Our Kaleidoscopic Future

Can we find a new way of thinking? Yes, and we already are.

There are multiple doors into meaning. Your experience holds the key to another person’s door. And their experience holds the key to yours. We are keys to our own meaning, but we find our rhythm and presence in the flow of one another as we share keys and open doors. It can be as simple as a word spoken to someone at the grocery store. It can be a lifelong passion, career or creation. It can even be the way you talk to yourself.

This is Part One of the Kaleidoscopic Futures Series for Way & Lifeworld.

We Are Multitudes

In sharing our paths, we share new ways of unlocking the world around us. This has been true for at least as long as we’ve had poets, and yet we still do not have a shared worldview that can accomodate such radicality and wildness in everyday life.

That’s why the next big shift could be a shift in the way we think. In short, we could begin to think in multitudes rather than binaries. We could move into forms of Expansive Thinking that offer new forms of connection, hold the polarities in our lives, and open the space around what currently feels constrictive or irreconcilable.

“I’ll tell you right now, the doors to the world of the wild Self are few but precious.

If you have a deep scar, that is a door, if you have an old, old story, that is a door.

If you love the sky and the water so much you almost cannot bear it, that is a door.

If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door.”

― Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves

One way this shift can come is through the simple and excruciating practice of understanding that there are multiple paths to the same place.

Even though we share a real world, we are each experiencing that shared experience uniquely. It’s not that our experience is cut off from others or solipsistic—we do share most of our regularities and most of our experiences because we do share the universe—but the part that is uniquely ‘me’ can mean ‘I’ sense and experience the world very differently from others. This can be problematic if I assume they’ve had the same path as me.

Hating another person or feeling a rush of anger and frustration at their views is not a battle of good and evil but rather a sign of how different our paths have been.

This doesn’t mean there is no right or wrong; it just means figuring out what they are will require a bit more work. It will mean sitting with that reaction and letting it be felt, and also letting it pass. And it will require opening to the path of the person in front of us, and trying to do it from a neutral embodied stance.

What could be harder than that? It is truly the work of a lifetime.

Until now, often for the sake of our own sanity and survival, we have mostly assumed that everyone around us is having an experience similar to our own. We don’t think about this and decide to feel this way; it’s more like an assumption that is the default mode of our existence as we move through life.

To be aware of the multitudes in everyday life is a little bit like doing psychedelics and trying to go shopping for vegetables—the fractals of the broccoli make it very hard to move on. In truth, however, each person around you really is having their own sober trip. Everyone in that crowded airport or that university class or that church or that train station is experiencing the life you share with them in a unique way, one that could be a portal for you, a key to your lock, if only you had the time to open it.

‘Their’ ways, like ‘ours’, are oriented by every experience they’ve had up till then. Every word that has ever been spoken to them, every book they have read, every song they have listened to, every experience of being loved or unloved or hurt or helped, and every way they have learned to get through those experiences and continue in life—all of this is walking by us on the street.

As Walt Whitman says in his poem, Song of Myself, we are multitudes and each of us has our own intricate purpose. That purpose is to communicate our unique experience in any way we can, but especially through learning how to share it with those with whom we come into contact—maybe we have the key they need, or maybe they have ours. As Whitman writes, this is even the purpose of the moss growing on the rocks and the bird flying through the woods and of the daylight as it falls upon your face:

Do you guess I have some intricate purpose?

Well I have, for the Fourth-month showers have, and the mica on the side of a rock has.

Do you take it I would astonish?

Does the daylight astonish? does the early redstart twittering through the woods?

Do I astonish more than they?

This hour I tell things in confidence,

I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you.

Still, it can be hard to hold the multitudes of others in view in daily life without losing the thread. I’ve struggled with it myself, and it’s not to be taken lightly; much of what we call ‘mental illness’ may in fact be related to different levels of overwhelm relative to these multitudes and the ways our bodies sense and align with them. A “a new way of thinking” is also a new way of being, there’s no separation; we are nested, continuous experience.

Thinking differently is a change in the basic way we exist. It requires taking a step back in presence and choosing to love the person in front of us. Love is the act of opening to other paths. It is the foundation of our existence and it is also our greatest challenge. We have reached a time where we can become aware of this and even choose to assume multiplicities of presence rather than contrast.

Are we ready for it?

Indeed, yes. Many of us are ready. Many people are already beginning to experience it. But we do have to be careful. This process is challenging and delicate and can easily spiral. For that reason, it can never be forced. It can only be started when the person starting it is ready for it. To act now, we need infinite patience.

Growing Community

Through my university research, working with Making Ways, and in all the conversations we have in Love and Philosophy, I’ve realized that there are many people who want to find, learn and co-create orientations and ways of thinking that are not based on contrast. Many have already found ways of doing this and are looking for community.

Community is crucial; we all need all the help we can get. As someone who is generally a lone wolf, opening to community has been (and continues to be) a major practice for me. It is part of why I started Beyond Dichotomy. We need one another, and we need to connect in as many fields and disciplines and professions and ways of life as we can, because changing habitual patterns of thought and action on this scale is The Big Challenge.

Binary division is rooted in many of our worldviews; we often take it for granted that either/or is our only choice. We do so without even noticing or questioning the pattern or rhythm that structures those categories and actions. And, as expressed above, there has been good reason for that. Still, over the past year, I’ve found many out there who are already engaged in the same practice by different names, working to implement a different pattern of action beyond dichotomy across scales and levels of life.

One cascading example from this past week: Manda Scott invited me to be on her Accidental Gods series, and since that conversation—which is all about the themes presented in this Substack—many others have reached out or written movingly about their own ways of finding this balance. Manda’s podcast is itself an example of this practice, and I am so grateful to her and to all of you out there who joined us in trying to articulate the feelings we were trying so hard to express.

Calibration

Now for the real post ☺️. The following is made to be read in full OR scanned and perused as feels best over time, as there’s a lot in it. It is a nested, complex system of the ideas above but told through many different questions, approaches and perspectives. Here are the sections:

1. Life is not a hallucination

Beyond the either/or of simulation

2. In the Spirit of the Fractal

3. Embracing Paradox

Distinct Indivisibility

From whatever place you enter and for however long you explore, the main idea at the heart of this is to bring out the pattern of multitudes, to engage in expansive thinking, moving beyond traditional, assumed confines of either/or while embracing both. At the end, you’ll also find a list of references and inspirations.

Life is Not a Hallucination