The Edge of Becoming

The mass of cells behind your eyes is an engine of prediction. Your brain contains an estimated 86 billion neurons. These neurons receive a signal, decide if that signal matters then passes it along as an electric spark to communicate between your brain and body. It uses billions of these precision electrical sparks every single second. The range is somewhere between 8 to 274 billion sparks per second. In the time it takes you to read this there were around of 20 billion sparks. This is happening throughout your day, even while you sleep.

It isn’t just recording the reality around you, it is also taking your internal model that has been created from your life and then projects it outward so it can process any errors based on what it knows.

When a person becomes deeply entrenched in a rigid ideological framework or belief system, the prefrontal cortex suppresses any data that may contradict your model before it ever reaches conscious awareness. It decides whether or not the signal should matter. Over time, processing in this manner, more neural pathways that might process alternative data are pruned. This is the gradual death of curiosity. As this continues the brain begins to see what it expects to see validating it’s rightness. Your brain is now frozen in time.

Self growth stalls.

Adaptation is absent.

Evolution is pushed off the trolley.

This is why you can live inside the walls of your bunker of beliefs creating a high level of certainty about the world. But when you’re inside a bunker all you can do is wonder why in the hell anyone would ever want to walk outside into the expanse that sits outside your walls.

This isn’t a one off experience. The lack of curiosity and cognitive development is widely present. We create communities that thrive off of it. In these communities you’ll hear talk about “going deeper”. They will find a time to commune together, speak the same curated vocabulary, nod in supportive assurance at the beliefs that built the bunker. All the while mistaking mutual affirmation for deep insight or even spiritual maturity.

It’s a hollow pantomime.

You might even find yourself saying you want to experience life on a deeper level. To be Thoreau living on Walden Pond. But you don’t want wonder and mystery. You want a sturdier boat.

Something sound.

Unshakeable.

The perfectly crafted design that skims across the surface of the water.

The best case scenario would be a glass bottom boat allowing you to view the mystery of the depths beneath you without ever diving in, feeling the pressure of the deep. Depth can’t be discovered in the boat. It is found in shipwrecks on the ocean floor. These benthic ruins aren’t just surrounded by water. The longer they’re down there the more the water has penetrated the wood. It is constantly becoming part of it.

Your bunker keeps you protected from the elements.

Separated.

Unexposed.

Safe.

Cozy.

You might even find yourself hopping from one bunker of certainty to another. The reasons you left your bunker for the new one doesn’t really matter because while the vocabulary may have shifted, the neurological mechanisms are identical. A bunker, no matter what color it’s painted, won’t allow others in unless they convert, assimilate and learn how to comply within the walls. The community’s collective brains cannot tolerate any additional neural noise an outsider may cause. To the bunker folk, outsiders become symbols of uncertainty and uncertainty equals internal panic.

There is a distinct difference in a bunker constructed for you to hunker down in so you can grow old and die, and a chrysalis made to give you shelter during transformation. When it’s time, the caterpillar begins to build a perimeter. A hedge of protection. The chrysalis it constructs is designed to protect it from the elements, predators, and even dehydration. It goes into isolation, putting distance between itself and the outside world.

But what's happening within the walls of a chrysalis and the walls of a bunker lead to what comes next.

In the beginning the chrysalis is dark and cramped. You can feel the walls rub against your arms as you struggle to reposition yourself for a glimpse of comfort but it does not give. There are no surprises. You learn what to expect.

Yes it is a type of bunker.

But it is a bunker for one.

And by design it is temporary.

It is not constructed to sustain life long term. The walls were not built for you to remain within.

As the caterpillar finds its place in its new home, it liquefies. It loses it previous form and starts the arduous process of self evolution. Inside it is not merely “change” occurring. The caterpillar is undone and remade. The old wiggly blog it used to be slowly dissolves into a murky haze keeping only the parts of it that have purpose in the future. From this surrender, cells pull together what was there all along waiting to be utilized and weaves them with new cells forming legs, antennae, wings.

It is the fight of enduring the process of becoming. A growth in which one form ends so another can become.

The creature that constructed the walls was bound to the earth. The one that emerges is being born to explore the mystery of the world.

What’s interesting is when it comes time to leave the chrysalis, the butterfly doesn’t slide out with casual ease to the ground below. It is a tedious process of moving out of it’s old home. The grueling nature of the fight to emerge has a purpose. The friction created to get out of the tight space helps force the fluid out of it’s swollen body and into it’s wings allowing them to expand and become strong enough to take flight.

The fight to emerge as something new is part of the process.

If you find yourself in the chrysalis with a bunker mentality you are in danger of convincing yourself it is a cozy forever home. Taking structure meant for transformation and flipping it into one of stagnation. You will refuse to liquefy. To let go of the pieces of you that don’t serve who you are to become. For those that can muster up the courage to the let the old pieces dissolve and a new body be formed, you still have to have a massive amount of bravery to start the fight to leave. I’ve watched too many hunker down after transformation and sit inside, then demand the world “out there” stop changing.

Self evolution is outgrowing your shell, welcoming the laborious nature of crossing the threshold into the uncertainty of what’s next and finally step foot on the slightly terrifying question of “what’s now?”.

What I have noticed in my work with people who have a difficult time with stepping out of the bunker of certainty is the allure of the stability of the familiar. Living in a bunker of certainty will cause you to confuse immobility for stability. Bunker communities love static stability. It is distant hope that if nothing changes in our bunker, we don’t have to change either.

But life requires dynamic stability.

Imagine an elite athlete performing in competition at their highest level. They don’t balance by freezing like a statue, even if it appears they’re frozen. They remain stable through thousands of micro adjustments and hundreds to thousands of nerve impulses per second, constantly scanning the field, absorbing forces and adapting to the surface of the imperfect ground beneath them. They are able to remain stable because they are in motion.

There is a story in scripture about a man at the edge of the pool at Bethesda. This man has sat at pool time and time again during his 38 years because it was believed the pools held healing properties. What we learn is he is trapped in a bunker of his own condition. In the story Jesus walks up to him and doesn’t offer immediate healing or cheap pity. Instead he drops a question that punches a hole through the ceiling of certainty.

“Do you want to be well?”

The depth of this question often gets overlooked. It is profound. Being well means he is going to have to leave the familiar, predictable environment of suffering. This has been a major part of his identity for his lifetime. Answering with a quick “yes” means taking a sledge hammer to the walls and stepping out of the bunker and walking into the blinding light of the unmapped life before him.

This isn’t a simple decision. Leaving a piece of yourself you’ve known so deeply for such a long period of your life is incredibly difficult. But you can’t experience life in all it’s fullness sitting inside imagining what it is like.

For you spiritually minded folks. If you find yourself believing you can experience and give the fullness of love, grace, mercy, peace, hope, empathy inside the walls of your bunker of certainty, I’ll tell you now.

No.

You can’t.

Love, mercy, peace, and hope, are mounted on the walls of your bunker.

All you know are the taxidermic versions of them.

Inside the bunker love is conditional. Extended to those in compliance. Grace is an adorable concept to sing about on Sundays and weaponize on Mondays against anyone who threatens your worldview. Peace is not calm in the storm. It is the numbness granted through isolation. Empathy can not be experienced through a slit in the steel door. It requires contact with the unknown. It demands you stand vulnerably exposed to someone’s pain without trying to fix, categorize or judge it or them.

You can live inside the fictitious serenity the bunker projects. That’s your decision. But you will be trading the visceral beauty of living in the mystery of the world for your climate controlled tomb.

You aren’t safe from death.

You’re simply safe from experiencing life.

The door is unlocked. You can see light peeking through the seam.

Open it.

Not because you know what to expect.

But because you don’t.

There is no map beyond the door. No guarantees. No version of yourself waiting in it’s fullest form.

Only untamed terrain.

It is full of dense forrest where certainty can not breath. Mountainsides that demand legs and lungs you’ve never had to use. Rivers that will wash away language, titles and roles you no longer need. Dark, deep valleys where you will confuse silence for loneliness until you realize the silence is introducing you to yourself.

You won’t just find who you are.

You will become someone you’ve been waiting to meet.

The world beyond the bunker isn’t there to accept you. It’s exists to transform you.

So

Walk.

Walk until certainty falls off your shoulders.

Walk until curiosity is your compass.

Walk until the stranger you’ve been following turns around and you realize it has been you all along.