First things first:
Everything is love.
You are free.
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So I’m in Europe right now. People keep asking me why I’m here and what I’m doing and the answer has become easier to give, even though it’s different every time. Frequently, I either say or am tempted to say:
*I’m doing stuff with my art collective
*I’m creating new connections for my poetry business
*I’m on a content creating adventure
*I’m hanging out with one of the loves/some of the loves of my life
All of these things are true, and based on the audience, I’ll pick one or some of them to talk about. And based on their responses I may even go in depth.
But the reality is..
I actually don’t “know” what I’m doing
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I don’t “know” anything.
The Truth with a capital “T” as in “the objective actual reality to which our human consciousnesses seem to agree we are subjected” is a thing that a single human likely cannot fathom. For example: Some of us think we “know” who we are or can figure out who we are. But the reality is that we can get attached to memories about the slivers of reality that we can perceive. We can trust and believe the details that we remember/misremember/intentionally distort/confabulate and further filter them through the lenses/media/contexts we have internalized that we are consciously allowed to use to analyze those “data points”
But as Diego so eloquently quoted from his professor last night-.. and I promise you I will promptly butcher (ha, misrememberings abound)
“the truth is our least provably false theory about the information provided”
and I had to add that even though that’s the standard of science and I’m sure many people could accept that as a definition of truth, many of us still use the much more lax “this is the most convenient theory I’ve come by, which I can accept without needing to change or challenge.”
This is not a judgment of humanity or our memories or our ways of thinking. This is an acknowledgement of that fact that human memory/conscious cognition is nothing in the face of actual reality. We are limited to what we can perceive and process and accept on a conscious level. The science is nascent but we’re working with 40 - 2000 bits per second bps on the conscious level. 2 Mbps is watching a 480p youtube video without buffering or downloading 1Gb in an hour. That could be a lot or a little or meaningless, based on your understanding of computing and your own brain. To put it in perspective though
The subconscious mind is theorized to process 200 million to 400 billion bps. 400 Gbps as the upper limit of what your brain can process is effectively the equivalent of 40 hours of 1080p video that your body receives every second.
If we put the lowest estimate of the conscious mind next to the highest estimate of the subconscious mind we would end up with our conscious experience being 0.0000000001% of our existence… further limited by the filters of our fallibility, selectiveness, and sleep. 😴
given how much we take in and how we structure reality based on the sense we can make of the stories our left brain creates/recalls… Actual reality happens to be no match for the mind either.
We will continue to believe what we are capable of believing until something unravels the foundations of the beliefs.
And the foundations of those beliefs run deep. And they were built at one of our most malleable and vulnerable points: Childhood.
Ex. Play: Peek-a-boo “Mama sometimes disappears, seemingly not forever. She is happy to see me when she returns. This can be fun.” (Object Permanence) Age 1
Ex. Change: Mother starts taking trips for work “Sometimes people disappear, and I do not know when or if they will come back. I know they still exist, but they are not here with me/for me. It hurts.” (separation anxiety) Age 4
Ex. Life events: Mother starts a new relationship with a partner in a different city “Mother loves new people and has a new family. They post happy pictures on social media together. She looks happier without me. This hurts even more.” (Abandonment Trauma) Age 7
These moments of creating understanding come to define how many of us process reality. But they don’t NEED to.
I used a “mother” because many people have mother figures to connect to at these ages and how they come to understand that mother figure showing up can determine their ability to understand what is possible in their other relationships. The subconscious messaging around “mother” as the “most unconditionally loving figure in a human’s life, save a god” can create lasting consequences when one has a difficult/abusive/complex dynamic with their mother, who was most certainly a human, before she was made to discover the reality of her experience as a caregiver.
We can decide how we see. We don’t need specific others to validate it, because life itself is always in conversation with us. What is happening is so much greater than the limits of your memories or ideas. Perhaps we could all stand to be a little bit bigger than what we can “understand”
Perhaps we could all stand to allow everyone to be bigger.
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What am I doing in Europe? I’m traveling light.
