LOTS Chapter Six, Part 2: STORY and BELIEF

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In Part 2 of Chapter 6 from Language of the Soul, Dominick Domingo continues his exploration of the relationship between belief, perception, and the narratives that shape both our individual lives and our collective culture.

This chapter reflects on how our beliefs influence the way we interpret the world, the choices we make, and the meaning we assign to our experiences. From the psychology of perception and confirmation bias to the powerful influence of social conditioning, Dominick examines how stories become the lens through which we see ourselves and others.

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Transcript

Belief And Meaningful Work

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As touched on in the introduction of this book, recent generations lean toward the ideal of livelihood as contribution. The notion that work need not be drudgery when inspired. Work that fulfills the creative drive while contributing to collective society is not taxing, it's energizing. According to this mindset, personal fulfillment and hard work, putting roofs over heads and food on the table need not be mutually exclusive. Hopefully, these examples have convinced you how ideas we expressly adopt and those we simply absorb through osmosis wield power over the manifestation of desire. They are the prime determinants of the degree to which we fulfill potential or fall short of it. Hopefully, both the micro and macro functions of this phenomenon are exceedingly clear. Our beliefs create our subjective reality, and our societal paradigms govern the world in which we live. But perhaps the life structure that provides the most vivid example of the power of belief is that of health. Let's start with the macro or societal level. In the current climate of the COVID-19 pandemic, the politicization of public health policy has been put under the microscope. The CDC has gone head to head with anti-maskers, forcing everyone from our parents to the local grocer to formulate an opinion on the matter. As a proponent of community, what I often call interconnectivity, I do not balk at notions that smack of socialism. As long as I've been on the planet, our very broken healthcare system has been in need of repair. At the same time, typically Republican values like personal

Health Policy And Personal Agency

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liberty, which I also come by honestly, are at stake when we hand our power over to government agencies. Without going too deeply into the divisive issue, again, another book entirely, a very fundamental truth is also at stake here. Agency. For the purposes of this book, let's narrow focus. The prospect of being forced to receive an understudied in the eyes of some vaccine in order to maintain personal health, not to mention rights and privileges, is distasteful. More than that, it's gesture symbolic of collectively handing over power to Big Brother, submitting to the powers that be. Abiding a vaccine mandate to some is akin to kowtowing to big pharma and other special interest groups in bed with our government. On the micro level, this trade-off is the difference between trusting the homeostasis of one's body, its ability to self-regulate and repair itself, and believing one is reliant on medicine to survive. A great many of us have been brainwashed by the allopathic model of Western medicine to believe in medication and surgery over prevention, to believe in chemical intervention over energetic healing, while devaluing lifestyle choices like diet, exercise, and even, in the spirit of this chapter, ideas. The mind-body-spirit connection is what we're talking about here. Let's look at the very real mechanistic ways in which our beliefs not only affect but become our biology. In chapter one of this book, Storytelling and Transformation, I introduced the phenomenon of synaptic pruning, in which potential neural pathways are snipped due to unuse. I also characterize this developmental milestone as tragic for its implicit curbing of potential, though it speaks volumes about the mechanics of manifestation in the fulfillment of potential. Perhaps more compelling is the cat study cited in this chapter. Those kittens raised with only vertical stripes literally could not perceive horizontal ones when released into the world. The implication is that the perceptual and

How Beliefs Become Biology

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conceptual limitations imposed on us in early development, socialization, determine what we see in the world. In turn, what we perceive determines what we're able to accomplish in it. We've established that Homo sapiens alone learns vicariously by adopting extrinsic beliefs. It should be clear that many of these beliefs are ill-founded and erroneous. Now consider that belief does not require empirical evidence. In fact, the word belief is used interchangeably with faith. Still, evidence certainly doesn't hurt in cementing our conceptions of the world. The more we see evidence of our beliefs around us, the more they are confirmed. It is important to note that the role of confirmation bias, the supporting, quote, evidence we perceive in the world, is also subject to perception, and that perception is inevitably colored by past experience. For good or bad, our beliefs are filtered by perception, and perception is colored by emotional experience. On Wonderland and Pills, in The Matrix, Morpheus offers protagonist Neo the choice between a red pill and a blue one. You take the red pill, he explains. The story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Though open to interpretation, the implication is ostensibly that there is an illusory level to life that masks a deeper reality. Native Americans might call the veil the dream spell illusion, and deep at Chopra might call the transcendent world beyond it the field of pure potential, Chopra 1995. In Lewis Carroll's original Alice in Wonderland, Alice drinks potions and eats mushrooms in order to alter her physical state, and thereby the way she interacts with Wonderland. The implication of the above references is shared by the animated short Shine. In it, the masses wear the equivalent of government-issued rose-colored glasses, while the reality their lenses mask is much more sinister. In both cases, the reality embodies the worker bee archetype, the futile suggestion that existence is simply a matrix for life, and we're all essentially serving a function in the dialectic, being chewed up and spit out by the universe. Hard to find meaning in such enslavement. A similar theme of illusory reality appears in the animated short The Lost Thing, though it proffers a more forgiving, benevolent view of the universe. In the shadows, between the lines it suggests, we find the square pegs, the absurd, the nonsensical, the inconvenient, that makes life worth living. In the biology of belief, cell biologist Bruce Lipton recounts an exercise he regularly includes in his college-level classes. In short, he issues red filtered glasses to half the class, and green filtered glasses to the other half, then shows them the same film. The color altering filters determine what each group sees. One group sees horrific images based in fear, the other images that evoke love. Even blocks of type differ according to which lens is worn. When asked to shout out what they've read, the group simultaneously read aloud either I live my life in fear or I live my life in love. Without beating the dead horse of the obvious, the message is that perception is a choice, and that we have the power, through free will, to swap out the lenses through which we see the world. There are infinite ways in which our beliefs determine our biology. To dipiteau and the implications on health, consider the well-known placebo effect. It's said that the history of medicine is largely the history of the placebo effect. Before staunch empiricists birthed the quote scientific method, little more than academic consensus really, varying degrees of success resulted from what we now dismiss as quackery. Bloodletting, leeches, and the notorious snake oil are but a few examples. And though many of these measures did more harm than good, a notable number of cases resulted in healing through faith alone. Carrying the baton forward, modern faith healers, however you view them, have joined the ranks of those who

Placebo Power And Medical Myths

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understand healing takes place within. For good or bad, they have become cultural punchlines, along with those who embark on pilgrimages to walk on hot coals. However you explain them away, the statistics are documented. Mind over matter is alive and well. In a clinical context, the placebo effect is briefly addressed in medical school. Despite the aforementioned view that medicine has relied on it from day one, the phenomenon remains severely understudied. Even so, the medical community takes statistics seriously enough to attempt to eliminate the full third of the population susceptible to the placebo effect from all clinical trials and studies. The logical conclusion is that there is a fiscal consideration at stake. There would be little need for expensive pharmaceuticals or surgery if we wrangled the beast of energetic self-healing. Western medicine is largely mechanistic and Newtonian, focusing on chemistry rather than energy. However, centuries of Eastern medicine have acknowledged the very real energy channels in the body that serve as superhighways. And as mentioned earlier, the human body is wired to obey both local and non-local energetic signaling from the limbic system. Thoughts and feelings over local chemical signaling through the cell wall, medication, pharmaceuticals, for example. Antidepressants are arguably the biggest culprits when it comes to smoke and mirrors. Though it took an act of Congress to release the research data, a 2002 article titled The Emperor's New Drugs revealed that a full 80% of clinically depressed patients improved based on the placebo effect alone. Beyond each individual's self-healing power, there is a larger implication. Mainstream society has come to adopt and embrace antidepressants as a panacea. The public perception that they are effective is downloaded via osmosis, and voila. Individuals respond in treatment. The placebo effect applies to surgery as well as medication. In a study by physician Bruce Mobley at the Baylor School of Medicine, subjects that underwent knee surgeries in which nothing at all was performed improved at the same rate as those who underwent traditional knee surgery. Abraham Hicks once commented on the cottage industry of dieting, offering the following wisdom Much more important than what you put in your body is what you believe about what you put in your body. The perfect illustration of this insight came over a century earlier, soon after Koch's 1884 discovery of Vibrio cholerae, the bacteria that causes cholera. In the debate over germ theory, contemporary Max von Pettenkoffer drank a test tube full of the potentially deadly bacteria. Other than about with the runs, he remained unaffected. Similarly, a significant number of patients carrying the HIV virus failed to become symptomatic, exhibiting what seems to be a quote natural immunity. In both examples of imperviousness, there is likely a variety of factors at work. Still, further study is warranted in this area of medicine. Exceptions are most often dismissed by the scientific community as anomalies to be tolerated and overlooked. Or worse, those who respond to the placebo effect are characterized as weak-minded. The aforementioned hold of Big Pharma on medicine and the pursuant financial stakes explain some of the resistance. Also playing a part in the staunch refusal to fund study of the placebo effect is pride and ego. Researchers will dig their heels in until bleeding to protect their own findings. You are getting very, very sleepy. In 1951, through hypnosis, Dr. Albert Mason cured a young patient suffering from severe disfiguring warts. It was later discovered that the boy actually suffered from ichthyosiform erythrodermia, an inherited condition that should not have responded to hypnotherapy. The breakthrough was recorded in the British Medical Journal. Though the exact mechanism of hypnosis is still scarcely understood, it has been used to rapidly heal wounds and burns, to make warts and blisters disappear, and to control the bleeding of hemophiliacs. As with the placebo effect, belief translates into tangible results. Real physiological and neurological

Hypnosis And The Nocebo Trap

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changes take place and genuine healing occurs. In my estimation, one of the most compelling phenomena I could cite to demonstrate the effect of belief on biology is this. Under hypnosis, the body can produce a burn with the mere suggestion an iron has been applied to the skin. Beginner's luck. Physicians themselves acknowledge that chances of survival and healing are greatly decreased if they convey the patient is dependent on treatment for that healing. They are aware the power to heal lies within. Many doctors have confessed that, despite positive results early on in their careers, they found themselves unable to replicate those results once they quote knew too much. They attribute this to the inability to project hopeful prognosis after repeatedly seeing discouraging statistics over the course of their careers. The damning effect of prognosis has been called the nocebo effect, and it should be self-evident. There is a self-fulfilling prophecy inherent in hearing the words, you have six months to live. The 2019 film The Farewell, starring comedian Aquafina, centers on the Chinese tradition of withholding cancer diagnoses from loved ones. The tradition is founded in an innate understanding of the nocebo effect. More often than not, patients' illnesses will accelerate with the knowledge they are gravely ill, and their bodies will obey prognosis. In the biology of belief, Bruce Lipton cites a case in which a misdiagnosed patient who was later found to be cancer free died on schedule. Of cancer, but not with cancer. It should be clear that to both miraculous and adverse effect, our beliefs run the biological show. The Mechanics of Belief. Our examples of how belief impacts our finances, livelihood, relationships, and health are compelling enough. I encourage you to revisit Dr. Beckwith's list of life structures and speculate for yourself how others on the list might prosper or suffer at the hands of well-entrenched beliefs. Let's continue to explore how our individual beliefs form our respective worldviews, and how those worldviews or value systems collectively make up the sphere of thought forms and paradigms that drives world events. Earlier in this chapter, I cited a sentiment I share with law of attraction teacher Abraham Hicks. A belief is just a thought you keep thinking. Hicks and Hicks, 2004.

Anatomy Of Belief In Daily Life

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However, in the same way thoughts and feelings are reciprocal, each can trigger the other. Thoughts and beliefs can do the same. In other words, once a belief is hardwired in one's worldview, or once a puzzle piece is locked into the hole, to use our handy metaphor, it will surely propagate similar thoughts. The law of attraction ensures that like thoughts snowball, they accumulate and gain momentum when the lens of our beliefs colors daily experience. In that spirit, Gandhi often spoke about the anatomy of belief as a determinant of destiny. He put it like this Your beliefs become your recurring thoughts. Your thoughts become your words. Your words become your actions. Your actions become your habits. Your habits become your values. Your values become your destiny. Though all the phenomena mentioned are interrelated in nuanced ways, the above model certainly has the ring of truth for many. When in Rome. In short, beliefs are contagious. This goes not only for an individual's worldview and resulting destiny, but for societies at large. The anatomy of social beliefs follows a pattern similar to that of the individual. History is riddled with examples of belief as contagion, from phenomena like the mass hallucinations of the Salem Witch trials and the McMartin preschool trials to the 2020 election denial narrative. Other more subtle ideological shifts occur over time and are harder to pinpoint. I call them slow burn ideologies. Often they are so slow and stealthy that, like frogs in boiling water, we adopt them unaware. Every day, we assimilate unexamined perceptions and biases by default on autopilot. Let's look at one example, one that has been simmering in Western European Judeo-Christian culture arguably since the advent of Christianity. To tie things into our former conversation about tolerance, the example has to do with the current, ongoing climate of homophobia. The concept of sexual orientation is relatively new. Historians agree that notions of heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual orientation simply did not exist post-Bronze Age, the oft-cited examples of fluidity being the classical Greek culture and the Roman Empire. Historians also agree that institutionalized traditions like taking on a same-sex lover, an Orominos or an Erastes, were due in part to the fact that childbirth was the

Slow Burn Ideologies And Homophobia

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number one cause of death for women at the time. Add to this the fact that contraception had yet to be invented, and that men are notoriously, well, horny, and it all begins to make sense. Throughout antiquity and the Roman Empire, the tradition of same-sex marriage existed, however reserved for privileged classes. Christianity, with its roots in Judaism, eventually turned the tables on all this seemingly progressive personal liberty. For reasons we haven't the luxury of dissecting, doing so is another book altogether, the centuries since have been characterized by a slow emergence from the demonization of all things non-binary. The early church extended its policy of fire and brimstone to sexuality throughout medieval times and into the Renaissance. Though same-sex marriage re-emerged in the form of enfrayment in certain regions, the privilege was selective, as was the persecution of any sexual deviance deemed heresy. Flash forward, during the writing of this book, both the Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida, and the Club Q mass shooting in Colorado Springs have ignited conversations about the pervasive, quote, climate of homophobia that may have been a factor. Between the two tragic incidents, fifty-four victims were killed. The true motive in both cases remains a topic of debate, as does the very topic of hate crime legislation in general. Those who oppose the distinction have long refused to acknowledge the role of prejudice, racism, or bigotry in fueling hate crimes. For that matter, opponents staunchly dismiss the notion that a climate of fear or hate even exists, let alone that it has the power to permit such horrific transgressions. After the Club Q shooting, Congressman Lauren Boebird rubbed salt in the wounds of the LGBTQ community by offering up prayers for the victims, while refusing to acknowledge the targeted community by name. More problematic is her record of relentlessly contributing to the fear-based homophobia that fostered a hostile environment that would permit such violence. Both Boebird and Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green knowingly peddled misinformation, rhetoric, conspiracy theory, and propaganda that, at best, marginalizes and ostracizes individuals. At worst, it makes them targets of violence. The far right's stance has been to turn a blind eye to its role in fostering animosity through rhetoric. Here's the reality. Everything from suggesting non-binary individuals are sinners or abominations, to relentless government-sponsored campaigns that position the LGBTQ community as a threat to quote family values contribute to this climate to varying degrees. Easier to finger are measures like the archaic aversion therapy backed by leaders like Mike Pence. For that matter, Ron DeSantis's don't say gay bill in education and its distant cousin Don't Ask Don't El in the military are designed to keep subsections of the population silent and invisible, to erase them in essence. In this spirit, the Bush administration attempted to diminish the LGBTQ population to a mere 1% of the population, contrary to most studies. What better way to dismiss the rights of a subculture than to reduce it to a mere sliver of the population? Proposition 8, regardless of one's views on the nature and definition of marriage over the course of human history, sought to defy constitutional principles by withholding rights and privileges from designated subsections of the population. It was attempted, of course, under the guise of religious principles applied to an otherwise strictly legal contract. The thing is, our much valued separation of church and state renders the discrimination unconstitutional. Regardless of one's particular moral standards, even if religion-based, the constitutional principles of equality, justice, and personal liberty take precedence. In the ongoing debate over marriage equality, each side has its well-preened arguments, some moral, some based in principle, some emotional and fear-based, with no rationale. Regardless of political platform or agenda, one thing is clear. There is an undeniable connection between rhetoric and innuendo and the hostile climate that results from it. Hate crimes like the two recent nightclub shootings are rooted in a homophobic climate. Even so, after the Club Q incident, Boebert and MTG only turned up their rhetoric. They continued to amplify outright lies, like the inferences of pedophilia and child grooming proffered by hate mongers libs of TikTok. These congresswomen, as a singular example, are leaders with ostensible influence. There are simply too many destructive rhetorical quotes, media statements, tweets, and documented policy decisions attributed to them to cite here. And although these congresswomen in their ilk categorically shirk responsibility, those within the trans community know full well there is a correlation between rhetoric and its statistical effect on the LGBTQ community. They know the true reason trans women find themselves victims of violent crime and murder at a rate many times greater than that of the general population. There is a reason the attempted suicide rate among LGBTQ adolescents is over four times that of the mainstream. History repeats. Emerging from the slow burn cloak of our binary system has been a process. One that's moved at a snail's pace to be precise. Folks both within the queer community and outside of it took offense to the blind eye turned by the likes of Boebird and MTG after the mass shootings. But many of these same individuals are simply too young to recall the Matthew Shepherd era. In the nineties, the literal crucifixion of Matthew Shepherd led to the passing of unprecedented hate crime legislation in the form of the Matthew Shepard and James Bird Jr. Hate Crime Prevention Act. During its deliberation, controversy abounded. Talking heads like radio host Loris Lessinger and Rush Limbaugh argued until red in the face that in the same way affirmative action was unwarranted, the LGBTQ community merited no, quote, special treatment. Even at the time, I thought, there would be no need for special treatment were there not special hatred. According to Dr. Laura, there was no quote climate of homophobia to discuss. No pervasive rhetoric-based milieu to permit or even encourage such a heinous act as the slaughter of Matthew Shepherd. According to her, he was just a slight wimpy kid in the wrong place at the wrong time. Hopefully, these vivid examples drive home the potency of the unexamined beliefs and values we adopt by default. Most of us of a certain age told an off-color joke in youth, a fat joke or a polock joke or even a fag joke without thinking twice about it, without considering how the lack of sensitivity could passively contribute to a general climate of bigotry or homophobia. Thankfully, today's culture is more aware than ever of such microaggressions across the board. For the majority of the well-intentioned among us, the perpetuation of negative stereotypes and unexamined bias or prejudice is unconscious. If we are fish breathing invisible water, unaware of its existence, that water is story. Not just the jokes we tell or the overt stereotypes in literature and cinema that fuel our biases, but the story that surrounds us every day. Life is story. We've all had the experience of prejudging another and later realizing we've built an entire story around a minuscule interaction with a stranger on very little information. We've all had the experience of returning home for the holidays to find ourselves stuck in old, tired roles we fancy we've outgrown. Old family dynamics die hard, as do well-entrenched narratives that keep those dynamics intact. Anyone raised

Story As The Water We Swim

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in a dysfunctional family unit, whether characterized by alcoholism and codependence or incest, knows the role of story quite well. Invariably, a rote narrative is enforced to protect the family image, or put another way, to protect the transgressors by relieving them of personal responsibility while painting a more presentable picture for appearance's sake. It's as old as time. The black sheep who speaks truth to power is gaslit, ridiculed or otherwise framed as being off their rocker. This archetype is played beautifully by Liz Taylor in the formerly alluded to Suddenly Last Summer. So effective is the gaslighting that her character, Catherine, blocks out her traumatic memories. When they begin to surface, she is forced to endure a lobotomy to keep the silence. Real-life characters like Tatum O'Neill, Christina Crawford, and Mackenzie Phillips have struggled to overcome childhood abuses by speaking their truth. Unfortunately, those who speak out are often the ones made to look maladjusted, mean-spirited, or, on the chance I've not yet suggested it, batshit crazy. Even as I write, Prince Harry and Duchess Meghan Markle are being actively maligned and vilified in the media for exposing institutionalized prejudices in the royal family. Rote narratives are also cemented due to the red dress syndrome, otherwise known as victim blaming. Sociological studies have shown that to absolve culpability, even subjects who have inadvertently harmed, wronged, or otherwise betrayed another are apt to characterize the victim in a negative light in order to rationalize their own capacity for wrongdoing. This phenomenon only compounds with further transgressions. We all act on presumptions unknowingly, from judging a book by its cover, clothing, or overall appearance, to racial profiling. Many of our perceptions of the world are unconscious, or we simply don't recognize them as beliefs. Many of us consider our subjective views the ultimate truth without imagining for a moment we host bias. Others of us fail to recognize the opinions and views we freely propagate as beliefs simply because they're shared by others. In that way, consensus justifies a myriad of transgressions. Even those hardcore facts empiricists back up with data are subject to semantics and perspective in the end. As much as society worships the scientific method, that which is canonized by the scientific community will always boil down to nothing more than academic consensus. It's said that the majority wins, but that doesn't mean they're right. Though I do believe in universal truth on some level, I may be the sole inhabitant of planet Earth who maintains the majority can be mistaken. It's startling to read statistics on police lineups and firsthand forensic accounts. Recollections of what color hat or what brand of tennis shoe a suspect was wearing differ wildly under the best of circumstances. Further, phenomena like conformity, the human compulsion to bond and forge affinity, account for what's known as identity politics. Many who know better opt to belong to a group simply to fit in. Beliefs and convictions are sold out every day. If the O.J. Simpson verdict did not sufficiently school us in identity politics, the last few election cycles should have made it clear that the Emperor's new clothes are alive and well. I believe, therefore I am, and other theories of relativity. I once received an overblown reaction when I heard myself say, I try not to have too many beliefs. I'm not sure exactly what I meant by it myself even now. What I do know is I quickly backpedaled. Granted, the in-law who nearly spit his drink on the tablecloth between us, at my assertion, was a known devil's advocate. His reaction was some version of, oh come on, how can you say that? If there was any earnest sentiment behind my facetious statement, it was this. In the divisive climate bolstered by the COVID-19 pandemic, the war between science and quackery had reached a boil. Staunch empiricists resented the magical thinking, there's even a podcast by that name, they saw in anti-maskers. Much of the divisiveness lay in the age-old but imaginary divide between science and faith, the grand illusion that the two are mutually exclusive. My facetious comment was meant to convey a distaste for beliefs that prove dangerous or somehow at the expense of others. I've long said that although empirical, quantifiable reality is mere consensus, the tip of a metaphysical iceberg. Obeying the material universe is the only way to function. To cooperate by building bridges or sending rockets into space. In that spirit I meant what I said. However, I could just as easily have said everything is a belief. I am hyper-aware that any definitive statement one can make is easily disproven using the Socratic method. By asking enough questions, logic will inevitably fail due to flux. Perspective and semantics, time and circumstances will always step in and blow the deal. The simple statement, this is an apple, is patently untrue because the word apple is nothing more than a concept. The fruit in question is really, on some level, just an arrangement of vibrating particles in the time-space continuum that is interpreted with limited sense organs, then reified by a brain. Sometimes that arrangement of particles is a seed and sometimes it's in decay. It is not categorically an apple by any stretch of the imagination. The seemingly innocuous declaration the sky is blue fails even more quickly. A simple shift in location reveals that the interplay of light on atmospheric particles is wholly responsible for the sky's appearance. Thanks to a variety of factors, a widespread cultural paranoia has surfaced of late. The Internet, since its inception, has been a wild, wild west of misinformation, propaganda, rhetoric, and conspiracy theory. This unregulated until recently free-for-all has given rise to a trend in the mainstream with both potentially productive and destructive implications. Skepticism. Like adolescents thinking outside the box for the first time, the mainstream have come to adopt every last conspiracy theory proffered on the internet, to question every institution from politics to education to religion. The thing is, most are not practiced at it.

Internet Skepticism And Propaganda

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As a subversive individual who has questioned the establishment since the moment I arrived on planet Earth, I see it clear as day. The public's newfound enlightenment is intoxicating. Adopting conspiracy theories feels like empowering subversion, some kind of action to combat paralyzing circumstances and conditions. If only rogue factions inculcated by QAnon, Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and Antifa realized most of the propaganda in social media is generated by foreign superpowers like Russia and China. China owns TikTok, for heaven's sake. The divide and conquer strategy of world domination is alive and well. I am a proponent of free speech, with a healthy vigilance against censorship. Even so, the irony is glaring. The very free speech we seek to protect by guarding against censorship is what's at stake when democracy is in peril. Daily, authoritarian dictatorships seek to erode our solidarity and fuel the divisiveness that threatens our democratic system. In this chapter, I'm advocating a keen awareness of the role story plays in society. I support vigilance when that story is propaganda, with no redemptive literary value or artistic integrity, but I am by no means championing a categorical rejection of all institution. Fashionable cynicism dictates a popular sentiment. All politicians are corrupt. How could this be helpful in the least? Isn't it more productive to acknowledge those who have earnestly devoted their lives to public service? Sure, some have good intentions at the outset and are corrupted over time by aligning with lobbyists, special interest groups, or earmarks. Others find themselves with a lifestyle to uphold and sell out in order to be re-elected and sustain a career in politics. Still others, however in the minority, maintain their ethics and enforce social change throughout their careers for all the right reasons. They continue to defend democracy and the equality, justice, individualism, and personal liberty it represents. As with our educators, we should celebrate these public servants, if for no other reason than the fact they get off their butts each day and do more than the rest of us to make the world a better place. If it sounds like I'm preaching, guilty as charged. But more to the point, we must be judicious about the stories we take in. As in all aspects of life, balance is the key. Rather than complaining that the talking heads on Fox News are biased, then taking refuge in our respective bubbles of confirmation bias, what about considering another option? What about exposing ourselves to all views? From PBS and Al Jazeera to MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News? Then deciding for ourselves where the truth lies? What about recognizing with a minimum of cynicism that all contemporary news organizations have a daddy, and the content they proffer is slanted by nature? In the end, we must decide for ourselves where innuendo and fake news step in for real facts. We must be judicious and sift out the propaganda, and doing so begins with an awareness of story. Making it personal, the role of intuition, philosophy and quantum mechanics, for that matter, has long been dogged by the elusive question as to whether objective reality exists at all, whether there's a universal truth beyond subjective perception. In business, human resources departments navigate this philosophical terrain with the policy that collective perception is what matters. In other words, if universal truth exists at all, consensus is the closest thing to it. In internal investigations, for example, the subject's rationalizations and defenses are expected. But if eleven of twelve office employees perceive a fellow employee as a rogue and not a team

Intuition, Trauma, And The Pain Body

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player, the characterization is probably true on some level. In relationships, both personal and professional, there is little value to projecting or attributing on events, circumstances, and conditions. Building stories around things on very little information is something we human beings do all day every day. It's best not to read into another's intentions or motives. We simply cannot crawl inside their heads. It's best to take things at face value or to hear the truth from the horse's mouth, to employ two popular colloquialisms, or to mix metaphors as the case may be. That said, most of us have a learning curve when it comes to intuition. We've all congratulated ourselves on finally learning to trust our gut or being a good judge of character. If not, we've all aspired at one time or another to abide our hunches and not second guess them. This is testament to a vibrational level of reality transcendent of the data that is perceived by sense organs and reified by a brain. It's testament to our ability to sense vibration by means other than the traditional senses. When it comes to human behavior, this spidey sense, which dogs have perfected, zeroes in on intent. We could learn a great deal from our canine companions. They are known to cut to the core of the vibrational content of a moment, an interaction, or a dynamic. We could all learn to trust our guts, rather than being gaslit by the world. In a more empirical sense, intuition can be thought of as the unconscious connecting of dots. Our limbic system is the emotional guidance system that taps into our innate database of human experience, as well as our learned responses. When those learned responses to life experience are characterized by stress, however, by perceived threats rather than opportunities, what results is a chronic protective fight or flight response. Eckhard Toll calls this database the pain body, toll 2004. In the extreme, an overactive stress response crafted by trauma is known as PTSD. In the case of clinical PTSD, the wiring is faulty. But short of that, most of us can relate to the metaphor of old, tired records that replay throughout our lives. Personally, I've sought balance on this front for much of my adult life. As much as I detest the popular term empath, we all have immense potential to be highly sensitive. I have often characterized myself as possessing the heightened senses typical of self-identified artists. At times in my life, marred by betrayal and gaslighting, I've had to reclaim my agency and learn to trust my intuition above all else. The balance I've sought more than reached is that between trusting my gut while resisting the temptation to, quote, read into a given situation. Humans are not just inclined to make up stories, it's a compulsion. But why all the heady discourse? The beliefs we adopt, largely through story, powerfully determine our destiny. This goes for the individual and society. For that reason, an awareness of the role story plays in daily life is crucial. This goes for storytellers and artists as well as, well, anyone who lives in the world. We all adopt models and paradigms proffered in advertising and media by default. To bring back our earlier metaphor, we internalize them like fish breathing in visible water, unaware of their influence. There is another alternative, vigilance. We have the agency to let the limiting beliefs imparted in media and storytelling roll off. We have the power to protect our intrinsic values and remain impervious to conditioning. Just as important, we can actively enforce social change through the content we put into the world, our contribution. Blissfully, easily disparage trends like revisionist history, political correctness, and woke culture have great value on this front. Trends have the power to inform policy and enact social reform. In the case of diversity and inclusion efforts, cultural sensitivity training, revisionist history, and the overall sanitization of pop culture vernacular, an innate understanding of the mechanics of epigenetics means younger generations have an eye on the future. The thing is, we can all get our hands in the clay of human potential and capacity. Earlier in this chapter, I hinted that to be human is to aspire to redemption. Human frailty dictates we often fall short of our ideals, but we keep trying. In this spirit, it could be said that the agenda of younger generations, those presumably on the cutting edge of thought forms and paradigms, is to walk the walk by embodying our ideals. Woke culture's self-assigned task seems to be rooting out and policing hypocrisy. It's become fashionable to point out that while our founding fathers went on until blue in the face about equality and personal liberty, they also kept slaves. The ostensible message we are all created equal, except those we view as subhuman. Cognitive dissonance arises when the contradictions of history rear their ugly heads. It takes a sophisticated mind to accept that many forces coexist in the human condition and its checkered past, but we are not defined by one single aspect. At over half a century, I am apt to defend the past, refusing to throw out the redeeming baby with the distasteful bathwater. In other words, by rewriting the past, we inevitably discard valuable cultural values and norms. We devalue the wisdom of experience, that of both the individual and cultural dialectic. A stark example of this occurred nearly 15 years ago during one of my art center class sessions. It was right around the time people on the street became mesmerized by their cell phones and devices, forgetting to say hello and goodbye or to hold the door open at Starbucks. It was a startling turn of events, but clearly only for dinosaurs like me. This development coincided with the moment entitlement drove the final nail in the coffin of community. Unity and interconnectivity in my parlance. I was co-teaching with a well-established and prolific graphic designer who was a decade my senior. I fully expected him to back me up on my casual reflection. I just missed the days when folks were nice to one another. The off-the-cuff reflection was not just me waxing on to a captive audience about walking ten miles to school in the snow and liking it. During a blizzard, no less, the class discussion centered on shifting norms. The response from one of my younger students, an embryo for all intents and purposes, was instantaneous. When I suggested that decorum and pleasantry, class, had its place, that there was a day when folks were simply nice to one another, he quickly interjected. Yeah, unless you were an N-word. After lifting my jaw from the floor, I thought about it. I could not argue with his perspective. But part of me also recognized the short-sightedness of confounding unrelated cultural norms. Especially if you were not yet a glimmer in your grandfather's eye when those norms prevailed. Bottom line, I had to respect the pervasive rejection of the past that characterized the younger generation, however unmitigated by experience. After all, we all need to evolve lest we end up surrounded by velvet ropes in a museum. Adapt or die, they say. Still, I continued to combat ageism with every breath. Better put, in the spirit of focusing on solutions in lieu of grievances, I champion the wisdom of experience. Not only is ageism the only overt prejudice we still tolerate, we flaunt the arrogance of youth unabashedly in every aspect of life. Society sucks at the teeth of youth in a more pronounced way than ever before. Quick to dismiss our elders, once elevated as sages, as relics. We must not only return to due respect, we must place value on experience. We must restore wisdom as a cultural value and do away with words like relevant or irrelevant. Stranger than fiction. Earlier, I pointed out all the references to story inherent in vernacular language, from referring to periods in one's life as quote chapters, and recurring patterns as quote, the story of one's life. For that matter, themes seem to recur in our lives the same way they do in fiction. The stellar documentary, What the Bleep Do We Know, breaks down the nature of peptide addictions, familiar chemical balances in the brain. Our bodies seek to maintain these familiar cocktails at any cost, ensuring we will spill a drink at a party if we've internalized the title CLUTS due to early negative messaging. The same phenomenon is why many people find themselves forming relationships with or even marrying partners from the same mold over and over again. It is also the reason an alcoholic and a codependent will find one another in a crowded room like magnets at a cocktail party. Some circles hold that on our respective spiritual journeys, we are presented with familiar scenarios until we conquer them. In other words, we are gifted patterns and cycles as opportunities to break them. Some go further and suggest these opportunities for spiritual growth are the very reason for existence. In concrete empirical terms, very real phenomena like being prone to clinical depression are passed on to offspring genetically. However, if cared for properly and resolved through lifestyle choices, habits, and therapy, the resultant methyl groups will squelch the expression of the faulty genes. The newly encoded DNA is what will be passed on at the moment of conception via epigenetics. In this way, our innate congenital wiring to serve evolution via personal transformation is a very real calling. When I was nearing forty, I wrote my first narrative nonfiction essay. A pending midlife crisis put me in touch with my mortality and therefore legacy. This turn of events coincided with my discovery of David Sederis. A friend had turned me on to Me Talk Pretty one day, and it had me howling with laughter on the life cycle of the gym. I felt I'd discovered a kindred spirit. He was gay, I was gay. His mother's name was Sharon, and so was mine. He'd struggled with culture shock and language foibles in Paris, and so had I. I suddenly knew I had plenty of stories of my own to tell. Not the same old literary fair I'd been cranking out since Santa gave me that typewriter at the age of seven, but stories plucked directly from my life. After all, as the first four words in this book suggests, everyone's got a story. Though I draw an experience with every word in my genre writing, how could it be otherwise? Writing so directly from personal experience was the most cathartic experience of my life. More so than even therapy. Songwriters know well the therapeutic purging of putting pen to paper. In both my fiction and my narrative nonfiction, there inevitably comes a point when I find myself navigating uncharted waters, no matter how well I've outlined a piece or how sure I am where I'm going with it. Inevitably, by digging in the emotional dirt, I find myself making major life decisions, being forced to examine my worldview and establish, quote, policy for the next chapter in my life. The main theme of my first young adult urban fantasy novel, The Nameless Prince, was that of overcoming disillusionment. I saw it as a universal rite of passage. In the writing of the novel, I very much drew upon my own childhood experience of processing life's disappointments and returning to innocence. I tapped into the very feelings that surfaced at our kitchen table years previous, when I was informed childhood was officially over due to a teen pregnancy at which no one would bat an eye these days. When I wrote the novel sequel, The Royal Trinity, several years later, my own life had been further seasoned by time. My protagonists had advanced in age, and so had I. The theme of the second book was that of overcoming futility, the temptation to throw one's hands in the air and give up on the world. The thing is, regardless of the themes I intend, the creative process itself ensures that my worldview, at the moment I put pen to paper, is reflected with every word. In the way only art can reflect life, opportunities to work through issues magically present themselves, consciously or unconsciously. I recently looked back at the first novella I ever finished. To truly date myself, it was written before the first home computer hit the market, on my best friend's mother's electric typewriter. The piece was science fiction by genre. Its plots centered on a young man, clearly my alter ego, or one of many, stuck on a starship headed for Alpha Centuri, humankind's new home. Earth had essentially been trashed, not unlike the current state of affairs. The main character knew he would never live to see the destination. Man's new paradise. He was just another worker bee fulfilling a function. Michael Adam Riley, as I named him, was struggling to find purpose in his feudal lot. Reading the piece decades later, I saw the true cathartic function the novella had served, beyond my intended themes. I'd been on the cusp of adolescence, so I was clearly processing my burgeoning sexual orientation. But more glaringly, Michael's feelings of imprisonment and futility mirrored the fact I was trapped in an alcoholic household with nowhere else to go. In workshops, I often have participants write the quote myth of their life. With a minimum of instruction, they produce stellar results. Those raised on the Lord of the Rings or the Narnia Chronicles end up employing elves, dwarves, or fawns. Others raised on Harry Potter inevitably feature witchcraft or sorcery. Still others employ regional folklore or classical Greek archetypes, but all categorically rise to the occasion and sink their teeth in. Intuitively, they home in on metaphors for their temperaments and dispositions, while clearly identifying recurring themes in their lives. But more fascinating, they identify defining moments, ethical dilemmas, turning points, peak experiences, existential crises, and transformative experiences. In the same way a great documentarian will find, quote, the emotional core of a story by thoroughly interviewing its subject, we can find our own story through such exercises. A great ghostwriter will structure a memoir by choosing its subject's defining moments, those charged with the heightened emotion I've referred to throughout this book that tags those experiences for encoding. In the same way, we can understand the stories of our own lives and begin to write our next chapters. In art school back in the Cretaceous period, I was asked to create a conceptual illustration of a defining moment, one that changed the course of my life. Truth be told, the instructor may have simply said, a moment you will never forget. At nineteen, I'd never been faced with such an assignment or asked to dig in the dirt, really. I sifted through moments that were more like indelible images, postcards from the past, or Polaroid pictures frozen in time. There was the haunting tableau of my oldest sister Tina, clearing the mucus from a suffocating puppy, one of ten birthed by our family dogs. One of the two black labs had dutifully licked off the afterbirth, demonstrating maternal instinct. The other had grown, well, tired by the time she got to the fifth puppy. Had Tina not stepped in and done what the lazy mother could not, the puppy would have suffocated to death. As the youngest of four children who often felt neglected, the haunting image has stayed with me throughout life for sheer identification. There were plenty of other vignetted images floating in my skull, outrunning my drunken father in the rain lest he beat me to a pulp until a janitor took me in from the storm. Learning later my father had collapsed on the sidewalk only half a block from home, finding him sitting on the hood of my car when class led out that Monday after running away for the weekend, seeing him shed tears for the first time ever, and begged me to come home. For the assignment, I settled on a pivotal moment long before all that. One that was more a scene than just a faded Polaroid. I was in sixth grade, the adolescent world of junior high and puberty lingering on the horizon. My mother had called my brother and I into the kitchen and seated us. She just hung up the phone and was clearly fighting tears as she uttered the words, Now I don't want you to think Tina is a bad girl. Tina, our oldest sister, could be no such thing. She was beyond reproach. Your sister is pregnant. She was fifteen and a half. Tears were shed all around. Not because the sister we worshipped was a bad girl, but because childhood was effectively over. That abrupt ending of innocence became the disillusionment I spoke of in the Nameless Prince. That universal milestone when we first realized the world is not the place we've been told. The thing is, Tina would later admit she'd carelessly allowed herself to get pregnant unconsciously. For the same reason I'd sprinted down the street in the rain. To get out of the house, to escape. Writing our own song. Youth is famously resilient. The way I put it, the world is a strange and wondrous place. In childhood, we learn a great deal about the world and no one aspect of it is any odder than the next. Oh, there are very real requisites for well-being, like physical touch, a feeling of security and positive messaging that instills self-love. Clear-cut abuses will absolutely inflict psychological damage and even PTSD. But short of that, children are rather non-plussed by the external world. We learn to be terrorized by world events. Though some of the conditions listed above were missing in action in my household, those to do with feeling safe and developing the tools of true self-love, I knew nothing different. In essence, I quickly learned not to depend on the outside world for completeness. I fostered it within. I developed an intrinsic sense of self. Only once I took stock in young adulthood, a universal milestone, did I begin to diagnose my upbringing and identify the classic alcoholic dysfunction. I also began to identify as an overcomer. I began to characterize my art as a way of making lemonade of lemons, or as I have put it in my writing, cleansing the world. In young adulthood, usually due to higher education and exposure, most of us begin to question our upbringings. This goes for the values imparted in our nuclear families as well as, for example, the provincial values of our hometowns or even the institutions and ideologies of the world at large. In doing so, many of us find our quote peeps. It is a fairly universal milestone in youth. By redefining ourselves, we take refuge in identity politics, identifying and forging a sense of belonging independent of our roots. An African American friend of mine, whose parents emigrated from Jamaica, was raised in the ultra-white provincial town of Burbank, not far from where I grew up. Only once she'd immersed herself in Afro-American studies in college did she begin to put words to her own identity crisis. More to the point, she began to embrace her heritage and own it. I would say the same of the gay experience. I had to be inculcated by LGBTQ II history, sorely lacking in all aspects of society, especially education, in order to have an opinion about it. Granted, I rejected much of the identity politics I was spoon fed, true to my nature. But the more I learned about what I shared with my peeps, from identical coming out stories to our rich shared history, the more it explained, the more I understood my life. The thing is, finding our peeps is not the end of the journey of emotional maturation or spiritual evolution. In fact, it may be just the beginning. Especially of coming into our own and redefining ourselves is characterized by grievances. Eventually, after a long journey, most of us return to our roots and embrace them. The archetypal template of quote coming home is at the heart of all heroes' journeys, including classics like The Alchemist and The Wizard of Oz. In this latter case, Dorothy, quote, finds her peeps by becoming the wounded healer to the band of seekers with whom she embarks on the Yellowbrick Road journey symbolic of life. Indeed, finding one's tribe, independent of one's roots, is an early milestone on life's journey. There is plenty of pavement left to pound. I've always bristled at the suggestion that our quote personality is cemented by age seven. I categorically rejected, mainly for its reductionist dismissal of nuance. Those who parrot the sentiment rarely take the time to reflect on what is meant by personality, let alone to read up on the studies that seem to suggest what they're repeating. Is the quote personality that's supposedly cemented defined by temperament and disposition? By worldview and value system, or emotional imprint? Frankly, adopting this damning characterization that, quote, personality is cemented by age seven is a convenient way to evade responsibility for circumstances and conditions. And in the spirit of this chapter, to shirk responsibility

Brain Plasticity And Rewriting Narratives

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for the fulfillment of personal desire. Just as often, the mantra is leveled to limit others from growing and redefining themselves. It's a control tactic. Nope, nothing is cemented by seven. The world is our oyster if we value brain plasticity and practice it through free will. It is a choice to continue learning and growing in life. Finding our peeps in young adulthood and bonding through shared grievances is a fairly universal milestone. But if we plateau there, we stunt our maturation. Though I am a fan of therapy and think everyone on planet Earth could benefit from it, many become junkies. Through no fault of their therapists, they find themselves ruminating on the past and defining themselves by their counterproductive narratives. Simply put, they become addicted to grievances. Others skip the step of digging in the dirt to discover what makes them tick, often for fear of what they might find. Instead, they look to spiritual or religious practices to provide structure and answers. It's been said, mainly by those not particularly fond of religion, that it can be a replacement for other addictions. And it often is. In my economy, the ideal may lie in digging in the dirt, but using what's unearthed as a tool for growth, not dwelling on it, but transforming it. At that point, there's no danger in looking forward by adopting a spiritual practice, because it will not be a surrogate. Even so, being the proponent of brain plasticity that I am, I tend to admire those who continue to expose themselves to new ideas, even those that may challenge their spiritual or religious tenets. Life is long, and we must continue to introduce novelty lest we wither. Oh, that old story. Many life coaches and manifestation teachers shake their fingers at indulging defining narratives. In these very pages, I too have warned against perseverating on the past, using familiar metaphors like beating threadbare drums or replaying old warbly records at infinitum. We've all caught ourselves doing it, for years, or lifetimes to be precise. However, I must clarify, personally I see no harm in identifying the recurring narratives of our lives. Digging in the dirt and diagnosing is often the only way to discover what makes us tick. But letting these narratives define us is another story. Embracing our past can be a form of empowerment, especially when we choose not to play along with the less than empowering narratives. In the same way that Alice learned to interact with Wonderland by transforming it, we can rewrite the songs broadcast by those warbly phonographs in our heads. Alice resized herself and morphed to better interact with Wonderland. We can similarly change how we interact with the world we inhabit. But this does not mean compromising or betraying our core essence by any means. Rather, it means owning our essence, not conforming to the world but transforming it by swapping out the lens through which we see it. Reclaiming agency in the world does not mean outrunning our demons, but rather leading them into the light. We have the power to redeem our villains by finding their humanity and to see all through the eyes of love. We transform the world around us by choosing contentment. And here's the catch. It's a daily commitment. All of us can relate to colloquialisms like renewing hope in order to quote rise another day, meeting that person that inspires you to be a better man or finding a reason to get out of bed in the morning. For some, having children is the impetus to renew hope, the prospect of leaving them a better world instead of giving up on it. Amid unprecedented political divisiveness and a global pandemic, among other things, we can all relate to the daily struggle to renew hope, to restore faith not only in our fellow man but the world itself. In every moment, we are faced with the choice to not only see things through the lenses of fear or love, but to act accordingly in gratitude. Every interaction can elicit a love response or a fear response, what Bruce Lipton would call a growth response or a protective response. And we use free will alone to make this choice. I offered an intentional glimpse earlier of the alcoholic milieu in which I was raised. I also hinted that I came out relatively unscathed due to my intrinsic tools. Only when coming into my own in young adulthood, discovering what made me tick, did I learn the pop culture vocabulary to diagnose what I'd endure. Like two of my siblings, I read the handbook for walking cliches, adult children of alcoholics. I took the opportunity to forgive my father for perceived transgressions, for making me feel unsafe. By acknowledging that he was young when he became a father and did the best he could. I knew I would not have done the job any better, no matter how evolved I fancied myself. I would have made my own mistakes. I knew life was messy, and the Cleaver household was a fantasy. Not only that, all of my peers, collectively called latchkey kids, were famously unparented. Or rather, we were raised by parents with a martini in one hand and a cigarette in the other. I embraced the understanding that even the best parents are subject to scrutiny by their children, receiving credit for what they did right and blame for what they messed up on. Even so, and I could not have seen this coming, twenty years after absolving my father, I had to renew my vows for the hundredth time. Though my father and I had reached a level of mutual respect and enjoyed it for two decades, the past reared its ugly head here and there. I fancied I knew what was going on behind the scenes, in the wings, but the pattern that recurred was largely unexamined. I sensed that guilt was plaguing my father and I was being made to pay in small ways. To mitigate, both out of love and self-preservation, I decided to voice my gratitude for all my father did right. For Christmas, I crafted a small book that reminisced about fond childhood memories, those shared by my siblings and I. There were the special family outings to Chinatown to dine at the Golden Pagoda when Dad could scarcely afford it. There were the cross-country trips to Chicago, during which he'd stop off so each of us could buy postcards or take a picture atop a stuffed bronco. There was even the memory of my brother and I wearing his oversized fruit-of-the-loom t-shirts as pajamas, stretching them beyond recognition with our knees. I illustrated the book with crayons using my left hand. This engaged my right brain, putting me in an intuitive space with a direct line to childhood, to a time before I put judgments on life or blame. Though I did not analyze what drove me in the moment, the book turned out to be an exercise in transforming grievances into gratitude. We have that power in every moment, the choice to celebrate what's right in the world rather than lamenting what we perceive is wrong with it. Needless to say, the gift scored points with my father. It meant a lot to him. But more to the point, it was one of the best things I ever did for myself. Those who do not suffer from childhood trauma or dysfunction surely have an easier time with life. Though I identify as a positive person, keeping demons at bay has required a great deal of self-talk. Even the positive thinkers among us are surprised at the sheer volume of negative thoughts they entertain out of habit once they begin to pay attention and audit them. For me, reframing the past has been a daily commitment, catching my negative thoughts and not admonishing them, but giving them love, bringing them out into the light and transforming them. And I do this largely through the catharsis offered by storytelling. Even for non-writers, exercises like the one I cited above, in which one writes his or her own myth, can have immense value. My own self-assigned project of finding gratitude by stepping into childhood in appreciation of my father proved therapeutic, cathartic. It was an exercise in rewriting the past, but only to a degree. It was more like playing editor, choosing what to focus on, what to give airtime to. After discovering David Sideris, I proceeded to pen an entire memoir in the form of narrative nonfiction essays. Even so, I am in awe of writers who can craft a comprehensive memoir or biopic for themselves or another subject as a ghostwriter. When attempting the same, the dilemma I encounter takes the form of a question. Which story should I tell? I could rewrite the ongoing, hopefully, story of my life through any lens. Pick a theme, and I can tell the story of my life accordingly. I could write it as a comedy or a tragedy. The genius in a great memoir is its adherence to the defining moments that comprise the narrative of one's life and the themes they inherently impart. Yet more magic is the ability to identify which defining moments, arcs, and themes, belong authentically and uniquely to the subject. It's been said that ironically, the more authentically personal one can make a work, the more universally it will resonate with others. Still, when it comes to purpose, authenticity is the key. In other words, what subjective experience begs to be contributed to the whole of humanity? What defines a subject's legacy? We get to choose our legacy. We get to write our own song. Earlier I quoted Abraham Hicks by offering, what you put your attention on grows. In that spirit, choosing our defining moments, our narratives, is empowering. Doing so determines what we invite into our lives. When I hit young adulthood, pop culture was fond of putting social issues under a microscope, largely in talk show format. For the first time, on shows like Phil Donahue, Oprah, Jenny Jones, and even Geraldo Rivera, the mainstream developed a vocabulary for all that was swept under the rug in the 50s and 60s. It was finally okay to talk about everything from incest to alcoholism to domestic abuse and mental health issues, and to diagnose it. All this pop culture psychobabble is why adult children of alcoholics became a bestseller. This trend coincided with my college years, a period I earlier suggested is the rite of passage in which most of us dig in the dirt to discover what makes us tick. This alignment meant that my generation were the first to diagnose, label, and attempt to remedy, well, everything, to sanitize life. I had my share of therapy in my twenties and would not trade it for the world. But I'm grateful to have possessed the wisdom to understand life was a mixed bag and there was beauty in imperfection. I intuitively understood that the true value of digging in the dirt and diagnosing my grievances lay in refusing to be defined by them. My agency lay in reframing them, choosing wisely when it came to the mantras I repeated and the words I put out into the universe. Our earlier Gandhi quote suggested that our words become our actions. Miguel Ruz's bestseller of the Four Agreements devotes an entire chapter to the tenet, Be impeccable with your word. This includes the words we say to ourselves, the stories we tell about ourselves and the world. Overcomers do not define themselves by their perceived trials. They recognize every crisis is an opportunity for growth. In chapter one of this book, I contrasted the strife of the 1960s with phenomena like Woodstock and the Moonlanding during the same period, suggesting that on a macro scale, unrest always precedes social reform. Strife always signals change. I pointed out that conflict resolution skills break new ground in relationships, and resolving cognitive dissonance is the only way to forge new, promising thought forms and personal paradigms. Adopting this view of conflict, assigning it value rather than avoiding it at all costs, is yet another example of our power to transform the world. In this way, our less than pleasurable experiences and growing pains count as transformative experiences rather than taxing ones. I also began this book by referencing the many life coaches, teachers, and spiritual gurus who promise the manifestation of a yard over that of contentment and inner peace. Law of attraction teacher Abraham Hicks, on the other hand, parses material abundance or prosperity from contentment. Esther suggests you must be a vibrational match to your desires in order to manifest them. You must believe that what you seek is already present in your life and find the corresponding place of contentment. Only then will you be a vibrational match capable of attracting what you want. Only on occasion does Abraham go on to point out that what we truly want categorically is not the accomplishment or the material thing itself, but the feeling we imagine it might bring. In that way, it could be said that Abraham is tricking folks into simply feeling good, being happy,

Contentment As The Real Goal

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with or without that you fill in the blank, dream lover, mansion, yacht, dream job, etc. So many defer happiness, making it contingent by adopting the mantra, I'll be happy when. What Abraham is illustrating is a version of the familiar colloquialism, you can't buy happiness. Another vivid example of tricking others into contentment despite themselves, can be found in an old wives' tale that exists in many cultures. It goes something like this A woman, dissatisfied with her marriage, visits the village witch doctor. She complains her husband has not come near her in months. She longs for the passion, fire, and romance they once had. The witch doctor concocts a potion and offers it to the woman in a glass bottle. She instructs the woman to cleanse every corner of the cottage she shares with her husband, in order to clear out the spirits of ill will and resentment. Once the cobwebs are cleared from every corner, she is to sprinkle two drops of the potion on the floor. Most important of all, the witch doctor instructs, not an ill word must be spoken in the home throughout the ritual, or the spell will be broken. The woman is to repeat the ritual weekly and report back in two months. The woman returns to the witch doctor in two months with a smile on her face. The passion is returned to my marriage, she beams. My husband cannot keep his hands off of me. Thank you. What on earth was in that potion? The witch doctor admits the potion she concocted was nothing more than creek water. Then she smiles wryly. Would it have worked if I'd simply told you to clean the house and be nice to your husband? Despite any misogynistic undertones, feel free to flop genders if you like. This wife's tale is life in a nutshell. So is Abraham's sly strategy for nudging seekers toward happiness, with or without physical evidence of accomplishment. In theory, though focus is not on outcome, Abraham's logic is solid. The vibration of contentment, the thoughts and feelings projected, paves the way of least resistance toward achieving the desired goal or manifesting the material object of desire. Though there are many mechanistic ways in which our vibration attracts what we want, it's nearly as simple as this. When we're content, we're just plain nicer, and we attract more flies with honey than vinegar. The trickery required in the wives tale speaks to a form of laziness. Though many are addicted to griping about conditions in their lives, they rarely do anything to better them. In fact, a similar illustration of this phenomenon is the formerly referenced knee surgeries that were nothing more than placebos. In all likelihood, it was the physical therapy mandated post-bogus surgery that accounted for healing, something the subjects would not have otherwise gotten around to. I once read a fascinating transcript of a conversation between a therapist and a patient. In it, the woman complained of isolation and loneliness. With every suggestion the therapist offered to remedy the situation, the bevy of arguments, excuses, was profound. Too far, gas too expensive, conflicting schedules, logistical issues. The therapist chalked her resistance up to a common idiosyncrasy. Many will resist change at any cost. More and more, people seem to have short attention spans. In modern society, we are quick to quote change the channel by quitting our jobs or filing for divorce. But when we skip town, we take ourselves with us. If we can't develop the tools to find contentment where we are, those same eyes of discontent are the ones through which we will see our new digs. The needed change is always within. Contentment is an inside job. The Wizard of Oz offers everything we need, to be content, presumably, is in our own backyard. In more clinical terms, the contentment, inner peace, well-being, tranquility, and satisfaction we all seek is independent of circumstances and conditions. Anyone who's ever meditated amid a crisis knows the feeling of quote finding one's breath. Once centered, once the mental chatter has surrendered, the sometimes unfamiliar feeling of well-being is profound. In an instant, we understand it's always there, even amid a crisis, and we have the power to access it at any time. Anyone who's suffered or spent time in prison knows the opportunity it represents. The challenge to find inner peace despite suffering is the trick to life. Eckhart Toll contends that all human suffering is rooted in wishing things were otherwise. He suggests that accepting circumstances and conditions as they are, from standing in line in the supermarket and wishing you were elsewhere, to living without a foot eliminates suffering. In the meditation example I offered a moment ago, I would add that it's impossible to focus on inner well-being and pain simultaneously. Holding a positive thought or mantra in the mind as an object of attention magically relieves pain. Try it sometime. Conclusion. Call to action. I opened this chapter by suggesting for the umpteenth time that the evolution of our ideas is as crucial to our survival as that of our biology. I suggested that the moral realm of ideas evolved as an adaptation that served man's proliferation by redeeming him from base drives and survival instinct. Language quickly became the means by which to expand our conceptual domain, and story followed as the rote method to express the exponential explosion of ideas. From oral tradition onward, story has been mankind's mirror for assessing his place in the universe. Story has reflected back the human condition with an eye on the march toward human potential, as is the way of evolution.

Conclusion And Twofold Call

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This chapter went on to trace the anatomy of belief. Through the images and ideas expressed in story, man adopts paradigms, thought forms, and ideas vicariously. We explored how the lizard brain, our database of instinctual responses, is regularly augmented by life experience, as well as those beliefs we internalize or quote learn from others. Adopting beliefs vicariously is uniquely human. The beliefs we adopt, however, can be erroneous and therefore dangerous. At best, obsolete, tribal or fear-based beliefs can be counterproductive to our social evolution. We broke down the means by which personal beliefs become universal paradigms. These paradigms in turn become policy. To illustrate the mechanics by which personal beliefs become widespread thought forms, I offered the image of bees spreading pollen, or with slightly more ominous implications, mosquitoes spreading disease. This chapter went on to explore how story informs the countless media through which ideas are spread, from the arts and literature through advertising, journalism, propaganda, news outlets, and tabloid culture, to the more recent advent of lightning speed and far-reaching social media. Next, we delved into the mechanistic ways in which our beliefs create our realities, from our circumstances and conditions to structural change on a cellular level. In the same way an individual's subjective beliefs dictate what they see in the world with which they interact, societal beliefs determine mankind's destiny. On the macrocosmic scale, universal paradigms, thought forms, and ideologies can serve to expand or thwart human potential. From there, I suggested that we're all wired for fulfillment of purpose for the sake of the collective. For those who adopt the cult of manifesting personal desire as an end in itself, this may be an uncomfortable prospect. There is, however, a way out. Personal fulfillment, well-being, and satisfaction have proven to hinge on purposeful contribution to the collective. It's the very universal intelligence behind evolution that drives mankind to fulfill personal potential. By doing so, we co-create with the universe. What's passed on through epigenetics supports the persistence of life rather than its extinction. In this way, our calling to be the best possible versions of ourselves is no small thing. But awareness of storytelling in all its forms supports our purposeful contribution to the collective. By recognizing the beliefs we adopt all day, every day, often in an unexamined way, we are empowered to be judicious about what we internalize and what we reject. We can parse between redeeming art or literature and a propaganda, drawing our own lines in the sand. Perhaps more importantly, we can be conscious about the ideological content we put out into the world. The personal beliefs we generate and propagate come with a responsibility to the collective. Rather than creating by default on autopilot, we have the power to reclaim our agency in the world. As a reminder, I find the image of individuals uploading subjective worldviews into a collective cloud titled status quo quite helpful, along with the image of subsequent generations downloading that status quo at infinitum. By holding this image in mind, hopefully, one comes to realize just how impactful personal contribution can be to dialectic. The call to action here is twofold. We must be conscious of the stories we internalize that craft our worldviews, while assuming the responsibility that comes with sharing those worldviews through creative efforts. That responsibility is defined by an awareness of which stories we are perpetuating and which we are transforming, which tropes contribute to our potential and which hold us back. The responsibility I'm hinting at has nothing to do with editing oneself or injecting caution into the creative process. On the contrary, assuming this kind of responsibility may be the most important step in empowering one's voice as an artist and storyteller. When we create for the quote wrong reasons, we quickly fall into the trap of mimicking what has come before. This is the landscape littered with tropes, stereotypes, and cliches that preserve the status quo. Honoring true inspiration, on the other hand, forges new ground. And here's the clincher. True inspiration, those lightning strikes that come in the dead of night or in the dream residue of a lazy morning, those that call you home to madly scrawl or type come hell or high water, come from the universe itself. And the collective intelligence that binds every particle of the universe knows what it needs from us. In the same way wills can move mountains, shifting minute particles imperceptibly. We are agents of universal intelligence if we open ourselves to its messaging. Like antenna, we receive the vital charge of inspiration and are called to realize it, to bring the conceptual into the perceptual realm, to create something from nothing. When we honor this urgent need, we dovetail with the universe. We co create, and there's nothing more fulfilling than that.