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Four Ways the Counterintuitive Approach May be the Better Approach

Gary Z McGee
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Four Ways the Counterintuitive Approach May be the Better Approach

“Believe me. The secret of reaping the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment from life is to live dangerously.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

On the one hand, we all know that if we continue doing things the same way, we’re going to continue to get the same result. On the other hand, we are so accustomed to doing things a certain way it seems like too much of a chore to try something different.

But this general disposition effects our lives more profoundly than we might think.  Sometimes it can be as simple as taking a step back and thinking to ourselves, “What if I try the opposite of what I usually do? What if, instead of living comfortably, I decided to live dangerously? Would I reap greater fruit and greater enjoyment out of life?”

Perhaps. But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves. Let’s begin with things that have a direct effect on our general disposition toward life and our perception of reality.

Here are four ways in which the counterintuitive approach may be the better approach.

1) Don’t be certain, be skeptical

“That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.” ~ P.C. Hodgell

bulb2 Walk into any library, into any Barnes & Noble. The books on the shelves represent some of the greatest minds of human thought. When you open one, suddenly you’re standing on the shoulder of a giant. Every single book will give you a unique perspective on life, but, and here’s the rub, every single book was written by a human being.

And every single human since the dawn of mankind has been a fundamentally flawed, fallible, and imperfect being. This should go without saying, but it absolutely must be said, because people tend to be in denial about it. Not only in regards to their own fallibility but in regards to the giants who came before them, beaming like shiny beacons from golden bookshelves.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t stand on the shoulders of giants. Not at all. That’s one of my favorite pastimes. I’m saying be skeptical when you do. Written thoughts do not necessarily imply wise thoughts. Nor do wise thoughts necessarily imply Truth.

Whether it’s a holy book written 2,000 years ago by a bunch of Middle Eastern men who believed they had all the answers, or a scientific paper written by a patent clerk who thought he discovered the answer to the mysteries of energy and gravity, or anything between, be skeptical.

Stand on the shoulders of giants, just don’t put all your eggs in their basket. Take it into consideration in order to expand upon what you’ve seen. Certainty is for amateurs. Skepticism is for masters.

Remember: when standing on the shoulders of giants, seek not certainty, even if the giant is certain. Seek uncertainty instead, even if doing so threatens to shatter the fragility of your faith. When a giant is established or resting in peace, their shoulders can be comforting, there can be no doubt. But that is not what a giants shoulder is for.

Like Ursula K. Le Guin said, “The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.”

2) Don’t be invulnerable, be vulnerable

bulb3“Experience is the hardest teacher. It gives you the test first and the lesson afterward.” ~ Oscar Wilde

Invulnerability is overrated. Weaponized hyper-security is overvalued. Manic comfort at the expense of comfort-zone-expanding adventures is valued to highly.

Like Mary Oliver wisely put, “Your heart is beating, isn’t it? You’re not in chains, are you? There is nothing more pathetic than caution when headlong might save a life, even, possibly, your own.”

Within the violent, militarized societies of today, it’s difficult to feel our way through the metallic armor that has been cast over us like a security blanket. But feel through it we must, if we wish to get back to the Desert of the Real and back to the wisdom of the source.

This means getting vulnerable even when others have all their walls up. This means getting vulnerable despite the invulnerable tank of the state. This means standing in front of that tank and staring it down with Tiananmen-like courage and naked bravery.

This means having tough skin and a soft heart. This means staring into the abyss of the human condition and having enough humor to laugh at all the daunting demons.

Truly being vulnerable means being okay with getting tested first and learning the lesson afterward. It’s putting ourselves out there, raw but resolute with an insurmountable courage. It’s taking a leap of courage.

It’s living dangerously rather than comfortably or safely. It’s walking up to that very same abyss and doing as Friedrich Nietzsche advised: “Throw roses into the abyss and say: ‘Here is my thanks to the monster who didn’t succeed in swallowing me alive.’”

3) Don’t overthink, overflow

“There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.” ~ William Shakespeare

The age of information is upon us. The internet is an overwhelming ocean of interconnected thoughts. We are all lost in a sea of uncertain knowledge acting like it’s certain, awash with crushing waves of opinion and tsunamis of data.

But alas, wisdom eludes the majority of us. This is because, within the realm of thought, the majority of us have forgotten the two most important steps of wisdom: The first step is to question everything; the second step is to question the answers.

But it goes even deeper than this. We are overthinking in the first place. We are unable to let go, to breathe, to simply fall into the masterpiece. We too often have the cart of Thought in front of the horse of Flow. We’re a Jackson minus the Pollock, frozen over the pale-white canvas of our life.

Twiddling our thumbs. Afraid to make a mark without thinking it through. Don’t be afraid. Don’t overthink, overflow. Let go. Dive headfirst into your art, whatever it is. Just remember to breathe.

Creativity is in communication with creativity. There’s a universe of creativity in which we are merely specks. But the creative urge within us remembers its connection with the universe. Even the tiniest speck has some degree of creativity in its link to the universe, which is unfathomable. But the way we fathom it is to be it.

To become the artistic process itself. To overflow. To allow the deep, aching chasm that is the emptied cup of our mind to be filled, not with thought, but with flow.

Like Elizabeth Gilbert said, “The only thing that can fill an eternal hole is the eternal.”

Let it go. Then let it in. Just remember to breathe.

4) Don’t cling to Love, let Love go

“Drop the idea that attachment and love is one thing. They are enemies. It is attachment that destroys all love. If you feed and nourish attachment, love will be destroyed; if you feed and nourish love, attachment will fall away by itself. They are not one; they are two separate entities, and antagonistic to each other.” ~ Osho

bulb5Here’s the thing: everybody wants to be loved, and everybody wants to fall in love. Whether it’s with a person, with life, or with the moment. But here’s the other thing: everything changes. There is no permanence.

People change, fall in and out of love, and die. Life changes, takes us through thick and thin, and then it ends. Each moment bleeds into a new moment and is lost forever. Even our memories are inexact and short-lived.

And yet, this is all the more reason to love. It’s because things end, that we cherish it while we can. It’s because the moment passes, that we appreciate it while we’re in it. It’s because love doesn’t last, that we love at all.

Like Osho said, “Love is not about possession. Love is about appreciation.”

Love is Time’s ultimate benchmark. When we let love go, we’re allowing love to be free. We’re allowing it to go through the process of itself. When we let love go, we’re honoring the universe its vicissitudes.

When we let love go, we’re breathing in and out. We’re more in love with the coming and going of love than we are with it either coming or going, stopping or starting, living or dying. When we let love go, we are practicing Buddhist non-attachment par excellence. We are Zenning. We are emptying our cup of appreciation so it can be filled over and over again.

Understand: when we let love go we are not letting go of Love itself – not at all. We are letting go of the ego’s need to possess love. We are letting go of the ego’s attachment to love: the need to cling, to smother, or even trap it. It’s not like we let go of love and then forget about it.

No, it’s more like we are honoring the love we had by allowing it to be free. Love is never abandoned, nor is it ever forgotten. Only the needy, codependent, addictive, ego-driven side of love – filled with unhealthy expectations and preprogrammed cultural dispositions about the way love should be, is abandoned.

Indeed. True love, infinite love, enlightened love, is the uncommon ability to let love go.

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3 Ways to Feel Creative and Inspired Every Day

Ester Eckhaus
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3 Ways to Feel Creative and Inspired Every Day

“When a poet digs himself into a hole, he doesn’t climb out. He digs deeper, enjoys the scenery, and comes out the other side enlightened.” ~ Criss Jami, Venus in Arms

Stuck creativity can feel like suffocating or drowning to any artist. Even when there is no deadline to create by, one can often go days or weeks feeling creatively stagnant. It can eat away at you.

Even while having a good or successful day there will be an itch to create and a nagging at the back of your mind saying, “yes, but I haven’t created anything today.” If you’re anything like me, you know how horrible it can be if this goes on for too long. Whether your projects are standing half-done, or your mind is just uninspired and procrastinating, here are a few tips to get your creative sparks firing.Creativity-or-Art

“Morning Pages”

This is the most valuable thing I learnt in art school. Morning Pages is a concept taken from the book “The Artist’s Way,” by Julia Cameron. What you do is: take 10-15 minutes in the morning, three pages of a notebook, and just write. This should not be a journal or a diary, it’s a free-form stream of consciousness that is free to explore anything that might be going through your mind; whether it’s your worries, musings, to-do list for the day, etc. There are no rules or “right way” to do morning pages. It should just be three pages of unedited, uninhibited, unapologizing you, and your thoughts.

The Two Things Morning Pages accomplishes:

1) You are emptying your mind of all the possible distracting thoughts of the day. These are all the thoughts that will otherwise nag and nudge at you while you may be trying to work, create, or just be. By giving all these thoughts the time and space to be acknowledged and expressed, you are opening your mind and attention for other things.

2) Morning pages are a good way to brainstorm or process. When I feel stuck (in any way, whether it be creative, emotional, or mental) I will pick up my notebook and use this free-form writing to explore my mind on any subject that may be keeping me stagnant.

It is just structured enough, and just free enough, to unstick my brain. Because your pen is following the complicated process of your brain, and putting it out in front of you, things tend to become clear where there was brain fog before. I will sometimes find amazing solutions to stubborn problems, or questions, in this way.

Don’t worry if it feels forced or unnatural at the beginning. Just write the three pages, whether your thoughts come out profound or simple, and you can even throw the pages out afterwards if you wish. The pages are just for you and will start to feel more natural and helpful if you stick to it for awhile.

Also note, that although it’s called morning pages, and it is indeed most helpful to do this at the start of your day, I have made a habit of doing it at any time of the day. At the beginning, the best way to get into the habit is to stick to the morning, but once you’ve got it, make it your own and form it to whatever you need it to be for your unique creative process.

Learn something new

Creativity “Dive again and again into the river of uncertainty. Create in the dark, only then can you recognize the light.” ~ Jyrki Vainonen

Another way to get yourself unstuck and moving is to give your brain something new to eat. This can be in any form. If you’re feeling uninspired as a writer, read some new poetry, or read those articles you saved in your tabs but never got around to.

A painter can find newfound inspiration by seeing an art form that has never been explored before, and a teacher can be reinvigorated by watching an online video about new educational methods.

So, whether you’re trying to finish up that essay but can’t think of any original ideas, or if your brain just feels like it’s been sleeping on the job lately, a good way to jostle things is to do anything that will feed you new and interesting information and ideas.

Good ideas often lead to newer ideas and insights. So, go to a lecture or an art opening, buy a new book, listen to a new album, read an out-of-the-box article, or spend time around friends who bring up interesting topics, and see where new ideas can bring you.

Practice being a channel

TeriWallace
“The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.” ~ Anton Chekhov

Any artist will tell you that the best ideas and work come from a place completely outside of them, and at a time that they least expect it. Some people even say that you have no control over your creativity; it comes and goes in waves, and you just have to be there, ready with your pencil or paint, to ride with it.

Here are two things that are helpful to ride the waves:

1) Acknowledge that you are just a channel for this creativity you experience.
2) Create a space for the creativity to find you.

This is done by finding a spot that makes you feel happy and inspired (or even just a place you feel you can concentrate). For me, it’s always my bed, or in a cozy room with lots of sunlight. For other people, it’s in nature, or in closed dark spaces.

Wherever it is, find it, and plant yourself there. Next is the acknowledging part. However you feel comfortable, put the message out into the universe that you are a ready channel to receive your work. You can say it out loud, just think about it, or even write about it (morning pages anyone?).

Being a channel is difficult. It requires you to let go of your ego and control over your creativity, and be grateful to something outside of yourself when you do receive it.

For some people, this is a hard thing to let go of, especially because creativity is so personal. But for others it is relieving and refreshing when they can feel that they were given these gifts for a purpose and there is something guiding them.

If all else fails, take a walk, spend some time with yourself, or someone you enjoy, and do something fun. Come back to the creative endeavor later when you’ve had some time away, and hopefully you will be able to see it with new eyes.

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Insurgent Love: Why Falling in Love is the Ultimate Act of Revolution

Gary Z McGee
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Insurgent Love: Why Falling in Love is the Ultimate Act of Revolution

“Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover’s war, and he does, at his best, what lover’s do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelation, make freedom real.” ~ James Baldwin

Love is the ultimate alchemy, the supreme transmutation, the essential transformative power. Falling in love with anything less than everything is just love.

However, falling in love with everything, with all of life –the ups and the downs, the tragic and the magic, the hunger and the angst– this is falling in love, in infinite love, what some might call unconditional love.

love1As Stephen Levine said, “True love has no object. Many speak of their unconditional love for another. Unconditional love is the experience of being. You cannot unconditionally love someone. You can only be unconditional love. It is not a dualistic emotion. It is a sense of oneness with all that is. The experience of love arises when we surrender our separateness into the universal. It is a feeling of unity. You don’t love another, you are another.”

Being in love in this way is falling in love with life itself, with the whole of the cosmos. It’s an Agape love that transcends all religions, all ideologies, all politics, and goes beyond good and evil. No single thing can contain it. It is in all things, otherwise it is extinguished. Those who are truly in love, are in love with love itself.

There is no container that can fill it. No single person, nor even group of persons, can own it. There is no particular experience that it can be pigeonholed into. Truly being in love with life means being in love with existence itself: the filth and the beauty, the sacred and the profane, the comfort and the discomfort.

Like the old African proverb states: “One who loves you, loves you with your dirt.”

This is the kind of love that revolutions are born out of. It’s not only a revolutionary force to be reckoned with, but an evolutionary force as well. It’s revolutionary precisely because it cannot be contained. It shatters all paradigms. It stretches all comfort zones. It pushes all envelopes. It flattens all boxes.

It must, otherwise it would not exist. But it does exist. It can be seen in those who have truly fallen in love with life, in the hearts of those who have become love. No authority can contend with it. No amount of power can crush it. No flimsy, man-made laws can imprison it. It is free from all limits, and so it is seen as a threat to all who seek to limit it.

love2 Love shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s ability to let it be free. Those who are truly in love, naturally create freedom. Because they love themselves, they are compelled to be free. Because they love others, they are compelled to free others. Being in love gives one the strength and the courage to love others.

As Lao Tzu said, “Being deeply loved gives you strength; while loving deeply gives you courage.”

The individual in love is not creating anarchy, they are creating art. Anarchy is merely a side effect of their art. They’re not creating revolution, they are creating love. Revolution is merely a side effect of their love.

This type of love poses a threat to the status quo, because the status quo wishes to maintain its status. Being in love without boundaries is feared by those who cannot transform their boundaries into horizons. Those who cling to comfort, hold tight to security, and kowtow to authority, cannot stomach so fierce a love as this.

For this love contains the two things they fear the most: courage and wisdom. Those under the spell of the state, or any power construct for that matter, will find this type of love abrasive, dangerous, and irresponsible. But true love is not meant to be morally responsible, it’s amorally irresponsible, rebellious and scornful of cowardice. It’s Meta-moral. Indeed, those in love serve one master alone: love itself.

Ask yourself this: Do you wish to live out a harried life of nine-to-five slavery, giving up your days to heartless corporations that don’t give a damn about anything except making money, or do you wish to live a happy life of passion and compassion, in love with life and doing what you love, despite plutocracy and tyranny?

Swallow the bitter pill of that question. Quit rationalizing exploitation. Do not deafen yourself to those who would make you their victim. Realize with real eyes real lies.

Like Terrance O’Connor said, “When I act out of realization, I act not out of guilt but out of self-love, a love that includes family, which includes the planet. When I look, I see. When I educate myself I break through my denial and see that humankind is facing an absolutely unprecedented crisis. When I act from this knowledge, I act not out of obligation or idealism, but because I live in a straw house and I smell smoke. I realize the truth: that, in Krishnamurti’s words, “You are the world, and the world is on fire.””

love3 Those who are in love are the personification of fire. The individual in love can survive anything, because the fire inside them burns brighter than the fire around them. The courage in their heart is a howl born of reinforced love. This fire is the love burning behind the third eye.

This is what Rumi meant when he said, “Close your eyes. Fall in love. Stay there.” Falling in love compels individuals toward heroism. It burns the line drawn between morality and immorality. Amorality is the ashes left behind, from which the liberated Phoenix of their passion arises.

We are seized by our own freedom. What we do with this freedom is the greatest responsibility of all. Do we fall in love or do we falter in fear? If, as Naseem Nicholas Taleb said, “A man without a heroic bent starts dying after the age of thirty” then it behooves us to discover a heroic bent.

And the best way to do so, is to fall fiercely in love with life. This will probably mean breaking away from the status quo, stretching comfort zones, and courageously diving into adventure.

Being in love in such a way is subversive precisely because it poses a threat to the established order of the unhealthy and unsustainable culture. Because this love is healthy and sustainable, people are free to connect to each other in a meaningful way. They are compelled to push their comfort zones and risk being honest and vulnerable together.

As Carol Pearson said, “No matter how much people want to feel loved, appreciated, and a part of things, there will be a loneliness deep in their souls until they make a commitment to themselves, a commitment that is so total that they will give up community and love, if necessary, to be fully who they are.”

And by doing so, they discover true community and love, because they learn to love people without hope, without an agenda, and without expectation.

Like Walter Benjamin said, “The only way of loving a person is to love them without hope.”

But being fiercely in love is not for the faint of heart. Such a path is ripe with dangers and demons galore. There will be those who will try to contain your fire.

There will be those who will claim to be an authority and attempt to extinguish your flame. There will be those who will be consumed by your flames, like moths. But you must continue to burn. Burn brighter.

You must allow the fierce flames of being in love to burn what it needs to burn. Allow the beacon of your love to shine through dark times. Other people have a choice: fall in love and become the sacred fire, or remain moths. If they choose to be the fire as well, all is good, for fire plus fire begets more fire. And if they choose to remain moths, it is still good, because you are fire, and fire only knows how to be fire. So let your love burn.

Burn until all unsustainable infrastructures crumble into sustainable ashes. Burn the boring rituals of daily grinds. Burn the too-precious productivity, the bottom-line, and the socialized etiquette. Burn the marketing strategies that depend upon apathy and insecurity to sell products.

Burn the monetary-based economy to ashes, so that the Phoenix of eco-centric, resource-based economy can rise. Burn all man-made laws with the cosmic law of your love. Burn, and then keep burning. Burn until all the pitiful moths are transformed into mighty flames.

Burn God if you must. Love cannot be lorded over. Love is not subject to this or that so called dogma, doctrine, or deity. Love burns even holy constructs, because love is the only holy construct. So burn through the screwtape of religion. Like Jorge Luis Borges profoundly said, “To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.”

Which is all the more reason for your revolutionary love to exist, to reveal infinity to itself, to show the human condition its own vulnerable fallibility, to expose the lies that circle entrenched power, to disclose truth to those who are hypnotized by corrupt power, to lay bare what true power really is: the ability to fall in love, and stay there.

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How to Reach a Child-Like State in Adulthood (and Why that’s our Ultimate Goal)

Ester Eckhaus
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How to Reach a Child-Like State in Adulthood (and Why that’s our Ultimate Goal)

Why do so many people feel nostalgic about childhood?

Even when looking back and realizing the flaws of systems, parents, and illusions, we still feel a pull to reach back into our past and relish in the comfort of being a child; an unblemished soul.

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But there is a deeper reason why we constantly return to fantasies of childhood; why we ache for our old story books, innocent desires, and imagination worlds.

Our higher selves recognize that our ultimate goal is to return to that child-like state.

A state in which our deepest desires and selves are not yet veiled with the many masks that adult life requires us to use.

A state in which creativity and play are not luxuries, but needs for a content soul.

We often feel such pressure to settle into our “adult selves,” but in truth, the more we appreciate and work with our inner child, the more wisdom is available to us, and the more fulfilled our lives can be.

Listen to the child-like voice inside of you

Sometimes, even after smothering our inside voices for years, little urges will still work their way up to our consciousness. It may be the child-like urge to jump into rain puddles, or hum to yourself while waiting on line. Take those innocent urges and run with them.

The child inside you is not only wise, but very knowledgeable about who you truly are, and what you need in your life to grow and thrive.

The best advice for someone who is struggling with an unhappy and unfulfilled job is to think back to what they enjoyed doing when they were a kid, and to follow their gifts and passions. So, listen to what the child inside you wants to do. The more you listen, the more he/she will speak up with valuable advice to guide you through your life.

Example: While passing by a local toy store, a wooden build-it-yourself airplane caught my eye. Though I passed it every day and it was a meager price of five dollars, I found myself promising to buy it “eventually”, but never stopping to actually do it. (Quite literally like promising a kid a prize “next time”.)

Last week, while writing this article, I realized this and finally gave in and bought it. I could actually feel my inner childs victory as soon as I left the store.

Heal your wounded or hidden child

inner-child Just like any child, the child inside you needs tender love and care in order to flourish. And sometimes, your child, after having been pushed down for a while, needs time and attention to heal again. Just as any child, it needs an attentive and supportive mother who can be trusted to raise him/her up.

A wounded inner child is one that was ignored or quieted for a long period of time; or perhaps even abused or talked down to. Our inner child is especially sensitive to negative self-talk, and negative beliefs.

Example: While dealing with a difficult bout of depression, I could not hear my inner child at all. I believed that the negative voices that had take over were all that there was. It needed very specific gestures from me in order to speak up again.

A lot of coaxing, soft words, and mother-like hugs brought her back up to the surface. And since then I make sure to check up on her all the time to make sure she feels safe and listened to.

This is truly having a relationship with the child inside you.

Take time to live as your child would

Once we’ve established communication with our inner child, the next step is to integrate his/her wisdom into our daily life. Set dates to do something that would make your inner child happy and fulfilled; whether it’s doing an art project, picking flowers, or throwing a ball around the park.

Or just small things each day that make you break out of the adult mold and into the freedom and imagination of the child. The next time you find yourself spending time or taking care of a child, play on his/her level.

Get down on your hands and knees and delve into their world of imagination. What better practice than to truly play as a child. Much love and luck on your path!

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The Cosmic-Fingerprint: Being an Independent Galaxy in an Interdependent Universe

Gary Z McGee
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The Cosmic-Fingerprint: Being an Independent Galaxy in an Interdependent Universe

“Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.” ~ Carl Sagan

Trapped in the silent darkness of your skull is a magnificent brain that has never existed, nor will ever exist again. Your conscious awareness is more unique to you than your fingerprint.

You are more distinctive than a snowflake. Your independence has never before been experienced in all of the multiple histories of the universe, and it never will be experienced again.

brain3In fact, the only thing that trumps your unique independence is the meta-unique interdependence of the universe living through you. You are your very own double-edged sword, piercing time and space with a cut so exclusively sharp and so phenomenally inimitable that nobody else can wield it but you.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. As the famous Serbian Proverb states, “Be humble for you are made of Earth. Be noble for you are made of stars.”

Within the infinite cosmos is a finite universe that may or may not be part of an infinite multiverse, within which there are billions of galaxies, within which there are billions of stars.

Orbiting around one of these stars are nine planets, and within one of these planets there exists over seven billion different brains. One of those brains just so happens to be yours, within which there is an infinite inner cosmos of billions of neurons making trillions of connections.

These connections form the existential bedrock of your perception of reality. They lasso you to experiences that only you can have. In all of the world’s seven billion different human brains there exists seven billion different interpretations of something as seemingly simple as the concept of a fork. Or any concept, for that matter.

Even the concept of “concept” is interpreted differently, however minute that difference may be. We all might agree that a fork is a fork. We all might agree upon the definition of the word “fork.”

But we all have unique accumulated memories, our own feel, governing the concept of a fork. Every single one of those memories are unique to us. Even those memories shared with others, like with your mother or father, are remembered differently.

This difference is no small thing. It seems like it can just be shrugged off as deep philosophy. But it has far-reaching implications on how you perceive reality and how that reality is in turn shaped. Psychologically, your sense of self is an elusive moving target at best, and a target impossible to hit at worst.

Your brain is a relentless chameleon, camouflaging itself to the experience of its environment. It’s a persistent shape-shifter, constantly reprogramming its own programming through the persistence of memories (both true and false) and the emergence of new experiences (seen truly or falsely).

This is itself a double-edged sword: on the one side, your identity is never fixed because your experiences are so vast and incalculably plastic that there can never be an endpoint to the development of the self; on the other side, your programming may or may not be in accordance with the meta-programming of the interdependent universe.

You may or may not be a galaxy off-kilter from the universe, but you are always a galaxy within the universe no matter how off-kilter you may be.

You go through so many changes (mind body and soul) from hour to hour, day to day, that the changes are almost undetectable. Within about seven years every single atom in your body will be replaced by other atoms (body). Within that same amount of time your values will shift ever so slightly and your goals will change (mind).

Also within that same amount of time your accumulation of experiences and travels and burgeoning worldview will change the way you perceive reality both ontologically and existentially (soul).

Your memories of the past merging with the present seems to keep it all lined up and making sense, but only seemingly so, for memory is fallible at best and blatantly false at worst. The past is not a perfect recording, it’s an imperfect reconstruction.

Even the memories we are most certain of have a hint of mythology sprinkled into them. Your memories are more like myth-making than record-keeping. And that’s okay. That’s how you’re built. That’s what keeps you a fluid, plastic, and adaptable little galaxy in an ever-changing, infinitely complex universe.

The galactic structure of your brain is a cognitive narrative machine of universal proportions, spewing forth story after delicious story about how things connect to other things. So much so that it can subsume the entire universe with the story that it tells. And when those stories are properly oriented and in accordance with the universal construct, the cosmic source, the independent experience of the story becomes an interdependent feedback loop.

brain1 Outside the galaxy of your brain, the entire universe is just energy and matter. There is neither color, taste, sound nor scent. There is only energy and matter superpositioning itself over and over in a giant universal wave-function.

But on the inside of your brain, looking out, the universe is teeming with delicious morsels for all the senses to delight in: the taste of cinnamon, the scent of rain after a dry spell (petrichor), the sight of a beautiful sunset, the sound of a waterfall. The ache in your chest when your heart skips a beat with an engaging lover.

Your brain is intermittently a storyteller and a worldbuilder. Your brain literally builds the world you perceive and then tells an elaborate story to back it up.

Like David Eagleman said in The Brain: The Story of You, “Despite the feeling that we’re directly experiencing the world out there, our reality is ultimately built in the dark, in a foreign language of electrochemical signals. The activity churning across vast neural networks gets turned into a story of this, your private experience of the world: the light in the room, the smell of roses, the sound of others speaking.”

You are a walking, talking double-edged sword slicing through an interconnected universe under the delusion that you are separate. But you are the whole thing experiencing itself as you. You are the universe as much as the universe is you.

Perceptually, you’re a separate galaxy with your own unique galactic fingerprint, moving through a vast universe; but actually, you are the entire universe experiencing itself as a tiny galaxy: which is your brain connected to your nervous system, which is connected to your body, which is connected to your environment, which is connected to your earth, which is connected to your galaxy, which is connected to your universe, which is connected to you experiencing it all again in a way nobody will ever experience it again, ever.

Wow! What a rush. It’s enough to make your brain do backflips in your skull as your heart does pirouettes in your chest.

Like Neil DeGrasse Tyson, “We are all connected; to each other, biologically. To the earth, chemically. To the rest of the universe atomically. We are not figuratively, but literally stardust.”

brain4From inner to outer, from micro to macro, from independent galaxy (the unique experience of being you) to interdependent universe (the (also unique?) meta-experience of being interconnected with all things), it’s all you.

And me. And her. And him. And those girls doing the Double Dutch on the street corner. And those guys playing hacky sack in the alley. It’s all of us experiencing our own realities. It’s all connected.

We’re all connected: seven billion different brains experiencing seven billion different realities overlapping on a tiny blue dot in the corner of a tiny spiral galaxy in a universe so enormous that we’ve barely even scratched the surface of the tip of the iceberg of how enormous it really is.

It turns out the “rabbit hole” of actual reality goes a lot deeper than even Wonderland could offer. Your cosmic fingerprint literally is the universe going through the motions of being a galaxy experiencing the universe in a unique-to-only-you way.

As Donald Rumsfeld (of all people) said, “There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.”

So as the galaxy of your brain spirals down the rabbit hole of your universe (which is all you anyway), remember to have a good sense of humor. Otherwise those pesky unknown unknowns will be monsters you’ll have to battle instead of furry little unknown sidekicks that you can kick it with.

Like Lewis Carroll said, “Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality.”

Un_verse

The moon un-suns the sky
as I write this poem
about the universe minus the “i.”

And the black un-blues the sky
while a billion stars punch holes into it
the length of the speed of light…

And still I write,
as the ink un-whites the page
into words that dismantle palimpsests & plight.

And a shooting light un-stars a galaxy
as I pause and make a wish
that un-boxes thinking outside the mind.

But never mind, these words
have just un-poemed poetry and I’m
not too sure if I should end it with a rhyme.

Image source:

Universe in the head
Brain hands
Black Hole

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