The Third Pill

What if?

Duality. Oneness. Those who explore life often encounter and wrestle with this issue: how do we experience oneness - deemed to be our natural state - in a world of duality?

The answer may lie in a different direction than commonly thought. What if, instead of two, instead of one, there were actually three? Three options, that is: this, that, and what if?

Here’s the audio option for today’s post:

One stream is mental, another is emotional, and the third… imagination, combines them both. So, in any given situation - especially where opinion is polarized - we can learn to interrupt conflict with “what if?” Imagination can immediately go to work, escorting us beyond argument towards novelty and a possible discovery of some kind that might surprise everyone.

This sounds like how inventions happen and we could very easily relegate this idea to special moments of inspiration that geniuses have. But I’m “imagining” the opposite, integrating this mindset into every day life for all of us ordinary people. What if this way of thinking became normalized?

Here I am, this is what seems to be happening, this is how I think about it but… but, wait a moment… what if? And, immediately a door swings open in consciousness for awareness of something not previously seen or heard or even thought of.

In the 1999 film, The Matrix, the hero Neo is offered two pills. If he takes the blue pill he’ll go back to sleep and forget the vision his new mentor Morpheus showed him. If he takes the red pill, he’ll find out how dysfunctional the world really is.

Where’s the third pill? That would be the one that showed him how wonderful things are.

I awoke from a dream this morning at around 5am. Wide awaken and trying to recall the dream, I instinctively turned on my phone and found a message from a new friend in England. His short paragraph stimulated recall of my dream! Moments later, an email arrived from a friend in South Carolina with a paragraph that helped me access another aspect of my dreamland musings. Synchronicity? Coincidence? Or, the way things always are between us in our quantum entanglement, just rarely consciously experienced?

So, here’s my first attempt to fill out an “invention” flowing from this dream. It has a health bias but it applies to everything. Some of you will be familiar with the traditional debate between Pasteur’s “germ theory” and Beauchamp’s “terrain theory.” Pasteur won, not because he was right but because germ theory was easier to monetize. There’s big money in drugs and surgery, not so much in cleaning up our environment and developing healthy habits.

What if there’s a third theory? I’ll call it the “creating theory.” Yes, there are germs. Yes, the terrain in our bodies matters. And… not but, and, what if we are creating our reality? Hmn, not exactly a novel idea. Hold on. What if it’s actually true? What if we’ve not been educated as much as we’ve been hypnotized, to grow up ignorant of our God given ability to create and resigned to accepting someone else’s subjective creation as our objective reality? After all, aren’t we (all) made in the image and likeness of God who is… The Creator! Wouldn’t that make us creators in training?

Wouldn’t that also explain what this life is really about? To develop our God given creative abilities and create… what? How about the best day to day experience imaginable for ourselves. And what about helping others? What about creating heaven on earth together?

Why not? Anyone have a better idea?

So, this week, I invite you to consider this possibility, to collapse duality not into oneness but into threeness, to embrace “what if” as a new option in any moment. “What if?” we ask at 2:10 on Tuesday afternoon, faced with an impossible situation. And… well, we’ll find something novel, if we ask!

Back to the creating theory… I’ll be filling this out as part of my work with a new foundation working on the mental health epidemic. This, I believe, is the real answer to mental illness. Not to medicate, not to just process trauma, but to restore our innate ability as creators.

If we are not living the way we are designed to live, if we are not developing our incredible creative abilities - and we all have them - no wonder we go mad!

Have fun creating and let me know your thoughts on this.