MIND OVER MATTER
Everything begins as an idea.
At first, it might not even be articulated in words but exists only as an emotion or unpronounced thought.
Slowly, it begins to take shape, and as it does, it begins to find its orientation.
Think of how a city comes into existence; perhaps a traveler one day decides to stop moving, chooses a place and settles down.
Soon, others follow his example, and together they build the things they think they need.
Four walls and a roof as protection from the elements, then a floor, followed by pathways connecting the huts.
Gradually, the pathways grow into streets as they realize that they need infrastructure to transport things.
Not long after, the cities will begin stretching toward the sky (in the shape of skyscrapers) and downwards, through the ground (previously as catacombs, today as vast metro systems, sewage and electric networks).
Events taking place in our minds, both in the shape of emotions and as thoughts, influence and shape the world around us.
It happens on a macrolevel, as countries are invaded because someone’s political leader has gotten the idea to do so, but also on a smaller level, several times during each day.
What we decide to eat, for example, can have consequences for the global food industry. If more people acted on the thought to eat more locally and organically produced, as well as less meat, this would revolutionize the entire world of food, impacting also the use of pesticides and other forms of chemicals currently found in many foods.
This is what is revolutionary about the seemingly simple notion that internal thoughts affect what we see around us: how we orientate and act in the world is based in what we think the world should be, while subsequently also shaping the world of the future.
Carl Jung believed that everyone was connected through a collective unconscious. In this subterranean inner landscape, we have access to profound, ancestral knowledge.
One way of understanding this idea is to image a landscape full of lakes. When walking through the landscape, the lakes all appear isolated from one another, but when viewing them from the underground, one discovers that they are all interconnected through an intricate system of underground springs and streams.
The same is true of humans – we appear to be isolated from one another but in fact, we are all part of the same invisible network, through which wisdom flows and is shared.
Have you ever thought of someone, only to run into them on the street moments later? Or thought of a song, only to hear it on the radio later the same day?
Jung called this occurrence “synchronicity”, and in many ways, it is linked to his ideas about a collective unconscious.
If our minds are connected on some mystical level, it is not surprising to discover that we somehow engage in dialogue with others even when we are not aware of the fact that we are communicating.
Jung’s hypothesis on a shared unconscious is based in an understanding of the world as being made up of more things than the eye can see, which connects the ideas of Jung with the theories of Albert Einstein.
For a long time, the world was thought to be made of two variables, space and time.
The ways in which they intersected defined the foundation of human existence.
Einstein, however, thought that there was something lacking in this outline of the world, and began theorizing of how matter affects both time and space.
Through his theory of relativity, he discovered that not only does matter affects space, it also bends time.
Outside of a heavy astronomical object, time moves slightly slower than in other places. and just outside of a black hole, time doesn’t seem to move at all.
Time and space, mind and matter are thus all engaged in a complex entanglement through which meaning is continuously being produced.
For this reason, it is important to continue daydreaming, exploring alternative ways of living through fantasy and play.
At times, this may feel like an insignificant game, but as our minds continue to affect and shape the things around us, and these things in turn affect how time and space are being organized, what we choose to think about and focus on is an important tool of creating our futures.