Let’s Go Deeper

Welcome to Insights and Implications!

Like many of us, living through 2020 rocked my worldview. In the US, we weathered COVID, racial injustice, and political and social unrest – all with brand new pandemic lifestyles. Personally, I was smacked in the face by my own ignorance about racism in the United States and woke up from a long, oblivious, privileged sleep. The more I listen and learn, the more I realize how far we have to go, but I also have bright hope that humanity can find solutions, start fixing the stuff that needs fixing, and heal. Here’s why.

Seems to me that human beings are connected to something that belongs to everyone and no one at the same time. I can’t explain this something – no one can, although countless people have tried. Some call it God, some call it universal intelligence, some call it formless energy, some call it pure love, some call it our higher self, some call it nothingness. There are infinite words and phrases, yet none of them quite touch it, because we can’t describe it – we can only intuit it. We can feel it. I know you feel it. Pretty much everyone does when they get out of their heads. It’s a formless spiritual…something.

This something is powering everything.

So. All 7B of us utilize a formless energy to create our experience of life. And in this respect, all 7B of our minds work exactly the same way: when our heads are clear, we’ve got a direct line to the formless something. When that connection is wide open, we’re at our best. We’re wise, connected, full of love, full of compassion, full of beautiful feelings, full of insight, full of new ideas, full of life’s good stuff. Obviously we’re not always there, but we have the potential to awaken to the good stuff at any moment.

Every single good idea or invention or discovery or creation in human history has come from this source. “The solution hit me out of the blue,” the scientists say. Or, from the writers/artists: “I wasn’t the one creating it, I was just a vessel, it came through me.”

This ability to connect, learn, and generate new ideas is one of the coolest parts of being human. But everyone, in one way or another, gets wedded to certain thoughts, and when we’re wedded to a particular thought, we’ve shut ourselves off from the flow of new ones. Me too. You too. All of us. All day. Every day. It happens all the time. And when we get wedded, we tend to block our own insight and go forth and screw stuff up. Sometimes we’re blind to our own blockages and sometimes we hold onto them intentionally. Either way, whether we know it or not, we’re stuck.

Many of the world’s issues remain significant problems because being wedded to our thinking – being wedded to what we already know – is a comfy place for most of us. That’s where I was prior to last year. Comfy. Mostly oblivious. Operating from what I thought I knew and completely missing what I didn’t see.

And yet.

“We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.”
– Albert Einstein

The good news: if we thought our way into these so-called intractable problems, we can think our way out of them. But getting out of them – changing things – requires insight and new ideas. It requires our hearts.

It requires us to value what we might not yet know.

When we value what we don’t know, we’re more likely to open up, connect to our compassion and get hit with new ideas about how to fix the things that need fixing.

Otherwise, we’re trying to derive solutions using the same level of thinking that perpetuates the problem. We’re coming at it horizontally, which means change will take forrrrrrrrrever. To move things along, we need to go deeper, to see beyond what we think we know and remember that the not-yet-known is an incredibly fruitful space.

Going deeper – pointing people toward their inner capacity for new thinking and ideas – which resides in all human beings – is like putting humanity on steroids to have the insights and do the subsequent heart and structural work needed to create change as fast as we can.

There’s a whole world of insight waiting to guide us toward a better future. Let’s look inward and find it.

Nikki Platte Nieves