3 - The Meaning of the Sphere

Toye Oyelese

Welcome back, friends, to The Sphere of Reality. I'm Dr. Toye Oyelese, your ever-curious host—back to pry a little further into the sketch that kickstarted this whole journey. You know, that picture I drew twenty-five years ago: a point at the center, arrows bursting out, and a sort of dashed circle roped around the whole thing. Sometimes I still find that original doodle tucked into an old medical textbook—I won’t say which one, because honestly, I don’t remember, but I do remember the feeling it gave me. It just felt—true. But why?

Toye Oyelese

So let’s break it down with fresh eyes. That center point? That’s you. Or me. The self, right smack in the middle. Philosophers might call it your “epistemic position”—which is just a fancy way of saying, the only place you ever truly occupy in experience is here, inside your own head and skin. No matter how hard you try, you can’t hop over and look from inside someone else’s perception. You can get close—I mean, with empathy, listening, stories—but you’re still rooted in your own center.

Toye Oyelese

Now, those arrows—those are your awareness, not just the silent background of consciousness, but the active bit. Awareness reaches, it probes past the immediate into what’s out there—what you can hear, see, touch, and, sometimes, what you can only guess at. If consciousness is the water we swim in, awareness is the ripple your hand makes as you reach.

Toye Oyelese

And then, there’s that dashed line, the boundary. Except—here’s the important part—it isn’t a solid wall or a brick fence. It’s dashed for a reason: it’s porous, an edge more than a barrier. Stuff leaks in—new ideas, strange sensations, other people’s perspective when you truly listen. I always liked that—reminded me of those old boundaries we used to draw in the sand clinics in Nigeria to explain “patient care zones”: the circle shifted every time we understood something new about who was in pain or how to help.

Toye Oyelese

I’ll admit, for years, I misunderstood my own diagram. I thought I’d managed to capture consciousness itself. But as I came to realize—and as the whole Toye Paradox drives home in this series—it’s not the stuff of consciousness that’s shown in that sketch. It’s the extent. It’s how far you’ve reached. That’s what the sphere actually is: the current limit of your awareness, radiating from wherever you happen to be.

Toye Oyelese

Now, let’s stick with those arrows for a moment. Awareness is, well, it’s alive. It’s like those beams of light shooting out from a flashlight when you’re camping—the darkness isn’t gone, but wherever that beam lands, you see more. The edge of that light, that’s your sphere’s boundary. And you can move it—sometimes it widens, sometimes it collapses.

Toye Oyelese

That boundary is never set in stone. If I think back, moving from Nigeria to Canada—oh, that was a leap. Talk about your sphere expanding in all directions overnight. New weather, new language quirks, new systems for healthcare. My “arrows” had to reach further just to get by. Some days, I felt like I was stuck on the inside of that dashed line, staring out at a country that made no sense to me. But slowly, awareness did its work. Every time I listened hard enough to pick up a Canadian turn of phrase or figured out how a local pharmacy worked, that boundary stretched a little further.

Toye Oyelese

It’s kind of humbling, actually—to see that edge flex. Sometimes, after years doing family medicine in remote outposts, I’d think I had it all mapped out. Then I’d find myself at a patient’s bedside, realizing I was still blind to half their story. The moment you step back and tune in—that’s your boundary growing. And on the flip side—withdraw, pull in from fear or from exhaustion, and you feel your world contract. Everything gets a little closer and a little smaller.

Toye Oyelese

When you pay full attention—when you open up to something strange or uncomfortable, your sphere extends. It’s not just about travel, or culture shock; it’s in the ordinary, too. Listening to music outside your comfort zone, picking up a new hobby, even trying a new route home from work. You don’t have to climb Everest—though if that’s your thing, good luck with the altitude. No, it’s about reaching, in any direction, with intention. And trusting that, wherever the edge is, it’s never the last stop—unless you let it be.

Toye Oyelese

So here’s the heart of it: you aren’t your sphere. You aren’t the dashed boundary, or the territory inside it. You’re the center—always. The sphere is what grows and contracts around you, based on what your awareness and your actions manage to claim.

Toye Oyelese

This is something I had to learn the hard way. Years back, I started a “wellness” clinic—out in Stony Plain, Alberta. I thought I was expanding my practice, you know, bringing wellness into family medicine. What I didn’t expect was how much it stretched my own boundaries. Going through Cerificate in Medical Acupuncture training at the University of Alberta with Dr. Steven Aung—was, frankly, uncomfortable at first. But every time I learned and practiced it and listened to a patient describe a kind of healing I didn’t fully grasp, I felt my “arrows” nudge into fresh territory. The dashed line got bigger, and the world inside my sphere felt richer for it.

Toye Oyelese

The real kicker, though, is that none of it happened because I just intended to grow. It was about action—signing up, showing up, doing something unfamiliar. That’s what shifts the boundary, not just thinking about it. And every time you step outside your usual patterns, the edge recedes. Leaning in or pulling away: that’s the difference between expansion and contraction, not just in theory, but in how much of life you actually get to experience.

Toye Oyelese

So—if you take one thing from today, let it be this: Your reality grows as you move. Not by wishing for expansion, but by reaching, even if you fumble at it. You can feel the edge, sure, but you’re always more than what sits inside it. Next time, I’ll take you right up to that limit and peek at what might be just beyond—something I’ve come to call “antevalence,” but... well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. For now: remember, wherever your arrows land, that’s your territory. The edge is always up for negotiation.