Once Upon a Time,
One upon a time, a monkey who carried the spirit of perfection in its heart spoke into the mute silence of it’s soul, saying:
“Do not be overwhelmed.
The part of you that I am speaking to, is the other half of your experience that is still asleep. Overwhelm is the language of the precise, lesser-half of your full experience that stayed awake when the master was induced to slumber by the cold discomfort and urgency of the world you have helped create; This unworthy steward lives in it’s own dream and believes that it is the master. It is not a liar by heart, but it lies easily. It’s dishonesty is due to ignorance, and that it is fluent only in languages other than love.
The master, is the sleeping giant in you, the king / the queen in exile, who is longing to return and whose kingdom is all the poorer for their absence. The emissary has allowed the soul to leave the palace and the magic to leave the kingdom. The emissary is half-blind, half-deaf, half-mute and very clever and altogether senseless.”
The Monkey’s lord, the King in Exile, answered with a question, saying,
“Who are you Monkey?”
To which the monkey replied:
“When I forget who I am, I follow the Way.
When I remember who I am, The Way and I are the same.”
THE MASTER AND HIS/HER EMMISARY
I am referring to an idea which has arrived from the field of psychology and neuroscience: The stark and almost unknown differences between the distinct and fascinating ways in which our Left and Right brains think.
Author Iain McGilchrist explains in a dense but incredible book called The Master and his Emissary, which presents a fascinating exploration of the differences between the brain’s left and right hemispheres, and how those differences have affected society, history, and culture.
The most fascinating and somewhat troubling part about the book and it’s message is that the meme we inherited from school and popular culture, the one about how the Left Brain is logical and the Right Brain creative, is cartoonishly inaccurate. The real difference is not in what they do, but how each hemisphere thinks.
The implication that you should care about the most, is how our ignorance of this difference is the source of all our deep unhappiness, and sense of depletion, disconnection and overwhelm.
The implication that you should care about the most, is how our ignorance of this difference is the source of all our deep unhappiness, and sense of depletion, disconnection and overwhelm.
AN OUROBOROS OF A DILEMMA
The most significant catalyst of the advancement of the illness, was the Industrial Revolution. Ever since our advancements in social structure and technology fell out of step with nature, we have been steadily and progressively creating an environment and a lifestyle that is diverging from the harmony of the nature, falling out of attunement to the tides and seasonality of our days and our months, and our lives. We have been steadily leaching the soul, our source of meaning, and for lack of better words, ‘our source of spiritual replenishment’ from this world and from our selves. Our advances brought great blessings in the software that afforded us opportunities for individuation and actualisation we would not have otherwise enjoyed. This allowed us to cure diseases, acquire food and fuel better, which allowed us to grow as communities, and to specialise. The Specialisation lead to more advances and so the dog chased, and caught, it’s own tail.
As our networks became more dense and the protocols for navigating them became more complex, the rate of information exchange and processing power each person needed to manage, increased beyond the natural current limit of what a human brain can parse.
The bugs that we are now experiencing have been emerging in lock-step with the rate at which our lifestyles were being engineered by the architect of both our cleverness and our current deep crisis of meaning.
The left brain is the one that is designed to parse facts and details. It is target-orientated and sees the world as external and separate and subject to itself. The left brain considers the world and every other living thing, only consequential in the context of whether it is ‘For or Against’ Self. To the left brain only the Self matters. It is the ‘aspergic’ sense of self-concern and self-preservation that we call the Ego.
To this egoic Left Brain self, everything else is data to parse or ignore, an opportunity or a risk. The world we created, the way educate children, the way we make promises, the disregard we have for our spiritual health, the way we make laws, choose leaders and sacrifice our dignity for our jobs and our relationships, is a result of the lifestyles and environments we have been iteratively creating. This is the way we have unconsciously relinquished our freedoms for the sake of comfort and the promise of safety.
At the same rate we were making ourselves more ill, we were losing the part of ourself that is it’s own innate, eternal and natural remedy for that illness. We made of the Illness a dungeon, and within it, tortured and imprisoned the Cure. We programmed of our Illness and confusion a Matrix and within it, entrapped and predated on our Soul.
We made of the Illness a dungeon, and within it, tortured and imprisoned the Cure.
DOUBLE MINDED
The ancient Greeks, believed there were two languages with which we might hold the Conversation of Life. They used these two languages to describe the world, their place in it, and the experiences that this created. They called these languages Logos (Reason) and Mythos (Imagination).
They lived with an idea that Wisdom was the ability to hold the Conversation of Life and with Life, in both Languages, at the same time. They called this being Double Minded. Today, we understand this in the context of one of the key definitions and prerequisites of Leadership: The ability to entertain Paradox. The ability to hold both sides of the argument in play. To be able to parse and navigate impossible dualities.
One of those Dualities is Mythos & Logos. The others areLeft brain & Right brain perspectives, classic wisdom & corporate wisdom. Another is Spirituality & Science. They are not so estranged. They never were actually separated or divorced as a couple. When someone has a severing if their Corpus Callosum or some other atypical wiring of the brain, we experience people with separate personalities in the one person, or people with strong defaults to narcissism or sociopathy. The gradual severances of the other dualities has has similar consequences.
We all know what classic wisdom is - we call it Philosophy. But we make no allowance for ‘corporate wisdom’: the wisdom that corporate industry arrived at. The truth is, human ingenuity does what ingenuity does, no matter the context: it innovates and iterates its way to optimisation. In the corporate world, one of the fruits of that evolutionary process was Agile.
Agile is a delivery approach that prioritizes flexibility and collaboration. It involves breaking a project into small, manageable parts, or 'iterations,' and continually reassessing and adjusting the project goals as work progresses. This allows for quick responses to changes and new information.
~ ChatGPT 4.0
What Agile philosophy taught me, was that if you are overwhelmed, it means your backlog is full, it does not mean you have a lot to do, it means you have a lot to prioritise.
What Agile philosophy taught me, was that if you are overwhelmed, it means your backlog is full, it does not mean you have a lot to do, it means you have a lot to prioritise.
The Left Brain is easily overwhelmed, being concerned with the volume and amplitude of the information it needs to parse, rather than it’s essence. It’s prioritisation of tasks is ignorant of what a human soul needs. Our Left Brain is the one that houses the psychological persona we all contain: The Protector and The Judge. These are two persona that essay to keep us Safe and ensure the world is Fair. When they fail, without internal leadership and self-love, they fall into their shadow aspects: The Protector becomes the Critic. The Judge becomes the Victim.
THE INVITATION
This post is a gift.
Every true gift is an invitation to the deeper gift, and so on:
Our illness is soullessness. No one and everyone is to blame. It is a byproduct of the unconscious, unwise manner in which we have been pursuing our comforts and the promise of safety. It is the environment and lifestyles we have been creating generation by regeneration until we arrived here in this moment, completely ill with anxiety, disconnection, isolation and depletion.
Our illness caused us to create ever more unwell systems, processes and ideologies, that had some crack cocaine benefits with some long term compounding side-effects.
Our illness is defined as our sense of reductionist logic and reason, the mundanity of our own story and how trivially we see ourselves, inflated to the point it has drowned out and eclipsed its natural equalising force: our sense of soul, our sense of symbolism, myth and metaphor; Our sense of Meaning.
The latter is the mediating cure for the former. Our sense of connection with meaning has been been cauterised and it’s flow of vitality in our lives stemmed and dammed up by the ecologically irresponsible developers of our pathologically self-centric sense of reductionism and logic. The sense of reductionism and logic is essential to a human life. However, left to its own devices, it will create its own hell. We are here now, childishly believing the child’s story that someone else is coming.
No One Else is Coming. You are who came. You chose this.
Now Choose this:
This is an invitation to begin and make the kind of progress on this journey worth all the discomfort and pain you have endured and more.
What you are seeking is also seeking you, but sometimes neither it nor you, were ready, yet.
The closer you leaned into the truth of who and what you are, the more you became prepared and ready to let go of the way you had been attempting to hold the conversation, the more ready you became to wait and allow everything to be as per its own season. And the season is here now.
We needed to accept that people and our gifts and our purpose, arrive together only when we can open ourselves to the Invitation, and allow ourselves to be guided through an initiation into the unfolding seasonality of how those three things meet and can only meet at this moment, accepting fully that it is something that will change and keep changing.
The invitation is a progressive Unfolding. So are we. We are also a progressive unfolding, so are our gifts, so are all people, and so are all places and therefore, so is the Truth.
The Invitation is a progressive Unfolding. So are we.
We are also a progressive unfolding, so are our gifts, so are all people, and so are all places and therefore, so is the Truth.
I will release the formal application here on Substack in the next couple of weeks. But that will just be the formalities. Every True gift can never be given via promise, it can only be given by Agreement. And agreements have Terms, both in the sense of boundaries and seasons.
If you want to reach out and apply to apprentice yourself to the way email me your interest: info@eyeswideopenlife.org
Consider yourself invited.
Alexander Heyman said: “Home is where people notice when you’re not there.” When you are not connected to your inheritance of wonder and vitality, you are not home. And people will notice.
Come home.
I love how wonderfully all of this comes across, Rocco. I am looking forward to consuming more of your stuff here. I'm 100% certain it'll flow into my own work too, and help me get better at The game. At the end of the day, we're all walking each other home.