Finding Power

One thing I have noticed in my time is this. 

I spent the first part of my life accumulating knowledge and a sense of self. 

Who was I? 

What was I supposed ot be doing in life? 

What was my purpose?

The more I accumulated the heavier I got. I wasn't aware of this at the time, but I did experience the symptoms of it. 

I was trying to figure it out. I was using something limited - my knowledge and intellect - to try to decipher something unlimited and unknowable - like the universe and my place in it.

I traversed those mountains, banging my head against the wall for a while until I saw that all the accumulated baggage of my past was the cause of why my journey through life was so heavy, so confusing, so hard. I had to let all this accumulated knowledge - who I thought I was - go.

But then I found out it was hard to let it go. All the accumulated stuff was who I was. I had formed an identity from it.

So I had to let go of it piece by piece. 

Some I let go freely. Some I had to endure the pain of carrying it until it became too much. Some of it I still can see how it has its hooks in. Some parts of myself have led me into dark spaces where I have to rediscover who I want to be apart from my past habits. It's all old habits, old ways of being, old patterns. Most of them are not even mine, they are inherited from generations before me. All of it is limiting, fear-based and conflicted.

The key is clearing ourselves out. Recognizing and letting go of all these old patterns. Creating what we want in the moment and inventing a future that we are excited to live into. 

Our capacity to create and ideate our own reality is power. 

Back Into Balance

Knowing stuff takes time. Knowing how to do things. Knowing how to use a computer. Knowing how to speak a language. 

This is all in the realm of accumulating knowledge to be skillful in something. It is a matter of storing up enough memory and then recalling it. It takes time.

It seems to me though that there is some other form of intelligence that operates within us. A form of intelligence that is not accumulated but is revealed holistically - all at once. These experiences sometimes overwhelm the intellect and change our perception of ourself and our life. 

This other state, this other form of intelligence is not accumulated. You don't learn just one fragment and then stack it on another. Rather, you see the whole thing at once. It is a breakthrough, a transformation, where before the insight you see things one way and after it you see things another way.

This form of intelligence has nothing to do with spreadsheets and data points, but it can give insight on how best to use them. It is like a light in the dark room. It reveals things that we had no idea were there. It makes us capable of things that we didn't know we could achieve. It makes us aware of more than just the single part and expands our view to the whole.

Baseball players and other athletes call this "being in the zone", artists call it inspiration, scientists call it a quantum leap, monks call it samadhi.

I feel like exploring this kind of intelligence is the key to bringing ourselves back into balance and order, and by doing that, we in turn begin bringing the whole of humanity back into balance and order.