2. The Porous Ones

By Josh Roberts

The posts in this series are laying down a pathway block by block, a pathway that can lead to profound freedom. But to explore freedom, first I need to tell you about walls.

Specifically, I need to tell you about the wall inside you. The one that makes you feel separate from everything else. The one Descartes helped build and we've all been living inside ever since.

A Canadian philosopher named Charles Taylor in his book A Secular Age maps out how before the 17th century, most humans experienced themselves as porous. Open. Permeable to the world around them. God, meaning, mystery...these weren't concepts they thought about. They were things that leaked in from the outside, through ritual, through nature, through community. The world wasn't something you stood over and analyzed. It was something you were inside of. And it was alive.

Taylor calls this the porous self. Like holes in a cloth that water can pass through.

Then the buffered, walled self showed up. The private interior. The self-contained individual who decides what gets in. We're now the CEO of our own psyche, and from this box we have accomplished some breathtaking things for the bottom line. Modern medicine. Human rights. Democratic societies. We owe a lot to that wall.

But here's what the wall cost us: mystery.

When you buffer yourself from the world, you also buffer yourself from wonder. From the sense that there's something flowing through everything that makes it matter. The vitality that was so easy to feel as children, remember? Before meta-consciousness kicked in, before we started thinking about thinking, we lived on the porous side of the wall.

We traded enchantment for control. And control is good, until it's the only move you know.

Now here's where it gets personal for the Neurodiverse. And this map is designed to invite those who have tasted of my Neurodiversity Gifts content to the next level.

If you're Neurodiverse, highly sensitive, or what I call one of the canaries in the coal mine, there's a decent chance your walls are thinner than most people's. The world comes in at a higher volume. You feel things others don't register. Invisible dynamics in a room hit you like a weather system.

You probably thought this was a problem.

I'm suggesting it might be the whole point.

While the buffered world built impressive things on the outside, the Porous Ones among us couldn't fully build the wall no matter how hard they tried. And in the century we're entering now, that turns out to matter enormously. Because the most urgent work ahead isn't adding more walls. It's recovering what's on the other side.

The Porous Ones have been living at the edge of what the rest of society forgot. We aren't broken. We're early. Quite literally, ahead of our time.

Almost every wisdom tradition has a version of this, people who are themselves "thin places," where the veil between the unseen dimension and ours is thinner: the wounded healer, the Sangoma, the empath, the prophet, the visionary. The one who goes through the hard thing and comes back with medicine for the masses.

I work with thousands of people who've been told their mental health diagnosis is the worst thing about them. I watch them encounter this idea, that their porousness, their sensitivity, their difficulty with a buffered world designed for control, might be a feature rather than a flaw. And something shifts. Not immediately. But it shifts...and sometimes within one hour, like it did just yesterday!

That shift is what re-enchantment actually looks like. It's not a mood. It's a fundamental reframe of who you are. Because we are more than neurons. And even our neurons don't only hang out in our head.

Next time, we'll go somewhere unexpected: into the gut. There are neurons there too! And we'll explore those 38 trillion bacteria I mentioned last time. We'll delve into what it means that most of "you" is technically "not you." And why that might be the most liberating piece of science to emerge in the last century.

The wall is already dissolving. And the news is good.

Have thoughts, questions, or something stirred? I'd love to hear from you: josh@inspiredmindmentalhealth.com