EPISODE 1 — AVENTURE IN UNCERTAINTY
Five days ago I packed up my home in New York’s Greenwich Village, putting nearly everything into storage except for two duffles bags worth of clothes and hiking gear. Rented a ragtop car … and turned right… before turning left.
The plan is no plan … though I do have a number of destinations.
I am currently driving to the upper right corner of the US (Maine). I will then drive across the northern states to the US’s upper left corner (Seattle). From there I will leave the car and cycle down the West Coast to San Francisco … eventually to the lower left corner (Los Angeles). I might then drive back across the States to the lower right corner … before completing the circuit back in NYC …
… or not … maybe … I don’t know!
After all, I could have an accident along the way. I might be hit by a car while cycling down Cost Highway 1. Or maybe I’ll just abandon the adventure all together.
In times of doubt the most powerful way to engage with the resulting anxiety, concern and fear is not to ignore these perceptions (as many ‘gurus’, pop-psychologists and positive-psych coaches might suggest). It’s to engage them proactively. These difficult perceptions of uncertainty, objectively, are omnipresent. They are inherent in all of us, fundamental aspects of our brain and therefore essential to everything we do, believe and think. You can never be rid of them … or you do so at great peril.
So while people like Deepak Chopra suggest that the difficult perceptions arising from doubt can be eliminated by ‘being present’ … or by ‘being in the moment’, as a neuroscientist I have no idea what this literally means. Every perception we experience in the moment is necessarily grounded in our past perceptions and shapes our future ones.
There is a different way.
Doubt need not define you. You can define it. And that is what an ADVENTURE is: The stepping forward into the unknown proactively in order to create meaning out of ‘not knowing’.
Remember, the first step from A-to-B is not B. The first step is not-A. To let go of the reflexive meanings that your brain associated with any given stimulus and/or context in the past. Being in Not-A is doubt. Adventure is doubt manifest … but on one’s own terms. To adventure into Not-A ‘re-means’ doubt from a pathology to be avoided into a reason for stepping forward onto an unknown path. In doing so adventure creates the context for truth and understanding to emerge.
Remember … perception underpins everything it is to be you, from the colours you see to your deepest desires. Every time you open your eyes (or heart), you don’t see or feel the world around you, much less the data arising from that world. You don’t see light (which is colourless) nor indeed the mind of another person (though they are there in front of you). Your brain evolved to perceive something else: What my mentor (Dale Purves) and I called the ‘empirical significance’ of sensory information… i.e., a meaning that proved useful to see in the past.
This is important: Understanding this creates freedom. The freedom to Deviate.
What you perceive is not inevitable. It’s contextual. There is no inherent 1-to-1 relationship between data and its empirical significance … a priori. The open-endedness of perception, which many find unsettling, is exactly what gives you the freedom to discover … and rediscover … the world and yourself in it. Perception is created.
How?
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https://www.labofmisfits.com/community/episode-1-the-power-of-adventure-i-m-turning-left/
