Wrote an email to an old neuroscience friend, doing her post doc at UC-SD. It was raw, but it was a nice stream of my conscious experience that took me to opening up on some deep places. I believe sharing is caring, so I’d like to share with the rest of the class. :) I omitted my intro, then dive into my personal story, the rest of this post is my email. Still waiting for my response, but no need to have that stop me from sharing. Enjoy!
Edit: she got back to me. Her specialty runs parallel, so she couldn’t comment. She DID send me to people that could, which is the beauty of our species.
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Just to give you an idea of why I’m writing to you, I’ve been doing a lot of introspection. It’s rooted in Science, but also guided by a calibration of my own compass. That’s why I think it’s important to always re-calibrate to experts in the field. If I’m digging down physics rabbit-holes and end up in “meta-physics” territory, an expert could tell me where I went out of line with proven Science, so to speak. But I believe as broad as life may be, the building blocks require a certain Truth, and a certain Order of Operations. This gives understanding a linear path. Probably why universities have a generally clear cut, sequential curriculum. Essentially, I’d like you to hear my ideas and give me your thoughts on them. 🙂 I’d be so grateful.
I’ll tell you a bit about my time since Mentor, just to catch up! I went out to UBC to study Computer Engineering. Always been curious about Psych, so took a few courses in that direction, a bit in cognitive sciences, but always chose “jack-of-all-trades” to “master of one”. Did musical theater shows (2 principle roles!) in my undergrad, kept with wrestling, kept searching for the answer to my big question: “What is the meaning of life?”. It led me to some pretty strange and unexpected places. Without getting into heavy details, I had some really low points in the process, but never lost sight of Life.
Ultimately, I was honing my applied science and other “skills” to try to reason my way to figuring out “the meaning to life, the universe & everything”. It was a huge load on my brain, but I felt the responsibility to myself and humanity to urge on.
I had a point where I felt I wanted to settle down and build out my nest, but within a few years everything I had set into place as my support structures shattered. Got married, did everything to provide and nurture, but ended up divorced. It put me back to the drawing board, shattered.
Without going into details, my “shattering” led to a journey of questioning everything I “knew”, re-evaluating and re-consolidating the body of knowledge I had been building in my mind. How could I have gotten things so wrong? Was my faith misplaced? I had to move on with life, but a brain process had been set in motion. Eventually, in the course of a few years, this led to an epiphany. I quite literally, in a sense, “found God through Science”.
This experience also led me to really hone in my mind. I started re-teaching myself how to learn, think, speak, reason… I talked myself through and eventually unraveled myself through all my trauma. Like a librarian sorting library books.
Eventually, I hit the “system update”, then my “system reboot” button. Then let my modified “mental maps” re-map the world for me. It was a heavy process, but I came out of it a completely different person. Same, but different. Any contradictions I may have still had lingering in my mind as far back as childhood were undone. Any fear was undone. I had taken inventory and understood exactly who I was, what my powers are, and where I’m going.
This also gave me “super powers”. A more objective perspective of the world… but deeper. “The gift of prophecy”, as the Bible might put it. It’s almost like in Buddhist tradition, where you feel and perhaps “understand” how everything is interconnected. I could read people like books.
The next step was re-integrating with the world. I needed to calibrate my new compass to the real world. I learned to tell stories to connect with people. You can’t tell someone to leave a toxic relationship, for example, but you can tell them about what your toxic relationship did to you. I needed to share my newfound gifts with the world. My ultimate ambition is world peace. Musk has his Martians, I’ve got my faith in Love.
Anyways, in terms of understandings of Science, everything “clicked” too. What’s understanding how the Laws of Physics/Psychology/Sociology/Anthropology work, when you’ve found the Laws of “God”, so to speak? They all converge on this common Law, so it all makes sense. In the same light, so does instability. I’m not trying to sound arrogant. If I was, I wouldn’t be writing to you for critique.
Essentially, with all this quantum research coming out & my ability to find the marriage of spirituality to sociology and to physics… I had opened up an insight into what this could all mean, where it is, and where it’s going.
Switching to your field of expertise. How likely is our consciousness to be a quantum system? I strongly suspect so. Vision is a manifestation of these quibits, in a way. How else could people think/navigate/see so fast, if the system isn’t all changing in conjunction to changed “quibits”? In that context, environment is a set of “external quibits”, connected to our systems of sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch… This all runs really close to simulation theory, which is spooky, but it shouldn’t be! … I could be conflating another entirely more complicated concept with a simpler one, but with the way God works and with the spookiness of spiritual experiences in people’s lives, it’s really difficult to just “brush” these things off. Why do some things just resonate so much stronger in society than others?
Another theme here/idea is behind “mirror neurons” and our understandings of learning and empathy. In a way, it really does seem like empathy is an ability to “visit” people at a distance and “let them in” to do work in our minds. That’s a really intuitive way to understand inner conflict stemming from a “parental voice” living in a child’s head, telling them to live in contradiction to their heart’s desires, for example, and the suffering that comes from it. Also, as another note on this, mirrors are a reflection of our bodies. What if our bodies don’t actually represent us at all? Apples to apples, we’re each others’ mirrors. There’s the wisdom of “jury of peers” in our legal system.
The weird thing is when you start thinking about a “collective consciousness”, that could be societal pressure, but it could also be quite literally a conversation of “spirits” in one’s mind. Why is the universe so perfect, and why does God answer people’s prayers? Perhaps God is a manifestation of the “loudest” voice in this sea of consciousness. The voice of Morality, but also the voice in people’s hearts, mother’s guts, “daddy senses”. Kind of like Nietzsche’s Master and Slave ideas, suffering draws a path to morality, tunes one’s mind to God’s frequency, then you can choose to change the station.
I can talk deeper in just about any direction, but I really wanted to share with you my experiences over this past little while and see what you think. I’ll cut this email short here, so I don’t bombard you with my musings. I really appreciate you taking the time to hear me out.
Hope you’re doing well. Lots of love.
