the gorilla effect: the most underrated way to change your reality

Introduction & Overview

00:00All right. Hello and welcome to this training. As you can see from the title, what we're going to be covering today is every version of you already exists. And how that's possible. As you can see from the overview, what we're going to be talking about more specifically is the super position of you, the filter behind your eyes, the gorilla in your life, the review, and finally your action items for the day or the next few days.

00:23Now, before we get started, as always, if you want this training along with this respective document and make sure to join the free community from the link in the description. If you want to work with me one on one, then make sure to book a call again from the link in the description and if you want weekly newsletter.

00:41So improving in every aspect of your life meaning, health, wealth, love. And so then make sure to join the newsletter from the link in the description. With that said, let's get started and talk about the super position of you.

How Quantum Superposition Applies to You

00:56So there's this physicist named Carlo Rovelli, and he wrote a book called Reality Is Not What It Seems, where he basically lays out something that can change how you think about everything, not just in terms of physics, but your yourself, your life, your sense of who you are and what's really possible for you.

01:14And it starts with this one idea that at the very small scale of reality, at the quantum level, things don't have one fixed shape or one definite state. They exist in what physicists call superposition, which basically means every possible version of that thing is happening simultaneously, all layered on top of each other until something forces it to pick one.

01:37And that's something that force is observation. It's measurement, it's attention. So what makes this so wild is that it's literally how the physical universe operates at its most fundamental level, where a single particle can be in multiple places at the same time, existing as a blur of probabilities rather than a fixed point, which means the building blocks of everything you see around you, including yourself, are not really solid, locked in things, but fluid, overlapping possibilities that are just waiting to be collapsed into one definite outcome.

Why Attention Is the Collapse Mechanism

02:15And so if you really sit with that for a second, what's that? What it's really telling you is that reality itself at the deepest layer is not one fixed thing. It's a stack of every possible version happening at once. And only the act of looking at it, of measuring it, of placing your conscious attention on it, forces it to become something specific and definite.

02:37And this has been demonstrated in labs for almost 100 years now. It's one of the most tested and confirmed findings in the entire history of science. So we're not working with wishful thinking here. We're working with how the universe actually functions, which is why this matters for everything we about to get into.

02:54Because if the fabric of reality itself operates on the principle that all possibilities exist simultaneously until attention collapses them into one, then the question for us in our lives becomes something very different from how do we become better?

03:09It becomes more so about which version of ourselves is our attention collapsing into existence right now. Because the same principle applies to you as almost a direct parallel where every version of you already exists.

Every Version of You Exists Right Now

03:24Right now, in this moment, the disciplined one, the scattered one, the focused one, the distracted one, the one who follows through and the one who quits, they're all layered on top of each other, all running simultaneously. And the version that shows up today, the one that becomes real, is your action in your actual lived experience is what whichever one your attention is pointed at.

03:46And that's the part that most people miss. They think that the better version of themselves is somewhere in the future, something they have to build towards over months or years of grinding. And that's one way. But that's not what the physics is showing us, right?

The Physics Behind Identity and Possibility

04:02Every version is here, right now, in this moment, not down the road. So the real question was never about how to become that person. It was always about what is collapsing you into this one. And the answer, just like in quantum physics, is measurement.

04:17It's observation. It's wherever your attention keeps landing over and over, day after day. That's the version of you that solidifies in your reality. And honestly, you've probably already experienced this without having the language for it.

04:32Because think about what happens, for example, when you decide to buy a specific car or anything for that matter. We can also go for shoes and then suddenly you see that car everywhere, or those shoes everywhere. In terms of the car, you'd probably start seeing it on the highway in the parking lot and ads.

04:51It always, always there. But your attention wasn't tuned to it, and the moment you made it relevant to you, the world seemed to rearrange itself around that decision,

The Car Example: Superposition in Everyday Life

05:01which is superposition and collapse playing out in the most mundane, obvious way imaginable. The car did, and multiply. It's not like suddenly more people have that car, it's just that your filter just started letting it through. And this is really the whole thing.

05:17The entire thesis of this training, the attention is the collapse mechanism, is the force that takes all of those overlapping possibilities and turns one of them into something concrete and real and lived, which means your attention is not just some passive thing floating around in your head.

05:34It's the most powerful tool you have for determining which version of you actually shows up in the world. And when I say attention, I don't mean positive thinking or repeating affirmations. I mean the actual sustained direction of your conscious awareness towards specific, specific things, specific evidence, specific patterns, specific truths about yourself and your life.

05:55Because that's what does the collapsing genuinely and repeatedly

Why Sustained Attention Changes Everything

05:59placing your focus on the version of you that you want to be real until your entire perceptual system starts organizing itself around that version. And the key word there is sustained because a fleeting thought doesn't collapse anything, right?

06:13Just like a brief glance at a particle doesn't force it into a state, it takes consistent, repeated, deliberate attention over time to shift which version of you becomes the default, which is why most people stay stuck. They think about the better version for five minutes, and then they spend the rest of their day measuring themselves against the old one and doing what the older the old version of them does.

06:36And it goes both ways, too, because your attention doesn't just build up the version you want. It also reinforces the version you don't want every time you give it focus, every time you dwell on your failures or your limitations or your worst moments, or failures, you're collapsing yourself into that version just as powerfully, just as reliably.

06:56Which means the discipline isn't just about what you focus on, it's equally about what you stop focusing on.

What You Stop Focusing On Matters Too

07:03So if you take nothing else from this section, take this. You're not one fixed person, right? You're in a superposition of every possible version of yourself, and the mechanism that determines which one becomes real is not time. It's not effort.

07:16It's not luck. It can be, but it's not the only thing is the sustained direction of your attention. And once you really get that, you'll stop trying to, quote unquote, build a new you and start to start learning how to collapse the one that's already there.

07:33And again, this is the actual operating principle of reality at its most fundamental level, adapted into a framework that you can use for your own life. And it's a genuine shift in how you approach everything. Because now, instead of asking what you need to do to become that person, you can start asking yourself where your attention is right now and which version of you it's reinforcing.

07:55And the thing that makes this framework so different is that it puts the entire thing back in your own hands, because if the version of you that you want to be already exists, and the only thing determining which one shows up is where you place your attention, then there's no more waiting for the right moment, or for the right circumstances, or the right person to come along and change things for you.

08:15The power was always yours. It was always about the measurement and you've been the one holding the instrument this entire time, whether you knew it or not.

Your Brain Has a Built-In Reality Filter

08:23And your brain actually has a built in biological system whose entire job is really to determine which version of reality you get to experienced, to experience on a moment to moment basis. And it does this by filtering what you see, what you hear, what you notice, and what you completely miss.

08:42So what we've covered so far is the physics, the principle, the idea that all versions exist and attention collapses them. And that's the foundation. But the next piece is even more important because your brain has hardware that's been doing this collapsing for you automatically your entire life, mostly without you knowing about it or having any say in how it's been configured.

09:02And that's the thing that should both excite you and make you a little uncomfortable, because it means you've been collapsing yourself into specific versions of yourself for years. Not by conscious choice, but by default settings. And the good news is that this hardware can be reconfigured.

09:18It can be retuned, it can be pointed in a completely different direction, which is exactly what we're going to break down in the next section.

The Reticular Activating System (RAS) Explained

09:25So let's talk about the filter behind your eyes. So now that you've got the physics down, the idea that every version of you exists simultaneously and attention is what collapses one into reality. Let's talk about the biological mechanism that's actually doing the filtering inside your head.

09:44Like we discussed, your brain has a real physical system called the reticular activating system or the rats. And its entire job is really deciding what gets through to your conscious awareness and what gets deleted before you even notice it was there.

09:58Now the rest is this bundle of nerves sitting at the base of your brain stem, and it's essentially the gatekeeper between the raw flood of sensory information hitting you every second and the tiny, tiny fraction of it that actually makes it into your conscious experience.

10:13And we're talking about a genuinely absurd ratio here, roughly

11 Million Bits Per Second: What Your Brain Deletes

10:1711 million bits of sensory data per second coming in. And your conscious mind can only process about 50 of them. So the rest is choosing those 50 and everything else just disappears. So your race filters 99.999 plus percent of reality. And really think about that ratio for a second 11 million to 50.

10:41That means 99.9999 something percent of what's happening around you right now in this room, in your life, in your field of possibility, is being actively deleted by your brain before you ever even get a chance to perceive it. Which means the reality you're experiencing is not reality at all.

11:01It's just a curated highlight reel selected by a filter you probably never consciously set, and the rest doesn't filter randomly. That's the crucial part. It filters based on which you have told it. It matters right through your beliefs, through your repeated thoughts, your dominant emotional states, your habitual focus.

11:21All of that programs the rest like a search algorithm. And then it dutifully goes out and finds evidence that matches, which means you're not seeing the world as it is. You're seeing the world as your race has been programed to show it to you, and where it connects back to what we talked about earlier in the last section is that if attention is the collapse mechanism, the thing that determines which version of you becomes real, then the rest is the hardware that's executing that collapse automatically every second of every day based on whatever programing it's currently running.

How Confirmation Bias Locks You Into One Version

11:55And this is also why confirmation bias is so powerful and so hard to break, because the rest is literally designed to confirm whatever you already believe. So if you believe you're unlucky or unworthy or behind in life, your rest will scan through those 11 million bits of data per second and surface the 50 that prove you're right in the thousands of bits that disprove it, or millions.

12:20The opportunities, the compliments, the evidence that you're actually doing fine. All of that gets deleted before it reaches your awareness. And so what ends up happening is you end up in this loop where your belief programs the rest, the rest filters your reality to match those beliefs.

12:37And then that filtered reality reinforces the original beliefs, which programs the rest even further in the same direction and round and round it goes. Most people live their entire lives inside this loop without ever realizing the filter is even there.

12:54So what makes this so tricky? Because the filtering is invisible. You can feel it happening. You just experience the end result as though that's simply how things are or who you are.

Why Your Filter Was Never Set by You

13:05And it feels so completely true and objective and real that it never occurred to you that you're only seeing a tiny, heavily curated slice of what's actually available to you. And you've probably felt this in real life. Like, think about the last time you were in a bad mood, and suddenly everything seemed to go wrong.

13:23The traffic was worse, the people were ruder. The day just felt heavier in every direction. And then think about a day where you were genuinely excited about something, and suddenly the world seemed full of good signs and good things and lucky breaks and things just clicking into place.

13:38The world didn't actually change between those two dates. Your rest did. Your filter shifted based on your emotional state at that time, and it served you a completely different slice of the same reality. And the really sobering part is that for most people, the rest was programed by default, not by conscious choice meaning your parents, your environment, your early experiences, your failures, your trauma culture, all of that installed filters that have been running in the background for years or decades.

14:09Even the information you consume reading automatically collapsing you into a version of yourself that you never actually chose, and you've been living inside that collapsed version for so long that it feels like regular life. Like if you grew up hearing that money is hard, hard to make, or that people like you don't get ahead, or that you're not the smart one in the family.

14:30Those messages didn't just make you feel bad for a moment. They literally programed your rest, especially if they were repeated to filter reality in a way that's consistently confirming those messages. So you walk through life seeing evidence of those limitations everywhere, while the contradicting evidence gets deleted in real time.

14:49This is also why people that constantly binge watch and binge read negative news will think that the world is ending every single day, right? And so every time you experience something that seems to confirm those installed beliefs, the filter got stronger, more refined, more locked in.

15:08Which is why deeply held, limiting beliefs feel so unshakable. Be true. It's not that they're actually true is that your raz has got an extremely good at surfacing only the evidence that supports them while scrubbing everything else. From your awareness and the whole point of understanding this is to realize that those filters were never chosen by you.

15:30Most likely they were installed without your consent, and they've been running on autopilot ever since. Which means the version of yourself you've been collapsed into all this time is not the only version available, it's just the one your default programing selected.

15:45And here's where it flips. And here's what makes the Aria so powerful once you understand it. Because the same system that's been working against

How to Reprogram Your RAS and Retune Your Attention

15:52you can be deliberately retuned to work for you, and the process is way simpler than you might. You might think it's about consistently and deliberately controlling your awareness and directing your attention towards the evidence, the beliefs and the patterns and the possibilities that match the version of you that you actually want to collapse into reality.

16:14And it's not about lying to yourself or pretending that things are just great when they're not. It's about consciously choosing to notice what your race has been deleting, and to actively look for the opportunities it has been scrubbing to seek out the evidence of your capability that's been filtering away because that evidence is there.

16:31It's always been there. You just haven't been able to see it because your filter wasn't tuned to let it through. Think about it, guys. With 11 million bits of data per second, the evidence is there. And like anything, it takes practice and repetition.

16:48This system has been running for 20 or 30 or 40 years. For some of you, you want to reprogram it overnight, but every time you deliberately shift your attention and every time you catch yourself running the old filter and consciously redirect, you're rewriting the programing a little bit more.

17:04And over time, the new filter starts running automatically the same way the old one did. And the most important thing about all of this is that just knowing the rules exists, and understanding what it does is already the first step and changing it.

17:20Once you're aware that your experience of reality is being filtered, once you genuinely understand that what you're seeing is not the full picture, but a tiny curated selection based on old programing programing, you can fully go back to take your default perceptions at face value anymore, and you shouldn't.

17:37That awareness alone will start to loosen up the old filter even before you do anything deliberate to change it. And so what we've got now is a pretty complete picture of the mechanism that physics says that all versions exist simultaneously and attention collapses them into one reality.

17:53The biology says your raz. Is the hardware doing that, collapsing automatically based on its programing, and that the practical takeaway is that you can retune the rest by deliberately shifting what you pay attention to. But there's one more piece, one more example, that shows you just how aggressively your brain filters reality and just how much you're missing because of it.

18:16And that's what we're going to get into next.

The Invisible Gorilla Experiment: What You're Missing

18:18And I want you to notice how all of this connects, right? The physics and the biology aren't two separate ideas. They're the same idea at different scales, the quantum level and the neural level, both saying the same thing, that reality is not fixed, that observation attention determines outcome and that what you pay attention to is literally what becomes real for you.

18:41And that convergence, the fact that the most fundamental law of physics and one of the most fundamental functions of your brain, or worst, are both telling you the same thing, should tell you something about how important this principle is.

18:54And once you see the next piece, the experiment we're about to talk about, you will understand exactly how blind your current filter is making you, and exactly how much of your life is happening right in front of your face without you even knowing it.

19:06So let's talk about the gorilla in your life. So there's this famous experiment in psychology run by two researchers named Christopher Cadbury or Cadbury. and Daniel Simmons. And it goes like this. They show the people a video of two teams passing basketballs, one team in white shirts, one team in black shirts, and they told the viewers to count the number of passes made by the team in white.

19:32Just focus on the team in white and basically count their passes. And while the viewers were focused on counting, a person in a full gorilla suit walks right into the middle of the scene, faces the camera, beats their chest, and then walks off.

19:47And when they asked the viewers afterwards, did you see the gorilla? About half of them had absolutely no idea there was a gorilla, and they missed it completely, totally invisible to them. And the thing that makes this experiment so powerful is that the gorilla isn't subtle.

20:02It's not hiding in the corner or flashing by for a split second. It literally walks right through the middle of the frame. It stops. It faces you directly, it beats its chest is there for a solid nine seconds instead of still half the people looking at the screen cannot see it because their attention is locked into something else, and their race is aggressively deleting everything that doesn't match the task at hand.

20:27Now, this shows you just how ruthless the filtering is. Your brain didn't blur the gorilla or make it slightly harder to notice it completely removed it from the conscious, from conscious experience, as if the gorilla did not exist in that person's reality, even though it was right there.

20:44And that's exactly what your race is doing with everything in your life that doesn't match your current programing. So this is the literal mechanism by which you're missing things in your life right now. Real things, real opportunities, real evidence, real possibilities that are right in front of you, in plain sight, that your brain is scrubbing

The Gorillas in Your Own Life

21:03from your awareness because your filter isn't tuned to let them through. And so now bring this back to everything we've been talking about the superposition, the rest, the collapse mechanism. And think about what this means for you specifically.

21:15If half the people in that experiment couldn't see a gorilla standing right in front of them just because they were focused on counting passes, then what are you not seeing in your own life because you're focused on counting the wrong things?

21:28When someone genuinely believes they never get opportunities, or that nothing good ever happens to them, or that they're stuck for reasons they can't identify, they're probably telling the truth from their perspective. They genuinely don't see opportunities they genuinely experience a reality where nothing seems to be working.

21:47But it's not because the opportunities are in there. It's because their rise is filtering them out. The gorilla is walking right through their life and they can't see it. So which passes have you been counting? Is the question. What have you told your raz to focus on?

22:04What filter are you running? And is that filter showing you reality or a tiny, biased, outdated slice of it that's keeping you collapse into a version of yourself you didn't even consciously choose? And what really makes this experiment interesting is when you start to think about the scope of it, because that was a simple, controlled, two dimensional video on a screen where the only task was to count passes.

22:29And even in that stripped down setting, half the people missed something enormous and obvious. Now think about your actual life, which is infinitely more complex than this scenario. It's more layered, it's more overwhelming with information.

22:43And ask yourself how much you're probably missing every single day. Just because your race has been told to focus on a narrow set of things that may not even serve you anymore. And this is really a call for radical honesty with yourself. Because once you understand the gorilla experiment and what it reveals about how attention works, you have to be willing to sit with the uncomfortable possibility that your entire experience of how things are, just maybe, has been incomplete this whole time, that the life you think you're living is just the version your filter has been showing you,

23:18and that a completely different experience of the same life has been available to you all along and has been hidden in plain sight, waiting for you to change what you're measuring. And this is probably the real reframe of this entire training that the thing I really want you to walk away with.

The Reframe: Your Problem Was Never Ability

23:34How about everything else? Which is that your problem was probably never a lack of ability, or a lack of opportunity or a lack of resources. Your problem was a filter that was tuned to the lead. The very things that could change your life, and the version of you that has those things, that sees those things that lives in that reality, where those things are obvious and everywhere.

23:54That version already exists. It's in the superposition. It's been there this whole time. You just couldn't see it because you're a gorilla was invisible. And the comfort in all of this is the word already, because the version of you that's focused, disciplined, confident, capable, successful in whatever way matters to you, that version already exists in your superposition.

24:16You don't have to go out and find it or earn it or deserve it. You just have to stop collapsing into the other one by changing where your attention goes and what your race is programed to surface. And the best part is that you can start today.

24:29Like right now, because every single moment is a new measurement, a new observation, a new chance to collapse, a different version of yourself into reality, and the accumulation of those moments, those small, deliberate shifts in your attention, is how the filter gets rewritten and how a completely different version of your life starts showing up.

24:49And if nothing else, just hold on to this one truth from everything we've covered. You are not one fixed person. You never were. You were every version of yourself simultaneously. And the one that becomes real is the one you keep measuring, the one you keep observing and giving attention to, the one your attention keeps collapsing into existence.

25:10And once you know that, once you really absorb it, you can't unknow it. And life is never quite the same again. And that knowing is permanent. That's the thing. Once you see the gorilla, you can never unsee it. Once you understand that your filter has been curating your reality this whole time, you can't go back to thinking your experience is just the way things are.

25:31And that awareness alone, that simple recognition that you've been living inside a filtered, collapsed, partial version of what's actually possible for you. That's the beginning of everything. And it's really just is the beginning. Because understanding the mechanism is step one.

25:46The ongoing work is the daily, deliberate, consistent retuning of your attention, of your rest, of your measurement and taking control of your awareness so that the version of you that collapses into reality tomorrow is closer to the one that you actually want.

26:02And the day after that, even closer, and the day after that, even closer now because you're building something new, but because you're finally letting something that was always there become visible. So with that said, let's talk about the review.

Review and Action Steps to Start Today

26:16We went over the superposition of you, the filter behind your eyes, the gorilla in your life, the review, and finally your action items for the day or the next few days. First, start a daily attention audit where you spend five minutes at the end of each day writing down what you focused on most, what task dominated, what evidence your brain kept surfacing?

26:36Then honestly assess which version of you that attention pattern is collapsing into reality. Then, for the next seven days, deliberately look for the gorillas in your life by actively asking yourself, what am I not seeing right now? And what opportunities or evidence is my rest?

26:54Probably filtering out and write down at least one thing per day that you notice only because you went looking for it, and then finally pick one specific belief or identity statement that you know your race has been programed to confirm something like the belief that you never follow through or that you're not good at something specific and for 30 days, deliberately direct your attention towards every single piece of evidence, no matter how small.

27:19That contradicts it. Training your filter to surface a different reality. With that said, if you want this training along with this document, then make sure to join the free community from the link in the description. If you want to work with me one on one on any of this, then make sure to book a call from the link in the description.

27:37And if you want weekly newsletters on improving in every aspect of your life meaning, health, wealth, love. And so then, as always, make sure to join the newsletter from the link in the description. thank you for being here. Thank you for your support and I'll see you in the next one.