Our Candy Machine Cosmos

Whoa! In this 7-minute episode, we step into the Candy Machine Cosmos — where you insert something small — a coin, a thought, a risk — and what comes back is always unexpected: sometimes grace, sometimes grief, but always a call to see anew. 

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Chapters

• 0:00 Setting The Theme
• 0:37 The Viewfinder Of Perception
• 1:30 Lenses: Panoramic To Kaleidoscopic
• 2:34 Telescopes And Inner Vastness
• 3:05 Shock, Loss, And Reclaiming Self
• 4:12 Expectation Versus Surrender
• 5:19 Wonder, Attention, And Living

Transcript

“Our Candy Machine Cosmos”

By Pat Benincasa

© 2025  Pat Benincasa   All Rights Reserved

The size of our world is measured by the size of our view.

How we see the world determines the range of our view. 

Think of it as a psychological viewfinder.

The “viewfinder” we use determines what we see and what we miss. Perception shapes reality.

Is it panoramic, microscopic,  kaleidoscopic or telescopic? 

A panoramic view expands empathy and context, while a microscopic one reveals the intimate textures of life. A shifting lens asks: What am I not seeing because I’m standing too close… or too far away?

The Kaleidoscope View - it’s all movement and surprise.

Life keeps turning, breaking apart, coming back together—

a swirl of candy-colored moments, never the same twice.

Maybe it’s about surrender- how letting go can reveal symmetry we couldn't see while holding tight.

The cosmos- sweet chaos—always changing,  yet somehow, held by unseen order.

The Telescope view- it's a  search for wonder, it turns the gaze outward and inward at the same time. Connecting  the vastness of the cosmos with the smallness of being human. Maybe perspective isn’t about distance, but attention.

And then-something happens—a jolt, a loss, a moment that shakes the lens. Suddenly, the world we thought we saw, goes out of focus. That’s when another kind of seeing begins: the slow work of reclaiming ourselves- our voice, our joy, our place in the story.

But something else happens too — a new self begins to take shape, not made of what was lost, but of what we’ve chosen to keep.

This self carries the fingerprints of everything survived — refined now, quieter, clearer. It sees through a wider lens, one that knows sweetness and sorrow share the same sky. 

We don’t return to who we were; we rotate the viewfinder and find a wider cosmos within.

Maybe that’s where the next shift happens—when we stop trying to make sense of what life gives us and start letting it reveal itself. 

The viewfinder is how we frame reality — narrow, expectant, or open.

The Candy Machine Cosmos is what meets that view — a universe that doesn’t owe us what we imagine, but offers what we need, if we’re willing to see it. 

It's a clash of titans- where expectation and surrender collide! And surrender never comes easy; it strips away our certainty, our dogmas, our illusion of control. What’s left is presence—the raw kind that notices everything.

And maybe that’s the grace of it all.   The cosmos was never a puzzle to solve but a mystery to stand inside. Wonder replaces certainty. Attention becomes prayer. And in those small, shining moments—a flash of color, a sudden kindness, a silence that understands- we realize that what we dare to see is what we dare to live.  

sometimes we reclaim a name, 

sometime we reclaim all the things we unlearned growing up. 

To find a reclamation of self.

What can trigger this process?

Illness, accident, job loss, divorce, passing of a dear one,

betrayal, catastrophic storm,

elections,