Michón Neal's Blog, page 41

Day (338) - Tell Them

Reblogged from The Better Man Project:

I can’t tell you how many times I have told someone that I cared about them, whether in a relationship sense or just as friends, and received…worse that disastrous results. In fact, there have been times actually where the other person simply just doesn’t respond. Yikes.

You know, there’s this old saying that you find out about someones true character when they are in hard times and pressure situations.

Read more… 526 more words

This post describes what I had assumed to be a common problem of mine. I often felt my honesty scared people away. That's true but not in the way I thought it was. I feel much better about telling people how I feel and I will never stop. The world needs more love and I can help by letting others know what they mean to me.

Hermetically Sealed and Beating the Odds

If science has taught us anything, it is that nature abhors a vacuum. Many scientists are now describing the vacuum, the great nothing, as actually being filled with potential. Not only potential but enough energy to blow the bejesus out of space itself. It is unknown what force, if any, prevents space itself from blowing itself to smithereens for all eternity.

I return to the original point; no matter where you look in the universe you find that there is no such thing as a complete vacuum. This posits two things: that anything conceivable has a very small chance of happening and that there is always a way. No event is completely isolated. This makes scientists uncomfortable, nearly as much as infinities or singularities. I’ll write on those topics later.

We often hear the phrases “what are the odds”and “beating the odds” but what practicality can be derived from these? How do they affect our everyday lives, and what implications do they have for our thoughts, behaviors, and their effects on the world at large? The best we can gather is that the quantum world operates by probabilities, likelihoods. The potential of nothing is concretized into actual events, into solid objects based on the most likely outcome of an arrangement of trillions of particles. It’s like the imagination come to life and it is amazing.

People calculate their own odds, based on their average experience. Usually this means they fall into patterns. While this isn’t always a bad thing, it can lead to stagnation. The whole universe is changing more times than we can count every single second; does it make sense to behave as if we are any different? If all your need is that one tiny chance, no matter how miniscule, that means it’s possible. There is a way. The number on the other side just means that that is the number of certain events that need to occur first. So the lower your odds, the higher the number of events need to happen, meaning the more work you have to do or effort you have to put in. Whenever I’m sad, or dragged into the past, or wondering if I’ll ever make it, I remember the odds. The nice thing is, once you put effort behind it, your odds increase.

Oddly enough, what this also means is there is no vacuum that people operate in. The saying goes “no man is an island.” There is always a leak somewhere, no matter how small. Though the thread may only be an atom thick or smaller, it is still weaved into the universe. That’s what the unity principle is: on the smallest of scales we’re literally sewn to each other. Not to say there is no freedom. We have remarkable freedom of movement: physical or mental. It’s just that if we pull hard enough, we end up tugging others in one direction or another. So watch out for that, and maybe ask them first.

Parallel vs Serial: the Processor Smackdown

People can’t figure out how my mind works. Most people go about things one at a time, yet that’s never been me. My mind operates like a parallel processor, running an unlimited number of tracks at any given time, resulting in my extreme impatience with having to slow down to explain just one track. My siblings, certain friends, and I have seemingly incoherent conversations of fragments and gestures. This is die to the fact that each word, phrase, look, and micropexpression have reams of pages of possible meaning.

So how can we possibly understand one another? It’s all about context. To make up for the number of tracks running art the same time, there’s the constantly-running track of determining context. Unfortunately this can also result in paying attention to events, conversations, or objects that we actually don’t want to see. My brain is always on. I know where I am and my plan for the day as soon as I wake up, unless I’m extremely ill.

I rarely take down notes; instead my mind just tosses related ideas into a box or room together in my mental landscape. This creates the hilarious situation where I blank out whenever someone asks what I am thinking about. It is literally impossible to answer because I am thinking about so much during any given moment. There often isn’t any simple way to sun it up, and so I come across as incoherent or confused. Where many people insert details, I insert systems.

I suppose then you could say I have modal thinking. There are groups, even cities of thought and whenever I switch subjects it is because I have walked into a new room in my head. Each room contains associated thoughts and rules. I often fine myself frustrated in conversations because the brakes come on frequently. I am powering ahead to the end point or already moving toward my next set of tracks when suddenly I must stop and explain the color of the wheel on the first train on the smallest track. That’s not to say there isn’t a time for that. I just make a terrible serial thinker.

Everything I enjoy, my philosophy, and even my deepest desires are parallel in nature. I have difficulty conceiving of “one-itis” because multiple paths are all I see. This is why I write braided stories, with many series happening concurrently. They appear unrelated and random to those who are serial thinkers. Perhaps that is why I am considered crazy. All of my settings predispose me to parallel, Mobius-strip thinking: being a lefty, being bipolar, a multi-tasker, and just generally being the opposite of what’s considered “normal” in many categories.

I suppose I can never fully appreciate the one true choice because I have always made bundle choices. It is my view of freedom, to operate in as many directions as possible as often as I can. Instead of walling the line, I am filling in a circle as I go. That is my natural state and unfortunately it is often held as a mark against me. I’m different in so many ways but that does not make me confused or wrong. Each of us has a unique capacity and some of us are serial processors and others are parallel processors.

What about you? Are you parallel, serial, or both? What communication issues have you had trying to discuss things with a person with the opposite processor?

Google Doodles Still Erasing Women’s History

This is a wonderful article by a woman I admire very much. I have oft had the problem of wondering what women were doing for most of history. Google had sadly been of no help in this regard.

Google Doodles Still Erasing Women’s History.

Bias Barrier

It is the job of science to expand the horizon of human knowledge to the very edge of the universe itself. It is the goal of science to explore every facet of the world around us in a way that makes sense. Armed with the tools of logic, reason, rationality, and imagination scientists of all kinds confidently tease out explanations of physical phenomena. So far, scientific pursuits have largely broadened technological abilities. To a smaller extent, it has also allowed for social progress. Yet, there is that startling, relevant question: why hasn’t ethics caught up with science?

In nearly every other area  of life, people have found a better way to go about their business. Technology is streamlined despite much of its planned obsolescence, our information is crunched at incredible speeds, and the rate of scientific discovery and progress is an unprecedented burst of pure creation. There is a heavy emphasis now on STEM programs and jobs. We are encouraged to learn more about how the world operates and build it better, faster, and shinier.

Yet it seems to me as if the push for ethics is lagging behind. We are creating technology faster than we can create laws to keep up with it. Or is this even under the purview of law, since you cannot exactly legislate behavior, only punishments or a protocol one follows when another has broken one. What we seem to have are the deeply religious calling us back into the Dark Ages; they’d rather us eschew modern sensibilities, products, and “lifestyles.” I have never hated a word so much as “lifestyle.” It implies that a chosen life is somehow less honorable, less moral than one lived purely by sacrifice.

Humans are so numerous now, and our abilities and freedoms so many that the ways of the past cannot sustain an effective move forward. The pace of everything is speeding up every year and it seems like hardly anyone can hold on. We have record numbers of mental disorders, even though crime rates have dropped to record lows. We are turning inward on ourselves because we can barely grasp the pace of the world. This is an age where some scientists are literally creating never before seen elements, materials that shouldn’t exist, and are poking through the very fabric of space itself. We are planning to send scientists and regular people to Mars within the next few decades. We are also planning on quantum computers becoming a regular thing in the same amount of time, and many scientists aren’t even completely sure of just how many different uses they will have. They can barely conceive of it because it is just so wondrous.

I have to wonder if we are so excited by these prospects that we forget to put some ground rules in place. The rules of the past are showing themselves to be the temporary modes of operation and that they usually only serve as a detriment now.  The scientific method has become its own weird source of morality, abstaining from all judgment until checked against actual reality, which is very very strange indeed. It almost starts to seem like anarchy, as if you cannot actually judge what people do, what privacy is, what freedom means, what is ethical and what is not. However, this is not the case. What this is is an opportunity to change the pace of morality and ethics as well.

We have such forward tech and such backward thinking. These two pull at each other and only one can win out. In the end, we may have to lose our minds just a little in order to realize that we can rebuild it better. There seems to be this mode of thinking that denies that change can happen within the mind, the personality, that people should not be broken. But isn’t it the most scientific of attitudes that when something breaks, you can learn how it all works together and improve upon it? Has that not been what human progress has been since the beginning? Our immune systems, our minds, even our entire race has been broken, infiltrated, and nearly completely destroyed only to come back as something newer, slightly different, and better equipped.

As we move forward towards a future stranger than we can even think of today, our morality must keep up with us. It must be rooted in actuality instead of speculation. Everything is literally up for grabs and nothing is sacred. Each of those deeply rooted ideas that people hold about community, gender, government, privacy, and freedom are changeable qualities of our lives. They have different meanings now. I don’t know how possible it is for the current law-making process to keep up with the pace of technology and practices that alter our perception of the barriers between us. I’m not sure how people will understand or utilize manners when lives are evolving in the public sphere in such a way as to erase what was once thought to be the public/private threshold. In the digital world, rights management and inheritance is a huge issue. What kind of morality and ethics last in a world that won’t sit still for long?

Do we use quantum physics or stick with the classical interpretation of the brain? It seems as if the world was so shell-shocked by quantum physics that we pretend it doesn’t exist most of the time, despite it being the most accurate model to date. Relativity has barely sunk into the collective consciousness. Too many still live in that classical, mechanical world, with it’s static and rigid classical morality. Relativity brought up the problem of there being no absolutes, and therefore no real way to judge. Quantum physics is all about taking account, about individual effect, and about the fact that we cannot escape our consciousness. If we go a little crazy in the process, it’s just par for the course.

The Sin of Duplication

Comparisons. Competition. Thievery. Envy. Lying. Denial. Insecurity. Every day we hide ourselves, we put on a mask when we step out of the door, we belittle ourselves and one another. Sometimes we look at another person and wish we were them, other times we just wish that we were anyone but ourselves. Some people steal another person’s idea or story and try to pass it off as their own in order to build up their own reputation. A lot of people tell themselves, if they could just beat this person, they’d move up some invisible ladder to take their place.

Humans are not a line. They are self-contained circles. You cannot replace another person. You occupy a certain time, space, and body that only you are able to move along. There’s a saying “everything in its time and place.” What this means is that there is no need for duplicates. Reality is one whole and there is no need for anything extra. All that is here, will be here, and long gone exists as a potential across the entire universe. Nature always chooses the path of least resistance. Nature is efficient. It provides everything necessary.

So why do we behave as if none of this is true? It is an actual denial of reality when we duplicate or seek to duplicate what has already been done. Creation is a process of bringing something completely new into the picture. We are blessed and equipped with minds that can create new angles of sight on any problem, obstacle, or project. When we take the “easy way out” and shut down the active part of our brains, nature responds in kind.

What this means is that nature waits for you to choose then responds appropriately. If you seek to create anew then opportunities spring up everywhere. Like a farmer, you must learn to tend your garden. If your mind is a tangled web running through the same ground repeatedly without providing nourishment, the land will die, your mind will shut down, and you will be depressed, apathetic, or reactionary. Every single moment is an opportunity to choose: for better or worse. We are scientists in our own lives due to the fact that we can assess our actions and their results. When a mind stops doing this, any random force can rush in and destroy the garden.

What most people think is the easy way out is actually just the longest path around. When they shrink away, hide within themselves, and deny responsibility they are actually saying, “I agree with any random thing happening to me.” Saying “I don’t care,” opens the door for the odds to fall as they may. The odds have no reason to fall in our favor. When you reject reality, it rejects anything you say you want. These same people will complain about how life sucks, how nothing ever good happens to them, and how they wish they were anyone else. It is an act of erasure to deny your own existence. To say that you have no control over your life or your choices is a denial of your mind and soul. Why should the universe take care of you if you don’t even admit you’re aware of it or you think that you are a mistake?

I used to wish I unexisted. I wished I had never lived. I was literally cancelling myself out, committing spiritual suicide and trying to commit bodily suicide. Hence a whole series of contradictions managed to sneak in, weeds destroying the crops of my mind. However, even when we say these hurtful things, to ourselves and one another, we are missing a fairly obvious point. The one question you need to continually ask yourself is “Who is saying this? Who is wishing for another life?” No matter what, there is always an “I” behind every thought. You are still the one doing the thinking, the wishing, the denying.

The ever-wise Iyanla has a saying, “When you compare yourself to others, it is an act of violence against the self.” Every time you say something hateful, every time you covet what someone else has, every time you deny your choice or your existence it is equivalent to stabbing yourself repeatedly. A wounded person cannot move very far or very well. You are disabling yourself when you spend time thinking of these things. You are literally damaging yourself and making your life harder to live. How? By setting your perceptual filters to block out those things which you really need, desire, and can do. You strip yourself of any other choices that will lead to a better life. You literally become unable to learn or to see an alternative. This is how a mind dies.

This is why it helps to be as a farmer. Your mind is your garden; it needs the proper food. That proper food is reality itself. Humans are able to interact with reality and solidify potentials because of evolution. It is the one thing that we are specially built for. Our consciousness allows us to imagine things that never existed before and then enables us to produce it with our bodies. How fascinating is that? However this tool works best, nearly flawlessly, as long as we are paying attention and acknowledging what is actually there. How can we grasp anything else in the world if we are too busy cancelling ourselves out or seeking to duplicate someone else? That person is already them, and already being themselves well enough, what need does the universe have for another copy? We are unique for a reason, because (like Liam Neeson) we all have a very particular set of skills.

Each of us has a unique point of view and therefore we each have different choices to make, different paths to follow, and different abilities to employ. All that we accomplish by denying ourselves and coveting other’s goods or abilities is burning down a perfectly good garden. When we lie in any way, by saying we aren’t good enough or stealing someone’s idea or wanting their life, we are denying the truth, reality, the entire universe. That’s a pretty bold contradiction: assuming that you are such a wasted plant, that the universe messed up so badly with you, while asserting that you actually could do better. That is the hidden thought behind any denial; I could make myself better than the entire cosmos did.

So instead of telling the world what a bad place it is for sending you the life you have and are continuing to create, acknowledge that you are a unique creation. You have the choice to change the settings by which you operate. You have the ability to improve your mind’s capability to recognize reality. That is what learning is. When you get in your own way you deny your lesson. You shut off the food source that allows you to grow. You are telling reality it has nothing to give you; that you receive no benefit from it. And somehow we find ourselves still surprised that we receive no benefits after that. It is a sick cycle when we ask reality to just skip over us because we’d rather be anywhere else.

The easiest path is the truth. Tell it, see it, learn about it.That’s why science works so well; it seeks reality as it is and in return people can benefit from it by emulating the act of creation. When we start with the simplest truth, “I exist” we can follow it to further freedom of choice. There is no need to duplicate another person when we realize our own abilities. There is no need to adopt their property, ideas, or mannerisms if we see that our own is what we chose and what we have to work with. It is difficult to take account of what you really have at your disposal if you refuse to acknowledge yourself. Use your energy to tend to your own garden and you will not need to take over someone else’s, in any form. Be a good farmer. To want someone else’s life or property is to assume information you don’t have, information that may be inaccurate. You know your own life best and that will provide the best results.

When you find yourself thinking that being someone else would be easier, that having what they have would make you better, that you have to hide some part of yourself because it’s not okay; look for the truth and hang on as hard as you can. You always have a choice about how you feel, what you think about, and what you look for. If you want similar things for your life concentrate on how to obtain them honestly. Wishing yourself into their position just serves to cancel yourself out. Your mind may be hard to change at first (a garden can only grow what’s been sown). As you introduce new ideas, truths, and reality your mind will be able to put together new connections (the new plants need the time to grow). Give your attention to those ideas which affirm your existence, abilities, and worth. Gradually give more food to these and the old plants and weeds will eventually die (though there is always that one weed that keeps growing back). As time goes on, you’ll get better and better at this and wonder how you ever thought yourself so worthless that you didn’t deserve to be you. Remember, you can always tell yourself no, instead of telling the world no. You can look at that duplicating urge and choose to create something new instead. Creation begets creation. Denial (of self or learning) begets denial (of opportunities). I do hope this made sense. I also hope it helps. Please let me know what you think or share a comment if you have any examples of duplication you’d like to share.

 

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Liminal Horizon

I’ve been contemplating death a lot lately. The saying goes that death and taxes are the only constants in life, yet here the world sits at the brink of a new era. The world is perched on that liminal edge, ready to cross over into the strangest age of human history. Don’t believe me? There are scientists right now who are receiving the Nobel Prize  for their breakthrough transformation of stem cells into egg and sperm. This will mean that two men, two women, the infertile of both sexes, and some seriously self-loving narcissist can produce a human being from skin cells! Granted, this has only so far been done on mice. Still, it is amazing! Humanity is changing the process of life on both fronts. Humans are living longer than ever and there are other scientists, biologists, and nanotechnology experts working on ways to make humans live even longer, maybe indefinitely. Can you imagine?

News like this makes it seem all the more strange that I lost so many family members in the past few years. On top of that, doesn’t it seem like celebrities are dropping like flies? It certainly is an odd time. However, there is the topic no one actually discusses. What is it like to die? There are stories swept under the rug because they are still considered unscientific. We have the theories of relativity and quantum physics, we are changing what it means to be human, and the odds for the impossible (or at the very least the highly improbable) decrease with each passing day. Yet the greatest mystery of the universe, the very phenomenon that, once explained, may truly unite quantum physics with general relativity and provide the Grand Unified Theory once and for all, is embarrassingly unsolved.

 

There is the question of why anything exists, but that just leads into a confusing tangle of ideas and realizations that often ends in a strong dose of existential terror. No, I merely mean life itself. Is it necessary, scientifically? Is it inevitable? The tricky thing is, either way you answer, there is something fantastic and mysterious occurring. Life is a very, very, very strange thing. We are self-aware machines that can imagine the world as it isn’t, as it could be, and as it was. Regardless of our seemingly miniscule place in the universe (multiverse) the fact that we can comprehend how miniscule we are is amazing.

 

Before I get even more off track, let me make my point: I am so confused about near death experiences. I was reading today about a neuroscientist who slipped into a meningitis-induced coma and came out of the other side transformed. What are these people going through when they die and return? What about people who are not near death? There are those who just randomly are struck one day with a deep spirituality. Then there are those who get it from a certain drug, or even meditation. These stories keep cropping up and are littered throughout history and yet are attributed to nothing but a faulty imagination. Basically, all of these people are or were crazy and hallucinating.

 

I tend to take offense to this dismissive line of thinking. Human beings are more than faulty hardware. As an individual who is actually crazy and actually left-handed, I know what it’s like to be on the other side of this. I have had my share of liminal events; those strange occurrences in my life that have been chalked up to my being bipolar or being left-handed (lefties are more prone to craziness). But what does that label actually mean? That the chemicals are unbalanced in my brain or that I literally think the wrong way? I often felt I lived a backward life, as if I were in the wrong universe, because I only ever met right-handed, linear thinkers. Giving my experience a label doesn’t explain it; it only gives it a shorthand name.

 

It is not my goal here to discuss my neurodiversity per se. I am interested in this life-after-death thing. I have often wondered if an alternative explanation for mental illness, for hallucinations, for more-real-than-real experiences was simply that the person’s consciousness was partially slipping into another universe. If our imagination is rooted in the ability to rearrange what we know of reality, does it pick parts from all of reality, even other universes? I like that explanation more than the standard “It’s all random” spiel.

 

In any case, this is all speculation. I am a writer, and bipolar, and left-handed. Of course my explanation has to be more fanciful. I do not know for sure what it means to die. Does time fold back on itself so that the cycle of your life continues indefinitely, or does the last moment stretch out into eternity, or does consciousness move on to a new machine? Does it float and disperse into the void that somehow has enough energy to explode millions of times over yet doesn’t? Life has evolved from the unaware to the self-aware: is there a day coming when we’ll be hyper-aware? Humans are growing smarter and healthier yet the rate of mental disorders is rising instead of going down. Are we all just going crazy as we enter a world with technologies that people of the last few centuries called witchcraft or divine? Or are our minds evolving faster than our bodies can handle?

 

All I know is, as we prepare to send manned missions to Mars, build quantum computers, and phones that can scan your body to check your health (within the next few decades!), I am looking forward to learning more about life. We may have proof of exactly what these transcendent experiences truly mean. Until then, I can only wonder at the magnificent minds we have and the experience of having any experience.

Living on High

Hello all,

I last left you with some sad but hopeful news. In the weeks since my dear ones passed away, I have reassessed my life and am even more determined to live for my happiness. I've long decided that I want every moment of my life to be worship. Each moment is so precious. I've been doing a mental exercise, in which I focus on the idea that all of our senses deliver past information to us. I wonder about living in that state where information is actually current. The human mind is a wonderful, mysterious thing, and it takes all of that past information and produces a flowing experience from it. It seems that cases of mental disorders, physiological changes, drug use, or intense emotional experiences can give rise to different and strange perceptions of time. When thinking of all of the infinite little parts that have to function in concert to give us that smooth appearance of unity, my mind blows and I am awed. We tend to skip over the little things, because we have so many other concerns. Yet sometimes I think the greatest way to appreciate the world is to look at it in whole and in part, from quarks to multiverses, and ponder what it is that connects it all. I used to run myself in circles as a teen contemplating the bizarre fact of existence. The thought used to frighten me, because it just made no sense. I am no closer to answering that question, yet I fully embrace my existence. I am here, I have an effect, and it would be a contradiction to accept the idea that I should not control my life and what flows into it. Power must be tempered by accountability, and they must grow together or natural distortions arise. This year, I have taken a lot onto myself. My power comes from my responsibility. I take on the world, bit by bit, until I learn to handle more.

Eventually, I plan on delving deeper into each of these ideas. I am excited at the prospect of exploring them and finding even more questions to grow from.

Hardly Working

A myriad of events occurred today, not all of them what I would normally consider positive. If anything, it has been a glaring example of how one must let certain things go in order to receive something better. In the past few years, people dear to me have passed on, often without me having the chance for a proper goodbye. It is one of the topics that is on my mind so often; wondering just what happens when the life energy leaves the body. Some point to heaven, others to another life, and some to much darker places. There is what I believe, and there is what can be "proven." In this instance, I know that energy can only change from one form to another. Do we become the seeds for plants, animals, or even other humans? Tracking even where we start from is such a monumental task, could we ever fully understand how unlikely all these processes are? "The miracle of life"; and yet so often we rush through our days, waiting until we rest our heads so that we can escape from our daily duties and the people who place demands on us. I never liked that kind of a life; I used to love leaving home to go to school, but then I'd be sick of school and couldn't wait to get home. Always running. Because as long as we keep moving at reckless speeds, we don't have to stop and notice that in the thousands of years that "civilization" has existed, we have yet to answer the most basic questions in a fully satisfactory way. It usually takes someone dying, us or others, for anyone to even begin contemplating what existence is. I have always wondered. I have been looking all my life.

 

But for now, I will keep running. Away from my mortality, away from the depression that seeks to consume me as a loved one hangs on that thin ribbon between life and death. I have only recently really started pouring myself into the promotion of my stories, because I (the fearless) was afraid. I feared letting out such a personal object out into the world. Another author described artistic works as being our babies. It is so true. Artistic works are half us, and half what we perceive of the world, joined together in the very best way we could manage. I feared others pointing and laughing as anyone on a playground would know. Yet each time a person passes away, I tell myself the same thing, "Some people will like it, some will hate it, and a few will even understand it. Don't let it hold you back." This time, before he passes on, I am forging ahead and keeping that promise to myself. It is a very short life we live, and only a few of us have experienced what comes on the other side. In this life of science telling us there are no guarantees we must treat our lives as the precious gifts they are. It only wastes time to be afraid of the bully. The bully on my back is invisible, made up of my imagination. I have decided it is a shame to imagine horrible things. After all, I can imagine anything I want. I choose the things that make me happy.