Dead Ends at Stade de France
August 9. We made it to Friday. It’s Friday, right? Grab a coffee and let’s get smarter together.
What a drama last night at the Stade de France. I’m not talking about the ruptured Achilles tendon of the German heptathlon athlete before the competition even started. You inject such a tendon with cortisone instead of investigating the reason why it is constantly inflamed and the tissue becomes brittle. I’m talking about the women’s long jump and Malaika Mihambo. There are two things to know about her that will become important:
- Malaika’s source of strength is her ability to concentrate completely on the moment. Her practice includes a lot of breath work (pranajama) and meditation.
- Approx. a month ago, around the time the German Track and Field Championship took place, she tested Corona positive. On the day of the Olympic competition, yesterday, she had access to only about 70% of her normal lung capacity and her overall energy levels wouldn’t have allowed her to complete more than three jumps at most.
Before the sixth and final jump, she’d completed all five jumps, she was on second place with 6.98m. She needed twelve more centimeters to gold. She had jumped so far and more before, even in this season. And she is known as the mistress of the last jump. You could see her do her routine, breathing, meditating, concentrating, leaving the past behind, removing the future from her mind, being totally in the moment and becoming the tool needed to succeed in the task at hand. Then she picked up speed – and never lifted off. A few minutes later, she was on the forget-me-not-blue track, dissolved in tears, coughing, and fighting for any breath.
In the meantime, she has given the all clear. Thank goodness. But I bring this moment up because it illustrates a problem arising out of how our mind works that might cause us to fail achieving the main goals of all material things. That’s not an Olympic gold medal, nor power or money. All material things, us humans included, seek both their lowest energy state and to be in equilibrium with their surroundings. Material things try to get there by shaping patterns that then become parts of ever bigger patterns until all material things in the universe are in their lowest energy state as well as in equilibrium with the whole of their surroundings in one big pattern – or the whole thing makes boom in another Big Bang and the process starts from scratch.
When protons and neutrons found the key to join in nuclei – the cognitive glue that is the strong force – the patterns that nuclei represent, grew until they couldn’t grow anymore. At around 100 protons and neutrons the distance between the outermost particles becomes so big that the strong force that is a contact force, stops working and the electromagnetic force kicks in that drives those outermost particles apart. The next bigger patterns had to be combinations of what patterns already existed. The solution were atoms that use the electromagnetic force to bind electrons to nuclei.
Atoms formed molecules, and molecules combined to cells. Cells combined with other cells, that’s how our cells today got their mitochondria. But that turned out to be a dead end to creating decisively bigger patterns. The key to merge a plethora of cells into multicellular entities is bioelectricity. But the growth of these patterns was not limitless either. The megafauna and megaflora became to unwieldy, couldn’t adapt to changes quick enough anymore, and went mostly extinct.
It’s on multicellular entities to find the key to create even larger patterns made up of already existing patterns. The mind might play a key role in this. With it we can select what other energy patterns might be the most promising to interact with, we can make sure that our path crosses with that of the other pattern, and we can direct energies with it.
But, we do not experience the physical universe as it is. We experience it through a model that we generate ourselves from a slither of the data the cells merged to create our body, collect. From it we cut out a part that’s the best tool to deal with whatever interaction is on deck, which we call self. An intense focus on the self distances us from the self-generation of the world so much, from the fact that it is all a model – a tool - that we lose sight of the two specific goals of the material things gathered in us, and act like outside observers. The more we do it, the more the world we generate confirms us in the belief until the generated world in our mind has nothing in common anymore with the reality of the physical universe.
It goes so far that we can even disconnect out mind from our own body to become the tool the moment in our mind needs. That’s what we saw last night at the Stade de France with Malaika Mihambo. Until the physical universe fired back. Because its laws are stronger than any mirage we can ever create. Because, in the end, our mind is a product of the physical universe. Its goals are what count in the long run.
That’s why it is important to understand that we generate the world we experience and generate it as a tool to explore for ways to connect on the energy level with other patterns. Everything – society, politics, economy – should world to that end. So, explore. AKA think. Make a habit out of thinking. Let’s turn thinking into the norm again so not to become an evolutionary dead end.
Like, comment, share – and follow, lest you miss a single opportunity to improve yourself and society. Once you do, we’ll meet again. At the coffeepot.
To watch this post as a video, go here.
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