The Mind Behind the Cube
Building a Home for My Mind
What do you do when the way you once understood reality no longer gives your mind somewhere solid to stand?
In the second episode of the Cube Philosophy Podcast, Jacob B. Goettsche moves from the heart behind Cube Philosophy to the mind behind it: how the framework began taking shape when he needed a way to live with complexity, uncertainty, and questions that did not come with simple answers.
In the first episode, Jake described reaching one of the lowest points of his life and the search for stability that followed. Here, he picks up that story from another direction. If he was going to rebuild, what could he safely build upon?
For Jake, the answer did not begin with certainty.
It began with mystery.
Building From What You Don't Know
When the assumptions and structures Jake had depended on stopped making sense, he began stripping things back. Rather than replacing one absolute answer with another, he confronted a more difficult possibility: there are things we simply do not know.
That uncertainty could have remained destabilizing. Instead, it became part of the structure.
Jake began asking a different kind of question. If mystery cannot simply be eliminated, can we build a way of thinking that leaves room for it?
One of the first distinctions that helped him do that was deceptively simple:
My reality is not another's reality.
We can communicate. We can share knowledge. We can influence one another. We can recognize patterns and common experiences. But we cannot occupy another person's reality exactly as they do.
That distinction gave Jake somewhere to begin.
What Happens in the Space Between Us?
Once Jake could distinguish his reality from another person's reality, another question appeared: What happens in the space between them?
Communication happens there. Knowledge can be shared there. Influence travels there. Words, signals, body language, experiences, interpretations, and assumptions all move through that space.
And those things can have positive or negative effects.
Gradually, those distinctions began to give shape to what would become the visible faces of the Cube: My Reality, Another's Reality, Knowledge, Influence, Positive, and Negative.
These were not simply philosophical categories Jake wanted to invent. He describes them as part of an attempt to organize a mind that had been overwhelmed by complexity.
Instead of making mystery disappear, the developing framework gave mystery somewhere to exist.
That mattered.
A Home for the Mind
Jake describes the Cube as creating “rooms” for his mind.
His reality could have a place. Another person's reality could have a place. Knowledge and influence could be distinguished from one another. Positive and negative could be examined rather than automatically assumed.
Later, he recognized something else within that structure: the invisible Ground.
The Ground, as Jake explains it, was not something he created simply because the model needed another component. It was something he came to recognize within the structure.
The result was increasingly a way to take what had felt tangled together and begin differentiating it.
And differentiation is central to this episode.
When we can distinguish one thing from another—mine from yours, knowledge from influence, positive from negative, one scale from another—we gain the ability to locate ourselves more clearly inside complexity.
We don't suddenly know everything.
We have a better idea of where we are.
You Get a Cube. I Get a Cube.
One of the important developments Jake discusses came through a failed relationship.
At one point, he imagined Cube Philosophy as primarily relational: one person could fill out one side, another person could fill out the other, and together they could work on the Cube between them.
His understanding changed.
What he came to believe was much more protective of individual autonomy:
You get a Cube. I get a Cube. And then we get a Cube.
Before two people can responsibly work on what exists between them, each person has a reality of their own to recognize and take responsibility for.
That is one reason Jake describes Cube Philosophy as a private practice first. It begins with your own work—not with organizing, defining, or taking possession of someone else's reality.
When Complexity Needs Somewhere to Go
There is another practical idea running through this episode: sometimes we need to get what is happening inside our minds outside of us so that we can see it.
A journal can do that. Conversation can do that. Jake points to therapy as another example of externalizing an experience so that some space develops between the person and the problem being examined.
For him, the Cube became a kind of constrained external journal.
The constraint matters.
Rather than an unlimited page on which everything can spill out indefinitely, the Cube requires placement. Ideas and words have relationships to one another. Some carry more weight. Some belong in different domains. Some need to be tested against other parts of the structure.
Jake compares that process to construction. A structure has to carry load. What bears weight needs to be placed appropriately.
He eventually recognized a similar principle while playing Sudoku: constraint does not necessarily prevent understanding. Sometimes constraint is exactly what makes relationships visible.
Life Is Simple and Complex
Near the end of the episode, Jake returns to a paradox that sits close to the center of Cube Philosophy.
Life is simple and complex. It is both.
Breathing is extraordinarily complex, but we do not consciously manage every exchange of oxygen in the body. We inhale. We exhale. We return to the next breath.
Jake sees a similar possibility in the Cube.
Reality can remain enormously complex without requiring us to consciously hold every variable at once. By externalizing some of that complexity, differentiating it, organizing it, and returning to a structure, he found a way to move through uncertainty without needing uncertainty to disappear.
The Cube became what he calls his internal mental home.
Not a place containing every answer.
- A place from which he could continue asking questions.
- A place from which he could orient.
- A place from which he could move.
- And a place to which he could return.
Watch The Mind Behind the Cube
The Mind Behind the Cube: Building a Home for My Mind is Episode 2 of the Cube Philosophy Podcast with Jacob B. Goettsche.
“I was making a home for my mind. A place where all these things could live.”
— Jacob B. Goettsche
Compass. Journey. Home.
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If you've ever felt overwhelmed by competing thoughts, responsibilities, emotions, or decisions, you're not alone.
Cube Philosophy offers practical ways to organize your internal world, find your bearings, and navigate life's complexity with greater clarity, stability, and purpose.
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