New Answers Are Found In The Questions We Haven’t Asked Yet.
For most of my life I have been a watcher — an observer of the self and of others through media, travel, and research.
While some sought the sanction of academia and regurgitated the thoughts of others to demonstrate their intellectual proficiency, I chose another path. I decided to immerse myself in life and arrive at my own conclusions. I read voraciously, interacted with others and embarked upon a path of personal discovery and healing.
I was told I was broken; thus I was seeking repair so I could lead the normal life. I was not sure what this normal life looked like. Despite all the references to the normal life, I had never really met anyone who felt they had one; yet seek for the normal life did I.
Unfortunately, I also asked the ethers for the Wisdom of Solomon hoping to eradicate my existential angst. Be careful what you wish for. I can assure you now, asking for wisdom means being gifted with life happens, so you experience and grow beyond what is to what can be imagined. I can also assure you what you imagine is up to you.
As a fan of John Forbes Nash, Jr., the brilliant mathematician, I gleaned two distinctive truths about life.
The first was that game theory was not only demonstrable in human behavior, but it was revealed through patterns of the microscopic and the macroscopic. Secondly, reality was a perceptual creation based upon the processing and curation of patterns which we as individuals attributed significance to.
We each built our own House of Cards, and like every House of Cards they were inevitably buffeted by tempests and storms, collapsing and sending cards scattering to the winds. I began observing human soul construction zones seemed to share certain commonalities of pattern.
The challenge with attaching significance to observable patterns is the matter of causation and correlation. While the pattern merely is, it is the observer, coming to the observation with a specific lens or vantage point, who processes the pattern, attributes value and meaning, and then creates conclusion. The issue becomes observer bias or observer effect.
The observation’s merit is weighed and then assembled with the framework of the observer; thus it becomes paramount for the observer to observe from multiple vantage points and obtain replicable data when the observer wishes to attribute cause and effect.
In the old days, before the media decided to sell us there are only two sides to a story, we used to call this being educated and creative problem-solving, or being an informed responsible citizen. It meant applying the holy trinity of common sense, reason and logic, and tempering those with empathy and compassion.
It meant independent though versus three-minute sound bites and simplistic one-dimensional memes. It meant seeing the complexity of simplicity and the simplicity of complexity. In my observation, we as a planet are currently suffering from Societal Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome.
We have, as individuals, and as a collective species, been assaulted by the perpetual historical horror of our respective individual and cultural stories until words trigger spiraling emotional states of fight or flight. In a haste to alleviate our suffering, we often act out either self-destructively or violently towards others in the name of self-protection.
We hide our true selves in masks of doubt, secreting our shame, infecting our inner souls with non-stop negativity until we have lost sight of self-forgiveness, beauty, tolerance, and love. Our cultural and religious stories are too often ones dooming us to repetition or destruction before we even try. We vilify difference rather than embracing diversity.
We espouse freedom, yet define it as a right afforded the conformist. Mistakes are touted as learning opportunities until made, at which time they are met with punishment or retaliation. Being right is deemed more important than being empathetic or compassionate.
Entertaining one another by vilifying one another has become the norm, while learning from one another and healing with one another has become the apparent anomaly. We appear myopic — polarizing opposing dualities rather than facilitating radical acceptance. We have become monkeys minding the asylum of Planet Insanity.
We rehearse our traumas seeking relief only to relive our past trauma, and then wonder why we cannot break free from a vicious circle dance of blame and shame. We murder or persecute those who point us towards peace, dismissing them as insane, naïve, or simply foolish.
We elevate some while enslaving others in the interest of serving systems we treat more sacred than the lives those systems are entrusted to serve. We say we care until we are asked to act; then we all too often default to learned helplessness, look for salvation, or turn our heads the other way.
For those of us who suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, the most effective treatment is Dialectical Behavior Therapy, a balance of radical acceptance and redirecting the object of one’s focus. We are aware, the only way to redirect one’s focus, is to trigger one’s psyche with an equal and opposite reaction to induce an opposing mental state.
This in turn opens perception to embrace what is and seek other creative options related to interpersonal communication, namely listening to the stories of others. When we juxtapose the counterpoint of listening with imagination, we can personalize the story which evokes emotion.
Some of our most beautiful and miraculous inner healings are achieved when in the flow of feeling we act in love. There is no other force like creative inspiration, to release negative energy and restore your inner circuitry.
The peak experience of the creative state in my observation is the space between the tangible reality we are sold as truth, and the infallible reality of community and truth we know, mapped in the brain of our hearts without the convolution of the circus monkeys flying about in the belfries of the mind.
Every writer knows that the truth and the written word are a two-edged sword, for the cut of self-discovery leads to reflection of social dis-ease severing the fabric of our humanity until resolved through self-forgiveness and manifested with service acknowledging personal responsibility and accountability in the co-creation of the spirit of community.
With the advent of technology and social media, we have the opportunity like never before to become a global community. Unfortunately, there are those who equate any mention of global community with a New World Order, sharing with economic systemic trigger labels like socialism, tolerance with threat, and change with discomfort.
Meanwhile, we live on a small blue speck hurtling through space full of living energy forms that require our care and respect including ourselves.
As the rate of technological advance moves towards the Singularity (achieving exponential momentum where a zero state is the norm) despite the consistent upward trajectory of the macroscopic, on the ground it’s not going to translate into a linear process. The closer you move to observe the complexity of the simplicity, the more complex it will appear.
My prevailing suspicion is that it is not our outcome we need to fear, it is our current focus we need to shift. If I want to drive from point A to point B, I won’t get there by looking back at my point of origin; I have to steer towards the destination I desire to visit.
Certainly it can be beneficial to take a glance in the rear-view mirror, but you only focus there long enough to know what you need to know before immediately refocusing on the road before you. If we wish to have peace, we must focus on peace, and not embrace war as a necessary evil because looking at our origin it seems inevitable.
This means we each have an ability and a responsibility to then be that which we wish to see… or imagine. Can we even imagine peace? My official mental health diagnosis is Borderline Personality Disorder — a fancy way of saying I lack a core sense of constancy related to that little question, “Who am I?”
At some point I realized, “If I don’t know who I am, why, I can be anyone I choose to be!” While the dueling non-dualists might contend the egoless state is that of perfect bliss, I can assure you the egoless state is quite often a lonely and painful place to visit while dwelling within this plane of existence mustering the courage to be who you wish to imagine.
The truth is, each of us can be anyone we choose; we simply have to be open to being what we feel. This does not mean it’s acceptable to feel anger and then cause harm; it means it is acceptable to be angry but we then have a responsibility to ourselves and to others to create positive change.
For all our connection we are vitally unconnected, viewing ourselves all too often as virtual avatars and not often enough like the living, breathing, post-human experiential carbon units we really are. We are not afraid of our shadows, we are fearful of our power as beings of energetic light.
If we wish to shine a light on injustice, then Lady Justice must have the blindfold removed to see with clarity and compassion for healings’ sake. I suspect we would be better off as a species to shift from a competitive paradigm to a cooperative paradigm if we wish to co-exist within our ecosystem versus lead ourselves into an uncooperative demise.
I also suspect George Carlin was right when he persisted in the notion that the planet will be just fine; it is humanity’s continuance that is in question.
Perhaps we need to start asking different questions to find new answers.
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