If God Downloaded Everything Into My Head, Would It Make Sense—or Break Me?

I used to believe that if I could just see everything—if God downloaded all truth into my mind—it would make perfect sense.

The contradictions would vanish.

My soul would find peace in the master pattern.

I’ve always resonated with the old idea from Leibniz—that all things are part of a grand harmony, and if only we could see far enough, understand deeply enough, everything would fit together.

And in some sense, I still believe that.

At the level of physics—at the raw, empirical level of existence—reality is coherent.

The data doesn’t lie.

But now I wonder…

Could I handle it?

Could the human mind actually survive that level of clarity? Or would the full download of truth—every pattern, every motive, every unspoken pain, every brutal reality of how humans actually survive and live, not how they profess they do—burn through me like a butane torch on spiderwebs?

Because even if reality does make sense from some divine vantage point…

I’m not standing there.

 We are story-shaped creatures living in a data-shaped world.

Our brains aren’t built to parse infinite nuance. They’re built to project, to simplify, to survive.

We think in narratives because reality—raw, unsorted, uninterpreted reality—is often too much to bear.

I’ve begun to realize that sanity and truth are not the same thing.

Truth is what is.

Sanity is what lets us live with what is.

This is where myth becomes more than bedtime stories.

It becomes a survival mechanism.

It holds us. It translates the unbearable.

It gives form to suffering and scaffolding to the soul.

And here lies the fishhook contradiction :

Data-reflective thinking is more accurate.

But certainty-driven thinking is more livable.

And that’s the deep tension I’m trying to hold.

 I used to think contradictions were just fog—temporary misunderstandings that more data would burn away.

But some contradictions are functional, not logical.

They’re baked into the human condition.

We need truth to grow.

We need myth to survive.

And the bridge between the two is so thin some days I wonder how any of us make it.

 There’s a quote from Travels with Charley that never left me.

A man tells Steinbeck, “My grandfather knew the number of whiskers in the Almighty’s beard. I don’t even know what happened yesterday.”

That’s it, isn’t it?

The farther we walk from simple stories, the more we lose our footing.

Not because truth isn’t good—but because we’re not infinite.

We stare too long into complexity, and we forget how to breathe.

We scroll through horrors, and we forget how to feel.

The shape of truth may be perfect…

But it may also be too jagged for the human hand.

And that’s why I write.

Not because I have the answers.

But because somewhere in the space between myth and reality,

between the dream and the data,

between God’s voice and my limited ears—

  —there’s something worth holding.