When Reality Refuses to Stay in Its Box

Thoughtful images of perception and what they illuminate — A Dialogue with David Bohm, Bernardo Kastrup and the Framework of Holistic Perspective

A Pilot, a Stream, and a Question Worth Holding

The philosopher Bernardo Kastrup offers a striking image. Imagine a pilot flying through dense cloud cover. The windshield shows nothing. All she has are her instruments — airspeed, altitude, attitude, heading. The instruments are not the sky. They are accurate enough to land safely by, but they are representations of something the pilot cannot see directly. Now imagine a pilot born inside the airplane, who has only ever known the dashboard. She might come to think the dashboard is all there is.

The physicist David Bohm offers a different image. A whirlpool in a stream looks like a distinct thing. You can point to it, watch it move, observe its boundary. Try to scoop it up and you are left holding only water. The whirlpool was real, but it was a pattern in the flowing whole, not a separate object that could be removed and remain itself. What we perceive as separate things, Bohm proposed, may all be like this — patterns in something deeper and undivided.

Both images point at something the Framework of Holistic Perspective also acknowledges. We do not perceive reality as it is. What arrives in awareness is filtered through the architecture doing the perceiving. The Framework calls each person’s experience a Perspective Reality — genuine, but partial, shaped by the specific Diamond each of us carries.

So the three accounts agree on a basic observation. The interesting work begins when we look at what each is doing with that observation, and where the most useful conversation may live.

Three Layers in the Pilot’s Situation

Sit with the pilot image a little longer. Even in its simplest form, it contains three distinct layers.

There is the sky and landscape outside the airplane. The reality the pilot is flying through, whatever it is in itself.

There is the dashboard. The set of instruments that translate something about the plane and the reality outside into readings the pilot can act on. The dashboard was designed and constructed somehow — by engineers, calibrated through countless test flights, refined over generations of aviation. It is not the sky, but it correlates with taking the plane from one place to another safely.

And there is the pilot herself. The user reading the dashboard, interpreting what the readings mean, deciding what to do with the information and with the controls inside the plane in relation to the environment as she understands the situation.

Most of Kastrup’s careful work concerns the relationship between the first two layers. He is asking what reality fundamentally is and what dashboards are. This is honest metaphysical inquiry, and it reaches the kinds of limits that careful inquiry tends to reach.

Most of the Framework’s work happens in the third layer. Not “what is reality?” or “what is the dashboard?” but “what can we develop, in terms of how the dashboard gets read, how it gets built, how decisions get made from it, and how the plane behaves. How does the pilot engage with other people reading their own dashboards in control towers and ground traffic control?”

These are not competing questions. They are different questions, working at different layers of the same situation. The Framework can take Kastrup’s observation about representation seriously, take Bohm’s observation about wholeness seriously, and still have its own distinct work to do — the work of helping the pilot and all people supporting her in different functions become more skillful.

Two Pilots, Same Dashboard

This becomes clearer when we notice that the dashboard image, even as Kastrup tells it, contains two pilots. There is the trained pilot flying safely through the clouds. And there is the pilot born in the windowless cockpit, who has only ever known the dashboard.

Both pilots have the same instruments in front of them. The difference between them is not in the dashboard. It is in the observer.

The trained pilot has spent years looking at other pilots, planes landing, out windshields in good weather, watching landmarks pass below, calibrating what the instruments showed against what she could see directly. She has flown with other pilots, discussed with them, and learned from their experience. She has studied weather patterns, understood how the engine sounds when something is wrong, felt in her body how the plane responds to her inputs.

When she reads the dashboard now, she reads it with all of that in the background. She can tell when an instrument might be misreading. She knows what to do when one fails. She can notice that something is wrong before any single dial reports it.

The pilot born in the cockpit has only the inside of the plane and its current interconnections. She might be excellent at reading the specific dials in front of her, but she has no way to know what those dials might be missing, what they cannot represent, when to trust them and when to question them.

This is the difference Kastrup’s image actually contains, even if his argument focuses elsewhere. The same dashboard, two very different observers. And the difference between them is exactly the territory the Framework works in.

What Develops Over Time

The Framework’s models and tools — the Eight Perspectives of Seeing, the Diamond of Purpose and Meaning, the Five Awareness Modes — are essentially a developmental toolbox and structure for the pilots.

Most pilots, most of the time, read the dashboard with only a few instruments active. We default to certain perspective positions and rarely consult others. We notice some kinds of information and miss other kinds entirely. We treat what we perceive as simply what is, not as what reaches us through our particular way of reading.

Presence is the capability to read the dashboard with all the instruments active rather than only the few you usually consult. Sensing what is here through the body. Tracing patterns and connections. Weighing what matters and how urgently. Staying open to what has not yet shown up on any instrument. Not as separate steps. As one integrated act of reading.

Diamond alignment is checking whether the dashboard you have built actually serves where you want to go and how. The Diamond maps the architecture underneath your reading — the Beliefs that filter what registers, the Values that weigh what matters, the Needs that determine what your nervous system attends to.

Most people never examine this architecture. The dashboard they read was largely built by histories they have not chosen, in environments they have not designed. Wisdom Practice brings this architecture into view and asks whether it is serving what you and your larger context actually need.

Social Reflexivity is comparing your dashboard with other pilots’ dashboards. No individual reading can correct itself against ultimate reality. We do not have direct access to reality as it is. But readings compared with other readings can locate something none of them could locate alone. The pilot who flies in formation with others, who listens to ground control, who has trained with experienced mentors, develops capabilities the solitary pilot cannot reach.

Wisdom Practice is the ongoing development of all of this. The work of becoming a better observer — better at reading, better at noticing what the reading is missing, better at acting from what the reading reveals. Not arriving at reality as it is, but working skillfully and sustainably with the perception we have.

Building the Dashboard, Not Just Reading It

There is one more layer worth naming. The dashboard is only partly given. It is designed, built and the developed on together with countless others.

A pilot does not appear in the cockpit with her instrument-reading skills already calibrated. She develops them through training, through practice, through correction by other pilots and by the consequences of her own decisions and intrinsic accountability. The dashboard she reads now was constructed over years, and she had a hand in constructing it.

This is true of the dashboards we all read in ordinary life as well. The frameworks we use to interpret experience, the categories we sort situations into, the patterns of attention that determine what we even notice — all of this was built. All important parts built through direct experience and interaction with reality. Some of it through what we learned from people we trusted. Some of it absorbed from environments we did not choose and may not have noticed shaping us.

The Framework takes the construction of the dashboard seriously. Beliefs are not arbitrary opinions; they are mental models built from experience and tested against consequence. Values are not preferences; they are weightings developed through what has mattered in our lives. The Diamond as a whole is the dashboard we have been building, mostly automatically, since we were born.

The practice of working with the Diamond is partly about reading the dashboard better and partly about building it better. Bringing more of its construction into awareness. Noticing where it has been shaped by environments that do not serve us. Sometimes allowing other people to add instruments we did not know we lacked. The trained pilot did not just learn to read instruments; she helped build the relationship between herself and the dashboard that now lets her fly safely.

This is also why Wisdom Practice is relational rather than solitary. A pilot who only ever flies alone, who never compares notes, who never gets corrected by others — can still develop, but slowly and with significant blind spots. A pilot embedded in a community of other pilots develops faster, with fewer blind spots, and with more dashboard-building options available than any single pilot could discover alone.

What Bohm Was Reaching For

Bohm’s whirlpool says something the dashboard alone cannot quite say. We are not pilots in cockpits, separate from the sky we fly through. We are patterns in the stream, perceiving the stream from within it. Our perception is not aimed at reality from across a gap. It is part of reality, engaging other parts of reality, through the specific architecture we are.

The Framework agrees with this. The Diamond is part of the world it perceives. Other people’s Diamonds are part of the same world. The dashboards we read are not external to reality; they are reality engaging reality, through the specific configurations each of us carries.

This matters because it changes what perception’s limits mean. If we were sealed pilots in sealed cockpits, the limits would be walls between us and an inaccessible territory. As patterns in the stream, the limits are partial — we engage with what is here through the specific shape we are, but we are also part of what is here. The whirlpool cannot perceive the whole stream, but it is genuinely in the stream, genuinely shaped by the stream’s flow, genuinely able to encounter other whirlpools.

This is the territory the Framework operates in. Not the metaphysical question of what the stream fundamentally is, but the practical question of how each whirlpool can develop the capability to engage more skillfully and sustainably with the flow it is part of.

What This Makes Possible

Kastrup’s pilot needs to land the plane. Bohm’s whirlpool exists in flowing water. The person walking across the room, the parent in a difficult conversation, the leader making a hard decision — all of them are reading dashboards, all of them are engaging with reality through architecture, all of them are working with partial perception.

What the Framework offers is not a better metaphysics. It is a developmental structure for Wisdom Practice.

• Reading the dashboard more fully — across all the perspective positions, not just the few you usually consult.
• Building the dashboard more thoughtfully — bringing the Diamond into view, noticing what shaped it, choosing what to refine.
• Comparing your dashboard with others — through Social Reflexivity, in learning communities, in conversations where different perspectives can actually inform each other.

Acting from what the fuller reading reveals — through Presence in the moment, through Diamond alignment over time, through the patient work of letting your engagement with reality become less narrow than it would be if you only ever consulted your default instruments.

None of this requires deciding what reality fundamentally is. The work is available regardless. The pilot lands the plane regardless of whether the sky is fundamentally physical or fundamentally mental or something for which neither word reaches. The whirlpool keeps turning regardless of the metaphysical status of the stream. The pilot can develop regardless of whether the dashboard is, ultimately, all there is or a representation of something more.

Wholesome Action and the Conversation We Are In

When the Framework points toward wholesome action, it points at exactly this: action that emerges from a fuller reading of the dashboard, built more thoughtfully, calibrated through encounter with other dashboards, taken from a position of integrated awareness rather than narrow optimization.

The pilot lands the plane. The walker crosses the room. The parent finds the words. The team makes the decision that serves more of what actually matters. None of these require direct access to reality-in-itself. They require persons able to read what is available, acting from what they are reading, and keep developing through encounter with what other persons see.

Bohm pointed at wholeness and at our chronic tendency to perceive in fragments. Kastrup argues for the fundamentally mental nature of what underlies perception. Both of them, in different ways, point at something true about the gap between perception and reality.

The Framework takes that gap as a starting condition rather than a problem to solve. It works in another layer — the layer where development is possible, where dashboards get built and rebuilt, where observers can become more skillful, where wholesome action becomes available not by escaping the gap but by working within it more honestly.

This is a conversation worth having. Given that we are all reading dashboards built from particular histories, in particular environments, with particular blind spots, how do we become better readers, better builders, and better partners with each other and the ecosystems we are a part of?

That conversation is available to anyone willing to examine their perception, and humble enough to compare it with others. It does not require metaphysical certainty. It requires the patient, lifelong practice, development, and growth — and discovering what becomes possible when more of the dashboard becomes readable, more of its construction becomes visible, and more of what others see becomes available to inform our own seeing.

The sky is what it is. The dashboard is what it is. What we may develop is the one doing the reading.

That is where Wisdom Practice lives.