Let me riff a bit more on the topic a few weeks ago. We are told that 95% of “who we are” is implanted by someone or something else, not a result of our own work. Our brain and ego run on autopilot most of the time; using knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, and perceptions that are virtually unquestioned and/or heavily filtered and ignore all that is unconscious. Even those who glimpse the possibility that other ways of being might be more meaning-full or enjoyable don’t want to take on the difficult task of questioning everything. They run away from unlearning, in other words. That’s the deal-breaker for most.
In fact, most are unaware that when they remember an event, the same chemical changes take place in mind and body as in the original experience. Mirror neurons can produce an almost identical experience just watching another person act. If you relive a particularly traumatic experience over and over (PTSD), you condition your response to remain stuck in the past. If this extreme is true, it is also true for the mundane…practice, real OR imagined, makes permanent. Without healing, trauma leads us to ‘fear’ a future that looks remarkably like the past. In a quantum world, that has us emotionally embracing a future we don’t want, even before it happens…and so it happens.
If our fear for the future has us remaining small, every time we feel afraid then we refresh the programming that keeps us living small. Living small can take many forms: we could be proud of living frugally or take on massive debts; we could be addicted to any of many habits or isolate and cocoon alone; or never find a way to say ‘no’, and become spread too thin to be effective. Often we spend so much of our energy focusing on what we don’t want that we manifest nothing but that. In those cases, ego thinks it just did its job by keeping us ‘prepared’ for ‘the disappointment’.
As more humans go feral, return to the Wild side, we could wonder what is driving them to begin to live large. Of course we can’t know for sure, nor should we paint with a broad brush, stereotyping as we go. It is quite possible however, that like sleepwalkers, a person gets hurt and the pain “wakes them up”. I was quite the sleepwalker when young; once I got lost at 2 am in King’s Canyon National Park (California) once, and it took me about two hours to find our campground in the moonless dark. That didn’t wake me up necessarily, but it has remained a touchstone in my understanding of how mind can manifest, or maybe just “see”, reality through a different lens. Other events that actually did help to “wake me up” have been mentioned in Let’s Go Wild before, of course. More will be explored, no doubt.
But it might well be that it is pain that scars me, while calling into question the very foundation of the Modern worldview. Modern still has lots to learn about the True Nature of the Universe; yet many pretend Modern knows best. If Quantum Physics has a more accurate understanding of that Nature, even more remains to be learned. If the Native Peoples’ understanding of connection and right relationship is also more accurate than Modern (which I feel is the case), then Indigenous wisdom also points out a path forward out of Modern and into the Light. Both alternate views leave self-responsibility behind, and focus on connection and real wealth: healthy relationships, healthy communities, and healthy Nature. Modern is antithetical to all three. We are all only as healthy as the most ill among us, so it begs us to take care of each other, to heal everyone and everything as much as we can. That, my friends, is my Wild thought for today.
Thank you 🙏