← The Observable Unknown
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Welcome back to the observable unknown. Earlier today, with one of my mediumship students, we explored three mysterious dimensions of retrocognition. Knowing the past without learning it. Metacognition, frequently oversimplified as the mind watching itself think. And precognition, the sense of what has not yet come. That conversation inspired to tonight's journey. Could these uncanny capacities, which seem mystical, be connected to biology itself? Could memory, what we inherit, what we anticipate, be written not just in our minds, but in our very DNA? In biology, phylogenetic inertia explains how traits persist long after their evolutionary purpose fades. Charles Darwin hinted at it, and later Stephen Jay Gould developed the concept. Think of the human spine. It struggles to bear the load of upright walking, yet we carry its ancient quadrupedal design. Or think of instinctive reflexes flinching from snakes or spiders, fears that may be echoes of ancestral threats. The observable unknown here is that our choices may not be choices at all, but the shadows of adaptations laid down millions of years ago. Now we step closer to human memory. Epigenetics, first described by Conrad Waddington, reveals that life experiences can mark our genes, and those marks can be passed on. One famous case, the Dutch hunger winter of 1944-1945, showed us mothers starved during the famine who gave birth to children. These children were more prone to obesity, diabetes and heart disease. Decades later, trauma had been written into physiology. In 2013, Diaz and Ressler trained mice to fear the smell of cherry blossoms. Astonishingly, their pups and even grandpups were born with the same fear, never having smelled the flowers themselves. And Rachel Yehuda has smart studied descendants of Holocaust survivors showing altered stress hormone regulation. These scars of trauma ripple forward in unseen ways, the observable unknown. Here is inheritance beyond story. Pain, fear and adaptation carried as whispers in our biology. Carl Gustav Jung spoke of archetypes, universal patterns that shape dreams, myths and fears. Whether symbolic or biological, we all inherit motifs. The hero, the mother, the shadow. Some researchers push further. Rupert Sheldrake, controversial though he is, proposed morphic resonance, that patterns of behavior persist like fields resonating across generations. Even without such bold theories, we see inherited templates everywhere. A spider weaving a perfect web. A bird navigating continents without any map. A newborn startled by a sudden noise. These behaviors are not taught. They are remembered by the body. The observable unknown here is that some of our most private experiences may not be our own. They may be borrowed, ancestral echoes speaking through us from biology. Let us circle back to the psychic retrocognition metacognition, and precognition. These may be framed not as magical but as natural extensions of cognition itself. Neuroscientist Carl Friston describes the brain as a prediction machine. It's constantly forecasting what's about to happen. It compares the forecasts to reality and updates. Precognition, then, may be sensitivity to subtle cues, unnoticed details that allow us to guess what will happen. Retrocognition may be the mind reconstructing the past from hidden fragments, but in experience they feel like transgressions of time, insights beyond or what we could possibly know. The observable unknown here is time itself, the mind stretching across past, present and future. Let's gather the threads. From Darwin and Gould, we inherit the drag of ancestral design. From Waddington, Diaz, Ressler, and Yehuda we inherit the biological scars of trauma. From Jung and Sheldrake we inherit patterns and archetypes beyond biography. From Friston we inherit a brain that is always predicting, always reaching through time for validation. Together they reveal our choices may not be purely our own. We are shaped by inheritance, shadowed by trauma, carried by archetype and pulled toward future futures our brains already anticipate. And so the observable unknown reveals itself as our most intimate companion, that of thought and memory. In every decision, in every recollection, in every hunch of the future, we are constantly haunted by what we did not live but still carry within us. As always, I invite you to join the dialogue. Visit our WhatsApp channel, the Observable Unknown email me your reflections@theobservableunknownmail.com or text me directly at 336-675-5836. When you do, please share with me. How did you first find out about this show? What's your favorite part or episode so far? What's one thing we could do to make the show better for future listeners? And what's one thing that you personally are struggling with right now? Because even here in our conversation, we are shaping the inheritance of thought together, weaving what is remembered and what is yet to be. Sam.