Sculpting Moments

Today I was thinking about that title. Meditation has shown me a certain default. Which I use to think was me. Or, at least, was the situation at hand. Turns out it was neither.

Any moment, THIS moment, for example, is carrying a certain momentum of mood, of ideas stirred, ripples of stones dropped earlier in the day, undulating as a wave, unfolding as a line, not destined to veer from the course set by all those causal arrows. All the beliefs we've built, all the experiences and memories we've stored ...what else could happen, how else could we be feeling and experiencing this moment other than the last domino in that cascade?

Our day may start like a ball at the top of the pinball machine. A little bit chance, a little bit how we got out of bed but mostly it all filters through the same bumpers and lanes. As the ball drops, and the world rotates, the same familiar collisions in our brain light up and ring, bounce back and forth down narrow chutes, we score points we lose points. One day slides into another. Mechanically. Conditioned. We get to punch the flipper a few times, then work on autopilot through long chains of cause and effect. After adolescence, I'd hazard a guess that 90% of our life is often just reaction to things. Our game gets repetitive. Wherever we go, there we are. We no longer really even have to think. And when we do, it's usually just a response to another thought that triggered it. It's why the concept of 'free will' has been so hard to find in the lab. The fRMI shows our neurology typically making decisions before the conscious is even aware of it.   

But as mechanical as pinball games appear, most of them were designed with an option known as Wizard mode. With the right skills, this mode can be accessed and it changes the nature of the game. Our reality may have a similar option. In ancient Tibet, monks trained for this Wizard mode by imaging their daily life as a dream. Each night before sleep, they reviewed their day as if it were a dream. Each day they thought of their experiences as a dream. To the degree they could experience this, actually feel it, marked their abilities as a wizard. Only by recognizing the dream, could they begin to awaken. This is not the same, however, as mistaking a dream for reality. That's just crazy, right? But sometimes, the only way out of a condition, is to not accept the assumptions it proposes.

Wizard mode enables us to create experience, or at least start a new cascade. To actively change the warp and woof of the fabric of our day.  Rather than trying to jockey ourselves into positions to get a pat on the head from our environment, we explore our capabilities to invoke from within. This can start as simply as remembering a song, a movie scene, a scent, dance or movement, an image or memory. This produces a change in chemistry that could activate more freedom, more playfulness, more presence in a field of truly infinite possibilities. It's the same mechanism external stimulus and internal loop utilize. But now we are the instigation.

Mining our memories for what resonates with deeper things, probing our responses as silly or trite as the external triggering forms may be. Collecting power. We've all touched magic in our lives. Now we collect and construct these talismans to cast into the Now, complementing or overriding the wyrd that reverberated around us like a net. Pulling and influencing our daily path. Can we Believe six impossible things before breakfast? We may find ourselves more aligned with what is actually happening, closer perhaps than all our current historical and evolutionary certainty.

I subscribe that our wildest fiction will be closer to the ultimate truth than any of our most advanced science, circa 2012. Wizard mode intends to write its own story, rather than adhering either to random historical occurrences or cultural happenstance.