No Way Out Is the Only Way Out

I cut my middle finger a few months back with a knife accidentally. The blood poured out like anything. It hurt a lot. I had to go to emergency and get the tissue bandaged and everything. The scar healed in a month, but it left a mark to remind me that I used the knife in an unsafe way - at least once in my life. This is true of all types of scars, emotional, psychological, and spiritual.

It's true that what doesn't kill you, makes you stronger. That's basic evolution.

What you do is saved inside you - trillions of times, in every cell of your body, in ways scientists can't fully comprehend. That is how your body changes itself when you decide to change yourself. Watch this TED lecture about epigenetics if you want to know more about it:

You'll never experience evolution except in your personal life. You'll never see lizards evolving into flying reptiles or elephants evolving into smaller donkey-like creatures. However, we saw coronavirus evolve into its less lethal variants. But the feeling of how life changes, how we change as we grow old, is our best way of experiencing evolution firsthand.

Evolution is about developing new senses - new sense organs or improvements to the existing organs.

Most people assume that growing older means losing some of the senses we had as children. Not correct. If your senses are going numb, it means you're not evolving in the right way.

The best way to grow is to become more sensitive to our surroundings. Your purpose is not to get piles of money in a bank but to have more sensitivity to how life happens around you. If you have become more loving, caring, compassionate, and empathetic toward others and yourself, then you're evolving right.

One way you can prove that you are evolving in the right direction is to see inside you and see how you feel about others around you.

If you feel nothing about others, you're doing it wrong. You're not tuning into the field - or the network - that connects us all. We are one essentially. We are cells of a bigger entity called the human collective. This whole entity evolves together. We feel evolution individually but we get the information from this whole much more quickly if we tune to it. If we communicate with one another, if we connect, we're most probably going to feel better. That's the joy of meeting new people and making new friends.

The thoughts you think can weaken you or strengthen you. If a thought is telling you to disconnect from others, it's the wrong kind of thought. If a thought emerges that tells you that things are not going to improve, it's the wrong kind of thought.

Thoughts are independent of you and they happen whether you want them or not. More than ninety-five percent of your thoughts are completely wrong. But if you value a wrong type of thought, it can weaken you physically and mentally.

Watch this viral TED lecture by Tim Urban about our monkey minds:

Most of the naturally occurring thoughts are negative - that's how our brains keep us out of danger. So, negative thoughts are not negative but precautionary. But warning thoughts can trigger stress and stress - though it makes us strong in the short run - in the long run, constant high-stress tears down the body.

The only way out of this ninety-five percent thought pattern of negativity is to focus your attention on an activity outside you. Think about others, think about entertaining others, think about serving others, think about laughing with others, think about a goal, a mission, a passion.

If you have ever reached the state of flow in your life, you'd know that when you get out of that state, you feel miserable. Negative thoughts flood your mind. You want to engage your mind with a novel, a movie, or chat with friends to feel good. Then you want to get back into your state of flow - that blissful place where your mind does not create negative patterns but serves its real purpose of helping you with your work.

When you feel no way out in life, try to think of the time when you entered a state of flow. If you've never experienced a state of flow, imagine the last time you almost lost yourself in your work.

You can enter that state only if you feel there is no way out. When you think you have to let go of everything else and pay one hundred percent attention to what you're doing right now.

If you survive this problem, your body and mind will remember how you came out of it. You'll emerge stronger and wiser. Stronger because you know you can overcome such problems and wiser because you know how to focus completely on the task at hand.

Some years ago I watched a video of a squirrel being chased by a snake. At the edge of a tree branch, the squirrel jumped and started to fly. I was surprised by this move. But then the snake jumped behind the squirrel and started flying too. If the squirrel didn't fly it would die. But if the snake didn't fly, it would die of hunger. If you don't believe me watch this flying snake:

And here is the flying squirrel:

I don't know exactly how these animals evolved to learn to fly. But in my imagination, I become a squirrel facing death. I have to fly to get out of danger. But I can't fly, so I get eaten for millions of years. Then my wishes collect in the squirrel collective mind, or squirrel network, for millions of years, my body changes, and one day I in intuitively know I can fly.

Then in my imagination, I become a snake. I see the squirrel flying away. I feel hungry and I wish I could fly too. The more I go hungry, the more I die of hunger, the more I wish. Ultimately the snake collective mind or snake network changes over millions of years, my body changes and one day I know intuitively I can fly. I go after the flying squirrel and catch it mid-air.

That's evolution. Brutal but effective.

When you feel there is no way out, feel it. The more you feel it, the greater the chances that the collective mind or human network will respond and you'll find a way out. If you survive, you'll emerge stronger. I don't say many won't die looking for the way out. Many would die. But ultimately the evolutionary mechanism will give you an intuition, a way out.

The good thing is that you don't know if a solution already exists. All you have to do is to find the solution. Sadly, a solution doesn't need to exist for your situation right now. In that case, you die.

In any case, you have to wish for a way out. You have to work to find a way out. Even if you die trying, your work will not vanish. It would be available for the next person who encounters the exact problem you have.

That's evolving in the right way. You must think about yourself and about others who are not even here yet. That connection will help you work and find a way out. In this process, you'd find new abilities, develop new sensitivities, write hopeful words, and imagine happy endings.

Maybe we are just cells of a mega-being - an enormous cosmic whale or tortoise or something. Maybe the best life is a life lived not for yourself but for those around you and those still to come.

Stay connected. Evolve better.