Link: https://www.infiniteloopspodcast.com/tom-morgan-all-you-need-is-love-ep74/
Tom Morgan, Director of Communications & Content at The KCP Group, joins Jim O’Shaughnessy on Infinite Loops to discuss:
- The trillion-to-one ratio of attention
- “Love” as a compass for growth
- Religions and Traditions
- Enlightenment vs. Adulthood
On attention and the possibility that there is something beyond us:
Tom: I’m not going to paraphrase the whole thing [Usual Illusion], but the relevant piece that we probably are aware of 60 bits of information at any given moment, but there’s 11 million that are potentially available to us. If I say to you, “Wiggle your big toe,” you’re suddenly aware of your big toe. That information was coming to you all this time.
You are having a conversation with a cocktail party with one person, and you hear someone else across the room say your name and you swivel your attention to that. You were taking that information in some way, it just wasn’t being served to your conscious awareness. It’s a filtering process. That feels like something that’s intuitive and is easy for us to understand. The bit that took me a really long time to understand is the idea that outside of that million to one ratio, there’s a trillion to one ratio of things that we’re never aware of and never can be aware of.
When you think about an earthworm, an earthworm has never seen a sunset and it will never see a sunset because it has not evolved to see a sunset. We will never experience the way a Bloodhound does with 200 million receptors in its nose because it’s not relevant to us. So the reason why that’s important is that if you think about a trillion to one ratio of things outside of us, the things that we’re aware of, the idea that there wouldn’t be a force influencing us that was hidden goes from a possibility to, I think, a probability.
How the powerful were able to shut down threats with might and control of information in mid-sixties to mid-seventies
Jim: Watch the music videos from that time. Again the artists were at the forefront. They were the tip of the spear in this and the spear scared the shit out of the left-brained dominant society and the man, so to speak. Psychedelics were broadly being misused in many cases. But all of the elements required for a phase change to happen successfully were in place in the mid-sixties to the mid-seventies. The man in this case, Richard Nixon, but everyone in control, and I’m speaking pretty specifically about the US here. But it happened in the UK too. And it happened in Germany. It was a global phenomenon. They made drugs, almost all of which are the non-addicting drugs, illegal. Fed max prison for going. They made an example of Timothy Leary. He became the scapegoat for like, having a couple of joints in his pocket? They didn’t even get him with any kind of psychedelic. You got to remember this guy was a tenured professor at Harvard, who was a well-thought-of psychologist. And, so they made an example of him because, now this is getting into kind of my take on this, people are terrified of what the implications are for being free.
The conventional keepers of the social “truths” shut it the fuck down. And they did that because they could. They did that because back then there was no global communication network like we have today.
People, for example, didn’t know that Franklin Roosevelt was in a wheelchair. They did not know that. Can you imagine in our day and age? Even trying to comprehend that is wild. So they were the keepers of the “truth” and it was a narrative that everyone believed.
Bucky Fuller, on death and rebirth being a shocking or scary idea:
There’s nothing about a caterpillar that suggests the butterfly.
The balance of safety and vitality; bridging specific knowledge and control with the abstract
Tom: And at the moment we’ve optimized for safety at the cost of vitality. And if you want vitality, you have to give up certainty. You have to give up the certainty of what you want, and you have to give up all forms of security, but not all forms of security. I don’t want to overstate this. Everything’s a balance, right? We’ve just gone too far in one direction. And I think that’s sort of the prescription. It doesn’t involve a huge societal meltdown. It just involves more of an awareness of our own vulnerability and our own holistic inclusiveness.
Jim: It’s not like we haven’t been thinking about this as human beings. Forever we have, and we let traditions, and I’m not anti-tradition, but I am opposed to traditions which have osified and are not serving us anymore. And it’s like our school system, it’s like every, this is the kind of the main central heart of the great reshuffle. All of those old systems are broken or breaking. And we need to make new ones. And making new ones is going to be scary, but the only way you do that is to understand vitality.
Tom: I think any kind of reductionist theory is always going to be incomplete. You can get to the Higgs boson, but the Higgs boson isn’t going to tell you how to live your life. Right? You need values for that. I think there are actual universal values. They may be expressed in a Ten Commandment or something like that. But there is some sort of metaphysical truth out there. But the root to that individual creativity. That way you co-create with the environment around yo is intrinsically unique. And that sounds incredibly saccharine. Because it’s like, everyone’s special. Everyone’s got creativity inside them. Again, terrible words, right. When I heard “creativity”, I think of finger painting. And when you talk about reading poetry and listening to songs that just annoys my intellect.
But you have to remember that your intellect is fiercely resistant to all of these ideas because it requires giving up the steering wheel.
[Still] you do need to be is actually practical, because spiritual regressiveness and spiritual bypassing gets us nowhere in the same direction. So you need to be looking for people that are building the bridge from science back to spirituality.
Intuition or wisdom as evidence of a good filter
Tom: I read a resonant quote, two days ago, wisdom is knowing what information is important. Well that’s simple and incredibly profound, right? And to go back to the Usual Illusion example: you can’t take in 11 million bits, you’d be burned out like a light bulb in a nuclear reactor. You can’t take in a trillion bits, you’d be jello. So all this is about, is all we’re talking about is how do you calibrate your filter to get the full range of human experience, including the shit stuff, which is the problem. If you hide in your intellect, as a lot of people I know have, it’s typically a coping mechanism to prevent yourself from experiencing the full range of human emotion.
And if you do get blown open, a blowing open experience tends to be incapacitating and overwhelming. And that’s the point. You’re not supposed to have a direct experience of that, right? Too many crazy psychedelic experiences make you too open. You believe everything, you need a good filter.
And that’s the definition of wisdom. And I think that George Soros example is brilliant. So like, for those of you that don’t know the George Soros anecdote, it was that he used to give all these really clever, retroactive reasons why he did things and then his son gave an interview I think to the Irish Times where he was like “Oh no, it’s just his back hurts when his portfolio positioned wrong.”
I thought about that for a long time. And my interpretation of it, whether right or wrong is that, we lay down a whole bunch of information from pattern recognition and he laid down a whole bunch of information from seeing an enormous number of different trading scenarios play out. But those recognition patterns run in the background. Because if they’re running in the foreground, you’re not going to get anything done. You’re going to be using your 60-bit consciousness to act in the world. But when something trips that, because it’s not running in your intellect, it’s running in your unconscious, you’re going to feel it as a sensation first.
And that’s the point. You need to be in tune enough and embodied enough that when you feel that, you don’t just feel it and discount it, you feel it and know what it means. So you are serving the correct emotions, you’re serving the correct physical sensations to your consciousness. And then you are able to interpret them and act on them in the correct way. That is a well-calibrated filter. It’s not about feeling everything all the time, because then you’re just going to be mush.