Of Strange and Impossible Things
I'd been putting off watching Dr. Strange for a while. Not sure why, really. I love Marvel movies. I love Benedict Cumberbatch and Chiwetel Ejiofor. I love the notion of magic and the occult, and dreaming of a wonder of infinite worlds. Of infinite possibilities.
The other day, I went and saw Infinity Wars with my cousins, seeing it out of order. It's a credit to Marvel that it doesn't seem to matter what order you watch their movies in, they all still make sense.
I finally just finished watching Dr. Strange and it was everything I'd hoped it would be.
No, this isn't going to be a movie review. More-so just some general musings that the movie, along with recent events, prompted my spirit to make, but ... you might wanna stick around anyway. Maybe, just maybe, reading this prompts your spirit to some deep revelation, either now or at some point down the line.
Time has always been a fascinating concept to me. People say time is the fourth dimension. They treat it like it's a real thing. The space-time continuum they call it. Ever since I first took physics in high school, I'd always rejected the idea of time as something real, at least in the way that, say, matter and energy are real. I've always seen it as more of a human construct. Something our consciousness creates. Time is an illusion and the only part that's real is present - right now.
Anytime I say that, people often look at me like I'm crazy. Anti-science. But think about it.
We only ever experience the now. We can't experience the past except in memory, or the future except in imagination. We can't envision events from other times apart from what we're experiencing right now except in the mind's eye. It isn't real. It isn't physical. Just a mental construct. A program. A simulation of reality.
People act as if it's real, and that's not to say there aren't consequences, but they only ever happen right now, don't they? Anything else is just a projection, really. The only part that feels real is now.
Think about all the ways in which we perceive time.
The sun moving across the sky. Hands moving across the face of a clock. Things eroding. Things decaying. Things growing. The passing of the seasons. The vibration of atoms relative to some fixed point in space. The beating of our hearts and the rising and falling of our breath.
Do you know what all these things have in common?
They're things in motion. Like cels in an animation or frames of a movie, the universe around us exists merely as a series of points arranged according to certain patterns. Abstract symbols. Dots on a page for our minds to connect and interpret and make sense of. Our consciousness - our spirit - then moves through each slice of life, each moment, each instant, one by one, in succession, only ever viewing one at a time, and always in the present moment. This cycling - this apparent change in the arrangement of dots on the page - creates in our minds the illusion of the passage of time.
It's an illusion because the dots don't really change. They just appear to as we flip from page to page, from frame to frame, but each instance is necessary to remain exactly as it is. At least until we've past through it.
Everything in life happens exactly as it's meant to, when it's meant to, because time is an illusion.
Like Dr. Strange, I am a born healer, gifted with great power to fix problems and to heal others. I speak often of the benefits of alternative medicine and spiritual healing. I have helped others find peace within themselves. I have listened to them and gotten them to lower their emotional barriers at a rate that sometimes scared them, opening up about things they'd never told anyone before. I created the #HealTheDivide campaign because I thought my purpose in life was to bring healing the world.
To heal the divide.
And like Dr. Strange, I have been arrogant at times in thinking that I could heal those who didn't want to be healed. But I can't. The divide can't be healed when it's actively fighting against me.
On the wall of the office of our family doctor is written the following phrase:
"The most powerful doctor in the world, is the doctor from within."
It seems self-evident, really, if you know anything about medicine. No surprise that it came up in the movie. The Ancient One poses a question to Strange that any doctor worth their salt knows the answer to - do you heal the body or does the body heal itself? Of course, the body heals itself.
Elsewhere on the walls of our family doctor's office is written:
"The power that made the body heals the body."
Whether you think we are spiritual beings of light made in God's image, or a complex chemistry set, the principle is the same. Whatever power made the body is the same that heals the body. No external assistance required except to remove those obstacles that stop the body from naturally healing itself.
The same is true on all scales of reality.
Whether mental, physical, emotional, spiritual, personal, familial, financial, social, political, global, environmental, temporal, universal ... All you have to do is surrender to that power and things will work themselves out. Remove whatever blocks the innate flow of life and healing will follow. In this way, a great many miracles have been performed. Many seemingly impossible things.
At one point in the movie, I got up to go use the bathroom. I stood there washing my hands, staring into the mirror. Like Dr. Strange, I'd been arrogant. Time was the enemy and I thought I could fight against it. Like the Ancient One, I'd been given a vision of my own end but struggled to see past it.
One-hundred-eleven.
That's how many years the universe told me I would live. Not bad as far as humans go, I've still got a long way until then; but while such knowledge may seem like a comforting blessing, it's more often than not felt like a curse. Instead of enjoying my life, safe in the knowledge that no matter what happens, I'll survive to a ripe old age, it's instead made me fearful, risk-averse. I wanted so badly to live that long that I questioned whether each thing I did would be the death of me and keep me from seeing it.
In reality, the opposite should have been true. It should have empowered me, but it didn't.
Likewise, it brought to the forefront of my transhumanist mind questions of what will happen around that time. Will we have the technology by then to extend life? To dive into an artificial body and life as an immortal? Was my death a metaphor or was it simply the result of my hubris in trying to outfox the dark dimension of the abyss? Would I go under for surgery and never come up again? Would I see my astral self projected into the ether and watch as some artificial intelligence now walked around acting like it was me?
Would I be among the first generation of immortals or the last generation to just barely miss it? I don't know the answer to that, but it'll be interesting to find out either way.
Death gives life meaning. Like a cancer patient suddenly living their life to the fullest because each breath is a gift and they don't know which will be their last. Yet my own is squandered on not really living despite knowing exactly how long I have. I'd been looking forward to the promise of immortality through technology, but what would I do with it if I had it, given I'm wasting my years now?
Would I still be paranoid, avoiding risks for the sake of prolonging longevity? If I had a robot body, for instance, would I avoid swimming out of fear of not knowing whether the water might seep into my circuits and fry them, and me along with it?
That doesn't sound like much fun to a fish like me.
I viewed time and death as the enemy. I tried to fight them in my arrogance, just as I had tried to heal those who didn't want to be healed. You can't do it, the universe told me. Yet it was also the universe who compelled me to watch this film at precisely the time when my spirit was ready to hear what it had to say. The lesson was that I'd forgotten a most crucial fact. It wasn't about me.
Being a healer and helping others isn't about yourself. It's about the other person you're helping.
Yes, in a technical sense, through the laws of conservation, you still do it for your own selfish reasons and get something out of it in return, but the intention should be one that recognizes their benefit, their will as an individual entity. That their own body, their own spirit might not be ready to accept your offer and forcing the issue without their conscious participation would be like a doctor violating their patient's consent.
Somehow, I keep forgetting that, and when I do is usually when things get fucked up. That even when I'm doing something objectively good for someone else, if the focus is still on me, then it becomes a subtle poison tainting the whole process.
It becomes a cure worse than the disease I'm trying to remedy.
All actions have consequences but we can only affect what we do in the moment. We can't change the past, but we can change how we feel about it; and we can't change the future, except by changing what we do in the present.
The Spirit whispered to me as I stared in the mirror. You can't heal them, you can't heal the divide, and you can't live forever, it said. You already know the answer, and what your purpose is. It's to live in the moment and transcend yourself, always growing. I glanced up and stared at my reflection, looking deep into my own eyes, through the very window of my soul, and in my mind I said to the Spirit with a look of determined defiance:
I will live forever. I will heal the divide. I will broker peace, healing those who don't want to be healed.
I will do the impossible and do all the things that you tell me I can't, because I can.
It's been said that the reasonable man adapts himself to the world, whereas the unreasonable man adapts the world to himself; therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
This has certainly been an era of accomplishing impossible things.
No one thought Donald Trump would run for President, but then he did. No one thought he'd win the primary, but then he did. No one thought he'd win the general, but then he did. No one thought he'd start the wall, but then he did. No one thought he'd rescue the economy back from the brink, but then he did. No one thought he'd defeat ISIL, but then he did. No one thought he'd bring about peace in North Korea, but then he did ... at least it's looking that way.
How many more times does this man need to achieve the seemingly impossible?
I can't tell you how many times, both on Twitter and in real life, I've heard people tell me that getting through to the social justice left was impossible. But then I did it. On the other side, people think it's impossible to get through to those on the far-right. But then I did that too. In both cases, I did what others thought was impossible just by being reasonable and appealing to their humanity.
Christ went through this with his own disciples who doubted his miracles, as have many prophets and luminaries throughout history.
Do you think Gandhi would have been better off listening to his critics who told him that trying to oust the British Empire from India was impossible? How about the leaders of the Civil Rights movement or the Founding Fathers?
Imagine how different our world would be today if great visionaries like that allowed themselves to be limited by what others thought was possible.
Maybe instead of telling people how they can't do the things they're actively doing because you think they're impossible, maybe you humble yourself and actually listen to what they have to say and try to learn a thing or two from them in the hopes of achieving it yourself.
You watch the tremendous progress the Intellectual Dark Web has accomplished. Amazing, wonderful human beings like Dave Rubin, Candace Owens, Jordan Peterson, Scott Adams, Mike Cernovich, Cassie Jaye, Kanye West, Hawk Newsome, Anita Sarkeesian, and many others all working to do what people think is impossible, which is heal the pain and division in our world.
People think it's impossible, yet it's actually happening!!
If you want to see more examples of impossible things happening in real life, read about the lives and work of anyone from my Portraits of Inspiration gallery. There's a reason I call it that. Read about the struggles and hardships many of these people went through, the ways in which their lives and their world views changed over time.
The things they've done, and the things they continue to do.
Those who say it can't be done shouldn't stand in the way of those doing it. Those people simply lack imagination, and like Dr. Strange, they will be in for a rude and sudden awakening as their own egos get flung from their bodies until they weep.
This is the mindset that people like Kayne, Trump, Scott, Cernovich and others talk about, that we can imagine ourselves into a better future, and that in fact having such a vivid imagination and clear vision is an essential first step in shaping our reality into what we'd like it to be. That process is well under way and people can either conform to it and get on board or be left behind to suffer a life unfulfilled.
Change isn't just coming. Change is here now! Open your eyes and take notice!
You might like reading my book because it's got all sorts of strange and impossible stuff in it too, like magic, and totally badass characters, action scenes, sexiness, and deep philosophical insights. You can also support me on Patreon if you enjoy articles like this and want to read more. It really helps and I appreciate your generosity.
May you each find love, peace, purpose, happiness, and will in your lives.
