Imagine growing up in a difficult household where you can’t speak your mind.
What do you teach yourself? To keep your mouth shut. Keeping your mouth shut is mechanical: you literally control your mouth differently. You hold your mouth internally in a different way than you would have if you had grown up in another family. This creates tension in your jaw and builds up a lot of internal tension throughout your body.
At first, it works fine: you get away with it, and no one notices. But after 20 years? Then you might experience every psychological condition you can imagine. Not because your brain is sick, but because you taught yourself something the wrong way.
I am firmly convinced that almost all psychological disorders stem from these kinds of experiences. The trick is time: you only see it after a long period, and by then it’s difficult to identify the initial problem—silencing yourself.
Overspending
Imagine: a group of people a few hundred years ago. And a group of people now.
Let’s take a task: doing the laundry. In the past, this was done by a group of people. We only used human energy (mostly women, of course, but that’s not my main point).
Now we use washing machines. So we consume resource energy instead of human energy.
We have created a system in which relatively little human energy is used and relatively much resource energy.
Let’s take another task: office work. Nowadays, relatively much human energy is spent on uploading things into a computer network. The problem is that this does not necessarily give anything back to the universe: that computer network itself also consumes resource energy.
We should devote much more human energy to other people. For some, this comes very naturally: they often think of others and quietly pay attention to humans, animals, and nature.
You are playing outside and you fall on your knee. Now your knee is bleeding.
“I have a wound on my knee” is how a lot of people would frame this.
They make a distinction between the “I” and “my knee” — as if they are two separate things.
It doesn’t work like this. You are also every cell in your knee, so you are repairing yourself.
Your knee isn’t repairing itself.
You are — you just don’t know how.
This is where consciousness comes into play. Through consciousness, your body shows how it works. When you sit and think for a second, your body starts to explain (but only if you find it interesting). It is as if the inside of your body becomes visible, it lights up so to speak. Many people find this scary, so they invented entire religions around it, with legacies like the Adam and Eve story (which is really about your Adam’s apple, the thing in your throat).
But it’s your body explaining how it distributes its energy resources. And therefore you are explaining it to yourself — but always with the help of others who also have this.
Energy is like water
The interesting thing about quantum is that everybody recognizes something in it. It’s extremely relatable, even when I have no idea what physics is about. How is that possible? It’s because people who don’t know physics understand basic reality way better than most think.
Assuming that something moves from A → B was never the question. It simply doesn’t work like that, since everything moves freely in this universe. So if everything turned out to be predictable and deterministic, we’d have a huge problem. It’s nothing like that. Have you ever tried to predict how humans behave? Even if you think you can, you can’t.
Quantum is like an open invitation to reconsider everything we once thought was true.
For instance: maybe on a fundamental level energy is more water-like, so it reflects back the interest we have in our own universe. Which is beautiful.