I thought of Chris' most recent posts when I read this...
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I know in some of your more recent work that you’re talking about how we can navigate chaos in our life. And you talk about how we can navigate chaos with uncertainty as our guide. And you introduce an idea that you call “The Drift.” And I wonder as a last conversational point if you can explain to us what you mean by “The Drift” and how we can possibly navigate the chaos of our lives with uncertainty as our guide.
MM: OK. That’s one of my favorite subjects. [Laughs] Actually you have to navigate, I think, uncertainty with chaos. Chaos and uncertainty are related. Why? Because we have linear ways of looking at the world. The world is not linear, we just impose linearity on the world because that’s how the brain works. If we didn’t have linearity, we couldn’t focus on anything—but it doesn’t mean that there’s no other complexity going on. Complexity theory can explain more things than Newtonian sequential linear processes, reductionist process.
So what happens? You want to do from A to B. That’s linear. Then, all of the sudden, turbulence comes in. And what do we do? We try to impose a linear system of confirming, confirming, confirming. Immediately, you stop there. Again you embody what this is doing to me, and you move from a mode of confirming, to a mode of observing. You observe with a premise that says that there’s implicit wisdom here that I need to extract from the moment. This implicit wisdom that I need to extract from the moment. Not only does it take you out of reducing cortisol because you’re all uptight, but it tells you there’s an implicit wisdom here that since everything is interconnected, if I find that wisdom, synchronicity all of the sudden comes in
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I’ll give you a very specific example so you can see how, because I practice it. I’ll also give you a way that you can start doing it and it will come out more frequently in your life. I had to go to a lecture in St. Lucia, in the Caribbean a few years ago. I didn’t know anybody there. It was an interesting lecture because it was for bishops and cardinals about the psychoneuroimmunology of confessing for Catholic cardinals and bishops. So I get there, and one of the bishops is supposed to be picking me up. See, that’s a linear thing I’m expecting.
All the sudden, the bishop’s not there. I go, “I don’t know anybody here. I don’t even know where they’re having their conference.” Then chaos comes in. You begin to secrete cortisol. All kinds of things happen. So I stop and I say, “OK. Let me breathe. And let me look at things that are familiar to me.” So instead of confirming, you’re observing.
What’s familiar to me? OK, I’ve see palm trees and I’ve seen sand, and I’ve seen people of different race. And I start looking around, looking for the wisdom that’s there that I have to extract. All of the sudden, I see this taxi driver smiling. So I go up to him and I said, “Look, I’m having this and this happening,” and he said “Oh, my cousin is working at the tourism and information [desk] …”—synchronicity begins already—“… maybe she can tell you.” I’m already relaxing because I’m allowing myself to observe the wisdom within the moment and I go up to her and I tell her what’s going on.
And she said, “I don’t know, but let me call one of the nuns here. The nuns know everything that’s going on here.” So she calls and the nun tells her. And she says, “Oh my god that’s on the other side of the island.” Again, another linear turbulence. I get tense again but I stop, I breathe, I do the same thing again. And I ask myself what is the wisdom here. I said, “OK, which way can we go?”
And immediately she says to her cousin, “Don’t take him the long way and don’t rip him off! Take him through the rainforest so he can see the beautiful birds that we have.” Another synchronicity. He does that, he takes me to the place. I get there, and I find out the bishop couldn’t pick me up because he had to pick up the cardinal, and the cardinal is more important than a psychologist. So what happened? I didn’t bring my blood pressure up. I was able to connect with someone and I was able to go through the most beautiful rainforest. If I had gone through that sequential, imposing, confirmation on that, I would have been fighting out there and getting upset, and you see how it works.
It’s a process of observation. Now how can you create the synchronicity and getting into "The Drift?" Try it and you’ll see. Simply do what I call “Feedforward.” Feedback, gives information from the past. Feedforward is information from the future. That sounds almost like Star Trek, but you’ll see in second. Get yourself ready to go out to dinner. I always talk about dinner because that’s the most powerful ritual that you can do for the immune system.
You and your friend, or you by yourself, decide that you’re going to go to a restaurant, and you make reservations and you plan to go to that restaurant. You get to the restaurant and you go to the maitre‘d and you tell him, “I changed my mind, I’m not going to this restaurant.” Right there the Drift starts. You don’t know what’s going to happen. You don’t know where you’re going to go, and then that is non-linear because you created self-turbulence—but you’re trusting that something is going to happen.
It doesn’t have to be significant. A very small thing has wisdom. And it may come up today and it may come out tomorrow, because non-linearity is not immediate. It has in the long run effect. Every time I do that, I amaze myself with the things that I find. I amaze myself with again confirming that the world is non-linear, that there’s tremendous information and tremendous possible things that go on, that when they come together, we call it synchronicity. Synchronicity is always there, we just don’t know how to get into the portals. And that’s the Drift.
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What are the conditions for linear and the conditions for non-linear? The linear conditions are predictable. You go from A to B and you can predict, and you go here and you go there.
The moment something breaks, especially if you get upset, that’s an indication for potential wisdom, an indication for going into the Drift. But you have to trust it because I have always found that eventually it has wisdom. You can’t expect the wisdom in the moment. And you can’t look for it because if you’re looking for it, you get linear. You have to let it come into you and humble you with the discovery.
So the key is to find when something is out of order, that’s a potential for the portal of the Drift.
www.soundstrue.com/podcast/transcripts/m...romhome=camefromhome
Here's yet another good book to add to my reading list. If I had to finish all the books on my list before I could die, I would live well into the next century. 
