It's a trap!

The fallacy of this scientific age is its focus on formulas as the key to unlocking life and experience.

The other way to think about this is "mistaking language for the real thing."

Something has been driving me. For all my life, for reasons I haven't yet recreated.

But it's the desire to know the how and the why. It's this odd driving desire to break experience down into recognizable patterns of cause and effect. Perhaps because there's a comfort in knowing the rules of the game. Perhaps all rules are projections, and all boundaries are conventions, and whatever comfort I feel at having some sort of final solution for making myself happier and more secure is really just the desperate hoping of the heart.

There's no formula to the creative process. No series of steps that explains how best to break up with someone without bruising the spirit. No instructions for how to know which path to take.

I used to ask: people say to trust my gut. But how do I know what's my gut and what's fear or arrogance? How do I know which voice is my gut's at all?

Now I ask: why can't I hear my gut? What's getting in the way? What's clouding the communication?

I struggled for years to discover the exact methods to consistently understand something, when so much of life and relationships and experiences transcend that. And yet, when we get there, we realize we have no guidance about what it's like to transcend, because we become suddenly, terrifyingly conscious that we've been skating along on a hundred and one training wheels.

Ways, methods, traditions, loyalties, hates, projections, schools, stories, and more and more.

The dual machines of cultural expectation and societal path will not give us the rubrics to truly understand ourselves. That we must discover for ourselves. There is a time, whether we know the broken bone is healed or no, that we let go off the crutches to take our very first unassisted steps.

Perhaps, like Ram Dass says, they're all traps.

They're metaphors, tools, training wheels that were meant to guide me as a start.

To keep give me the confidence to accept the mantle of a mind, to complete my own mythic evolution from birth - my first (or fifty first, who knows) emergence from the cave of being into a realm of sights, sounds, and a storm of internal/external stimuli. And it became very easy for me to attach to these guiding boundaries. Like a barnacle, caked and calcified in increasing desperation.

"How do I know?" was the lonely cry of my life.

Consider an actor. They might follow this technique or that, might get wrapped up in behavior or an inner monologue or memorizing a certain way, or certain rhythms of speech, or certain ways to psyche themselves up. When, at the end of the long day's journey into night, it - like everything, like life in and of its infinite self - is just about honestly encountering another human being.

While channeling another spirit.

Which is terrifying.

And thrilling.

What's your something that's even a little like it?

How do I relax into the invigorating pool of being,

and live a life I could never have imagined?

Why not?