Go crazy or turn holy

“I am beginning to despair and can see only two choices: either go crazy or turn holy.” - Adélia Prado, The Alphabet in the Park

A note: this post has an audio track with voiceover and music. Feel free to give it a spin (feedback welcome!).

How’s your brain feeling these days? If you spend a long day on the internet, does it feel like you’re emerging from a ping pong match in a modern art gallery under a strobe light next to a loud round of Trivial Pursuit? Speaking for myself, when the most thoughtful part of my day looks like methodically closing 32 browser tabs then lying on the couch to zone out in instagram stories and cat videos, it’s time to zoom out and reflect.

I do start the day with a morning journaling practice, based on what Julia Cameron presents in her book The Artist’s Way as “morning pages,” where I attempt to write a few pages, stream of consciousness style, after coffee but before I do anything else. I end up dumping out my dreams from the night before, my thoughts, worries and fears, affirmations and plans. As you might expect, recurring themes appear over and over, and one of the requests I’m often making to myself is to slow down, get quiet, and listen.

It’s becoming increasingly rare for any of us to have the time or surroundings to do that: to just listen. To sit in the in-between, letting our mind gently unfold and curl around a question, a musing, a connection of one thing to another. And it’s different from meditation. Some of my best ideas have come out of quiet space, but still I rarely make it happen: instead I’m constantly grabbing for my phone, my inbox, my feed, to give me inspiration or the answer to the question, ‘what do I do next?’— or to distract me from however that last online interaction made me feel. I know I’m not alone in this.

At some point I had the thought that the internet is like the oceanic field of cosmic intelligence or infinite wisdom, and at this stage we are like newbie intuitives or psychics, trying to take it all in at once like drinking out of a firehose instead of dipping in and out and using it as a tool to obtain we want and need.

Years ago, when I was in Guatemala on a scouting trip for my impact travel startup, Journey, I stayed with an old family friend of my cofounder — an expat from the midwest who had been living in Lake Atitlan for over a decade. In her small living room, we sipped cold beer (gluten allergy be damned, I wanted the full experience) and talked about her time in Guatemala. She told me she led candle ceremonies with the local shamans — a very rare thing to be accepted into the community as an outsider. But it had all happened very naturally, because she had always known she was “different,” She told me that when she was a kid, she would sit alone in the schoolyard and birds would land on her and she’d talk to them. The other kids thought she was nuts, but over the years she realized she had the gift of intuition. When she finally founder her way to Guatemala the spiritual community essentially said “We see you, we know you. Come in.”

I was fascinated by the intuitive part. Then I became self-conscious. I asked her, can you always read people? Like, right now are you reading me?

She looked at me intently and said, I’ve learned to turn it on and off. Otherwise it’s too much, if I’m always receptive I can’t walk through the market without picking up energy right and left. But if something is strong it will come through anyway — like if someone’s in the wrong relationship, for example.

I blushed. I was married, but at that point the marriage was precarious. We loved each other but been growing apart in unexpected ways— I was hungry for new experiences, new people, couldn’t settle down (travel company as case in point). He couldn’t understand why I couldn’t be happy with what we had and frankly, I couldn’t understand either.

This idea of turning intuition on and off stuck with me. I imagined the listening practice of an intuitive as tapping into a vast energetic field, a frequency that enveloped the earth like the TV waves in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, invisible to the naked eye but thick in that other dimension, where all wisdom is available, all the time, if only you know how to tune in.

Back to the modern internet: with the advent of AI search tools, it feels like everything is there — or at least has potential to materialize there. The amount of information on the internet grows exponentially, with estimates of 2.5 quintillion bytes of data (1 with 18 zeros) created daily. 90% of the data on the internet was created in the last two years alone.

And for our novice untrained squirrel-brains, this is irresistible. Tell me everything — tell me my neighbor’s profession. Does Keanu Reeves have a spouse? What time of year is best to plant wildflowers? How about pinach? What time does the cafe down the street open? Like candy for our dopamine-seeking systems, we can’t help but chase the reward over and over, learning answers to questions we didn’t know we had, or losing ourselves in rabbit-holes of stories and facts. It tricks us into thinking, I need this knowledge — knowledge is good, right? The more I know, the more powerful I can be. Let me just finish this enewsletter about how nuclear power works, then I’ll be available to my present reality again.

But that’s just it—it’s destroying our ability to have original thought, it’s disrupting our inner voice. How can we listen when there is so much outer noise? When we insist on swimming in the internet most of the time, we risk drowning drinking from the firehose long after we’re thirsty.

To be clear, I am not a technology pessimist. I grew up next to Silicon Valley during the first internet boom, when there was a lot of excitement for what was possible and almost no fear of things going off the rails.

Even if technology feels like the most unnatural part of our lives, I still somehow see it as a natural part of what’s next. Biomimicry is the practice of learning from nature when designing for human society, and we can see this in how the internet’s structure reflects the brain’s neural networks. Zipping around, looking for information is not dissimilar to our brain’s synapses firing, mysteriously accessing the exact detail we need at the moment we need it. But we are young in technology terms, and we must learn how to harness it instead of get used by it. We are not there yet, and many worry we never will be.

Returning to the idea of intuitives, the parallels become clear. You can’t leave the switch on all the time — otherwise you take in too much energy that’s not yours, too much information that’s not relevant. There is no space to synthesize or process, and learnings lose their meaning in the chaos of too much. The system floods into overwhelm and without original thought it becomes more susceptible to coercion and brainwashing.

But if we found more quiet space in the day, and trained ourselves to tap in on a genuine quest for information, we might rediscover that inner voice. The one that has answers of its own.

The internet has some real darkness these days, but I still believe it’s neither good or evil, it’s all of it. It’s a messy contradiction just like us, but digitized. It’s an unfathomably large mapping of our public consciousness, with our fellow humans’ ideas, curiosities, writings, computations, an unprecedented hive mind of at least what we’ve concocted so far. I recently saw a video of someone asking AI whether humans created it or it already existed, and it made the case for the latter — that humans devised the tech tools, but AI was here all along waiting to be discovered. Creepy, but also profound. Isn’t that similar to theories about consciousness, that it has always existed as a fundamental aspect of the universe?

I don’t claim to know what will happen next. It would be logical to end with a recommendation, a 4-step mindfulness practice to use the internet in a more limited way so we can become more intentional, more focused, more attuned to the wisdom we seek. But we’re deep in it at this moment, right in the messy middle, and I can’t tell how realistic these practices would be when so many of us live so much of our working and creative lives online.

For now, I’ll stop at having explored the dimensionality of it all: the fields of consciousness and intelligence, the ever-expanding networks of the internet, the unknowable vastness of time and space. And one thing’s for sure, it’s more fun to ponder while looking at the stars than looking at your phone.

I’ll end with a tune I put out last year with my friend Jon Dryden, a world-class jazz pianist and composer — he delivered the song idea, and the lyrics came to me in one fell swoop (unusual!). It’s about the multiverse. Enjoy~