The ego’s worry about annihilation starts at throwing rocks or building a stone wall around the hut, but a larger society grows more modern, sophisticated attempts at manipulation and control. Over time this materialist thought has come in many names and from many different angles, all murky.
As bigger problems and larger and larger human conflicts developed we birthed the telegraph and radio, and out of that the entire marketing industry, information control and propaganda. We moved further away from each other, but with a line running behind us, still connecting each of us, leaving us both in and out because we can’t actually leave each other.
Nobody can truly hide. More complexity in human relations brings yet more feeble attempts to deal with it.
Notice that I’m using the word “we” in these sentences. It is us, not some evil person or force, not “them.” The energy running humanity is universal, one solid continuing process with no
broken link in the chain.
I can hear your ego screaming.
A sprinkle of the greatest scientists and inventors have been able to admit that they weren’t the actual source of their winning ideas. That the breakthrough formula or solution
simply came to them out of the universe. They did not make their own idea, they retrieved it. While being.
German chemist August Kekulé is a famous example. He solved the structure of benzene with a
dream. Benzene had stumped scientists for decades before Kekulé’s snake dream.
Unexpectedly, during a nap, he visualized the mathematical structure without forcing anything. There was zero control involved, and maybe even snoring.
Srinivasa Ramanujan is yet another example. The self-taught mathematician developed solutions to complex math problems considered unsolvable at the time. We’re not talking about a couple of ideas. During his short lifetime Ramanujan compiled almost 4000 results. Many of his ideas are considered fundamental now and have advanced modern physics, including quantum theory.
His claim? These ideas were revealed to him during dreams by the family
goddess, Namagiri Thayar.
An example from today’s era is music producer Rick Rubin. Rubin has produced some of the most successful albums of all time, with sales measuring in the hundreds of millions over multiple genres, and with some of the world’s most renowned artists.
To these artists Rubin is viewed as a sort of cultural shaman, with vision to discover and discern the perfect musical elements at just the right time. Rubin has said that he has “no formal training in anything at all,” including music. He’s discussed his creative process in many interviews and in his book, The Creative Act: A Way of Being.
Rubin believes he is participating in something spiritual, his works an “offering to God,” and that he is not some kind of special genius. Musical art is out there everywhere floating in and around him, he then tunes into it. He finds it, sees it and puts it together. He coheres. The results speak. When you have it, you have it. God works. Our ego wants this to be something else. It will never be anything else.
If he didn’t do it, Rubin believes firmly that it would eventually come out somewhere else anyway, through a different creative mind, though perhaps a little different. He’s correct. The ideas are not his to own completely, as he is a participant in something that is near impossible to explain in a language. It is akin to surfing. Waves. The waves are already here, before we are born.
I had this realization myself while walking the Allicar Museum at Colorado State University. Even within this cozy museum and its relatively small collection you’ll notice humans traveling together in a wave of artistic creation.
Initially we find ourselves firmly within the golden age of portrait painting, with very true-to-life physical likenesses created throughout Europe from the Renaissance of the 15th and 16th century up through the end of the 18th. But then photography shows up: art goes modern, full of abstraction and entirely new ways of seeing the world. Sharp lines appear, bright colors and experimentation. The classic portrait now fades out, nearly disappearing from the remainder of your museum walk (if you’re traveling linearly).
It happens suddenly, you notice it suddenly. Why did portraits cease to be painted?
Great ideas originate outside us because we are not a body. We hold form temporarily. Our spirit is traveling, for now inside a tuning device existing within the bigger thing that contains everything. The circle. We are spirit, moving, driven by a soul.
If you pay attention, open up to it, you are guaranteed to notice. If you do not, and are not, it drifts right by in the chaos. Can you pause it? What your friends cannot?
A paranoid obsession with control is the opposite of noticing. It is forcing. It is a technological spiderweb laid over the top of something real. And yet it was inevitable in a structure built entirely from fear. Original sin is just that and only that: fear of an other.
What starts as one other thing facing you in public – observed as a threat, regardless of the real situation – eventually grows into everybody is out to get you. This whole thing is against you. Threats are now everywhere and you’re deep in it. At the gas station, with Doritos in your hand.
When nearly all humanity views life through the lens of a weak, threatened physical body all day, what else should we expect? One only has to look around anywhere, online or in any coffee shop down the street, and you’ll see or hear a conspiracy. It might even be the majority of conversations now, as we struggle to climb out of a truly dark age. “The world is rigged, throw all the bums out!”
Is it 1976 or 2026? Both dazed and confused.
This has to happen when living from fear.
Our words start out as physical impulses, a feeling in the belly. The grand conspiracy is really just inside each individual person. Both the enemy and solution exist side by side, the battle is always one-on-one.
Of course the marketing world is trying to influence you with music and images at every turn. The airport-sized modern grocery store, White Noise.
Of course there exists a byzantine system just to get on an airplane and fly two states over.
Of course we now run job applicants through a silly spreadsheet gauntlet – paint-by-numbers interviews, drug tests, background checks, a credit pull – just so they might have a chance to, you know, earn a paycheck for you. Is everyone scary? What happened? When did everything get so scary? Did Andy Griffith do this to another person? What changed? Really ask yourself on a fear level. What has changed with humans? What is the problem? What is *your* problem? Not them. Mirror.
Of course there’s a guy wanding your body and checking the bag just to watch a football game and eat nachos. In a stadium you’ve been taxed to build. Yes: it is absurd.
How many times do we need to change our Terms of Service? Should we add yet another page to something that nobody has ever read?
We can’t stop. We haven’t figured out how to stop, the off ramp. Too scared. The fractal spins out and runs. We will be forced to stop. To choose once again.
We have moved in one direction, toward fear and away from God. You feel it every single time you find yourself in a corporate moral maze.
The nefarious agent involved here is each of us. We built this one choice at a time, as individuals, and only as individuals can we solve it. By saying the obvious. That we forgot it’s obvious, basic human respect, plays no role now. Nobody is going to remember this system. The souls here? Yes.
And God will keep asking us about it, until we choose differently.
Distractions, programming coming from a TV or phone, or even the visuals of wild, old school analog human engineering experiments like Las Vegas, can be a deterrent to seeing frequencies just beyond our material world (distraction by design), but it’s important to grasp that they are all part of God too. All of it is serving something, part of our remembering. The long journey. Outside of time, of history.
One may even “lose it all” in a single weekend in Vegas, yet there are no accidents. A disaster can flip into the best thing that ever happened to us. That relationship that drove both of you crazy at age 20, did it teach you something?
The evil you just saw on the news, or social media, might it tip someone over into now changing their whole life? Did someone regret their behavior and go back to school, fully risking becoming a completely different person?
Did you just change the world simply by being a clown, yet recognizing it?
The act of observation modifies both the outcome and the observer itself. But you have to actually say it.
In our darkest days we might stumble into beauty anywhere within this world, as it stands. It might even be the entire point of it all, that display of near symmetrical beauty in a tree, an unexpected field of fresh wildflowers around a corner on today’s hike, yet another stunning sunrise, or even just the sight of a family laughing and enjoying a bike ride together as one unit, completely unaware of today’s nonsense on the screen.
Any one of these could lift us out of the mess and send us in an entirely new direction. Instantly. Maybe this one sends the entire world in that new direction.
“For no reason at all.”
The key that forgives the entire world is knowing that both the things that you enjoy and the things that frustrate or scare you come from the exact same origin.
One source and only one question that lives everywhere all the time. That’s it.
Any distillation of what is happening requires the development of a particular skill: discernment.
This skill, ranked #1, comes at the price of both time and effort. The gaining of the skill is an active process, an act of being. The price itself includes quiet time and space to learn who you actually are. The learning then becomes an actual human remembering, and there’s simply no way for ChatGPT to remember any of it, because ChatGPT never was anything.
Sitting quietly on a mountain or an ocean alone is wonderful. Maybe you carve out peace in an isolated city park while listening to Brian Eno on Sony headphones, and that’s great. I plugged directly into God without any plan or warning right in the midst of a noisy, chaotic city brimming with what we call history, and certainly human struggle. It definitely wasn’t forty minutes away in Big Sur, loftily enjoying a breeze on the mountain, and I wasn’t in lotus position. The download struck like lightning right in John Steinbeck’s mess of a hometown.
If you are willing to allow that the genius of a legendary scientist or musician “comes from the ether,” you may be only one small step away from allowing the wild thought that the control mechanism – the fear we use against ourselves (and our neighbors, some who on random shuffle look different than us, physically) – is also originating in that same exact unseen realm. Shared by us, it literally is us.
You.
Until it isn’t.
You decide. Creative agency. Your art of living.
You too can choose to be fearless, and by doing so you release everyone.
From their shit.
Just by doing the real you.
Right now.
An original, like Adam. Perhaps even The Secret Adam.
(excerpted from a much longer draft, tentatively titled “Model A”)