My students/clients see me for one of two reasons; for psychological struggles and for spiritual growth. Part of the problem is that everyone gets taught to see our spiritual selves as separate from our psychological selves. In truth one is a product of the other, as ego is to soul.
They’ve recently been doing a lot of brain research and after all of these years they are now finally serious conversations by neuroscientists regarding the idea that our consciousness may not be a product of our brain but rather it may be a separate entity, as-yet undefined by science, that has a relationship with the brain but is not the brain itself. You’ll often see me referring to the electricity in your brain as being separate from your brain and I mean the same thing. The trick is there’s no words for some of these things and in a way we don’t want any.
Words are symbols and can be assembled into narrative stories that lead us to have emotional responses, but those responses are not reality, rather reality allows you to see your actions as both being from an individual, and the actions would exist within some kind of logical framework.
Your spirit is a strange thing that is both small and immense at the same time. The reason that can be true is that it is simultaneously you and yet you are just one tentacle of the Universal Octopus; a beam of light from the Great Universal Mirror Ball. Everyone thinks that’s what they want: Enlightenment. But it’s not, trust me. Even if you get it you’ll immediately know you don’t want to stay there. Can you imagine it’s boring in a way?
Imagine feeling like God. That’s Enlightenment. But that all-powerful feeling that goes with that all-powerful energy in that all-powerful non-space is doing everything, and everything at once is like trying to watch every channel at once. Lots of it can be amazing but it’s not very enjoyable.
The individual seemingly linear lives that we lead are just the universe weaving paths through itself. You take the sense of infinity and you filter it into a world using some base concepts which also live within infinity. Once applied, they become like the six formulas that essentially describe our entire universe. That’s our “space” as humans. That’s our realm. That’s somewhere we can build a narrative track. We can appreciate our three dimensions but others we can only prove; we can’t experience them directly.
The problem has been that you want to control your character through the TV and you can’t do that. You can’t deal with a post-thought world and expect to accomplish anything except for when your ego happens to go the way you wished it would. But even that’s fine because the ego-world is where there’s up and down and winners and losers; that is like the playing field and those formulas are the rules and from there we’re free to roam, but it’s important to keep in mind you’re the actor not the role.
You’re not actually on TV, that’s a character. You’re the actor back in a studio performing that character. The rest is a transmission, reception and interpretation. Any good actor is fully invested in their role, so in relation to the other characters in this play called life, you can all take the words in the script literally. But once a performance is over it’s important for the actor to drop character and just be themselves, lest they go crazy.
You don’t have to figure everything out. You can’t. It’s too huge. Relax more. Just observe. Others. You. Just observe the game. Trust me, you’re part of the Great Void as well. You have unimaginable wisdom within you if only you’d quiet your thoughts so that you could hear the universe.
Go ahead. Genuinely try to win your life-games. But do not mistake that for your larger journey, for that would be like taking the entire life of an actor and reducing it down to a single role. You’re much bigger than that. Have a great day.
peace. s
Scott McPherson is an Edmonton-based writer, public speaker, and mindfulness facilitator who works with individuals, companies and non-profit organisations locally and around the world.
A serious childhood brain injury lead Scott to spend his entire life meditating on the concepts of thought, consciousness, reality and identity. It made others as strange to him as he was to them. When he realized people were confused by their own over-thinking, Scott began teaching others to understand reality. He is currently CBC Radio Active’s Wellness Columnist, as well as a writer, speaker and mindfulness instructor based in Edmonton, AB where he still finds it strange to write about himself in the third person.