Predictive Processing and The Sacred

Liberating Reality from Our Priors

Through years of Buddhist meditation, I've gradually come to recognize that what I once took to be my 'self' is not a stable core but a dynamic process. The ancient wisdom of anata (not-self) and the modern science of predictive processing converge on this insight - our sense of identity emerges from a deeper, living reality rather than existing independently of it.

Modern cognitive science describes this process through the theory of predictive processing, which suggests that what we experience as "self" is actually a complex network of predictions, justifications, and beliefs - what scientists call "priors." These priors aren't passive assumptions; they actively generate our experience of reality, determining not just what we think about the world, but literally what we perceive. This network isn't just a part of who we are - it constitutes who we take ourselves to be, continuously confirming its own existence through circular patterns of self-reference.

This self-structure can manifest in two fundamentally different ways. In one, our constructed self becomes a fortress, rigidly defending against the very aliveness that animates it. Our priors form an increasingly impenetrable barrier, filtering out anything that might challenge our established patterns. In the other, discovered through practice and grace, the self becomes a permeable vessel, its predictive patterns continuously shaped by and expressing the living intelligence that flows through it. The difference determines whether we experience life as confinement or communion, separation or participation.

The Architecture of Self

Imagine walking through a forest. You notice certain things - perhaps the pattern of light through leaves, the sound of birds, the feeling of soft earth underfoot. But why these particular aspects of the infinite sensory data available? Your predictive mind, operating through established priors, determines what registers in consciousness.

If you're a biologist, you might notice species patterns. If you're a logger, you might assess timber quality. If you're experiencing anxiety, you might be hyper-attuned to potential threats. Your perception isn't a neutral recording but an active creation shaped by your priors.

This gets more interesting - and unsettling - when we realize these predictive patterns don't just shape what we perceive about the world, but what we perceive about ourselves. The "I" that can seem so solid is itself a prediction, a model the brain constructs to make sense of its own operations.

Consider your response when someone criticizes you. That flash of defensiveness, the rapid generation of counter-arguments, the feeling of being threatened - these aren't happening to a pre-existing self. They are the self organizing itself in real-time, a network of priors fighting to maintain coherence in the face of contradictory information.

The self isn't a thing but a process - a continuous act of prediction and self-organization that creates the experience of being someone.

The Prison of Priors

Why does this matter? Because these priors aren't just neutral information-processing shortcuts. They're deeply tangled with our attachment patterns, our compensatory strategies, our fundamental relationship with reality.

When early experiences teach us we're fundamentally unwelcome or unsafe in the world, we develop priors that predict threat, rejection, or failure. These aren't just beliefs we can argue ourselves out of - they're foundational to how our nervous system constructs reality.

Our predictive minds transform reality to confirm these deep patterns. If I believe I'm fundamentally unworthy, my perceptual system will highlight evidence that confirms this and minimize contradictory information. My attention will be drawn to slight facial movements suggesting disapproval while missing clear signals of acceptance.

In extreme cases, these distorted predictions can create what feels like a prison - a closed system of self-reinforcing beliefs that reinterpret all experience to maintain their coherence. This is what spiritual traditions have long identified as suffering, delusion, or separation - a mind caught in its own stories, unable to perceive the living reality beyond them.

The Living World and the Predictive Self

And yet, beneath this tangle of predictions and priors lies something more fundamental: the living world. This living world isn't constructed or predicted; it precedes and transcends our stories about ourselves and reality.

This alive reality shows up in moments when the predictive machine falters - in experiences of flow, in unexpected beauty that stops us in our tracks, in profound connections that can't be reduced to our usual patterns. It emerges when our priors are suspended, allowing for a more direct participation with the unfolding of reality, rather than our fixed interpretations of it.

Consider what happens when you're truly absorbed in creative work, deeply engaged in play, or experiencing overwhelming awe in nature. The self that's usually so busy predicting and protecting momentarily steps aside, and something more direct and alive flows through. We shift from observing reality to participating in its unfolding, and the boundaries between knower and known become porous.

The spiritual journey, seen through this lens, becomes about transforming our relationship with the predictive self - not destroying it, but recognizing it as tool and servant rather than truth. It's about creating enough space and safety that our priors can gradually relax their desperate grip on reality.

The Sacred Dimension

What happens when we begin to recognize the constructed nature of self? Does this lead to nihilism or meaninglessness? Quite the opposite. As we loosen our identification with the network of priors we've taken to be "me," something remarkable can emerge: an opening to the sacred dimension of existence.

The sacred isn't something we need to manufacture or believe in. It's what appears when our predictive filters soften enough to allow us to perceive the inherent value, intelligence, and aliveness of reality itself. It's what we directly encounter when we're not busy transforming the world into evidence for our stories about ourselves.

Practices across contemplative traditions - from meditation to prayer, from movement to art - can be understood as methods for suspending or rewiring our predictive patterns, creating openings where direct contact with reality becomes possible. These aren't just psychological techniques; they're technologies for encountering the sacred that exists beyond our conceptual frameworks.

The neuroscientist Karl Friston suggests that life itself can be understood as a process of maintaining coherence in the face of entropy - what he calls "free energy minimization." Our predictive minds continually work to minimize surprise and maintain our existing models. This has obvious evolutionary advantages, but it also creates a fundamental conservatism in our perception - we see what we expect to see.

Spiritual transformation, in this framework, involves a radical shift in how this process operates. Rather than rigidly maintaining existing models at all costs, we develop the capacity to hold our priors more lightly, to allow new information to flow in, to continuously update in relationship with reality itself.

Liberating Reality

So how do we liberate reality from the constraints of our predictive structures? How do we transform our relationship with the predictive self?

First, by creating safety. The predictive self is fundamentally a survival mechanism. Its sometimes distorted operations make perfect sense in the context of keeping us safe in environments that once threatened us. We can't simply destroy these protective patterns; we need to create conditions where they can gradually relax their vigilance.

This is why practices focused on developing a secure relationship with reality are so fundamental. As we build experiences of being fundamentally welcome and safe in the world, our defensive priors can begin to soften.

Second, by developing embodied awareness. The predictive self operates largely through conceptual frameworks separated from direct bodily knowing. By returning attention to the body - to sensation, to breath, to feeling - we create a counterbalance to these abstract predictive patterns.

The body knows directly. It doesn't predict reality based on past patterns but experiences it immediately. Learning to track and trust this bodily knowing creates an alternative source of data that can gradually reshape our predictive patterns.

Third, by allowing the dissolution of fixed structures. As safety and embodied awareness develop, the rigid structures of the predictive self can begin to dissolve into a more fluid, emergent responsiveness. This isn't about destroying the self but about allowing it to become more permeable, more adaptable, more in tune with the flowing nature of reality.

This dissolution can be frightening, even overwhelming. When priors that have organized our reality for decades begin to relax, we may experience profound disorientation. This is why traditional paths emphasize the importance of guidance, community, and gradual development rather than sudden dissolution.

The Dance of Structure and Flow

The relationship between living reality and the predictive self isn't ultimately antagonistic. It's more like a dance between structure and flow, between form and emptiness. The predictive patterns give shape and continuity to experience, while the aliveness provides the energy that animates these forms.

In the healthiest expression of this dance, our predictive patterns become increasingly aligned with reality itself. Rather than imposing rigid expectations based on past wounds, they grow more responsive to what's actually emerging in each moment. The self becomes less a fortress defending against reality and more a permeable membrane in dynamic relationship with it.

This doesn't mean we lose all structure or boundary. It means the structures we embody become more like flowing water than rigid stone - maintaining coherence while continuously adapting to the terrain they encounter.

The ultimate freedom isn't freedom from structure but freedom within structure - the capacity to embody forms that serve life while remaining unbound by them. It's the freedom to predict and plan while staying open to being surprised, to know while remaining curious, to be someone while remembering the vastness from which that someone emerges.

Toward Sacred Perception

Let's return to that forest walk. We've seen how a biologist might perceive taxonomic patterns, how a logger might assess timber quality, how anxiety might tune us to potential threats. But what happens when we walk through those same woods attuned to the living intelligence of reality?

Imagine entering the forest again, but this time with a perceptual capacity that Iain McGilchrist calls "valueception" - the ability to directly perceive the intrinsic value and meaning that saturates reality. The same trees, rocks, and streams are there, but they're encountered differently.

Rather than categorizing the trees or evaluating their utility, you directly perceive their intrinsic worth - not as a concept or belief, but as immediate as color or sound. The ancient oak isn't valuable because of what it provides but valuable in its very being. The stream's worth isn't calculated by its utility but directly experienced in its flowing presence.

In this mode of perception, the relationship between you and the forest fundamentally shifts. You're no longer a separate observer gathering data about an external object. The boundary between self and world becomes more permeable, and you experience yourself as part of a living, meaningful whole. The forest is no longer primarily a resource to be used or even an ecosystem to be studied, but a sacred presence to be encountered.

This isn't about imposing meaning on a meaningless world. It's about developing the perceptual capacities that allow us to recognize the meaning that's already there. Just as we can develop the ability to distinguish subtle variations in wine or music, we can cultivate the capacity to perceive dimensions of value and meaning that remain invisible to the mind caught in the prison of priors.

The predictive self, in its defensive configurations, systematically filters out these dimensions of reality. Focused on survival and coherence, it reduces the rich complexity of existence to manageable patterns based on past experience. But as these defensive patterns relax, reality itself begins to shine through - not because we're adding something to it, but because we're removing the filters that previously obscured it.

This shift in perception isn't just a private, internal matter. It fundamentally changes how we relate to everything - to other beings, to the natural world, to our own lives and deaths. When we directly perceive the inherent value and aliveness of reality, exploitative or destructive actions become increasingly unthinkable. We don't need ethical rules to prevent us from harming what we directly perceive as sacred.

The Journey Home

Understanding the self as a network of priors doesn't diminish its importance or reality. The predictive patterns that generate our experience are neither an enemy to be destroyed nor an absolute truth to be defended. They're more like a vessel - a ship we've built to navigate the vast ocean of existence.

The spiritual journey isn't about abandoning this vessel but about recognizing it as a vehicle rather than an ultimate reality. It's about maintaining and refining the vessel while remembering the boundless ocean it sails upon - and perhaps, gradually, allowing the vessel itself to become more transparent, more permeable to the water that surrounds and sustains it.

In this recognition, something profound can awaken - not a new self to replace the old, but an entirely different order of awareness. This awareness doesn't belong to the predictive self; rather, the predictive self appears within it, like a wave on the ocean or a character in a dream.

This isn't some esoteric state accessible only to dedicated monastics or mystics. It's our natural condition, the ground of all experience, temporarily obscured by the very predictive patterns that allow us to function in the world. What contemplative traditions offer are simply methods for reconnecting with what was never actually lost - our intrinsic wholeness beyond all patterns of prediction and control.

The journey home isn't about reaching a destination but about recognizing where we already are in relation to the living world. It's about allowing the sacred dimension of existence to reveal itself not as something distant or separate but as the very ground of being from which we have never been apart.

In this recognition, the predictive self doesn't disappear but rather finds its proper place - not as the master of experience but as its servant. No longer desperately maintaining coherence at all costs, it becomes a flexible instrument through which the intelligence of life itself can flow and express in ever more beautiful forms.

This is the promise and potential of understanding the self as a network of priors - not to diminish or defeat it, but to liberate it from its own unnecessary constraints, allowing living intelligence to flow more freely through the very structures that once seemed to confine it.

Philosophical foundations: This piece draws upon several wisdom traditions explored in my Lineages of Inspiration article, which outlines the key influences shaping my understanding of human transformation.

Work with me: I offer one-on-one guidance helping people develop secure attachment with reality through deep unfoldment work. If this resonates, explore working together.