The title of this blog post is what I have up as my "Religious Views" on Facebook.  These views are baffling to many, intriguing to few, and understood by a small majority that has expressed wavelengthness as a response.  Wavelengthness will henceforth be the term used to refer to the state of being on the same wavelength as someone.

QPK is not so much a religion as it is my view on religion itself.  Religion tries to explain something outside our realm of comprehension.  In the compression process that the information must go through to be understood by us, there is inevitably:
- Distortion: loss of meaning as the information is translated into simpler form
- Variation: different choices on how to simplify the information

Say we were to take two quantum physics professors to teach their material to two different kindergarten classrooms.  As with religions attempting to explain Truth:
- There is an intrinsic, shared Truth to what they teach
- This Truth will be incomprehensible to the audience

Then, in a completely subjective procedure, each takes their best stab at creating a model that the children will be able to grasp and that will be most representative of the actual Truth.  These are essentially metaphors.  Every religion is a metaphor for Truth, and it's all about finding the one that resonates with us. 

The best thing for the kindergarteners to do is to hear the simplified lesson from as many different professors as possible.  Then they can choose which explanation gives them the greatest feeling of Understanding, and accept that the other kids may better understand the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle with M&Ms representing particles.  Mutually accepting different preferences for understanding waves - now that's wavelengthness.

Did you ever notice how many times the people who seem like they have the most to be sad about, have an unflappable sense of acceptance and kindness?  It’s almost baffling: people born with physical ailments with a most positive attitude, versus, say, little rich kids who waste away all their God and parent-given gifts.  Given that contrast, it’s easy for one to judge one person as better and one person as a lousy ingrate. 

The way I see it, we’re all born on this planet to learn a certain set of lessons, perhaps revolving around a common theme.  There are two factors which facilitate the learning of our lesson:

- Nature: our intrinsic personality, mental predisposition, physical attributes. 

-Nurture: the situation we’re born into, involving parents, geographic location, etc.

People will be given a unique combo based on whether their lesson is to, say…  Be homosexual in an intolerant environment, develop their intellectual passions despite parents who don’t see value in their pursuing higher education, etc.

Yet everyone’s challenge is in one way the same: everyone is put here to conquer it.

The child with a physical deformity – his challenge is to come out on top.  The child given health and every material benefit – his challenge is to come out on top.  At first glance it may seem like the first kid has a much tougher challenge to conquer, so why do we consistently see them doing just that?

I think it’s simply: dependence on the external world.  The first kid learns early on that what he has in the material world will not satisfy him, he has to find inner peace.  The second kid gets everything he wants, sometimes he needs to cry to get it, but either way, he is conditioned to be dependent on "things". Since this approach rarely fails him, he continues into adulthood searching for temporary external patches for happiness.  Even if one day he realizes the flaws in his approach, by the time he is an adult many of these habits will be deeply ingrained.  It takes a lot more desire to change, a lot more effort, a lot more action.

Replacing thoughts of judgment with wishes of good luck on their challenge is an effective way to deal with these seemingly easy-to-judge situations.  There are not good and bad people, there are stronger and weaker people, all taking tests of incomparable difficulty.

It never fails to amaze me the way our entire experience occurs in our brains.  The implications of this are that we can be taken for a ride by the crazy ways in which it works, or we can understand its functions and use the tool to our advantage.

A brief and simplified lesson in neuroscience:

Your prefrontal cortex has an executive role in the brain, monitoring functions such as planning, communication and proper social behavior.  This part of your brain involves an aspect of choice, and for this purpose I will compare it to a computer desktop.  On this desktop you can choose to recall, or click on, a specific thought or memory.

The amygdala processes memory and emotional reactions.  When something occurs in your life that produces an emotional response, be it positive or negative, the amygdala releases serotonin, which can be described as a little dose of emotional fluid.  These little serotonin doses of happy, mad, sad, scared and so on are then tacked onto their respective memory like, as neuroscientist John Medina puts it, post-it notes.

When one chooses to recall a specific memory on their prefrontal cortex desktop, the serotonin dose attached to it is released into their processing experience as well.  This explains why recalling certain happy or sad memories brings back the emotional reaction that was previously tacked to them.

So how do we get over things?  Just focus on clicking the happy icons and trying to hide the sad ones in an emotional Recycle Bin?  I’ve been thinking about this one, and I think there’s a much better solution.  It is possible to replace previously instated post it notes for updated and reviewed notes based on new information.   By going back and reprocessing memories with a more rational mind we can replace the emotional post-it note tacked to a specific experience for one that is more in line with the truth.  This is why psychologists take patients through their painful childhood memories, helping them to reprocess memories tacked with a child’s illogical emotional response and replacing them with a rational and mature adult interpretation of events.

There is no way to hide our memories on our vast prefrontal desktop, and external events can trigger the neurons that bring a certain item flying up into main screen like an annoying popup.  We can be much happier if we make sure no nasty post it notes fly into our experience, and that at worst they will read “This was hard, but I learned from it”.

"I'll start tomorrow", "just this once"...  How many times do we hear people sacrificing the present moment for an elusive "someday"?  The truth is, there is only one moment that we can control, and it's shorter than a millisecond - it's right now.

It's true that character is borne from habits are borne from actions, but there are much more interesting (and practical) implications if you look at this common phrase backwards.  Each one of your actions is reinforcing a habit - for better or for worse.

Recent studies in neuroplasticity show that, unlike what was believed for many years, the brain is not wired completely during childhood only to remain static through adulthood.  We are not "stuck" with the wiring that we had no part in creating, which introduces a lot more power and, as it goes - more responsibility.  Studies show that through adulthood the human brain has the capacity to rewire itself.  And just how does it manage this? Repetition.

Just like repeating a particular action makes it easier, mentally repeating an idea reinforces a thought pattern.  The implications of this is that changing yourself to Who You Want To Be just requires the initial resistance your brain puts up when you act against the wiring of your neural pathways.

We grow when we're outside our comfort zone.  Keep pushing new actions until they are re-wired as the default response.  No moment is merely a means to an end, each holds the infinite power of creation.

Perusing istockphoto.com is how I've spent many an idle hour recently, looking for a logo for this website.  "Your face is a logo" said some, sounding oddly insulting.  Yes, but the eventual repercussion of this would be committing the ultimate faux-pas of featuring myself on my business card.  How 'bout "no", Scott.

And then, I found it.  My stock photo soul mate.  Minimalist and colorful, simple yet bursting with detail.  And best of all - shaped like an elephant.

The Parable of the Blind Men and the Elephant:

"The blind man who feels a leg says the elephant is like a pillar; the one who feels the tail says the elephant is like a rope; the one who feels the trunk says the elephant is like a tree branch; the one who feels the ear says the elephant is like a hand fan; the one who feels the belly says the elephant is like a wall; and the one who feels the tusk says the elephant is like a solid pipe.  A wise man explains to them:
'All of you are right. The reason every one of you is telling it differently is because each one of you touched the different part of the elephant. So, actually the elephant has all the features you mentioned.'"

Just like each religion is a metaphor for something so enormous and incomprehensible to the human mind.  And just like we shouldn't judge someone's view on any elephant.  If we were on their side of the room, we'd be feeling the same limb.