The Curated World: Do We See Reality as It Is?

Welcome to the latest issue of The Qi of Self-Sovereignty—exploring what it means to be free in an increasingly not-so-free world.

Whether you're looking to locate your authentic self or investigate sovereignty, you're in the right place! In my writing, I aim to share thought-provoking content that makes you go hmm...

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Thought-Provoking Quote:

"The map is not the territory." - Alfred Korzybski

I'd like to pose a question: What if the maps we follow were constructed to conceal, rather than reveal, the terrain ahead? A path you think is clear might be missing roads you were never shown—roads that could lead to entirely new worlds beyond your reach.

When Yeonmi Park escaped North Korea, she didn't just escape a place. She escaped a map.

In North Korea, as Yeonmi explains, everyday life is filtered through a state-controlled language, where there are no expressions for personal choice, inner struggle, or romantic love—the only love you're allowed to feel is toward the Kim family, the leaders of North Korea. There is no emotional vocabulary for grief, no space for desire beyond loyalty to the regime. The language, shaped by Juche ideology, has been intentionally pruned—not to reflect reality, but to restrict it.

When I stumbled upon Yeomi's story, I was in shock. What became apparent to me was that language isn't just communication—it's navigation.

By escaping the map imposed by her leaders, Yeonmi didn't just escape control—she altered her experience of the world. She began to articulate feelings she once couldn't name, and in doing so, realized how much of life she'd been cut off from. It wasn't just the absence of words like civil rights or anxiety—it was the absence of the experiences themselves. When the language changed, the world changed. Her story reminds us that updating our map is sometimes the only way to truly experience the territory.

And this, to me, is where things get interesting…

Each of us navigates our journey on this planet with a map—crafted by our culture, education, media, belief systems, etc. Some of us explore with curiosity, adding new details as we go, slowly refining a more accurate picture of the world. Others unknowingly navigate with maps warped by propaganda or inherited assumptions. But regardless of our path, there are shared frameworks—core maps—we all rely on.

What do I mean when I say "core maps"? I'm talking about the frameworks we often mistake for absolute truth: mathematics, physics, chemistry—as we currently understand them. These maps shape how we interpret the world, but they're still just that—interpretations. They're tools to help us manage the vast mystery of our experience, not final answers about what's real. If those maps are incomplete or distorted, then so too is the collective way we experience the world.

For example, many breakthrough discoveries were dismissed as eccentric hobbies, or even “quackery”—not because they lacked truth, but because the collective map people relied on wasn’t equipped to understand them. When the contours of possibility don’t exist on your map, truth looks like noise, not signal.

Take blood transfusions. Long before 1901, transfusion attempts were inconsistent and often fatal because doctors believed all human blood was the same. Without the concept of blood groups, even gentle infusions could trigger deadly reactions.

Then came Karl Landsteiner. His 1901 discovery that there are distinct human blood types (A, B, O, and later AB) upended medical dogma. That meant blood compatibility—something once invisible—could be tested. His finding was initially dismissed because the existing medical “map” lacked such topography.

But as doctors updated their maps to include this new terrain, transfusion outcomes transformed. With blood group matching, mortality dropped. This knowledge expanded the collective map in just a few years—from the realm of dangerous guesswork to the modern field of transfusion medicine. It wasn’t the technology that hampered change; it was our willingness to redraw the map.

So, while the maps we use can help guide us, they can also mislead us, which raises the question: What parts of our worldview are built on maps that may not accurately reflect reality?

The Unified Theory

If we're looking for proof that our current map of reality is flawed, we don't have to dig deep. Physics itself admits it: we don't yet have a unified theory of everything.

This unified theory is the holy grail in physics—a single map that explains how all forces in the universe work together. Right now, we've got different rules for different domains: quantum mechanics explains the tiny stuff, like atoms; general relativity explains the big stuff, like galaxies. But those two maps don't line up. They conflict. That tells us something fundamental is missing.

Side note: I do not have the answers—just a string of thoughts and open questions. I'm not an expert, just a curious individual trying to add detail to my personal map of the world through opening up dialogue.

In The User Illusion, by Tor Nørretranders, he points out that even our understanding of time reveals inconsistencies. In Newtonian classical physics, time is symmetrical. It can move forward or backward, and the equations still work. But the second law of thermodynamics disagrees, stating that everything moves toward entropy—greater disorder. You can smash a plate, but you can't un-smash it, implying time only flows one way. Two of our most trusted maps—physics and thermodynamics—give us opposite answers about something as basic as the direction of time.

Tor Nørretranders then goes on to explain a thought experiment devised by James Clerk Maxwell, known as Maxwell's Demon, that illustrates how a tiny flaw in our understanding could turn thermodynamics upside down.

But first—a bit of background.

In our current understanding of physics, temperature isn't some mystical property. It's simply a measure of how fast the particles in a substance are moving. The faster they move, the higher the temperature. The slower, the colder. So when we say something is hot, what we're really saying is: "the particles inside this object are zipping around quickly."

But temperature is based on average particle speed. In any group of particles—say, the air in a room—not every molecule is moving at the exact same speed. Some are faster, some slower, but when you average them all together, you get the room's temperature.

Now, enter…

Maxwell's Demon

Imagine a closed box of gas that's evenly heated—meaning the particles on both sides of the box are moving at random speeds, but overall, the temperature is the same throughout.

Now, place a divider in the center of the box, with a tiny door. At that door stands a little creature—the demon. This little being can see how fast each individual particle is moving. As particles approach the door from either side, the demon opens it only under very specific conditions: if a fast-moving particle from the left approaches, he lets it through to the right. If a slow-moving particle from the right approaches, he lets it through to the left.

Over time, something strange begins to happen.

The fast particles start to collect on the right side, and the slower ones gather on the left. The result? The right side gets hotter and the left side gets colder—without any energy being added to the system.

But here's the kicker: the second law of thermodynamics says this shouldn't be possible. That law states that systems tend toward entropy—disorder. Heat always flows from hot to cold, not the other way around. Energy spreads out; it doesn't concentrate itself. You can crash a car, but you can't uncrash it. That's entropy.

Yet Maxwell's Demon appears to defy that. It seems to create order from disorder. It makes heat flow against its natural gradient—without adding energy. Which, in theory, violates the second law of thermodynamics.

Of course, physicists have debated this for decades. Some argue the demon itself would require energy to observe and sort particles, which would account for the lost entropy. Others still see it as a puzzle that hasn't been fully resolved.

But the deeper point is that this thought experiment reveals potential cracks in our shared map. It shows that even our most trusted laws—like the second law of thermodynamics—might not be airtight.

During a recent work retreat, a friend showed me a video of a garage tinkerer who claimed to have built a perpetual-motion machine—apparently generating more energy than it consumes. Mainstream science dismisses this immediately as impossible. After all, any such machine, by design, violates the first law of thermodynamics (you can’t get energy from nothing) and the second law (systems increase entropy over time). This got me thinking, “Was the dismissal based on disproof or expectation?” The map we teach doesn’t account for this possibility, so we label it impossible before even looking. That’s the world we live in: we reject not necessarily based on evidence, but simply because the map we use has no territory for the claim.

And so we're left with the question: If our most fundamental maps of the world may be inaccurate, what realities might we be missing, simply because our maps don't allow us to see them?

...Could we be on the brink of technologies that let us harness zero-point energy, walk without the weight of gravity, or even glimpse time travel? Imagine energy systems so clean and abundant they collapse poverty; timely transport that dissolves distance; zero‑gravity living that reshapes health and consciousness. These might not be fantasies, but rather shards of a map we don't have access to, hidden by what our scientific understanding allows us to imagine.

I pose these questions because, to me, I see some clues that may reveal a deeper truth to the world we live in.

The US Invention Secrecy Act

Some time ago, I watched a documentary called The Lost Century, where I first learned about the US Invention Secrecy Act. It felt like glancing at a map of an alternate, abundant world—one that's almost within reach, if not for this legal roadblock that quietly hides thousands of inventions from public view.

The core of the act is this:

• Enacted in 1951, it allows the US government to retroactively impose secrecy orders on patents deemed a national security risk. What is deemed a security risk? That is up to the government to decide.
• Once a secrecy order is in place, the inventor is forbidden by law from disclosing, discussing, filing abroad, or even using their own invention—under threat of two years in prison and fines.
• As of 2024, there were 6,471 secrecy orders active—meaning thousands of inventions have been silenced, never making it to the public domain.

To me, this is mind-blowing! You can invent something that could profoundly change the world—and then never be allowed to talk or write about it.

One of the most infamous stories allegedly linked to patent suppression is that of Stanley Meyer, an Ohio engineer who gained attention in the mid-1990s.

He claimed to have built a vehicle that ran on just water. Via an alleged "water fuel cell", this car was supposedly capable of achieving 180km on just 4 litres of water. He held patents on the idea, but the car never reached the market.

In 1998, Stanley Meyer suddenly collapsed and died while meeting potential licensees—officially ruled a brain aneurysm by local authorities, who quickly closed the case under the label "natural causes." But eyewitnesses at the dinner tell a different story. After a single sip of cranberry juice, Meyer stood up in distress, gasped, clutched his neck, sprinted into the parking lot, and uttered, "They poisoned me."

If his water‑powered car could really travel 180 km on just four litres of water, this could have disrupted global energy systems. So it raises a deeper question: Could this technology that challenges the status quo actually of been suppressed by forces with a vested interest in keeping it quiet?

The Missing Branches of Electrodynamics

In Awakening in the Dream, David Wilcock describes Tom Bearden's critique of modern physics as an oversimplified map: electromagnetism as we teach it today is a shadow of what Maxwell originally built. To quote Wilcock:

"Bearden argued that we were working with a grossly oversimplified view of the electromagnetic wave ... We think we are seeing two simple sine waves [electric and magnetic] that move simultaneously … Maxwell had originally mapped out far more detail… Heaviside removed most of the three‑dimensional details that Maxwell had found." 

So, what was removed?

In his 1865 paper, A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field, James Clerk Maxwell formulated twenty coupled equations intended to describe the full geometry and dynamics of electromagnetic phenomena. But in 1884, Oliver Heaviside rewrote this set into four equations. While supposedly more elegant and mathematically cleaner, this version discarded many of the structures that Maxwell initially included. Heaviside's reformulation is the basis for what is taught today—but it removes what Bearden referred to as scalar potentials.

Bearden argues that this matters: those three-dimensional scalar potentials could, in theory, support scalar waves—energetic pulses capable of non-local communication, zero-point energy systems, and even medical applications such as targeted healing.

And just to add a little more fuel to the fire…

Tesla's early 20th-century patents (particularly US Patent 645,576) describe a promise of energy transmission via what he called non‑Hertzian or longitudinal waves—able to carry power without radiating away and defying the normal laws of electromagnetic decay. These are essentially the scalar waves.

Additionally, decades later, via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, a declassified CIA memo titled "Scalar Waves" explicitly references these waves as a potential for submarine communication or power transmission.

With this in mind, these beliefs aren't simply held by fringe scientists; Maxwell laid the foundation, Tesla sketched these ideas, and decades later, US intelligence formally catalogued them.

But even if only a fraction of this is accurate, our understanding of "electromagnetism" may really be a heavily pruned snippet of a much larger and more nuanced map of the world.

Distributed Idea Suppression Complex (DISC)

Despite earning a Harvard PhD in mathematical physics and holding research positions at MIT, Oxford, and Hebrew University, Eric Weinstein says mainstream science is governed, not merely guided. He calls the system the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex (DISC)—a loosely connected network of institutional, corporate, and government forces that discourages—or outright silences—ideas that challenge the accepted map of physics.

According to Weinstein, presenting a theory outside the orthodoxy is often met with immediate dismissal—and sometimes silent blacklisting within peer review, making future proposals nearly impossible to place. Weinstein stresses there's no statute banning speculative physics—but if the gatekeepers hold the lab keys, the outcome is functionally the same.

Ultimately, he sees systemic authority—not curiosity and understanding—as the final arbiter in our trajectory in physics. This network decides what gets grants, what journals allow, and which papers quietly disappear. Stepping beyond that map isn't just risky—it can stall opportunity, freeze access to resources, or even render researchers professionally invisible.

Tying together what we've discussed so far—from patent secrecy laws to scientific unification, and institutionalized idea suppression—a phenomenon emerges: the maps we use to navigate this world are being altered. Which leads us to the question: are these alterations to our most fundamental maps intentional or not?

Simplification vs Suppression

Now, a devil's advocate might suggest that the alterations in our maps are more about simplification than suppression.

Consider the case of electromagnetism: Oliver Heaviside drastically pared Maxwell's original twenty-equation theory down to the four‑equation form we learn today—not out of conspiracy, but to simplify an unwieldy model.

Similarly, although thousands of patents are currently kept off-limits under Invention Secrecy Act orders, one could argue that this is driven by national security concerns rather than a deliberate effort to eclipse innovation.

And what if DISC isn't a dark conspiracy aimed at silencing innovators—but simply the inevitable friction of elite institutions filtering for rigour and alignment? In this light, when a researcher fails to gain traction, it's not that "the system" suppressed them—it's that their ideas didn't add value to the map that is mainstream science. Peer review isn't a weapon—it's the last line of collective calibration, enforcing coherence, not conspiracies. What Weinstein calls suppression may just be normal quality control.

It'd be comforting to treat all of this—DISC, Maxwell's missing equations, secret patents—as innocent rough edges in our map of reality; nothing more than the awkward evolution of knowledge. But if we follow Munger's insight—"Show me the incentives, and I'll show you the outcome"—a different conversation opens.

What if the erosion of nuance isn't accidental, but motivated?

Why Truth Threatens Control

When we asked at the start, “What if the maps we follow were constructed to conceal, not reveal, the terrain ahead?”—we were talking not just metaphorically, but materially. Because maps don’t just describe—they enable. And when institutions alter sections of our maps—or redact entire regions—they change what the public can perceive and pursue. That is why truth threatens control. Dominant systems fear new terrain, as it may render such entities obsolete.

Therefore, once you start asking who benefits from the maps we see—and the maps we don't see—you begin to wonder if the pruning was curated.

Viewed through the lens of incentives, it becomes clear that true energy abundance and paradigm‑shifting healing would pose existential threats to today's dominant institutions and industry monopolies.

The energy sector is massive! In 2025, global energy investment is projected to reach $3.3 trillion—similar in size to the UK's GDP—with $2.2 trillion allocated to clean energy and infrastructure alone. Major global corporations like State Grid and Saudi Aramco place among the top four Fortune Global 500 companies, each making over $500 billion annually. That's more than most national economies.

If individuals had access to abundant, low-cost energy, it would mean no global grid, no oil oligopoly, and no geopolitical leverage tied to resource scarcity. Energy prices would collapse, and financial power centralized in boardrooms would diffuse.

Likewise, if scalar‑wave healing became scientifically verifiable and scalable, pharmaceutical giants (the biggest profit-generators of the past century) would face a tsunami of disruption. Low-cost, easily accessible healing would collapse the old paradigm.

Instead of this continual centralization of control, such technologies would enable prosperity built from the bottom up. It would break the current scarcity-based model of control and reveal a map of real possibilities.

Now, one might ask, “Doesn’t government exist to serve and protect us? Surely they wouldn’t suppress true, transformative ideas.” But let’s unpack this idea for a second.

Scarcity isn’t merely economic—it’s a powerful tool of governance. Governments evolved from the human need for protection, particularly over land, food, and shelter. If resources were abundant and reliably available, that social contract begins to break down; the need for centralized authority diminishes. History consistently shows that wars are fought over resources—from oil to land to water; power structures are built around controlling scarcity, not dispensing abundance.

That’s why abundance is a threat to the status quo. As long as fuel, healthcare, energy, and autonomy are controlled, citizens remain dependent—and by extension, governable. Governments gain not just from maintaining order, but from enforcing resource limitations.

Politicians are additionally incentivized to preserve scarcity—today through lobby dollars, and tomorrow through revolving-door opportunities with the very industries that benefit from the suppression of transformative innovation.

Take the energy sector: In 2024, oil and gas companies spent over $153 million lobbying the US Congress and federal agencies. And on the revolving door front, agencies like the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission saw heavy turnover into industry jobs—up to 65% of commissioners between 2006 and 2015 transitioned into roles with energy companies or lobbying firms they once regulated, increasing regulatory coziness and minimizing disruptive shifts in the status quo. That matters—because if truly abundant energy technologies existed, it would decentralize power, money, and access, making it far harder to maintain top-down control.

With all this in mind, if such patents or theories did exist that threatened our existing control structures, wouldn't you expect such entities to go to extreme lengths to suppress such knowledge?

Wrapping up…

I don't claim to hold the answers, nor have I studied quantum geometry or conducted physics experiments—my background is in curiosity, not calculus. I don't know whether hidden branches of the electrodynamic map truly exist, or if Stan Meyer's car ever ran on 4 litres of water. What seems undeniable, though, is the historical pattern: centralized power has always shaped—and tightened—our experience of the world.

Now, this shaping wouldn’t be too much of sheltera problem if it were only the suppression of breakthrough technologies—with the internet and the rise of decentralized knowledge, it’d hope such innovation would eventually surface—but it’s another thing entirely if we’re working from distorted maps. If we’re told something like zero-point energy violates core laws of nature, we stop asking questions. Not because the idea has been disproven—but because our map doesn’t even show the road that leads there. And when the path is invisible, the journey never begins.

If Yeonmi Park's story teaches us anything, it's that maps can be weaponized to limit what's possible—North Korea doesn't have words for concepts like liberty or love, not because the territory doesn’t need such words, but because they have been erased from the map to control thought and experience.

Thankfully, change doesn't always start at the top. Real transformation begins at the level of the individual—by questioning the beliefs, labels, and boundaries we take for granted. Even if we can't yet redraw the maps of science or society, we can unweave the smaller patterns—our emotional maps, financial scripts, and personal horizons.

So here's my invitation: if you enjoy being curious, ask yourself…

What does your own map look like—and have you questioned your long-held beliefs that make up your personal topography?

. . .

P.S. I want to thank John Ely for gifting me The User Illusion—the inspiration for this post. Every now and again, a book drops into your life at exactly the right time and fills in a part of the puzzle you’ve been mentally circling for years.

Thanks for taking the time to read The Qi of Self-Sovereignty. I hope you found it insightful.

I always welcome feedback and thoughts. So, do not hesitate to respond to the newsletter email, comment on the article or reach out via Twitter.

Seb