Rethinking how to Think

Is there something larger to tap into?

It’s been over a month since I posted last. I started my memoir in earnest the first week in January. By February I had a rough draft of the first four chapters and written nearly 80 pages. Things were humming along and I was feeling incredibly fulfilled by this new endeavor. Then, in the first week in February, I set a deadline for myself to have the manuscript completed by June. I counted the remaining chapters, figured out the cadence I thought I could maintain based on my current pace and determined June would be a good target.

Immediately things came to a screeching halt. Instead of sitting down the first thing in the morning and becoming absorbed in my writing, I found myself avoiding it. After a week of not writing much I took the self imposed deadline away, and started to write again. Then a few days later my book coach asked when I could share some of my writing with him so he could help me. I realized I needed to go back and take a second pass at my 80 page first draft so the material would be in decent enough shape to make his feedback meaningful. We agreed I would have the first four chapters revised by the end of the month, which aligned well with his book tour schedule. It seemed imminently doable.

Yet here we are a month later and I am still stuck on Chapter 1, with very little traction.

My coach’s one piece of direct advice after reviewing a rough draft of Chapter 1 was to remind me “show don’t tell”. As I started to make a second draft of chapter one, I realized I was doing a lot of telling. Telling what happened, telling what I felt, telling what insights I had gained. In the telling versus showing, the insights that seemed so profound when I initially wrote them now seemed trite and cliched. So I started adding more to the story, showing not telling. Spending hours on just a few paragraphs, that I would then up deleting because they seemed off topic or had too much irreleveant detail. I am not sure if this is what they call writer’s block, or just a rookie writer learning to write, but something certainly felt amiss, and my writing had become sporadic and felt fractured. I was out of the writing groove that I had so satisfyingly fallen into back on Christmas Eve when I made my first substack post announcing my intent to publish this memoir.

So what happened? Why did my flow stop? What happened to my mojo?

I fell into old patterns. Old patterns of thinking and executing. What I observed when I stepped away from the problem is that I was trying to use the same cognitive tools that had served me so well in a career of business and technology. Planning and figuring it out through logic and reason. I love to analyze problems, chunk them down into smaller parts, identify risks and then plan an execution path with associated goals. This approach has served me well in my professional pursuits and has allowed me to achieve a modicum of success. But it seems to be failing massively when I try to apply it to my writing.

The problem is that this memoir had not started from a place of planning or conscious logic. I just kind of just appeared in my consciousness and instantly became clear it was something I needed to devote energy to. It was a knowingness of what I needed to work on more than a well reasoned plan or logical use of my time. This place of knowingness is what I believe some refer to as your inner voice - some version of listening to your gut, your heart, or your intuition. I think it is all of those and maybe a little bigger than even that.

What is becoming clear to me, that outside of conscious thought and analysis, if I pay attention carefully enough I can sense a path to follow that seems to resonate at much deeper level than my normal pursuits in both business and pleasure. A path that seems to align with a deeper purpose larger than myself, and one that when I am able to follow brings more joy and fulfillment into my life. It feels like trying to navigate my way in a dense fog, not quite seeing where I am going until I move forward, only instead of using vision to chart my course I am relying upon other more subtle and visceral senses.

With that said, I realize I am treading into the land of hippy-dippy spiritual mumbo jumbo that doesn’t appear very grounded in logic or scientific reasoning. I am not a big fan of throwing all reason out the window and using fanciful notions to explain the un-understood. But this is what we do as humans, we use stories to construct a framework to help us better understand and operate in the world around us. When you think about it, religion and science are both stories. They both provide a mental framework to explain and comprehend a reality that is not completely comprehensible or obvious to us. What happens after we die? Where did the universe come from? What is consciousness? Science, unlike most religions, is a story that evolves over time in fits and starts - but it suffers from many of the same challenges in that its adherents hold on tightly to the current stories (scientific beliefs) and have a hard time evaluating evidence or concepts that may run counter to the current story. At one point in time people believed that the earth was flat, and then after figuring out it was a sphere went on to believe the sun orbited around it. In science, the story continues to evolve and present an ever more accurate and verifiable model of reality that we can then comprehend intellectually.

Modern physics is a perfect example of this phenomena. Classical (Newtonian) physics which explains the movement of objects we see in the every day life (think falling apples and billiards balls) can not explain what is observed at very large (cosmic) or very small (sub-atomic) scales. This is the conundrum that Einstein ran into in the early 1900’s with the emergent theories of quantum physics and was unable to fully resolve before his death. Quantum theory was pointing towards a non-deterministic universe where objects manifested as set of probabilities based on conscious observation. A reality where simply observing one object could influence the probability of how another separate object would be observed across both space and time. Einstein was convinced there were a set of hidden variables to explain this paradox and led to him exclaim “God does not play dice with the universe.”

Tom Gonzalez via MidJourney v6 “psychedelic image of brain in universe colorful”

It turns out Einstein appeared to be incorrect on this front. While god may not be rolling dice, it is clear after nearly a hundred years of scientific research and experimentation everything is pointing to a much weirder reality than Einstein conceived of. Modern physics is describing and providing evidence of a reality where objects and information are fundamentally connected across vast distances of space and can influence each other instantaneously. This has implications that go beyond simple scientific inquiry and enter into the metaphysical realms of philosophy and deeper questions about the nature of reality and consciousness itself.

The scientific experiments I am referring to come out of the research being done in the field of quantum mechanics, which is a the study of how sub-atomic particles behave and interact when they are observed. One of the most dramatic, and recent experiments that clearly demonstrates this convergence are those of quantum entangled photons.

Okay, I realize that once many people read the words “quantum entangled photons” interest in reading further will come to a screeching halt, to be followed by a couple thumb taps or clicks to the closest social media feed or other digital dopamine source. If you have it in you, hear me out as I attempt to quickly demystify these words and break down this experiment into something everyone can understand in only three paragraphs. While the explanation is slightly more involved than saying the world is no longer flat, it is equally profound.

In short, what some aspects of quantum physics point to, is that objects at the molecular, atomic, and sub-atomic level objects can be inextricably connected and by simply observing properties of one object the properties of another object will be instantly determined as a result of that first observation. What was originally theorized and presented in mathematical proofs during the first half of the twentieth century that predicted this phenomenea has now been repeatedly proven by hundreds, if not thousands, of real life physical experiments. These experiments show that you can take two quantum entangled particles, physically separate them at varying distances and when you make changes to one of those particles, the other particle will respond to that change. Instantly. Faster than the speed of light, which has been previously thought to be the fastest any thing can possibly move at in the universe.

So how did physicists prove this? In the 1980s French Physicist Alain Aspect conducted a series of experiments¹ that took two entangled photons, separated them at a distance and then measured what direction each photon² was spinning³. What is mind blowing about this experiment is that the measurement of one photon’s spin DETERMINED the state of the other photon’s spin regardless of the fact they were no longer physically connected. Einstein believed there was a hidden variable at work that would account for this, and that each photon’s spin was set at the moment they were entangled. But Aspect’s experiment was able to rule this out by running the experiment many times over and showing both the photon's spin was NOT predetermined and that measuring of one would determine the spin of the other.

In 2017 a Chinese research team successfully demonstrated quantum entanglement over distances of 1,200 kilometers using Satellites. They were able to replicate what Aspect proved, but with the photons staying entangled and instantly sharing information at a distance over 700 miles. And photons aren’t the only things that experience quantum entanglement, so do other fundamental building blocks of our universe such as molecules, atoms, electrons, neutrons, and other even smaller particles such as quarks, bosons, fermions.

So why do I bring this up? What does quantum entanglement have to do with me experiencing some version of writers block and trying to follow a little voice in my head? Being able to have more rationale and logical evidence to support the theory of a connected universe gives me a higher level of confidence to explore these more spiritual experiences without the fear that I am diving down some ill conceived hand wavy spiritual rabbit hole, or simply just making stuff up in my head. If your religion is science, this is a story that certainly supports many of the themes found in the esoteric religious tomes dating back thousands of years.

What if our mental framework for how the universe is constructed embraces a reality where everything is interconnected at a fundamental level. Where changes or pieces of information in one part of reality are somehow connected to other parts in non-obvious ways. What does this open up for us in terms of possibilities? Is it possible that we have access to a deeper set of truths or insights that go beyond our current concepts of who we are and what we are capable of realizing? Is this a “the world is no longer flat moment?" and if so how do we leverage this insight in a meaningful way?

If the world is truly round, and not flat, what does that mean for a world traveler? Instead of falling off the end of the earth at some imaginary distant point, a person could theoretically travel in a straight line long enough to end up back right where they started - having circumnavigated the whole earth! This has some profound implications for world travel. The same might be said for how we think and align with a purpose in our life. If instead of using our head as the primary mechanism to make all of our major life decisions, or following our emotions, or just letting life take us where it will, what if we were able to develop the capacity to better align with parts of the universe that sit outside our normal concept of self? What if that little voice actually represents something much larger than we realize, and the more we can attune ourselves to it, the more we start tapping into something much more powerful than ourselves? This is certainly what it felt like when I started this memoir; I felt deeply aligned to a higher purpose and experienced a profound level of joy and fulfillment when I was able to listen with more awareness and resonate more deeply in action and thought.

So pragmatically what does this mean for me and writing this memoir, now that I have been stalled for the last month?

It means I am going to make a practice of deliberately tuning in to this non-local stream of information⁴. Instead of trying to plan everything out with structure, timelines, and goals I am going to quiet my mind, let go of my ego, and listen to that voice. I will also lean into one of the fundamental traits for success I learned in building businesses and complex software. Perserverance. Often times in business and engineering I would encounter what felt like an impossible problem to solve, and I would have to attack it from a dozen different angles. After many repeated and failed attempts I would eventually find the solution, but it required the confidence to keep trying.

More often than not, those solutions seemed to come out of nowhere; in the shower in the morning, or falling asleep at night when I wasn’t thinking about the problem. Those ah-hah experiences of having the solution come to me in a flash is both inspiring and immensely satisfying, like a puzzle piece clicking into place. I am finding writing to be a more steady flow of these ah-hah insights when I can let go and slip into the experience. But this requires showing up, being present, and actually putting myself at the keyboard and performing the act of writing. This is where I will need to persevere. To keep trying.

I am sitting at the keyboard right now, and checking in with that voice, and the path is revealing itself to me. The voice is telling me to let go of chapter 1 and move onto chapter 2 from the time when I was a junior in college. The idea that is flashing like a neon sign is for me to polish up the excerpt that describes the time I was handcuffed, thrown in the back of a police car and dragged to the lock down unit of the psych ward and make that into my next substack post.

In this vein, I had a favor to ask of you. I am trying to determine an optimal cadence to post at. I started off posting weekly, then have had this month long hiatus. What is too long between posts, and what is too frequent? I sometimes struggle with signing up for new blogs and newsletters because I don’t want to clog my inbox, what is the cadence you would prefer?

1. The is a superficial explanation of the experiment Aspect actually performed that makes it easier to understand, but still fundamentally describes what he proved. In reality, Aspect measured many entangled photon pairs over time, which statistically proved that change in measurement of one photon would impact the measurement observed in the second photon. It should be noted that Aspect’s experiments are the first widely recognized actual physical experiments that proved the quantum mechanics violated the classically held belief of local realism as postulated in Bell’s inequality theorem by John Stewart Bell from 1964.

2. A photon is a fundamental particle of light and other forms of electromagnetic radiation. It is the quantum (or smallest discrete amount) of the electromagnetic field and carries energy proportional to its frequency. Photons are massless, have no electric charge, and travel at the speed of light in a vacuum. They exhibit both wave-like and particle-like properties, a duality that is central to the theory of quantum mechanics. In many ways, photons mediate the interactions between charged particles in electromagnetic processes and are essential for understanding phenomena like the emission and absorption of light, laser operation, and the photoelectric effect. Reference: Chat GPT 4.0 - 3/13/24

3. Since photon’s are massless they don’t actually spin, instead their electro magnetic energy oscillates along a specific axis referred to as their polarization, but for the sake of a more understandable explanation we will refer to a corollary which we call spin.

4. Scott Britton a fellow substacker has great post, and conceptual framework, for cultivating these skills. I would encourage you to read it (and his substack.)