Chapter 02: An Entangled Existence

Even before the moment we were conceived, we were already linked to the universe. This is because contained within each of us lies the original stew of matter and energy that existed from the very beginning of what we understand as space-time. This means that as unique and discrete as we may all seem to be, we are intimately tied to everything and everyone around us at the most elementary level. A basic set of conditions must be in place to enable the incalculable ways in which we come to exist and develop into distinctively individual entities, and this ultimately establishes our entanglement with the world of the animate and inanimate. Although we cannot fully describe or comprehend this mysterious foundation, we know that it gives rise to the rich complexity of life sandwiched between the simplicity of the very big and the very small, which it pushes and pulls us into the narratives of our lives. Without this universal framework, there would be no stories to unfold.

Our origins may suggest that we have or had little to do with determining the course of events and the things we encounter that come to define us, but we do harness a subtle control over ourselves and our environment found in our innate capacity to respond to the setting in which we are placed. Although many of us like to see ourselves as being governors of our destiny, it is more akin to an ability to tap into actively exerted forces that can broaden the reach of our influence and where we can play within the universe to have an impact without possessing absolute dominion over its natural affairs. However, we often make the mistake of thinking power as being something outside of the thing that it affects, but we have influence because we are actually part of our environment from which we cannot separate ourselves. Our existential entanglement implicitly alters the world, however big or small the effect may appear, but it also ensures that some events are inevitable no matter what we do or perhaps because of what we do. The world functions according to an underlying order with or without our cooperation and despite our demands of it, but we can sway the probabilities in our favour and avoid the unnecessary predicaments to which we are mistakenly drawn.

The second assumption that we make about the viagnostic narrative is that we are entangled with all things in the universe to participate in life and experience its meaning. To know life, we have to be inescapably in it. We must be immersed in the cosmic ocean of diverse relationships that define and shape existence. If we were separated from the world, we would have no insight into life that comes with experience. Unfortunately, many of us feel as if we are trapped within something that has the power to make us miserable and we consequentially scramble to find some semblance of happiness. We feel like we are glued to something that we think we are trying to escape only to realize that we have to find a way to fit it back together. Given this revelation, we generally surrender to the preordained conditions of life with the intent of making the most of our lives as we attempt to improve our alterable circumstances. Although we come to accept that suffering is an essential part of understanding life, we learn to reduce needless pain and find joy in the ability to have experiences; this includes making mistakes in the process of learning, adapting and developing as we come to recognize that failure is a prerequisite for success.

While an entangled existence lures us into our troubles and guarantees the ebbs and flows of our lives, what keeps us motivated is the possibility of things, embedded in their impermanence. Our intuitive knowledge that things will change triggers our hope for another chance to get what we think we want as well as our fear of missing that chance or of losing what we think we already have. As long as we believe there is an opportunity to live a more favourable life, we will struggle diligently to fulfill our desires and overcome our limitations. We will always attempt to transform the unsettling chaos of an overactive world into a calming sense of order, and in this process permit our stories to evolve. Whether or not we can replace brutal subjugation with gentle deliverance in achieving the harmony we need depends on our capacity to appreciate the natural course of things such as understanding the dynamically instinctive negotiation of discrete entities seeking scarce resources, which realistically differs from rationalized ideals of collectively beneficial zero-sum competition and unselfishly driven cooperation among rapacious individuals.

Many of us do not wish to acknowledge that our preconceived notions we hold regarding how to engage in exercises of growth and in the battles for stability contribute to our senseless hardship. Since we assume our intuitions and convictions represent the universal truth, we act in accordance to how we believe we should behave without recognizing how many of our peripheral influences that we have adopted as our own beliefs and expectations, which form mainly beneath the threshold of our consciousness. We know the truth, but we demonstrate that we do want to confront it by seeking the rapture of our fantasies to evade the doldrums of our disillusionment. Reality is an uncooperative acquaintance that we deceivingly think we can outsmart; this is why we struggle with the truth by struggling with others and why our tales of life are marked more by injury than fulfilment. Tragedy triumphs even when we win, especially when we consider the devastating wars of our violent history, but this equally holds true when we see the emotional harm of domestic betrayal and the political polarization arising from societal decay that ravage our communities with timelessly unresolved persistence. It does not matter whether we try to unite or divide, the illusions that lead to our unhealthy, possessive attachments are no different from those that cause our hostile separations and deprive us of our most basic needs. While affiliation may merely provide the false appearance of cohesion, detachment is only a temporary remedy to a chronic disorder. Hence, our transient stories of illumination may simply slide back to obstinate ignorance that never brings us peace.

As long as our inherent imperfections are stubbornly in search of their imaginary perfections, everything we pursue leaves us unavoidably and indefinitely in conflict within ourselves and with others. Since the ever-changing conditions of nature actively conspire with the never-changing realities of life, we are held in their ceaseless handshake that demands our acceptance of conflict as part of our struggle to develop our narratives and achieve meaningful transformation in our awareness and disposition. Our intrinsic determination to know life is caught in the web of our existential challenges and fictitious beliefs, each of which we must untie to unveil the uncompromising truth of our being and transcend our base programming. However, we cannot actualize our potential without the fundamental conditions in place to stir up the events required to crack open the mental shells of our spiritually sprouting seeds. And just as the relationships that bring us into existence can also constrain our development, the same confinement that suppresses our inner nature simultaneously signals us to break out of our sentient captivity and write our stories with brave honesty, whether they are inscribed in ink or blood.

A SYNCHRONOUS FATE OF ENTANGLED EXPERIENCES

Finding meaning in our narratives may generally require us to struggle to the extent that we feel as if we are participating in a relationship with things and people in our surroundings expressed as events, but struggle itself does not offer us any assurances that it is worthwhile or significant. We need it to have a focal point that turns arbitrary events into chains of encounters, which we layer in interpretation to culminate in relatable stories. We can argue that much of our interpretive study of these occurrences is illusory and reflects fiction more than fact. Yet despite our inescapable subjectivity, we are joined together at a more primordial level that knots our perceptions and strings our experiences into narratives that intersect with one another or that are conflated into a broader historical account of a given society. The latter is true of horrific wars, natural disasters, health crises, civil movements and cultural shifts in artistic tastes and social norms. We tend to brush off many incidents and outcomes as coincidence, and while it is important to scrutinize our proclivity for seeing patterns where none exist at least not by design, we need to appreciate that there are underlying relationships at play, which are not yet comprehensible to us and yet responsible for concurrences that may prove to be relevant.

Despite knowing there is a universal truth that binds us together at a fundamental level, many of us remain fearful of what we do not understand, and hence, we wish to believe that the world conforms to our limited grasp of its properties and propensities. It appears that while we can accept all things have a common source, we behave as if all of these things function almost completely independently of one another until we discern contiguous causes and effects. We somehow come to decide that our knowledge establishes the presence of relationships rather than pre-existing relationships setting the parameters for acquiring knowledge. Given it is only through real associations that our actual interactions can take place, it seems that we have conceptually missed the point over the transitional reign of religious creed to scientific orthodoxy. The ruling doctrines of both antiquity and modernity share a presumed tendency to establish the metanarrative prior to each of us discovering what we should readily know from our own experience.

We find ourselves in specific circumstances because we are linked to these situations in ways we do not comprehend. While we exert some degree of control as individual organisms even if it may be involuntary, there are incalculable conditions outside of our direct conscious control that set the boundaries for which events can occur as well as for the choices available to us at any given time. And yet within all of this complexity, which we can only dream to influence, our experiences seem to line up and intervene with each other in a stable manner that has significance to us. They may not necessarily conform to our wishes or expectations, but they do fit within the reaches of our imagination or the realm of the possible. And it is when they surprise us individually or collectively in a meaningful way, where events align to reflect something unexpectedly significant enough to capture our attention, that we encounter moments of synchronicity or serendipity. Some of us will insist that these coincidental occasions are merely happenstance and simply ignore them immediately or dismiss them over time because they do not correspond to our preconceived trajectories of life. But for those of us who witness or directly undergo these strangely associated events, however innocuous or dramatic they may be, we acknowledge the implication that there is something more to this world than our empirical faculties can detect. Although these events are rarely noted relative to our routine experience, they are too numerous to discount.

Our investment in scientific research and technological development, which has facilitated the modernization of our societies and economies, has justifiably minimized our tendency towards baseless superstition. But as the civilized enclaves of our galaxy have become more mechanized, our lives have also become deceivingly predictable due to the perceived expansion of what we seem to increasingly control. This unfortunately gives credence to our false sense of physical separation from our environment, which purposely neglects the quantum weirdness of our universe that points to particle entanglement as we descend the subatomic ladder and to a relationship with consciousness that we dare not discuss with any seriousness. There are multiple reasons for our encouraged indifference, but our continued explorations will bring us closer to the mysteries that we have discarded as myth. Regardless of this inevitable trend, instead of seeking the impossibility of irrefutable proof, we may want to embrace our foundational entanglement with animate and inanimate others as enablers of our viagnostic narratives that predispose us to the types of struggles we will have and discoveries we will make that disclose the meaning we seek as our stories unfold.

It is not a deterministic but a synchronous fate of entangled experiences we need to appreciate in the unraveling of events in our lives. We are pulled together by unconsciously primal goals built into our most common traits. This process is particularly salient in interpersonal and intergroup relations. Intertwined in our shared desires and fears, we are drawn into the drama of others that incite our own. It is as if we are programmed to perpetuate a cycle of conflict with one another and within ourselves by automatically infecting each other with our hopes, expectations, insecurities and beliefs. We are containers of physical and emotional energy that cannot stay trapped inside of us. We must permit this energy, both positive and negative, to flow in order to ensure the movement of existence through our narratives, which hold our ancestral courage and anguish embedded in a collective history of achievements gained and tragedies endured by networks of individuals, both living and deceased.

Much of life is riddled with unpleasantness that we endeavour to forget or ignore by any means of denial, distraction or dispute that feeds on our growing delusions of success and expanding sources of entertainment. Reality is too overwhelming to accept, and unfortunately, much of our amusement and gratification occurs at the expense of others. However, as tensions build through our interactions, they surface our deepest vulnerabilities and expose the unresolved questions of our lives that spill into the body of our narratives, and when we peer attentively into the profoundly haunting states of others that mirror our own, we come to realize that we are just actors in each other’s plays. Each of us is unknowingly performing a part or multiple parts in someone else’s story just as others are unaware of their roles in ours. We need one another to roll out our stories long enough to divulge who and what we really are to ourselves, but many of us merely use each other to sustain the illusions of life caught in our dramas that persist until our very last breath. It becomes a game we play trapped in an endless maze without resolution, except to plant false evidence of our elevated status.

Ideally, we want to find opportunities to be in mutually beneficial circumstances that help resolve each other’s struggles or overcome our fears to undergo our pending transformation. We secretly wish for this outcome in our relationships hidden between the dispassionate monotony of our comfortable routines and the fiery arguments that erupt over our divergent wants or unattended needs. But since harmony is difficult to achieve or maintain in relationships and since we learn to expect disappointment, we keep this yearning concealed even from ourselves. Instead, we settle for shared moments of interest or pleasure and evidence of caring gestures so that we are not completely alone in the fissures of our minds and the ventricles of our hearts because whether we long for romance or crave success, we are all unwittingly chasing our self-worth and deriving the meaning of our essence.

It should be unsurprising that the truth does not drive our actions because we merely seek what we want to believe and reality tends to be an untimely inconvenience. The truth is only relevant if it helps us attain satisfaction. Otherwise, we reconfigure our perception of the real world to preserve hope in an auspicious future and secure our happiness in some semblance of a life story. If we cannot achieve synchronicity between nature and our own spirit, then we rely on conformance to orthodoxy among fictitious cast members to emulate a preferable sense of order. But while this may galvanize us into action, the disturbing memories we obscure with our split personalities and counterfeit values colour over our lies in ways that set us along paths we never expect and lock us into habits with which we wrestle to escape. The traumatic hold of our indoctrinated beliefs and contrasting experiences weighs down on our capacity to live fully by unleashing the demonic terror of the characters that awaken within our psyche and summon us to the coliseum of our fears to do battle with our conscience.

THE PRIMORDIAL CLASH BETWEEN GOOD AND EVIL

Our imperfections rule our lives because without them, there is nothing to need or to overcome, and hence, there is nothing to move us. Life cannot exist without flaws or limits, which form the basis of our struggles in the search for meaning through the stories we create, endure and recite with an underlying faith in something fundamental that we all share or that brings us together. However, our experiences as viewed through the differences and boundaries of our imperfections inevitably lead to our divisive conflicts, which generate distrust and suspicion as well as deepen our own inner quarrels. Consequently, we configure our world into things that are good or bad, where good benefits what we value while bad hurts what matters to us, including and especially ourselves.

When we attribute intent or determination to good and bad, our perception is morally split between good and evil, and our judgment varies to the extent that we assume an absolute and stable quality; either we judge people harshly and definitively, or we consider the circumstances and assumptions of others in our appraisals. But generally, we tend to see ourselves as the righteous ones and classify others and associated events according to how they relate to us and our morality; this places us at the centre of our stories and positions evil as the faceless enemy we seek to overthrow, or from which we attempt to escape. It strips away our innocence by feeding on our weaknesses and playing on our misgivings so that we may stumble and descend to its level as proof that good does not exist or that it cannot prevail. But good refers to whom and what we trust to rise above our shortcomings and overcome adversity with the goal of actualizing our potential, and it is the dark forces surrounding us or our own demons lurking in the shadows that allow us to demonstrate our strengths and discover what is important. Whether the fight is within us or outside of us, the primordial clash between good and evil is necessary to elicit and project our essence onto our entangled stories.

Both polarized sides of this shifting moral divide are locked in a battle for our conscience. They each influence how we should live our lives in response to reality and in accordance with our beliefs regarding the impermanence of things. Since nothing remains constant, one camp seeks to disrupt any order that inhibits its dominance and uses chaos to weaken any resistance while the other aims to sustain or reinstate the natural course of realizing our essence. This is an endless war over spiritual sovereignty, where its means of attainment is split between seeking authenticity of being through its shared manifestation and imposing the fallacy of autonomy through supremacy over one another. If one is drawn to reflect the truth more openly to put it into practice, then the other uses deceit, disguised as truth, to redirect efforts towards more deviously selfish goals until its intentions are exposed and its powers grow to be unmatched. We all intuitively know these sides of others and of ourselves, even it is mostly unconscious and often expressed by the conjuring of fictitious heroes and villains.

We reinforce the notion of being good by finding a malevolent adversary or an unsuspecting scapegoat, but the hidden role of true evil is to convince the genuinely good that it is not good at all when it actually is and to expose the shallow façade of our hypocritical nature. We need evil to challenge us and reveal what we really are, and it is here where we either offer it our gratitude for being the lesser of us or we fall under the foot of its humiliation as we discover that we are a forgery of ourselves. Moreover, wickedness serves an emblematic purpose in the legends of the gods and of superheroes, which we bring to life in graphic novels just as we summon them through their depiction in ancient mythology. In the 2017 film Wonder Woman [2] based on the comic book character of a warrior princess, Diana represents the union of the mythical and modern notions of a goddess endowed with both superhuman powers and the deepest compassion in the fight against evil. She symbolizes a source of good that draws in chaos to restore harmony, and it is through her confrontation with the dark force of a cunning enemy kept hidden from her until the brink of planetary annihilation that she discovers who she really is and carves out her story out of a conflict with which she refuses to accept defeat. Having directly witnessed the brutality of men and the duplicity of humankind, it is in her recollection of the decency and bravery of imperfect individuals born without divine faculties that she finds faith and the will to defend something greater than herself, which ultimately defines her since she too errs despite her overshadowing gifts.

Although we tend not to notice effortless tasks unless they unexpectedly become difficult for us, we are also inclined to overstate our talents or superiority when we see others labouring over similar problems or chores. But while we may make note of our differences more than our similarities, it is mainly a difference in state that captures our attention. More importantly, it is an unexpected change in either our internal functioning or in our external experience of the world that causes us to revisit our knowledge. This is the process of unlearning our misconceptions in order to be receptive to reality and its meaning. We are simultaneously learning both verities and falsehoods mainly at a subconscious level with some of them already programmed into us, and we forge our stories based on how we unravel the universal truth, which we find entangled in delusions and mistakes. And while our enlightenment relies on something changing, it is the uncertainties and difficulties in the circumstances we face that animate our stories and present us with chances to transform. Although we experience pain from the moment we are born and confront hardship throughout life until we die, suffering is not necessarily an artifact of malevolence. It is a byproduct of life, and without it, we cannot appreciate what it truly means to be sentient creatures. There is no living without suffering, no relief without pain and no elation without melancholy. Joy is only the freedom we can spare from a life of agony and trepidation that is invisibly hounded by the apparition of death as we step onto the camouflaged battleground of unknown good and evil to realize our viagnostic journey of struggle and passage to transformation.

STRUGGLE AND TRANSFORMATION IN THE STORIES WE INVENT

Digging at the truth can be the most dangerous adventure of all, especially for many of us confronted with the neurosis of our unpleasant experiences that we have naturally and actively forgotten in order to protect us from the torment of recalling our associated memories. Our propensity for delusional thinking increases with the intensity of past traumas or their incessant repetition that caused us to feel powerless and then to formulate defenses against the recollection of our futility in their immutable instances. Over time, many of us acquire new experiences that serve as substitutes for rebuilding our confidence, which reduce these feelings of helplessness and alleviate our fears of such events returning or traumatizing us again. Unfortunately, for a countless number of us, we have unknowingly constructed so many unstable fortifications that we desperately overlay our encoded traumas or the active sources of these traumas with the veneer of fabricated security and identity. These sources usually include our own families or close relationships where we establish significant dependencies or we feel trapped in an environment where the basic conditions remain unchanged throughout our lives. Often our traumas are so deeply imprinted that we cannot escape them wherever we go or stay as we manifest their unhealthy tendencies.

The worst part of suffering is how pointless it seems, especially when it could have been easily prevented. Although finding a rationale does not necessarily heal our wounds, our minds nevertheless scatter for answers to these absurdities of life only to be ultimately left without a satisfactory explanation. As a result, we resume our lives with their hidden cracks and jagged edges unable to fill the gaps in our understanding and smooth the surface of our well-being. Consequently, these seemingly incurable afflictions call upon us unconsciously to devise a foolproof remedy or rationalize a plausible cause that replaces one preposterous reality with another, and this is where most of our personal fiction is conceived. We tell one another and ourselves convenient stories to redirect our attention away from uncomfortable questions that may expose the breaches in our twisted logic and corrupted memory that are held together by the fallacies in our beliefs.

Many of our external battles with others are projections of our intimate world, which shelters our earliest internalized experiences that shape our sense of existence and its truth. We move between outer conflicts and inner tensions that preoccupy our efforts and conceal the weaknesses of either realm from one another. This dynamic shifts our emotional friction between these two arenas to maintain momentum and keep the story alive until we are forced to face the inevitable. But as we become accustomed to a frenzied state, stillness and emptiness turn into the nightmares of the restless mind, which is always thinking, talking and tasking. This means that we find ourselves judging rather than listening, fighting rather than playing, and performing rather than being as we miss the silence present between the notes and try to fill in the space between our breaths. But regardless of these inclinations and oversights, we all deliberately or involuntarily become the stage directors of our dramas and the naval captains of our uncharted voyages trying to manoeuvre through our struggles to find or create the narratives of our lives.

Obviously, not all of us have a difficult story to tell, and even if we had such a story, we would rarely want it to be told. But what we do want is a socially sanctioned account of hardship or wrongdoing to justify our negative states, harsh choices and failed outcomes. It is our nature to invent stories to elicit acceptance. This is the burden of not having a true burden, and so we devise one typically in the pursuit of relative successes and unattainable relationships. We want to do something that we can recount to others while there is time to rejoice or gloat before we die. But for some of us, we simply find ourselves in circumstances where no guidance is offered or the opportunity to fulfill our potential is absent. In such cases, we seek the magnificence of life by living vicariously through the evolving stories of others, whether they are our venerated idols or our unsuspecting children. And as for the rest of us, we always have the option to focus on the sad stories of others to ignore or compensate for our own history and current realities.

However, we intrinsically know the importance of struggle and transformation in the stories we invent if we are ever to live a meaningful life. This implies that suffering is a prerequisite to that endeavour and that it opposes a purely hedonic approach to living. It is so significant that we will conjure up real or imagined pain when there is none to feel because feeling is our reminder that we are alive; even pleasure is more satisfying if it is preceded by discomfort. In a sense, a story without suffering is not a story worth living because there is nothing to endure, which turns the exclusive act of indulging into a form of capitulation. If we only surrender to life and never fight or struggle, there is nothing to attain or transform and we cannot discover what we value. Although aimless pleasure is often a prescribed antidote to pointless agony, both leave us alienated from the meaning we seek. A decadent life battles boredom or anguish until it reaches the summit of its indecency. But while some of us find religion after recognizing the pain we may have inflicted on others, it is clear that a life that struggles to find meaning can come from either a life of struggle without fortune or a life of fortune without struggle. And since the bliss of our ignorance is too frivolous and transient to sustain heartfelt bonds with the world that can accentuate and prolong the significance of life, we learn that it is in the impermanent presence of suffering that we find the permanence of meaning.

When any of us undergo the worst forms of suffering from the terror of war or the shock of a natural disaster to the loss of a loved one to a terminal disease or an act of violence, we are forced to confront the vacuum of our meaning. The distress or remorse of witnessing a senseless death or experiencing the debilitation that follows a horrific accident can be unimaginable until it occurs in our own lives, but it is in the sharing of our painful accounts that we gain a comforting form of confirmation from those of us who have also agonized over similar circumstances. It allows us to find peace in the validation of our grief even when it does not stem from exactly the same event. Acknowledgement of these stories dissolves the isolation of our own suffering, and at times injects us with hope upon learning of someone’s perseverance. In addition, it helps us to attain the courage we all need to complete our viagnostic narratives of valued struggle in search of a conclusion expressed as both inner and outer transformation, which we assess as being worthy of recounting to future generations.

MESSAGES EMBEDDED IN OUR TRAUMAS

We can never really dismiss or forget the suffering we have endured, and when we attempt to bury it, we eventually learn that it merely morphs into other forms of pain or sorrow seeking acceptable outlets for its expression. Its articulation is like a flow of energy that needs to be channeled or communicated. This occurs because we normally cannot reconcile our current states with the original sources of our distress, which often inadvertently involve significant others in our early lives when we were most vulnerable. This is difficult to accept when those who were supposed to protect us may have unknowingly transferred their own traumas onto us. This can lead to the segregation of our beliefs and identities along with their memories, which are routinely distorted by our perceptions. Sometimes, we transmit our suffering to unsuspecting scapegoats with no relation to our traumatic history, but unwittingly serve to elicit what we fail to ignore or control in our interwoven lives.

Our interpretation of trauma is heavily dependent on our own personal disposition and the subjectivity of our experience as well as the expectations we inherit from our families, communities and cultures. Hence, it is not unusual for one person’s trauma to seem inconsequential to another person subjected to a similar type of encounter. A good example of this is the breakup of a relationship. Some of us are not significantly affected by such events, while others among us would be devastated, although this will likely vary based on the significance of the specific person in the relationship. This is also true of how we cope as victims of crimes or catastrophes. We cannot assume how any of us will emotionally respond during or after a tragic episode, or to a lifetime of recurring incidents. We also cannot assume that a lack of overt expression means we have not been impacted by our experience since it is quite common for us to conceal our real feelings even from ourselves.

We do not fully express what we really feel because we are influenced by social and cultural norms. We frequently adjust our actions and reactions based on what and how society as a whole recognizes as acceptable forms of suffering or trauma. Many of us still suppress our pain because its expression is treated as a sign of weakness or immaturity, while others lean towards the other extreme of validating our victimhood and seeking appeasement. But generally, we are afraid to expose our emotional vulnerability because we have endured its abuse. Hence, instead of hoping to secure the comfort of others, we fear facing the condescending tone of those who hypocritically seek to take advantage of our traumatic states to evade their own. Ironically, it is often the most victimized among us who seem to habitually instigate and sustain this vicious cycle of affective unrest by unleashing our trauma-encoded energy onto those with the empathic capacity to decipher our existential agony.

However, regardless of what we are told to accept as appropriate, we are distressed in some harmful way and we need to find some means to express it. This may involve fabricating other forms of legitimatized suffering to earn acceptance and sympathy from others. But as we attempt to transfer or convert our original trauma into something bearable for others to approve, we also risk identifying with our contrived symptoms and losing sight of what truly troubles us. We unconsciously embed symbolism in our stories to signal the meaning of our trauma. Our encrypted distress is passed along with the hope that someone will decode our messages and recite them back to us since they have become unbeknownst to our own consciousness.

When similar states of tension or disaffection are experienced among masses of individuals and across generations, they are captured by artistic heroes who lend their voices or brushes to the cause of painting what needs to be expressed, whether it is through art, music and literature or as fashion statements, lifestyle choices and media personas. It does not mean that the intended message has been translated or understood by either the sender or receiver, but the widespread response to the images, sounds and stories they create serves as an indicator that a cultural epidemic of immeasurable significance is moving into the spotlight to clandestinely release the stored energy of our traumatic lives. However, not surprisingly, we may individually still repress the real origins of our traumas while failing to find positive substitutes that can alleviate the adverse effects of our unsettling past. Unfortunately, as long as there are alternative vehicles for channeling or reinterpreting our negativity, we will take steps to reject genuine remedies to our rooted woes and even mutilate their sources because they risk dissolving the only identities we know or exposing any ungrounded justification we have to behave badly. Sometimes, our distrust runs so deep that we believe that good things are always too good to be true and any excuse to be suspicious of deception is aroused by our dark memories, or sometimes, we are simply afraid of its authenticity and feel unworthy of its offering. But whatever the reasons may be, the result is that we keep spreading our traumas across our networks of interpersonal and sociopolitical relations while our stories are never fully and consistently told.

All of us suffer, but not all of us pay attention to one another’s suffering, especially the emotional pain that stems from the existential torment of death and meaninglessness. Most of us are too distracted by the routine affairs of our day to descend into these profound states, and many of us evade our most fundamental questions by seeking pleasurable experiences, engaging in productive work and raising families. But some of us face them head-on and open up our narratives to a greater story at the risk of much worse suffering because there are important messages embedded in our traumas, which we carry with the need to disseminate their meaning regarding the reality we bury and the essence we overlook. We generally do not appreciate how our forgotten traumas encode themselves in many of our seemingly unrelated feelings and beliefs that especially fall along the sociopolitical spectrum. Our strongest convictions and the vitriol we direct at others both disguise and expose what we really fear about life and ourselves as revelations of our deepest vulnerabilities and darkest desires. And our emotions reveal clues about our degree of stability and unfettered growth as well as any incongruence we experience within ourselves as we attempt to rationalize their triggers and justify our associated actions in the process. However, we unconsciously try to conceal our suffering within the protests of our societal issues while our societal disputes exacerbate our personal problems and entangle us deeper into each other’s traumas as we are caught in the mudslides of our storytelling.

CHANGING THE NARRATIVE OF OUR BELIEFS

We are forever chasing the stories of our lives never quite knowing the direction they will take, but we do know that something must change for there to be a story to tell and meaning to derive from its unfolding. Change is the critical ingredient of every narrative, and a significant story requires that we struggle to undergo transformation and transcend the constant cycle of desire and suffering. To achieve this, we have to break free from our misconceptions of existence and our fictitious identities that keep us in emotional captivity. While we should permit reality to refine our beliefs, we tend to let our beliefs define reality and suppress any awareness that conflicts with the worldviews that we have inherited as our own. Many of us adopt unquestioned rules and misguided notions of life out of a pressing need for clarity and stability while shielding our insecurities from ridicule or abuse that are intensified by our fear of being stigmatized or ostracized. Few of us wish to acknowledge the traumas of our formidable years that we repress to meet standards of conduct used to control one another and ensure the deepening of our weaknesses that makes them less likely to strengthen.

Much of the mental suffering we encounter in our globally integrated society seems to have less to do with our biology than it does with our identities, relationships and interactions with the world. Our biological nature merely positions us to be more susceptible to breakage depending on the conditions to which we are subjected and the situations in which we are placed. But it is our psychological and cultural influences that mutate our natural functioning over time to follow social norms as if they were part of an inherent order despite their instability and sharp deviation from nature itself. Although our social structures are natural to us to some degree, they are also instilled in us from a very early age to believe our acquired interpretations of life are commonplace and essential, particularly as the gap between culture and reality widens. Driven by a shared desire to make things predictable rather than understand the truth, our societal pressures to be normal steadily increase and ironically prompt the aberrations we associate with madness as well as behaviour we deem erratic or inappropriate.

However, our sanity demands that we revisit our beliefs, including those about ourselves, to realize the underlying change we unknowingly need and turn hopelessness into determination. Although the truth reveals itself through the narrative of life and our own stories are samples of or excerpts taken from the greater narrative, our beliefs are versions and degrees of the truth that we struggle to refine as an effort towards understanding or as a resistance to reality. Yet how much of the truth we can illuminate depends on how distorted our beliefs about life already are, and how long and how widespread our beliefs have remained distorted. Our cognitive alterations and misrepresentations of the world are like stampeding herds or indiscriminate viruses; it is almost impossible to prevent a conveniently false view from infecting the mindset of the masses because we are more easily convinced when we can find others to share that view. This is one of the dangers we face when we unwittingly accept popularity or plurality as being right, especially when our beliefs can be manipulated or swayed to the point where we have to question whether or not they are in fact our own true beliefs. While it is possible that a majority of us can be right, it is also equally likely that almost everyone could be wrong.

There are many beliefs primarily expressed as values that we would never contest because they are embedded in the apparent cultures of our societies; for example, few of us would challenge our principal concern with happiness and its relationship to individual success and freedom. Building upon generations of desired modernity, these undisputed pursuits have risen to the top of our value hierarchy where we glorify our individuality as supreme, despite the pretense of our contrived identities and the dependency on family and community, which are always at risk of perilous dysfunction. But we increasingly perceive our individual sense of meaning in a bubble possibly because we are haunted by images of ourselves living in a globalized system that magnifies the incalculable number of unknown lives among the faceless crowds to which we belong. The apprehension we feel of being marginalized in a highly skewed distribution of illusory wealth and power on an individual level is tied to the immense importance we place on social status, where mobility is anecdotally rather than statistically significant. Perhaps it is a remnant of our instinctive nature to survive, but it is an obvious failing of our sociocultural programming to evolve our sense of morality in unprecedented conditions. Nevertheless, while we may fear the individual saturation and social dilution of our existence, each of us has our own unique story to contribute if we choose to awaken from our encoded reveries that distract and deceive us.

We function within a discretely self-serving sociopolitical network of unsuspecting minds to fashion external enemies and divert us from our most intimate adversary, which is ourselves. We may not easily realize how much our culture both nurtures and disturbs our individual growth, but we know that we are metaphorically waging war on reality on two related planes: the corporeal and the cognitive. The corporeal plane is where we learn to bear or overcome our physical conditions, and how we respond to those conditions depends on whether we perceive our experience of reality as permanent or impermanent. If it is permanent, we believe nothing can change and the course of our lives is set. If it is impermanent, we see the possibility of change, and that possibility permits us to develop our narrative. The cognitive plane is where we struggle with the inconsistencies of a perceived reality by using our selective attention and recall as well as our creative capacity for rationalization to sustain our beliefs and reconcile our assumptions that collide with the truth. We are caught in an intricate web of information and misinformation where we confront contradictions and lies that challenge our sanity. But to avoid madness and maintain our extremely fragile mental states, we nudge one another into generalizing narratives that we hope will veil the illusion of our reality. We sell these stories to ourselves by quietly conspiring with one another to accept these accounts of the truth while our ability to do so determines the formation and course of our interpersonal relationships.

This collusion includes the belief many of us share that the narrative cannot be told without a demonstration of relative material success and social stature. But this tangible nature of socially defined achievement introduces us to the dangerous obsession and compulsion to acquire something that is unattainable. A materialist frame of life perverts our understanding of perfection as some physical state or outcome when we already know we can only represent a version of it like the truth, which is unique to each of us. Although an ideal is a concept that we may objectively assign a valued attribution in relation to our expectation of something or someone, it remains primarily subjective because it means different things to different people. This may include discovering our own ideal of beauty unknown to us until it is seen or attaining some preferred state that feels specifically right for us like a tailored shirt, but this more commonly involves measuring things or people against some pre-established standard that they may or may not meet. Nevertheless, in all cases, our own sense of imperfection defines our most desired or ideal state and drives us towards an unknown perfection sought in the universal truth through the obstructive terrain of our beliefs in an endless negotiation between reality and fantasy.

Since technology has taken over our relationship with our environment and even with ourselves, it has shaped and fortified our beliefs with artificial empowerment, which has placed independence and contentment within our imaginary reach. We can believe almost anything because most of our basic needs can be immediately gratified regardless of what we believe. Unfortunately, this perpetuates a cosmic hallucination of personal power and freedom that we do not really have outside of our basic volition. This also promotes our fixation with success as the most vital form of liberation and tempts us to chase the fiction of happiness after being informed that the joy we knew as children is taboo, and so, we come to deeply fear failure as we do success, which will never lose its significance until we realize that we are playing a game that does not matter. We are sheep counting sheep and comparing ourselves to other sheep when we just want to find a pasture where we can be the sheep we really are.

Unable to see this obscured truth, we remain trapped by our sense of success and failure that defines the core of our story and decides whether or not it is a story worth living and telling. This has a tremendous impact on how our narrative unfolds and how it is interpreted. It all depends on what we believe. There are no absolute rules or standards. This is evident in how one person’s failure is another person’s success, or one’s elation is another’s sorrow. There are only personal preferences influenced by culturally informed goals and social norms. The outlines of our beliefs were mainly moulded during our upbringing and early experiences before being fully inaugurated into our purportedly civilized class of sentient creatures, which makes the prevalent dogma and propaganda we are fed so difficult to detect. Consequently, our fabricated stories become so convincing that we believe we are free to choose our characters and scenes, and that our choices are our own. But our sense of liberty is really a pill we swallow every single day to prevent our potential awakening from this slumber we call life.

Yet despite our misconstrued beliefs that lead us astray to be lost in make-believe worlds, our entanglement is what enables our stories to be generated. We need these stories if for no other reason than to avoid madness. Sentient life cannot function without a narrative, right or wrong, real or fictitious. We breathe our stories, whether they are the ones we live to tell or the ones we tell ourselves to make sense of the world. All of us need to achieve clarity in our own way almost daily in order to hold onto our sanity, even for those of us who seem unhinged, because we tend to forget that we are all shielded from reality in some way and that we are all attuned to different frequencies with some being more commonly shared than others. Hence, as shocking as this may seem, even our most irrational assertions within their own context may make all the sense there is. Although we may feel more secure about the most recognizably proven ideas, it is the less familiar or ambiguous ones that test the limits of our awareness to catch a glimpse of a reality we are told does not exist.

This unknown truth is the purity we find by participating in the narrative of life, but it is not something we can acquire because perfection is the unattainable that can only be demonstrated and never gained. It has no physical location or state that can be reached because we can neither become what we already are nor attain what we already have. We intrinsically seek meaningful change along a mythical journey, which has no material destination and whose purpose has not yet been uncovered. However, we can only approach the universal truth in the greater story of life by changing the narrative of our beliefs. Our real struggle resides not in the hardship we endure, but in the entangled lies we tell to write our story. It is in simply doing or being that we can achieve the pure lucidity of an enlightened consciousness, and our transformation can only occur when we finally change what we stubbornly believe into manifesting and conveying what is essentially true.