Giving the Philosophy a Body

What happens when an idea that has helped you organize your mind becomes something you can actually hold in your hands?

In the third episode of the Cube Philosophy Podcast, Jacob B. Goettsche moves from the heart and mind behind Cube Philosophy to its physical body: the Cube itself.

In the first two episodes, Jake explored the personal experiences that led him to begin building a framework for living with complexity and uncertainty. He described how the Cube became a home for his mind—a place where different ideas, questions, and realities could exist without having to collapse into one answer.

But the Cube did not remain an idea inside his head.

Jake began giving it a physical form. And as he discovered, turning an internal structure into something he could see, touch, and manipulate revealed things that thinking alone had not.

The physical Cube would become another way to explore a question that had been with him from the beginning: How do we remain grounded and oriented when reality is larger and more complex than we can fully comprehend?

The Eternity Experiment

Jake begins this episode by returning to what he calls the Eternity Experiment.

He had been thinking about existence on scales far beyond an individual human lifetime. What happens when we extend our thinking beyond our own lives, beyond civilizations, and toward something as difficult to comprehend as eternity?

The further he followed those questions, the harder it became to find a stable point of reference.

At such enormous scales, familiar concerns can begin to lose their proportions. The immediate realities of everyday life can seem almost impossibly small. Yet those immediate realities are precisely where human beings must continue living, relating, and making decisions.

Jake needed a way to return from those enormous questions to the reality in front of him.

One of the distinctions that helped him was already becoming foundational to Cube Philosophy:

My Reality is not Another's Reality.

That distinction did not resolve the mysteries of eternity. Instead, it gave Jake a way to recognize where he was standing.

He had his own reality. Other people had theirs. And those different realities existed in relationship with one another.

Which led to another question.

What Do We Do With the Space Between Us?

If my reality is not yours, and yours is not mine, how do we share the space in between?

For Jake, that question became a practical doorway into understanding human relationships and the ways people affect one another.

We communicate through words, expressions, actions, and behavior. We share information and develop knowledge. We influence one another, sometimes intentionally and sometimes without realizing it.

Those interactions have consequences.

Some are positive. Some are negative. Some are difficult to understand until time has passed and we can look back at what happened.

The challenge is not simply to recognize that influence exists. It is to consider what we know, what we do not know, what effects our actions may have, and how our understanding changes through experience.

These questions contributed to the distinctions Jake began organizing within the Cube: My Reality, Another's Reality, Knowledge, Influence, Positive, and Negative.

Rather than assuming that one person's experience could stand in for everyone else's, the structure gave those different realities and relationships their own places.

It also allowed Jake to examine the space between them without pretending that the differences had disappeared.

The Ink Map and the Invisible Center

As the framework developed, Jake began working with what he calls the Ink Map, using the relationships among Influence, Negative, Knowledge, My Reality, Another's Reality, and Positive to examine human interactions.

These were not isolated words.

Their meaning came partly from how they related to one another. Knowledge could be distinguished from influence. Positive and negative could be considered without automatically treating either as the whole story. My Reality and Another's Reality could remain different while still participating in a shared situation.

The physical Cube gave these distinctions a visible arrangement.

But Jake also recognized something that could not be represented in quite the same way as the Cube's visible faces.

At its center was an invisible dimension: Ground.

That distinction mattered because not everything important to human orientation is immediately visible or physically measurable in the same way.

The Cube could have a physical body, but the person using it also had an internal experience. Jake was trying to understand how those visible and invisible dimensions could remain connected.

The question was no longer only how to organize ideas.

It was also how to ground them in lived experience.

Giving the Cube Its First Physical Body

Eventually, Jake decided to build an actual Cube.

The first generation was large—approximately eighteen inches across—and heavy. Its construction created practical problems that had not been obvious while the Cube existed primarily as an idea.

It had sharp edges. It was awkward to handle. And it lacked the color that would later become an important part of its appearance.

Jake describes how his daughter reacted to that first version and pointed out the absence of color.

It was a simple observation, but it illustrated something important.

An idea can seem workable in the mind and reveal entirely different problems when it encounters the physical world.

The first Cube was not a failure simply because it was imperfect. It was a first attempt that made new information available.

Once Jake could see and handle the object, he could recognize what needed to change.

That is an important distinction in the story of the Cube. Its physical development did not establish that every philosophical idea behind it was correct. It gave Jake a practical way to test the object itself, discover its limitations, and improve its construction.

And that process continued.

The Second Generation: Discovering the Importance of Space

The next version introduced changes in materials, color, and construction.

Jake experimented with steel, foam, and Gorilla tape as he worked toward a Cube that would be easier to handle and more useful.

Color helped distinguish its parts. The physical arrangement made relationships more visible. And the space within and between components became increasingly important.

The Cube was not simply a solid object with philosophical words attached.

Its structure needed to make differentiation possible.

If everything were permanently joined together without useful separation, the physical object would lose some of the flexibility Jake was trying to create.

The space was not merely empty.

It affected how the parts could be seen, held, moved, and understood in relationship to one another.

As Jake continued experimenting, he began asking more specific questions about what should connect, what should remain separate, and how those connections ought to work.

Magnets, Brackets, and the Right Amount of Hold

Later generations introduced another practical challenge: how should the pieces of the Cube stay together?

Jake experimented with magnets and brackets, discovering that the solution was not as straightforward as simply making everything attach as strongly as possible.

Magnets could interfere with one another. A connection that worked in one arrangement might create problems in another.

The design had to account for the amount of space, the kind of hold, and the relationship between the parts.

Jake's questions became increasingly precise:

What is the right amount of space? What is the right amount of hold? What kind of hold, in what measure, and for what reason?

Those questions arose from a physical construction problem, but they also echoed the kinds of distinctions he had been developing within Cube Philosophy.

A useful structure requires relationships, but those relationships need appropriate constraints.

Some things must remain connected. Others must be capable of separation or movement. The structure needs enough stability to function without becoming so rigid that it cannot be adjusted.

Through successive versions, Jake continued changing the physical Cube until he arrived at a construction that better supported what he wanted to do with it.

When the Cube Became Part of Everyday Life

The later Cube was not simply something Jake could display.

He could hang it on a wall, remove and interact with its faces, and use its physical presence as a way of returning his attention to the present.

He describes incorporating the Cube into a morning practice.

That practice begins with acknowledging his own being and observing what is happening. He considers tension, choice, alignment, balance, flow, and whether he feels rooted in his body and mind.

The words do not make decisions for him.

They give him places to begin asking questions.

What am I noticing? What is happening within me? What is happening around me? Where is there tension? What can I choose? What needs my attention?

The physical Cube makes those questions accessible through something he can see and touch.

This is where the title of the episode becomes especially meaningful.

The Cube has a body, and Jake has a body.

His thinking does not happen somewhere entirely separate from his physical existence. He must live, respond, choose, and act within the conditions of being human.

The Cube became one way of reconnecting those experiences.

Returning From Eternity to Here

Near the end of the episode, Jake returns to the enormous questions with which he began.

The Eternity Experiment had taken his thinking outward toward scales that were difficult to comprehend. The physical Cube brought his attention back toward something immediate.

He could see it.

He could touch it.

He could recognize its parts and their relationships.

And he could return to the distinction that had helped him find his footing:

My Reality is not Another's Reality.

The mysteries had not disappeared. The complexity of existence had not been solved.

But Jake had developed a way to return to where he was and consider what he could do from there.

That is one of the most important ideas running through this episode.

Orientation does not require having an answer to everything.

Sometimes it begins by recognizing what is here, what is relevant, what remains unknown, and what responsible next step is available.

Compass. Journey. Home.

Jake closes by returning to the three words that have become the guiding expression of Cube Philosophy.

Compass. Journey. Home.

The Compass represents orientation: finding where we are and considering which direction to take.

The Journey represents the process of moving through experience, change, choices, and consequences.

Home represents a place of sufficient stability—a structure to which we can return when we need to find our footing again.

For Jake, the Cube gradually became a physical expression of that relationship.

It did not eliminate mystery.

It did not provide a predetermined answer for every situation.

And it did not remove the need to keep learning from reality.

Instead, it gave him something he had been searching for throughout the development of Cube Philosophy:

“I needed a way to ground myself. I needed a way to orient myself.”

The heart gave the Cube its personal beginning.

The mind gave its ideas somewhere to live.

And the body made it something Jake could hold, examine, change, and return to.

Watch The Body Behind the Cube

The Body Behind the Cube: Giving the Philosophy a Body is Episode 3 of the Cube Philosophy Podcast with Jacob B. Goettsche.

“I needed a way to ground myself. I needed a way to orient myself.”

— Jacob B. Goettsche

Compass. Journey. Home.