The Biggest Delusion

It's safe to say that the people fortunate enough to have their most basic needs fulfilled and secured throughout their lives are faced with increasingly counter intuitive challenges that continuously manage to turn up the difficulty. Think of it as the game of life's ingenious built-in system to ensure a consistent level of challenge and infinite replay-ability. 

None the less, with the advent of the internet, guides and walkthroughs for virtually all levels can be uploaded secure in the knowledge that almost everyone from any level can possibly seek out their own personal solutions. So any advice offered is never really wasted, provided it's made easily available. Even if it isn't, no effort is ever wasted in general, but that's another topic in itself.

With that outlandish introduction out of the way, I want to talk about the single biggest misconception so prevalent that it manages to hold people back in innumerable ways regardless of their level. It is the idea that things are somehow separate from one another. To give some context for my following statements, a quick lesson in history.

You see around 6 million years ago*(m.y.a.)* our ancestors were animals of no significance, after which they developed tools (2.5 m.y.a.) spread across the globe (2 m.y.a.), evolved to Neanderthals (500,000 y.a.) and started using fire daily (300,000 y.a.) until our own species, aka Homo Sapiens, evolved in East Africa (200,000 y.a.). Yet things didn't really kick off until a very special event in our history around 70,000 y.a.

It was around this time when everything changed for us as a species, because that's when we went through a collective mental revolution. What actually happened was this, our species developed the ability to use our minds in order to imagine things that didn't occur naturally in reality. This meant that we could think up abstract concepts like Gods, fictional stories and The Future, things that you couldn't physically sense, things that didn't exist already. 

[How we were able to do this is a subject of great controversy and debate because it was actually a very expensive move for our biology, evolutionary speaking, as our brains now consumed a lot more energy which mean that we were actually physically weaker than our predecessors. Some viable theories claim that it is possible that plants that altered our states of consciousness, like marijuana, psilocybin and mescaline, might have allowed us to heighten our level of consciousness. Kinda like the apple of Eden giving knowledge to Adam and Eve. Although there is not enough evidence to say with certainty what might have happened.]

Not that our ancestors did not possess language, but they only had words for literal things like stone and saber tooth tigers. On the other hand, we developed fictive language and concepts like Gods, Justice and Morality that allowed us to cooperate in large numbers without getting to know someone in the group personally and individually in order to trust them enough to work with them towards the same goal. This ability to cooperate allowed us to conquer the world and is our distinctive characteristic as a species. History lesson over. (Reference: "Homo Sapiens" by Yuval Noah Harari)

A must read for those interested in the above.

Now here's the kicker, even though this ability to use our brains for these ever-so-increasingly complex mental gymnastics has allowed us to thrive in many ways as a species, there is some real validity to the statement that our quality of life has been going downhill since the agricultural revolution 10,000 y.a. Now obviously there's a lot more to this discussion, but I digress. My point is that, although you might be inclined to believe that human beings are somehow superior to any other life form, the truth is that our entire lives are complete fabrications. Because of how our brains work, we spend our existence confined within and restricted by our own personal narratives and these narratives are actually quite often very far removed from reality. 

Here's the thing about reality, it requires no justification.  It is inescapable and all prevalent. It has no inherent reason behind it and eludes our greatest attempts towards understanding it with our brains that are  themselves a product of the same thing. We can try to control it and find the universals principles that underlie beneath it, and we should, for it is in our nature. Yet we must always keep in mind the facts, that in reality nothing happens in a vacuum. That all things are part of the same and no two things are separate from each other. In reality there is nothing to be compared. There is no better or worse, no one or the other, no difference between now and the future, no concept of time whatsoever. It simply is. Reality simply exists.

So in Conclusion, Who Gives a Shit?

Well the point is when you keep in mind that everything is actually interconnected, it makes your life a whole lot easier in countless number of ways. 

• For one, you're less likely to be caught off guard. You realize that the things you don't understand and/or know about might affect you more than you had imagined. So you start caring a little bit more and it widens your horizons.

• It makes you more aware about everything else and really helps a lot in setting priorities. You understand that since everything is interconnected, your own well being will send ripples of good will across everyone and everything you've ever come across, and since that's where a majority of your dominion lies, it'll be easier for you to focus on what's important to you.

• You'll become more accepting towards things. It'll be okay for you to miss out on some things and focusing on a few without the fear of missing out (FOMO) because you will understand that there are "ten thousand ways to smell the Earth", i.e. there are so many ways to achieve the same results. Or you'll be okay with engaging with hundreds of different things on a shallow level because you'll know that ultimately everything has it's pros and cons. Who knows? Anything is possible.

• You'll appreciate diversity a lot more because in trying to relate many things together, your brain will naturally see what distinguishes each of them from the other and it'll paint a much more colorful picture of reality.

• Honestly the list just goes on and on, but I'm sure you get the idea.