareness)
· Libet, B. et al. (1983). Time of conscious intention to act in relation to onset of cerebral activity.
· Soon, C. et al. (2008). Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain
3. Default Mode Network (narrative self)
Raichle, M. et al. (2001). A default mode of brain function.
“The sense of a self appears retrospectively, stitching continuity…”
4. Perceptual cycles / phase resetting
· VanRullen, R. (2016). Perceptual cycles. Trends in Cognitive Sciences.
· Buzsáki, G. (2006). Rhythms of the Brain.
These support perception as cyclic and re-instantiated.
5. Embodied cognition / interoception
· Barrett, L. F. (2017). The theory of constructed emotion.
· Damasio, A. (1999). The Feeling of What Happens.