A Thought Experiment
Let me describe for you a scenario I’ve been imagining. You might need to stretch your imagination muscles if they haven’t been used in a while — then again, you might be very flexible! You might hear voices saying, “This doesn’t make sense” or “That is impossible”. Write those thoughts down. The important thing is to digest what comes up to develop a better understanding of yourself. Chances are what you write down will be very different than what I have written down and that in itself will be illuminating.
Begin Experiment
Imagine being on a deserted planet (ala Will Smith in the movie, I am Legend).
You are the only one around. You have access to everything (the internet, your phone, your house, the sun, the mountains, even the ocean) but nobody is around — nobody to talk to, nobody to watch what you do, nobody to approve or disapprove your actions. You can simply do as you wish.
Would you get up every morning to go for a run, hike a trail or climb a mountain? Would you do this once or every single morning? Perhaps you might even explore some more in the afternoon? Would you feel drawn to the challenge of pushing yourself a little harder each day or would you be satisfied doing something consistently? Do you have a gnawing curiosity to find the edge…where body and mind have their own self-imposed limits or would you rather remain comfortable? Would you experiment by pushing yourself little further and further each day or would you think it was dangerous? Do you feel uncomfortable not knowing or are you fine with it?
Might you instead enjoy listening to music, or maybe writing, working on a project or any of a thousand other things.
These are just 2 personas I have just described out of millions that inhabit this planet perhaps labeled “Athlete” and “Artist” never mind the possibility of combining these into multi-faceted hybrids. Eventually all of us will be alone sometime…so why wait to ask yourself these questions?
I was once told, “life is a journey and the people you meet along the way are your spiritual brothers & sisters, your true family”. Similar to hikers of the PCT trail, the people you meet are there for a reason — they are drawn to a commitment to explore…and learn more about themselves.
Work colleagues, friends and family may sow seeds of doubt in your mind. They’ll gently discourage you away from all the possibilities of failure. This is the choice you must make as Joe Barnes writes about in his book, “Escape the System: Discover Your Hidden Power and Live the Life You Want”. Opportunities (and their associated consequences) within The System, according to Joe, are very different than opportunities (and their associated consequences) outside of The System. It is interested to note that recent psychedelic research hasdiscovered that psilocybin (aka Magic Mushrooms) in fact decreases blood flow to the DMN. This implies that the doorway to human consciousness may be revealed when we unplug from The System.
Michael Pollan in his book “How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence” writes,
Psilocybin reduces brain activity, with the falloff concentrated in one particular brain network: the default mode network. The DMN forms a critical and centrally located hub of brain activity that links parts of the cerebral cortex to deeper (and older) structures involved in memory and emotion. “The highest-level parts”—those developed late in our evolution, typically located in the cortex—“exert an inhibitory influence on the lower-level [and older] parts, like emotion and memory.” As a whole, the default mode network exerts a top-down influence on other parts of the brain and appears to play a role in the creation of mental constructs or projections, the most important of which is the construct we call the self, or ego…these and other centers of mental activity are “let off the leash” when the default mode leaves the stage, and in fact brain scans show an increase in activity (as reflected by increases in blood flow and oxygen consumption) in several other brain regions, including the limbic regions, under the influence of psychedelics.
It is interesting that the default mode network isn’t operational until late in a child’s development…when we lose our sense of wonder or what Buddhist’s call Beginner’s Mind?
