15 Seconds...in 2016.

Have you ever had an experience so unexpected that it completely rewrote your identity, worldview, and epistemic system in about 15 seconds? If not, I don’t recommend it.

A birth.

A death

Traveling

Psychoactive drug use.

Supposedly those are the things that trigger an existential crisis. Doing all four at once…whoo baby. Okay, so it wasn’t all at once. Over a period of about 22 months. But then…was it 22 months, or 36 months, or 5 years. Where to draw the line? Unfortunately (or fortunately) my brain remembers just about…everything. The ingredients accumulated over months. The reorganization happened in seconds.

Suddenly everything became clear… to me. As Robert Pirsig called it…”waves of crystallization.” Oh, that finally makes sense. Decades of clocking things…of having certain emotions and feelings and experiences and seeing people react in certain ways and not understanding why they had reacted that way. I had been an outside observer but had not understood what had happened.

“You’re here because you know something. What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad”

-Morpheus from The Matrix

I have seen firsthand how powerful the mind is…how it will protect people from losing status.

Status has measurable neurochemical correlates (serotonin is one piece). I could pull the studies, but you already know the lived reality: status shapes competition, dominance, and hierarchy. And here, “status” really just means your place and reputation in the world. The mind protects people from getting humiliated–from upsetting the (wrong) people. I’m not defending the way it works…it just happened to turn out this way. Don’t blame me…I am just the messenger.

I’ve never met a single human on this earth who didn’t have some insecurities. In every single case they were social insecurities or social anxieties. Not one time was there a real threat of life or death. Sure, I’ve met people who have had terminal illnesses and they were worried about death—I’m talking about why someone is so terrified of public speaking? Does it really matter? I’m not saying I’m immune to it. I finally understood it. Public speaking is oftentimes rated as one of the greatest fears among people. I mean, really? Is someone going to kill you if you give a bad speech or tell a bad joke at a standup joint? Not in today’s world.

It makes no sense from the outside—until the key fits. Then it’s like…ahh. Oh, and this explains this and this and this and this and this and this. Wow, it is the “least incorrect” answer to almost everything. Not everything, of course. But it answers a lot. Of course it raises more questions.

The hard thing is most people have been indoctrinated with worldviews that need to be updated to be more healthy. We’ve all heard a lot of these sayings: An old dog can’t learn new tricks, etc.

Neuroplasticity is a thing that declines with age, however if it threatens someone’s existence then that is a different thing.

Enlightenment can be painful. Plato has a whole subject on it. The Allegory of the Cave. I’ll let it be summarized by one of our large language models for brevity.

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave describes people who have lived their whole lives chained in a cave, seeing only shadows on a wall and believing those shadows are reality. When one person is freed and brought into the light, the truth is painful at first, but he gradually realizes the shadows were only poor copies of a richer world. When he returns to tell the others, they mock or even threaten him—not because he is wrong, but because his message threatens everything that gives their lives meaning and safety.

What people don’t understand: the Cave is Safety. Emotional Safety. Identity. Existence.

This has been my experience. That’s for sure. People will defend their own slavery. They often do so because it feels safer. Humans learn through repetition, repetition, repetition. What you hear early and often again and again will stick with you. It will mold your brain. It will form your personality.

I won’t explain it now at the risk of disappointing people…I don’t think words CAN do it. But I will say there is a famous quote.

The map is not the territory. The name is not the thing named. — Alfred Korzybski

All that to say…I don’t have a monopoly on the truth. Nobody does. The stories we are told at a young age…if they are told with fear…constant fear or punishment…watch out.

If your worldview was built under fear, it will keep asking you to pay protection money—even when you’re safe. Protect your mind and the minds of those whom you love.

As Walt Whitman once said: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”