Stop Making Sense
Love on Wheels and the Biggest of Beings
Early in my teaching career, I served as a special education assistant to a remarkable woman named Karen Prichard.
Karen was one of those rare people who never learned how to make people feel small. An embodiment of love, grace, and joy, she never complained, despaired, or said a negative word about anyone. This, even though she never enjoyed physical health, and her many ailments had left her on oxygen and insulin, her body both overweight and frail, eventually resulting in the amputation of her left leg.
And yet, with the whirr of her motorized chair rounding a corner in the school’s hallway, its basket full of children’s books and an orange bicycle flag waving like the standard of some tiny, joyful kingdom, her hand would fly up in a fluttering wave as she tossed her head back and laughed in soprano delight at the mere sight of you.
Every embrace from Karen was given as if you were the dearest thing in the world to her, and in that moment together, you probably were.
I became a teacher for many reasons, but I became a good one because of her. Not only from her advice and instruction, but from seeing people through her eyes and learning that the most valuable guides and gifts we have as educators are our time and our love. Karen made everyone a little bigger and showed us how to do it as well. I have been trying ever since to understand what love asks of those who teach.
Which brings me, naturally enough, to BoB.
In the larger map that Toni and I have been drawing through our Journeys to Love adventures on the road, BoB is my affectionate name for God, Source, Universal Consciousness, the Divine, or Whatever Name Doesn’t Make You Immediately Run for the Exit. It stands for “Biggest of Beings.”
I know BoB sounds less like the eternal source of existence than a fellow who knows a good mechanic and brings deviled eggs to the church potluck. But that’s the point, and why I love it. BoB brings the Big Mystery close enough to squeeze a shoulder and chat with for a bit.
For my purposes here, BoB is the boundless loving consciousness in which we live and ride, part of the larger question Toni and I have been exploring in our search for love’s true nature. If love is what consciousness does to grow, then every genuine act of love, every moment when someone becomes more alive because they have been seen, somehow adds to that Being. Love makes us bigger, and it makes BoB bigger, too. In fact, that’s kind of the point of it all.
Karen, I’m convinced, knew this without needing the vocabulary. She would probably have just called it faith or common sense and waved away the metaphysical machinery, along with any attempt to make a fuss over her. But she lived every day from a kind of knowing that transcended rational analysis. Logic would dictate that someone in her physical condition, facing pain and daily struggles that would defeat most people, should become bitter, withdrawn, or at least understandably focused on her own hurts and needs. Karen operated from a different center, though. Love didn’t need to be explained or interrogated. It was just how she recognized the world.
I like to believe that we all receive at least one Karen at some time in our lives: the person who gives us a peek into the infinite scope and possibility of love. I’ve been blessed by several, and our Journeys to Love continue to reveal ever more of them. And yet, with every story and every person whose life and being expand the focus and range of what I’ve come to call my seventh sense, I am reminded how far beyond my current limits I still have to go to understand love as fully and easily as Karen did.
By “seventh sense,” I mean our capacity to perceive love: not merely as sentiment, romance, or emotion, but something real moving through a room - a face, a gesture, a life. It is the part of us that knows when we’ve been seen and reminds us to let others know that too. It is the faculty by which a hand on a shoulder, a laugh in a hallway, or a stranger’s kindness becomes more than an event. It becomes evidence.
The trouble is that our other senses, wonderful as they are, are not nearly as trustworthy or complete as we tend to believe. We rely on them with embarrassing confidence. I do, anyway. I have argued with furniture I walked into, as though the coffee table had violated a treaty not to leap in front of my shins in the dark. But our senses are less like windows than peepholes: useful, life-saving, sometimes beautiful, but still peepholes.
Sight, our favorite and bossiest sense, is both incredible and incredibly limited. We can distinguish astonishing variations of color, and even a single photon of light can trigger awareness. When we look at stars, we look backward in time, seeing light that began its journey before our species had invented campfires, grammar, or the sacred marital ritual of arguing over which way the toilet paper should roll.
Even so, we see only a tiny sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum: visible light. Infrared, ultraviolet, radio waves, microwaves, X-rays, gamma rays, and the rest of that vast energetic chorus move around and through us unseen. Bees see patterns on flowers invisible to us. Snakes detect heat signatures we can’t perceive. Birds navigate by magnetic fields we barely sense at all (unless we count the vague suspicion that we’ve taken the wrong exit.)
Same with hearing. Human adults generally detect sounds between about 20 hertz and 20 kilohertz, from a low rumble to the high mosquito-whine edge of sound. Bats in flight - acrobats, if you will - are committed overachievers in this, and can detect tones far beyond us, up to around 200 kilohertz. At least one moth species takes that even higher. Elephants and whales communicate in frequencies below our hearing, carrying messages through earth and ocean that pass around and under us as we go about our narrowly sonic business.
And even if we could see the entire electromagnetic spectrum or hear a butterfly flap its wings, we would still be confronting a universe of which most remains unknown to us. We live inside mystery, yet we routinely behave as if reality is limited to whatever our personal equipment can detect and serve up to us.
This is not a design flaw. It may be the very thing that allows us to function.
Cognitive psychologist Donald D. Hoffman is among those asking, Do we see reality as it is? His answer, in essence, is no. Our perceptions may not reveal reality as it truly is so much as help us survive it. He puts it practically, suggesting that evolution has shaped us with perceptions that hide from us almost everything we do not need to know. Which is to say, almost everything.
Hoffman illustrates this by asking us to think of a desktop icon, such as a document folder on a laptop. Let’s say it’s a folder containing a letter to Karen. She’d love that.
The icon looks like a small blue folder in the corner of the screen. But the document itself is not a blue folder, nor a paper folder, nor even the pixels you would see if you leaned in close and decided squinting would finally reveal Truth. The document exists as information: language, encoded through alphabet, structure, and grammar, translated into code inside the device, manipulated through minute changes in voltage and hardware and software, and everything else that has to happen before your sentence appears.
If your ability to use the device depended on sensing, let alone understanding, all of that reality before taking any action, you would never make it past the “D” in “Dear Karen.” You might, however, make it quickly to “d” for dead if the same principle applied while you were trying to avoid predators, ride a motorcycle, or hunt down pizza and other prey on city streets.
So our brain-based perceptions narrow reality for us. They filter out almost everything and bring us only the information most immediately relevant to survival. Like desktop icons, the things around us may be useful representations of reality rather than reality itself. The tree, the coffee cup, the motorcycle, the beloved face across the table: each may be an interface, a manageable symbol standing in for a truth far deeper than we could process all at once.
This is where the matter becomes far more than interesting. It becomes personal.
If our physical senses filter reality to keep us from being overwhelmed, what if our rational minds do something similar with love? What if intellect, that brilliant and necessary tool, also reduces spiritual reality to manageable fragments? What if love is not vague because it is weak, but because it is too large for our ordinary instruments?
That would explain a great deal.
We often talk ourselves out of love’s clearest invitations because they do not appear “realistic.” We perceive a moment through the heart, through aspiration, through that seventh sense, and for an instant we recognize profound possibilities for connection. We know we could be kinder. We know we could forgive. We know we could stop defending the little fortress of the self and step toward another person with open arms.
Then the old programming comes online. Be careful. Don’t be naïve. Don’t make a fool of yourself. People take advantage. The world doesn’t work that way. Make sense.
And because we have been trained to equate cynicism with intelligence, we often retreat from what felt most true into what feels most defensible.
This is not a call to abandon reason. Reason is a marvelous companion. It keeps us from eating suspicious mushrooms, wiring outlets with wet hands, and buying discounted cell phones from men named Rusty who operate out of folding chairs near the county fairgrounds. I am deeply grateful for reason.
But reason is a servant, not the whole kingdom. It can tell us how a thing works, but not always what it means. It can measure the body’s responses to love, but not contain love itself. It can analyze kindness after the fact, but it cannot always tell us why a simple act of kindness can resurrect something inside us that the world had tried to strangle years before.
Glimpses into what people describe as a less filtered reality through near-death experiences, deep meditation, and therapeutic research into psychedelics often share a striking commonality: reports of profound unity, unconditional love, and a sense that separation itself is not the ultimate truth. Whatever interpretive framework one brings to those accounts, their consistency is worth honoring. At the very least, they suggest that our everyday consciousness may be a narrowed channel, not the whole broadcast.
We have some sense of this universal love, of course. This is why religious aspirations toward agape love are so central to faith. It is why people like Karen, who manifest remarkable, unconditional love, make such an enormous impression upon us. They seem to be perceiving on a frequency we only catch in flashes.
But perhaps our seventh sense, like our other senses, is limited for good reason. If we suddenly perceived the fullness of universal love here and now, if we felt BoB’s entire embrace without filter or mercy, we would be overwhelmed at first. Of course, if we survived with our wits intact, then we might realize we had achieved what Buddhists and others have called enlightenment: the dissolution of ego and the fulfillment of our ultimate purpose, joining fully in living the ultimate love story rather than serving as the worthy but limited authors of a few new chapters of its documentary.
We’ll all get there eventually, I believe. Before then, we live here, sometimes beautifully and others awkwardly, with filtered perceptions, unfinished selves, and grocery lists. We navigate our limited awareness in order to create new perspectives, new acts, new chapters in love’s ongoing story. We are not here merely to dissolve into the infinite. We are here to help the infinite discover what love can become through us.
Karen understood this intuitively. Her motorized wheelchair, her failing body, her daily struggles - none of these filtered out her innate perception of the love connecting her to every person she encountered. She did not wait for life to become easier before becoming kind and generous. She did not confuse pain with permission to become smaller. She trusted something deeper than circumstance.
Living like her feels impossible to me most days.
My rational mind gets in the way. My filters get in the way. My habits of fear, skepticism, and old injury get in the way. I can admire Karen with my whole heart and still lose patience in traffic ten minutes later because someone in a white pickup with questionable bumper stickers has decided that turn signals are a form of government overreach.
So I do not write this as a man who has mastered his seventh sense. I write as one still trying to trust it.
That trust begins, I think, by noticing when love has already arrived before we have explained it. A laugh in a hallway. A shoulder squeezed. A stranger seen. A desert made beautiful because Toni looked at it long enough to notice sleeping sand ogres where someone else saw little hills of emptiness. A student whose confusion becomes the beginning of wisdom. A woman named Karen, who had every rational excuse to withhold joy, and instead became a fountain of it.
These moments don’t always make sense. Good. Maybe they are not supposed to, at least not on the terms we usually demand.
Albert Einstein, one of the great love storytellers, whether he intended to be or not, wrote that a human being is part of the whole we call the universe, yet experiences himself as separate from the rest, “a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.” Our task, he said, must be to free ourselves from that prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
That sounds very much like a man describing the seventh sense.
After all this, it’s easy for me to imagine Karen and Albert meeting somewhere beyond the narrow band of my current perception. Karen’s chair is gone, or maybe it remains only because she likes the orange flag. Albert is probably still trying to explain something with his hands, hair expressing independent opinions in several dimensions. Karen laughs, waves, and gives him an enormous hug.
Albert smiles.
And BoB gets a whole lot bigger.
References
[1] Bushdid C, Magnasco MO, Vosshall LB, Keller A. “Humans can discriminate more than 1 trillion olfactory stimuli.” Science. 2014 Mar 21;343(6177):1370–2. doi: 10.1126/science.1249168.
[2] Hadhazy, A. “What are the limits of human vision?” BBC Future. July 27, 2015.
[3] Hoffman, Donald D. The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes. W. W. Norton, 2019. See also his TED talk, “Do we see reality as it is?”