The remarkable thing about declining to generate a 900mph headwind
is that you find yourself riding a 900mph tailwind.
And that's cause for enjoyment,
but not glory-basking.
Tickertape
I've previously noted that most people's moment-to-moment mental tickertape is a chaotic miasma of regret, anxiety, disappointment, fallacy, fantasy, delusion, worry, projection, preference curation, and, above all, obsession.
We obsess by endlessly rerunning mental set pieces. We reargue old arguments, project faceless attackers or detractors, relive bygone humiliations, and endlessly suck outrage from various handy mental lozenges, e.g. the awful thing your fourth grade teacher said. It's not all downers, however. We also gloat over grandiose fantasies - and fantasized memories - of our epic journey and manifold triumphs.
If you sit in the window of an urban Starbucks and watch the faces of passersby, 99% appear utterly lost in demented noise irrelevant to their here-and-now.
Sanity is a relative term in the human realm.
Why Most People Do Nothing
I once noted that
most people do nothing.
If they sign on, they won't show. If they pledge money, they won't pay. If you hire them, they'll sit in their cubicle and sip coffee. You know how most soldiers never actually shoot at people? How as few as 30% perform all the kills? I've decided that this isn't a saving grace of humanistic morality. It's just another example of how most people do nothing.
I'm not saying they're lazy. I'm not saying they're liars or deadbeats. Just that they do nothing. Most people do nothing.
The reason is that people are busy with their big internal project. The exceptions - the people who do things - are mostly lashing out from this dreamworld; externalizing the rage and desperation burping up from the noise. This can be productive, for example when artists sublimate their angst into their work. But usually it's just raw burps prompting us to start wars, evict tenants, and grind away to afford bigger houses and newer cars; to live a dream that never quite arrives, even when it arrives.
Escape Velocity
But some of us manage to slash a momentary narrow passage through the dense psychic underbrush to produce something transcendent. "It's talent!" you'd conclude. And, yes, it is. But flip your notion of talent. What if everyone's gifted, but few discover or channel the gift?
If that's true, then what, exactly, inhibits them? The answer is obvious: spending their lives distracted and enervated by regrets, anxieties, disappointments, fallacies, fantasies, delusions, worries, projections, and lozenge obsession.
One can always opt out of all that. If you take a break from the big performance and come back to your senses, things clarify and hidden talents express themselves, like magic. You (re)discover the ease, creativity, and wisdom that's been yours all along. We all experience peak moments, and this is what they are.
Tantalizing Awareness
None of this is a particularly tough proposition to swallow. We know that we sometimes get in our own way. We perceive a certain headwind, and recognize that it can be self-generated. It's enormously hopeful that the term "rich people problems" makes Americans smile sheepishly and nod in acknowledgement. We
know!!
The Unimaginable Scale
But here's what we miss: the self-generated headwind of indulgently contrived mental drama is not mild. It's more like a 900mph desert siroco, though we're well accustomed to it. When we briefly step all the way out of the storm (which is whipped up by bored comfortable modern people as part of their intense devotion to
self-storytelling), we fathom its mind-boggling intensity. Relief from the sandy blast is like entering heaven. It's an entirely different level of existence, though we are inevitably drawn back into the storm, being bored and comfortable and irresistibly attracted to self-storytelling.
We vastly underestimate the tonnage of attention we've been devoting to bullshit and drama. So when we cease and desist for a moment, freeing up attention for more productive use, we find ourselves able to work miracles.
I have a different notion of miracles than most people. To me, they're subtle, and often missed or undervalued. When someone creates a whole that's greater than the sum of its parts, that's a miracle. The Arepa Lady's corn cakes, which can change the tenor of your day, are miraculous. We are surrounded by a plethora of miracles, but normally remain too distracted tracking our epic journey and straining for more of this and less of that to register or value them. Hell, we hardly even notice all the sensationally beautiful trees!
Great achievement and accomplishment are not gifts reserved for special geniuses. Nor are they power-ups to arduously acquire. The potential has been there all along for each of us, but forgotten in our frothy, ambitious fervor to dramatize ourselves and our world. Briefly un-froth...and there it all is, right before your eyes. And it's enormous.
Kundalini
I never write about kundalini (an enormous energy rush experienced by fervently earnest spiritual seekers when they really really "let go"...or sometimes by normal people who spontaneously fall into letting go while buttering their toast and never know what hit them). It's not worth discussing the particulars because few know or care about it, and those who do are kooky.
Don't go to Wikipedia for more information. Don't Google. Literally 100% of what you'll find is nonsense. This is because two kinds of people discuss kundalini: 1. People who've never experienced it, yet still consider themselves experts (thousands of "kundalini yoga" teachers will cheerfully accept your money without the slightest notion of what they're teaching, apart from dogma they've swallowed from teachers up the ladder), and 2. Kundalini newbies, who are usually unhinged from the extremely disorienting experience.
A handful of us view the topic from a long vantage point, having spent decades integrating and normalizing kundalini energy. Most never reach this point, because it often takes a lifetime to kindle the first spark. But veterans tend not to talk about it, because 99.9% of people out there have either never heard of kundalini, or are happily filled with nonsense about it, and .1% are whacked out on the most potent of natural highs, having lost all perspective and reason. So why bring it up?
But I combine two unusual qualities: I write for essentially no one, anyway, and I have indeed spent decades integrating and normalizing kundalini. So in this overlooked corner of the internet, I'll explain it in a level-headed way which apparently no one has previously thought of, and perhaps someone will eventually stumble in from a web search and appreciate the perspective.
It's the same explanation as above. You need to
flip assumptions about what's going on.
Shifting attention momentarily away from bullshit appears to ignite super powers, but it really works the other way - the bullshit concealed what was always there. This explanation covers the Attention end of things, but we don't just pay (obsessive) attention to bullshit, we also invest our energy in it. Oh, boy, do we invest! So if you pause frantically shoveling coal into your psychic oven (metaphorically speaking), loads of energy free up. It's shocking. And it's enormous.
We are so accustomed to lavishing attention and energy into meaningless mental fluff that, when we pause, miracles appear to happen. Kundalini is the energy end of it, and the staunchest atheist would describe its rush as heaven-sent.
But here's the long view, unavailable elsewhere to my knowledege: Yes, it feels like all the power in the universe. But that's only because you have, for years and years, been frittering away all the power in the universe to build and maintain a huge interior realm in your head. And the effort was orders of magnitude more ambitious than you realized.
For example, everything you conceptualize about the planet Neptune is
in you. Is there a "real" Neptune "out there", too? Let's say, for simplicity, that there is. But you certainly model and maintain an inner Neptune. And a Toledo. And a Roman Empire. And an Andromeda Galaxy. Pile on top of all that emotionally fraught tales of struggle, victimhood, triumph - plus the myriad details of your Persona - and keep all those plates diligently spinning, and you'll have created a monster. A universe. A monster of a universe!
Imagination is a light caprice when one envisions sentient cats operating a bagel shop. Such whimmy stuff is less substantial than a soap bubble. But the aggregated result of many years of obsessive, immersive, focused imagining is another thing entirely. It's a structure, however immaterial (
even physical matter is immaterial), and we never quite parse its vastness, because, being so close to it, it feels like humdrum normalcy. Fishes don't realize they're swimming, and humans don't know they're building and powering immense internal structures. Each of us is an
Atlas, needlessly imagining a dire obligation to hold up the entire world.
Until, that is, we let go. Whereupon energy previously sunk into The Project suddenly becomes
available. Un-channeled, it sprays wildly. The initial impression is one of potent glory, but it quickly becomes overwhelming, and there are burn-out issues. Eventually, after years or decades of patience and forbearance, this energy reintegrates and normalizes. It's a whole thing.
Like the genius spurring great accomplishment, this energy is like ruby slippers. It was always with you...but forgotten. Directed into inner world building and nurtured stories of victimhood and epic derring do.
That's where your attention and energy went, and, upon opting out, Allah, Jesus and Buddha seem to welcome you to a cosmic party.
But no. Calm down. This is your normal default energy level, previously channeled into obsession. It's impossible to anticipate the massive scale and intensity of that energy, though you can get some small idea by sitting in that Starbucks window, watching passersby whose attention and energy - tons of both! - are perceptibly trapped in an expansive universe contained in their heads.
The Twist
So: miraculous outcomes aren’t divine gifts. They're always available, but we lose sight amid mental machinations. We imagine ourselves incapable...then conjure extra juicy drama by lamenting our incapability. Everything's a conceit.
Once you realize it was all self-inflicted - that curating and inhabiting a strangling miasma of heightened drama was
your scheme - staggeringly vast resources of energy and attention are freed up. But it would be silly to triumph in that moment, despite all the apparent power-ups - i.e. the freed-up brilliance and energy. There's little glory in being slightly less fervidly idiotic for a goddamn minute.
But here's the bombshell: Even seemingly futile dramaturgy builds and manages realms of fabulous ambition. It's all dazzling creation. If we're not crafting spaceships and symphonies "out there", we're building towers of brooding discontent "in here". Either way, the miracles never cease.
In the broadest view, the same indefatigable creative spirit produces a diversity of impressive results, including ones other people never see and which bring the builder pain and anguish (humans have always suffered for their art!). So departure from the maelstrom was nothing but light caprice. Just another easy framing choice among multitudes, none of greater or lesser value.
