Category: Reviewing Life

Confidence and Doubt

The Confidence Bluff

Doubt invites attack by showing vulnerability and society protects its structure by trying to silence the questioner. Confidence draws unsure people like moths to a flame, because it gives them a feeling of safety.

Radiating this confidence signals that the person is on familiar ground and can take care of whatever arises, meaning their opinions are given weight by others. People wish to connect to folks who make them feel safe and are willing to accept their expert opinions, because of this feeling.

If you wish to lead others and have folks feed your feeling of importance, confidence in your beliefs is a great thing to have. However, being accepted as right and important does not make you either. It’s something others choose to believe about you, and is driven by fear and a need for acceptance. Finding your own path is the goal, not leading others. Confidence in your own path doesn’t mean your view is correct for anyone else.

Be aware that confidence is a construct of your conscious mind. This structure requires ordered clarity, an explainable understanding, and repetitive success. If you’re positive of a thing or sure of a situation, one of three things has happened. You’ve sorted things yourself often enough, or applied another’s successfully working structure, or are fooling yourself/others so you feel in control.

There is a need, by you and the folks that have chosen to look to you for guidance, to feel you’re standing in a known space, on safe, solid ground. Safe, solid ground is not a bad thing and is a great place to rest when you’re feeling overwhelmed. Everyone needs that from time to time, but it’s not the place that creates growth and change. Doubt gives permission for you not to know how you know. Doubt and vulnerability tell you you’re walking into the unknown, and the discomfort your conscious mind feels is a chance for growth.

The Stupidity of Intelligence

Intelligence doesn’t prevent you from hitting a saturation point of conflicting opinions and doubt, but it can make you believe you have it sorted. In fact, intelligence will build excellent structures to ensure your conscious mind remains comfortable. These are the structures folks sell to others as the answer. These are, at best, a temporary and unsatisfying respite from the search your spirit longs to continue. Your conscious mind’s comfort isn’t the answer.

Wait… what? Once the intelligent person spends all this time building a structure of understanding , they will, like everyone else, stop being open to new information unless it fits their story’s narrative. They have hit their saturation point and formed conclusions about the many things. These conclusions should be temporary and revisited as more info comes in, but often become permanent.

The more intelligent the person, the cleverer the conceptual idea and the more confident they become in their opinions. Unfortunately, they become more convincing as well, and can lead others to believe they have discovered the answer. That is, the all-powerful and never-changing answer, which will ease the conscious mind, but doesn’t exist in this word-filled reality.

Once a structure of ideas is finished, the intelligent person has achieved clarity and comfort. If they refuse the challenge of contradictory information, they miss excellent points of enlightenment others can offer. In this way, intelligent people can make very ignorant decisions. Their intelligence is turned toward defending the structure they have built and working to retain followers of their ideas, instead of seeking what should be their evolving personal truth.

Conscious Choices

This happens because the conscious mind thinks its comfort and surety is the goal, when discomfort and doubt is actually necessary to the cycle of growth. The conscious mind must chose the discomfort of the unknown, if growth is to be achieved by the spirit. How do you get the conscious mind to choose vulnerability?

We must allow the right questions and focus upon growth at the cost of structure and safety. This can be a scary proposition for the self that prizes its collection of beliefs and opinions. Much like the caterpillar’s structure must breakdown into a gooey mass to recombine into a butterfly, we must be willing to release the filter we view the world through and remake our perception of reality and of ourselves.

Letting go, of the word-filled structure we use to confine and define reality, can take place one piece at a time, or in large chunks all at once. The power of the right question must be used to expand into doubt and discomfort. Choose carefully, for it is up to you how fast you go, and that should depend on how ready for change you are.

The Pitfalls of Restructuring

The saying God never gives you more than you can handle is not true. It tries to hide the harshness of the reality we live every day, hiding behind soundbites. If God were in charge, we would have Eden, a utopian cooperative, without judgment or malice. There would be no hospitals, no mental or emotional breakdowns, and no one falling apart from the pressure of living, but God isn’t in charge of distributing suffering. Pain is a given, but suffering is optional.

Remember, you need to question everything, but how much you try to handle and how fast you move is up to you. It is possible, like a jenga tower, to move too fast or try to do too much. Do the best you can each day, try to replace at least one incorrect opinion, and be kind to yourself. You must learn to doubt without blame or guilt.

Don’t judge yourself harshly for believing what others taught you, and don’t judge others for passing on what they were taught. Everyone, from their point on the path, is doing what they can. Measure your progress against where you were yesterday and don’t push past your best. Trying too hard or measuring your self against others leads to confusion, madness, and death. A dramatic statement, but utter collapse isn’t what we seek. An understanding and acceptance of our potential is the goal.

The pursuit of cleaning your filter is not the safe bet. It is a personal and bold step into the unknown. You are attempting to see the world with new vision, leaping into the void, and admitting you don’t know. It involves trusting a part of yourself the world of things has told you is scary and illogical. And the world of things is correct about the scary. There are few rules to govern doubt, and words will only take you into the edge of this unknown.

Define sanity

Psychologists explain encounters where the wordless potential breaks through with rational constructs. They use archetypes, disorders and syndromes to understand how folks do or don’t fit the sane frameworks of a given society. We put them away to reconfigure their filter and maintain our created order. Oddly enough, larger societal constructs can add stressors to what causes the labelled disorders or emotional turmoil in the first place.

Denying our natures and forcing folks into limited behavior models that feel wrong to them create many deviations from our definition of sanity. Theology, philosophy, and the occult apply hierarchies and create elaborate structures to define the insane and unexplainable. All of this is Conscious Mind at work, trying to place things not understood into controllable, word-filled, well-defined boxes.

A well-argued point can shake a person’s ordered foundation, but it is a two-way street. Each person’s opinion is an attempt to sort and justify their own beliefs. If, in someone’s attempt to find their truth, they completely accept another’s opinion or belief as true, they open the door to confusion for both. If the seeker believes your opinion, your conscious mind sees that as validation. Unfortunately, believing an opinion doesn’t determine its trueness or its plausibility. Our conscious minds incorrectly equate acceptance and rightness with safe and true.

Awareness and acceptance by the person whose foundation is being shaken is vital, if psychological damage is to be avoided. Defensive and even violent reactions take place when someone isn’t ready to have their structured perception of reality challenged. After all, that is how they understand and interact with the things of their world.

The Transition Cocoon

 Shaking or rebuilding a foundation should be done carefully. Questioning what you know is a good start. Kindness from a best friend, a therapist, or even a stranger, can be helpful, if they don’t download their own belief structure. Instead, they should give their answers to your questions as they come up. When you’re ready to accept a reexamination of your beliefs with conscious understanding, you are very vulnerable and need different points of view.

You know the structure you have is no longer a good fit for continued interpretation of your reality. However, it’s usually better to replace your foundation by doubting a piece at a time, rather than taking someone else’s pre-assembled structure as gospel. We do this a lot because it’s easier, but the neat orderly package hides our discoveries of personal truth. We can only find our truth by putting in the work of questioning everything.

This processing and transition phase can cause the illusion to fall apart or change with the right word or phrase. The changes can be fast or slow, but this cocoon phase is essential and scary. To experience growth, we have to let go and work without a net. We must drop all the constructs that our mind has built, all the ideas of who we are, but we don’t have to do it all at once.

Better to read poetry and appreciate art to find the wordless known. What we seldom allow ourselves is the luxury of wordless knowing. The answer it feels right, or the intuition of a hunch, is frowned upon and must be layered with proofs and structure. This is not to argue the answer that feels right is correct.

The Created Filter

Wait…what? Just as art, literature, or poetry is subjective, so is personal truth. The answer feels right for the filter you are personally using at that moment in time. That filter has been created by everyone or everything (including TV, music, etc.) you have ever accepted an opinion from and is unique to you. You have to be ready to clean your own filter. Make your adjustments based on changes you experience as you let go of beliefs and opinions. As you apply the scalpel of doubt, the blinders fall apart, and the scary void is exposed.

It’s perfectly acceptable to not have an ordered explanation for the how or why of a thing. The question is; Does the story I tell myself express the knowing I feel? Understanding or even relatability are requirements for scientific proof, but not requirements for your personal truth.

Unless, of course, you ask the conscious mind, which demands you show your work and prove your case. The army of opinions you have accepted must have a defensible position established. The conscious mind must maintain the righteous illusion of correctness, whether what it defends is true or not. Does it truly matter if someone thinks you’re wrong? Should you waste your time trying to convince them you’re right? The answer is…maybe.

Who Are You Convincing?

Wait…what? A couple of questions should be considered. Are other people in need of convincing? Will a discussion that fleshes out your view be helpful to others with decisions in their personal reality? If so, allowing the words to rise from potential, to be heard, may be wise. However, this approach can lead to cofrontations from those whose foundational beliefs are challenged.

The conclusions we’ve drawn from experience and stories can be traced back to wise words rising from potential. The word-of-mouth wisdom expressed and passed down, elder to tot, originates from the void.

The problem is a lot of these stories have been honed over generations for control, instead of clarity and understanding. They focus intent or structure behavior that benefits society and domesticates each of us. In some cases this is a good thing, but we all have a storehouse of these understandings, and they need to be examined through the lens of doubt. Are they helping clear a part of your filter or are they applying limits to your potential? Just because it’s old, doesn’t mean it’s right.

Everyone is Your Teacher

Everyone has puzzle pieces or tidbits that will help open your knowing. You have to try each one and see which pieces fit your puzzle. We are all dipping into the same wordless pool of potential to create, and the words that rise from focusing our attention have power. If a saying or someone’s comment rattles your structure, stop and look at it. Rough the edges up and examine it closely to see why it rattled you, and whether it will clarify your view.

Begin to consciously question everything, especially what you believe you know. Not the nuts-and-bolts questions, which will only get you caught in the study of detail, the judging and ordering of things, and the winning of arguments. Questioning beliefs refers more to the asking of the big questions, where there’s not a right answer, understanding becomes a personal essay, and we transcend day-to-day detail. You must look at the themes you are positive of, and even further down the rabbit hole, realize most of what you know to be true is at least partially, if not completely, wrong.

Attention Determines Discovery

The truths we seek, while they may be universal, are sought because they apply to our personal filters. All the universal truths can be seen clearly once the visor you view the illusion through is completely clean. This is seldom accomplished by those who walk with us. When it is accomplished, we usually silence them, or deify them, or both. Their insights threaten our societal constructs, and those with material power cannot tolerate an uncontrolled populace of seekers.

The problem comes with where our attention is focused. Children are sponges, absorbing cues from before they’re born (a fetus begins to hear at eighteen weeks), retaining information, and filing stuff away. Part of what we learn very early is others know things we don’t. We are not taught to look within for answers, but to pursue and accept the stories others have heard, accepted, and passed along to us.

During our life, we reach points in our search where we have a saturation of conflicting information. We temporarily stop this overload by shutting off the flow of ideas, so we can sort. This happens at different points for different people, and doesn’t have to be permanent.

However, most of us know an individual that believed, at some point, they knew all they needed and stopped considering different notions. They could be very intelligent, but once you stop accepting new information, that intelligence turns to defending your opinions. Each of us can quit learning things new to us, but that doesn’t mean you know all you need, just that you hit a saturation point.

When we reach that saturation point, the war of internal conflicting opinions takes over and we flounder. We begin to search for someone to tell us what to do, to give us the secret. We find a person who says they know how to sort the world of things effectively. This happens because growing up you were taught by word and example that you should listen to everyone but yourself, and you must be able to justify your opinion. Everyone knows better than you and they must have the answers. Just look how confident they are and how doubt-filled you are. This is more confusion, because doubt is a key to growth.

The Bones of a Magic System

Focused Potential

The unlimited, wordless potential is fine with us limiting and defining our access to it. Much like someone deciding they have to have a certain thing, or be in a certain situation, to be happy. All they’ve done is place arbitrary limits on a state of mind that has no requirements and can be voluntarily enjoyed. Happiness is right there, waiting for us to take the limits off and change our perception. The unnamed potential is like that, waiting to have the limits we place on it removed.

Let go of the need for a safe and stable definition of our reality and embrace the scary, undefined mystery. Accept that it works and move on. Use your words, self-affirming chants, positive reinforcements, mantras, etc. with focused intent. The saying, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, is true, but incomplete. The road to wherever you’re going is paved with intention. Intention is how you focus potential.

Understand, any limits you choose to accept are real, and when applied, prevent you from accessing the potential available. These limiting beliefs are strong in society and reinforced at every turn. Conversely, unlimited being can be reached. If you can realize that the rules or requirements controlling you are imposed by belief, your possible would be without limit, but not without accountability and consequences.

Wait…what? Be aware, thoughts and emotions trap you just as they affect the situation or person toward whom you direct them. As you understand how to use your word to tap and focus the vast potential within you, a responsibility for your creative actions must be accepted. You shape your reality with every thought and word, so be kind, especially to yourself. Responsibility demands restraint and an understanding of your power as a creator.

Proving Yourself

If someone questions what you know to be true, it’s not a requirement you show your work or prove anything to them. Potential, from which everything rises, can seldom be proven or defended. Happenings of wordless knowing leave little proof behind, and the logic associated with things defines only a part of these happenings. The wordless potential is the soup from which the logical things rise and return.

This concept frees your consciousness from the need to justify yourself. It does come with a requirement, to not only accept responsibility but, to stay open to different viewpoints. You must truly listen to what the creator in others has learned. We are all creators and it’s your job to continuously upgrade and improve the filter through which you act and react in the world.

Listen without agenda. Unfortunately, most people are arguing proofs with themselves. They listen only for the opportunity to make their points and if you truly listen, you can hear the hollow echo of someone else’s words in their mouth. They are reinforcing a set of opinions and theories they have accepted, adopting them from one group or another. These groups argue points, reinforcing what is already believed, making members feel safe and correct.

Nine out of ten times, a person parrots back a theory or belief they heard and have already accepted. Their arguments seek agreement, to be validated in their thinking and reinforce the way they see the world. This is a way to maintain the safe, self-limiting structure their conscious mind and society has spent so much time building. Defending this foundation of personal and group reality is the root of most fear and hatred.

The in-depth conversations with these folks will rarely help them see your view of the world, but are engaged in for undecided seekers on the edges of the discussion. Unless someone is seeking change or growth, a well-constructed filter only allows each individual to justify their view of the world. If someone hasn’t formed a solid opinion, they may hear something that causes them to reconsider a part of their personal definition of reality.

Very seldom is your listening attention rewarded, but that conversational jewel is worth the effort. When a true exchange takes place with someone who has done the doubting necessary, it is obvious. They have asked the right questions to see something from a unique perspective. This makes listening and in-depth conversation worth the trouble.

Doubt is the Key

Who says we need to doubt? Well, questioning is a route to the clarity of knowing. We all remember young children beginning their whys. They are attempting to sort conflicting information. This is the way they begin to define their world. Some folks are very patient with the toddlers and answer the whys, but eventually the little questioner wears everyone down. They’re encouraged to accept with fewer questions by lesson givers and society as a whole. This is the ordering of facts and where each of us begin to become invested in our beliefs being right. Quite a few of us never lose that surety of being right and only begin to doubt when the structure stops hiding the vast unknown that waits for each of us.

Get a jump on life and start doubting now. Doubting is what takes us past opinions, into shadow and darkness. The not knowing or cocoon period starts when we lose faith in the beliefs we accepted as children and begin the recognition of truth. Your truth is discovered as doubt causes accepted opinions to fall away, leaving what’s left to resonate with your potential. This type of doubt helps clean layer after layer from the filter you use to see the world. Those things not-true for you break and fall away. If you doubt and question the validity of all statements, only your truth will be left standing.

Instincts extinct?

Sometimes you can’t put into words why something fits, it just feels right. We’re taught to discount that sense we are born with, to doubt its accuracy. When you were a toddler, you knew something was hiding under the bed or in the closet. Reality, through folks you trusted, convinced you how foolish it was to listen to your imagination. The fix was in and you began to close off your inner awareness of…things. But did that make the energies you sensed go away, or simply adjust your awareness (filter) so you wouldn’t perceive them anymore. You began to believe and accept what the world told you and stopped believing the creator within. What parts of your perception do you believe if you can’t trust the way you feel? This questioning of our internal instincts is what leads us to the conclusion that answers from within are suspect and truth is always outside ourselves.

The problem is the possibility that what you felt was valid. Others, in trying to convince you it wasn’t, may have warped your ability to listen to, or even hear, your inner creator. Some fight the programming, clinging tenaciously to their intuition, their gut feeling. These folks grow up to just know, to have a feeling. Often, they can’t rationally explain the chaos, the magic of reality, or why they believe what they do. This inability to put the wordless into words is frowned upon. It’s considered unfounded and ignorant by those who want everything to fit into its own neat, explanable box.

Our society has adopted well-structured psychological and sociological explanations so we can feel we understand the whys of individual decisions. These structures shouldn’t invalidate a person’s choice, although that’s how society often uses them.

The Bones of a Magical System

Defining the Situation

Imagine we are a tiny, conscious species dangling by the thread of self-awareness over a vast, dark pool of quiet potential, to which we all return. We desperately explain concepts and break down the things of the world to maintain an illusion. We want to believe we are in control, this unknown potential isn’t real, and we continue eternally. This includes our philosophical attempts through the ages to hang word-filled definitions on that which is beyond words. We are determined to believe in our continued existence. This is not to say we don’t continue to exist. Anything is possible…and that’s the point. We don’t know what can be, because we decide what to energize with our focused belief.

We seek to retain our distinctive self in a defined way, so we may believe our perception of self continues. Explaining to ourselves and each other how things work, we reinforce how we hope things work. We then feel safe in our minds, like we understand and are in control. This need for comfort continuously limits our perception of the undefined, the wordless potential. We are determined to shove the unknowable void into the tiny boxes of belief and opinion our conscious mind defines for it.

Imagine Being a Creator

The conscious mind is like an algebra teacher, caught up in the how. If it just floats up, you have the answer, but you didn’t show your work. The logic of steps makes us comfortable and capable of consciously defending our position, of proving our beliefs and opinions are correct. But being right, proving ourselves to others or the world is not our purpose.

Wait… what? Our reality does not require our attention to be focused on the minutia of its operation for it to work. Our conscious mind doesn’t have to understand, for things to work out. Leonardo DaVinci, Albert Einstein, and Marie Curie are examples of folks that leapt into the void with their imaginations. Their questions reached far beyond their own time’s limited understanding of…things. Their leaps allowed concepts that took a sharp left from accepted reality and led to more leaps.

The act of observing, focusing our attention on, a tiny electron locks it into a position within our reality, according to quantum physics. The probability of its position between detections is represented as a wave of possible positions. There are those that scoff and say the behavior of the smallest particles has nothing to do with the things around us or the macro world, although there are eight billion conscious minds focusing their belief and attention on every aspect of what we agree is reality.

From a Certain Point of View

Every-thing we focus on is made up of these particles. They constantly wink in and out of our reality, displaying multiple possibilities at once. They take a position in reality based on whether or not our attention is focused on them, and what we expect from them. This is the basis of our reality, but we deny the effect of our interwoven actions and beliefs. We focus on defining the rules, on focusing our explanation of reality to feel safe.

Dodging nihilism and striving for a more concrete view in this world of illusion and potential, the majority of us draw back from this abyss. Society’s explanations and proofs try to build representative structures that leave our beliefs and opinions about physics and reality intact. We create structure incrementally to reach points where geniuses have imagined a leap into the undefined pool of potential. They used their intuitive questions, while society works to preserve the Dr. Suess-like framework of order balanced above the void. We work very hard to keep our safety net and orderly expectations intact.

Our structure stretches toward unknowable, as quantum physics postulates a point where a probability wave (undetected potential) meets the comparative entangled aspect of things (observation). The unknown actually occupies a concrete position when it is observed. In one theory, this reality exists because we are aware of it, give it our attention, and expect it to act in certain ways.

As in uncountable times past, we walk a tightrope of creation, and can consciously choose what to believe, and thereby, what will exist. This is a massive obligation for such a tiny self, and is one of the reasons we tell ourselves and each other stories that abdicate this responsibility.

The Available Pool of Potential

Geniuses don’t arrive at their conclusions through scientific method. They prove their leaps of intuition and imagination with that method, but the imagination of asking the right question opens them to the chaos of an undefined knowing, an unproven answer. The conscious mind proceeds to create proofs to explain and test what has been realized. Science is driven by the conscious mind’s fear, strengthening safety nets over the bottomless intuitive pool that is the unnamed and undefined.

Instead of allowing the individual to determine the right question for themselves and accepting the intuitive leap as an answer, our society discourages that knowing. The collective experts make us feel safe by applying layers of a word-filled hypothesis to a barely stretched idea. This allows for society’s ordered progress without confronting the chaos. This approach prevents our collective structures and filters from collapsing. The leap of faith, far into the intuitive potential, that can be taken by the individual, is a risk most cultures cannot afford.

For instance, most of us feel and acknowledge a spark or energy of some kind we can’t define. We have a myriad of names for it, calling it consciousness, awareness, or spirit. We have many philosophies and religions attempting to define and control our self-awareness, our purpose, or the meaning of life. They address this situation with stories designed to convince those listening that a select few have answers to the mystery. Like shining a light into a lightless corner to explain the dark, they describe the unnamed with words, utterly inadequate words.

Many of our rational thinkers tell us more and more often there is no interaction that could be considered a soul or God, no energy that can’t be explained by the belief structures we’ve built. However, if the universe and gravity function the way our current models say they function, then there must be some sort of dark matter and dark energy. They call it this because it is unseen, it doesn’t emit, absorb, or reflect light, and so, is hidden from our world of perception. We know something must be there because we observe the effects on the defined universe, but we move forward without understanding it or how it interacts with us.

A Rose by Any Other Name

The part of reality we can explain and understand is estimated to be between five and twenty percent of our universe. The other eighty to ninety-five percent we have given yet more labels, dark matter and dark energy, in a long line of labels. It has mass and affects objects, but can’t be perceived in a measurable way.

What if our self-awareness (meaning, spark, purpose) is the driver behind all of it? What if our potential is being defined and restricted by our limited belief? Are we trying to give unlimited potential a name, place it in a box to feel comfortable? Are we trying to protect the current layers of constructed order our group consciousness has constructed?

Or, is dark matter the comparative opposite for our known universe and actually just another thing? Do we limit our reality by labeling things to feel safe? Should we order our reality to the point of defining every nuance? To enable potential to become what’s needed in the moment without restriction, should we allow things to remain undefined? If we stop trying to explain how our observation, the act of focusing our attention, creates a reality for each of us, would our creativity soar?

Controlling the Narrative

By believing and accepting those focused on the minutia of things, we box the vast unknown into explainable sections. We get lost in the details and our true universe is trapped by equations and explanations, remaining restrained by our boxes of complex rules passed down from one generation to the next.

Our science doesn’t want to let go of its constructs, its solid ground. They have theories that attempt to build bridges from their safe places to the unknown. With one hundred years of building those bridges, they still aren’t sure how our tiniest particles occupy many possibilities in space at the same time until we focus our attention. Or, why mass to counterbalance our reality is waiting in unnamed and intangible places.

Are philosophy and science converging? Will this mixture of separate word salads bring us any closer to knowing any truth? Or will it just give us more chances to define and restrict our reality? This circles us back to wordless potential, where none of our definitions of how the world works, can explain how the world truly works.

The revelation coming from this is we, within ourselves, through the right questions, have access to this potential. Magic disappears, not because it never existed, but because of the way we define everything around us without question. A lack of doubt leads to surety and confidence. A skeptic (sure of limited possiblity) can witness magic only if a believer (sure of unlimited possibility) is present. A lack of doubt also leads to a stack of neat boxes, to the safety of well-defined and predictable things. Over many generations, we have focused on refining the definition of things, and as creators, we get what we expect.

The Bones of a Magical System

The Fear of Questions

The conscious mind applies its order to a preset biological template or framework upon which we layer learned structure. Each of us uses this template to understand and build our reality through language, diverse cultural beliefs, and daily experience. We stretch this over the vast unknown and attempt to choose acceptable truth, avoiding discomfort and damage to the structure we have built. The conscious mind likes explanations for everything, and whether they’re true or not isn’t as important as having them. We feel better when there’s a believable reason for everything, and we are taught from a young age to seek order.

Well, order and being right. The perception of being right is very important to the conscious mind. Not just being sure we’re right, but the need to be right. This is why most of us become very attached to our opinions and beliefs. Ideas of judgment and order are fed to us through emotions. Our invested attachment to what we believe starts early.

Before the framework of language to layer our memories on and use to express ourselves, we develop an emotional understanding of good and bad, right and wrong, an internal gut reaction to the joy and anger around us. This shapes the way we see and order our world as we grow.

The conscious mind, once an understanding of language begins, finds comfort in linear thought. We use language to mark the progression of time, to use as a construct to separate and hang our memories in some semblance of order. Stories rise from this, and make it possible to retell, even restructure, our memories. We consider this not only a good thing, but use these reworked stories to define and present ourselves to the world.

The if-then of a rationalized world becomes a comfort, a way to avoid uncertainty. Language helps us impose a personal order to reality, causing us to ignore or discount the void and the unknowable potential from which we rise. The randomness, cyclical loss, and lack of logic the void represents, causes us to fear it, along with the answers that float up from it.

Your subconscious, on the other hand, is wordlessly working through all the conflicting order you do not disbelieve every day, sorting things into fragments of images, thrown together. It sorts while you sleep, to determine how new information blends with and shapes what you already accept as true. This bubbles through our language framework to become archetypal stories we construct by ordering our words to reinforce what we have decided to believe.

The Threat of the Effortless Answer

A maintenance man once said, “I’m not sure I understand everything I know about this.” He was referring to electrical wiring, but his humorous phrase caused something to click and a question arose. Do we need to understand to know?

The answer floated up quickly, no, without explanation. He didn’t need to understand how, for his wiring to work. He knew it would work, and just needed to follow the steps. The problem is, once the piece (the short answer to the question) is accepted as true, instead of moving on, our conscious mind can get lost in the details, finding a way to make it fit our narrative. We get caught in the proofs needed to appear correct. The logic that reinforces this constructed system has become important to us . The structure makes us feel safe and must be preserved.

An entire argument begins to form, a dissertation of many pages about the difference between understanding and knowing. This becomes a well-argued point instead of the intuitively known one word answer. What is the threat here, the thing the conscious mind is not realizing?

An answer, floating untethered to a proof or narrative, means there may exist an undefined pool within each of us where answers rise, responding to a question, without explanation or containment. This is a scary concept in most societies. There are questions we explain away, frown on, punish, or dismiss as invalid. A society’s foundation, layered concepts each culture applies and collectively agrees is true, cannot be threatened without consequences.

War has often been the result of ideas that threaten cultural structure. People will fight for a way of life, or a set of ideas, if they believe in them. The rightness of these ideas is not as important as belief, the avoidance of doubt. Our learned structure is just that, a set of stories we tell each other about the way things are, so we will believe certain things, feel safe, and in charge.

The biggest threat to our stories is proving an accepted truth could be false, just a hollow idea. Unfortunately, everything is an idea and becomes hollow when it’s not backed by belief. All the ancient mythology in the world used to be alive and vital, when folks believed in it. Decisions were made and actions taken, based on the stories we told ourselves. We look back on some of these decisions in horror, wondering how a group of people could be so cruel and wrong about something. It is a guarantee our future selves will do the same to us, because ideas are just that, and everything is cyclical.

The Confusion of the Conscious Mind  

The conscious mind internalizes details of societal order, accepting them to fill us with agreements. We do this with the whys and hows, the nuts and bolts, trying to tear reality apart. We disassemble to understand the details, so comfort, and the feeling of safety and control can be maintained.

This is where our conscious mind is comfortable, focusing our attention on the explaining and understanding of things. It tries to explain our world through judging and ordering the things that rise from the wordless potential. It also dismisses or attacks anything that doesn’t fit or challenges our chosen narrative.

That’s why we have different cultures, different tribes, different groups of conscious minds, agreeing to a set of behaviors that, from outside, appear to be constructed safe houses for dealing with aspects of reality. As a result, each culture ignores, downplays, or attacks some aspect of reality that conflicts with their current belief structure. This approach inevitably leaves itself open to cyclical collapse.

A Modern Twist

The algorithms of our social constructs play on this need of the conscious mind to feel a part of a group. We need to feel right (proving our opponent wrong), in charge (controlling our future), and vindicated (righteous justification of behavior). We find our group, and tune out any information that conflicts with the structure of belief we have chosen to accept.

This tribal approach has led to an us versus them team think. Unfortunately, much conflict in human history, every dehumanization, and every justification for the dark actions of terrified righteousness have started with this type of thinking. We need to stop believing we have the answers, doubt what we know, and accept that others know things we don’t.    

There is a vast undefined, from which we all rise. Instead of accepting we aren’t in control and enjoying life, we choose to become proactive, to do something, to get wrapped up in the details, even if it’s wrong. A fear-filled part of us needs to define our world, to create busy work, a place to focus our attention. We disassemble, study, and build a narrative defining things and how they work, instead of accepting life and each moment’s joy.

Instead of order rising from chaos in a cyclical dance, our modern reality takes ordered concepts, layering them upon previously understood order. These complicated, Dr. Suess-like structures have led to the wonderful and terrible things we enjoy, but all these complex rules and constructions still have their basis in fear. We are, each of us, tiny spiders of self-awareness, building furiously in an attempt to prevent the slightest glimpse into the void, a void we all return to in the greatest of cyclical dances.

***

by G L Hooks

The questions I knew needed asking to give structure to my worlds of magic

This is an exercise in determining consistency across the magical universe of my created realities. In other words, I’m attempting to define and expound upon an underlying framework that makes the magic in my fantasy worlds possible.

This may be a Teacher from one of my stories attempting to explain what is and what could be, or not. Any resemblance to this reality is an attempt to anchor said theory and should not be accepted as true and correct, unless it helps clear your filter.

I have discovered in my decades of living we don’t need answers, we need questions. The right question reveals the answer and just by asking it, we open our personal door to wisdom.

Wait…what? It sounds backwards, doesn’t it? We spend our lives searching for answers, to life, to love, to purpose, to everything. We’re shouted at, over and over, by this one and that one, telling us how they have the answer. They know the secret. Just give them your attention (money) and they will share what they know, but are we asking the right questions?

A Confused Focus

The focus of our search implies the answer is contained in the knowing and sorting of things. We’re taught to believe that an answer needs to be sought outside of you or given to you by an outside source. Not that there isn’t a world of valid things to learn from comparison and structure, but the knowing of truth is personal and comes from within. We are taught from very young to believe we don’t have any answers. Is everything we need to know in the things around us? Do others have the opinions and beliefs we need?

The world understands the sorting of things so much better than we do, but this is a confusion of focus and a distraction. Especially when it comes to the big answers, the ones we all eventually seek. We sift through all the things, searching for the perfect item, when looking to the source of those things is our answer.

We really need to think of the right questions. The right question opens up a storehouse of wisdom, focusing your knowing as the answer floats up. It bypasses your constructed filter. Using language, experience, and the dna’s undercurrent of structured perception, an answer is presented, if you ask the right question. It may not be what you wish to hear, or you may choose to ignore it, or decide it’s too hard, but the answer is given to you in spite of your personal filter.

Focus on the Question

The right question is like focusing a special searchlight into the void. Each of our personal searchlights has a filter, created by our beliefs and opinions, already blocking parts of the information available that we have discounted. We only allow ourselves to see the truth from certain points of view, at certain angles, and at certain times. The right question can adjust the filter, so the answer you asked for is shown as it rises from the void. It cuts through your biases and opinions to show you a truth unvarnished by personal belief.

The problem arises when the question focuses your spotlight, highlighting something the conscious mind (the builder of the filter) doesn’t like, can’t readily explain, or refuses to accept. Everyone has a huge jumble of conflicting beliefs and opinions, decision points where disordered things forced a choice. These choices are almost always informed by what we already believe and others people’s beliefs or opinions.

Is Order Truth?

We each have a pile of things we just know are true. We’re sure of it because an authority figure we completely trust told us, and why would they lie, right? The problem is it may not be a lie, just something they accepted as truth when they were younger. They are passing information to you, but having everyone believe something doesn’t make it true. It may just add another layer to your filter.

Then there’s the pile of possibilities we’ve been forced to choose between, when two or more sources give us conflicting information. We usually choose based on the opinions we’ve already accepted, not worrying about it’s truth as much as whether or not it clashes with what we already believe. Lastly is the pile of things we’ve been taught were true.

The conscious mind has sorted through this massive amount of belief and opinion to draw order from it. Has it succeeded? Order is an avoidance of conflict, a reduction in chaos, but that doesn’t mean it’s an exercise in truth. What type of order has each of us achieved? How can we be sure we have an accurate view of reality? One word, doubt. Doubt everything you know is true and the false beliefs will not stand. You’ll clean a few layers from your filter and help yourself see the world you’ve built a little more clearly.