Why ‘Blowing Our Minds’ is the Portal to the Future

As a child of the 60’s and 70’s, I would commonly hear how new ideas, technology or music would “blow your mind.”

Of course, growing up in a conservative household at the epicenter of the fossil fuel industry (near Houston, my hometown was dually famous for the world’s largest petrochemical plant AND the filming of John Wayne’s Hellfighters,) I literally imagined those tie-dye or psychedelic trippy art posters as just covers for the Beatles, Elton John, Jimi Hendrix or Stones albums, rather than images you might see when you’ve popped-the-top to your conceptions of reality.

I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

I grew up amidst many of my peers using marijuana to get high, stoned, tripped, dropped-in and tuned-out and generally escape the late-Nixonesque reality of my early adolescence.

Despite the crackdown of the era to eliminate what we now know as ‘cognitive liberation,’ most of my peers chose anyway to eliminate the social constraints of reality.

Being an ardent learner, I chose to walk the path of mind expansion through books and religion. It didn’t seem prudent at the time to risk the organic expansion of my mind and spirit for the temporary loosening of societal shackles.

And oddly, many of those same weed-wielding peers moved on to more conventional tracks in life — doctors, bankers, lawyers, teachers, scientists, tech moguls etc, while I kept wending my way down the path to explore what my mind didn’t yet know.

Perhaps I kept searching because I hadn’t found the answer.

Maybe they stopped searching because they found it early, but there was no way to live that expanded awareness in a society that was so constrained.

For most, the invitation to have your ‘mind blown’ was an outrageous (and ultimately disappointing) frontrunner to the mind-numbing experiences of the 80s/90s and simultaneous maximization and narrowing of power, productivity, and profit.

The vast shutdown of mind-expanding experiences of the 70s (designed to eliminate the liberation of young and radicalized minds and create conformity of thought around ‘traditional’ values) produced a corresponding winnowing of perspectives, which shaped the landscape we’re now facing.

Either way, societal level awareness and even formal infrastructures are increasingly loosening the restraints that have kept us bound in that conformist thought.

Not that this new awareness is mainstream, but it’s on its way to becoming so.

Why Do We Need to Pop the Top to our Mental Constraints? (aka Why This? Why Now? Why You?)

Hang with me here for a couple minutes. Remember I DIDN’T blow the top off my mind until much later… so I have an acute ability to synthesize large amounts of information.

Let me walk through this notion of why NOW is the time for truly blowing our minds.

Never before in recorded human history have we reached a state of potential civilizational collapse, along with environmental catastrophe, YET have access to tools, resources and technologies for achieving global transformation, AND while reaching a tipping point that demands we must act newly.

As Zach Bush noted in a recent podcast with Richard Rudd and influencer Deja Blu, “It’s Big Wave surfing time!”

We are perfectly positioned to tackle this problem. It is why we are here.

And, just in time, the majority of us (at least according to UK polls) believe that we must create another way for ourselves, and the planet, or see the end of everything as we know it (or wish it to be.)

And while some parts of our larger culture want to ignore these incontrovertible truths (as noted by decades of research by scholar Jem Bendell in Breaking Together,) the majority of us around the globe insist that we want things to evolve for the improvement of the planet and people.

Here’s the crux:

NOT ONLY do we want to create a shared possibility for an alternative future than the one that lies in front of us now…

… But we CAN.

The potency of this timing is realizing that the only thing standing in our way is a failure of imagination.

The Mental Schemas That Bind Us

When we hold onto the myths that:

• We are not ready for, nor capable of change,
• Finding our way must involve a complete deconstruction of all systems (or the world will end,)
• Speaking truth about our dire situation will be counterproductive,
• Small-scale approaches must precede large-system solutions, or
• Giving in to the ‘other side’ will water-down our effectiveness….

… AND, most importantly, if we hold onto the myth that the world exists as we’ve imagined it thus far…

… without considering that quantum physics has ALREADY shown us that our every observation and mental schema influences how we experience reality in the future and even the past …

…and that our old mental schemas of thinking of everything as matter (the materialist paradigm) are outdated and finally beginning to yield to the Idealist paradigm, whereby matter is created from our mental schemas [in other words, matter exists only because we think it’s so, or thoughts and beliefs CREATE our reality)…

… as none other than Iaian McGilchrist argues in Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World (2021) that we need both science and intuition, reason and imagination, to survive our own blindedness to materialist reality and find our way to the future…

… and this emerging awareness that the world we grew up in is, in fact, radically different than the one we imagined (see Living in the Metacrisis with Jonathan Rowson AND Nate Hagen’s Great Simplification podcast with Daniel Schmachtenberger)…

… both of which suggest that we’re REQUIRED to imagine a new future, and aim toward that which we’re called to do from our souls, rather than solving these intractable and intertwined problems…

[Yes, that’s all a mouthful. Take a deep breath. Please hang with me]

…And, Yes, Why We Should Now Blow Our Minds

…and it is possible to find new ways of knowing that allow us to truly engage with reality from this new awareness in order to step into our wildness and recalibrate to our full potential that’s never been expressed before.

So that UNTIL we let go of all these myths… and unearth the Creator that wants to be of service (what Richard Rudd calls the “abandoned nature” within ourselves)… who desires to act from our hearts’ deepest desires, rather than responding to the world from a trauma response…

… we lose the capacity to imagine that NOT ONLY are we more capable, prepared, insightful, trained, resourced and committed to creating a different future THAN EVER…

… but we are ALSO able to integrate perspectives, go small and big simultaneously, bring along our fellow humans, and scaffold new solutions onto old systems.

That is…. ONLY IF You, Me, and We can find a way to activate and enliven our own individual and collective hearts and souls desires, and fulfill our essential and collective purpose to actually create this new way.

To BE this new form of human.

And Here’s Where We Start

BUT to do so… as Chris Bache notes in LSD & the Mind of the Universe, we must do the work to resolve the patterns of our multiple lifetime trajectories. Richard Rudd also describes this notion of karma (being represented as the slice of suffering in each lifetime) as the “wound map”, or the spiral through our DNA from the fractal line that connects us to Source, and which also reveals the “golden thread” of our awakening.

Yep, the one and same Golden Thread that we’ve been identifying as the source of the soul’s trajectory among thousands of clients.

… so, IN A NUTSHELL, the only way to find our way into the future is to BOLDLY:

• Blow the lid off our internalized constraints and identity of who we are… because we are NOT who we thought we were,
• Reclaim the lost power (and Love!) of our true essence…because that power has always been inside us, just repressed,
• Reimagine who we truly are, as powerful Creators…because our innate creativity lies within those repressed parts of us,
• Allow the emergence of what lives within…because as we reclaim those parts, our natural unfolding happens without restraint or effort,
• Co-create our reality within a living cosmos, to BE the Portal to the Future…because as we end the dissociation of our fractured parts, and allow our true selves to emerge, we learn to create with the living cosmos which co-creates the future,
• Create an alternative future with generative Beings…because as we emerge as our true selves, we can’t restrain the playful power of joy and awe that resonates with other creative souls,
• Learn to Live as a Prayer to the Sacred within, through and all around… because living as your aligned sacred Self feels like living attuned to the cosmic impulse of Love, and
• Create a virtuous cycle of Evolution and Involution, Emergence and Creation, Love and Power.

Is That All?

Said quite facetiously, given we’ve all grown up in a world enculturated to believing that ‘reality’ was constrained by what we saw and touched, the material objects around us.

And therefore, we could only become what we could gain access to… money, material objects, the rewards of achievement…

… all this primarily gained by conforming to the dominant powers in the materialist culture.

And thus, as we attempt to replace the now-debunked materialist paradigm (only sustained by believing in it, voting for it, and recreating its stranglehold through consumerism, remaining forms of colonialism and dominant hierarchies of thought) …

…which ensnare us all to believe we’re less than who we really are…

… and as those mental-hijacking cords are cut and the emperor’s clothes literally fall to his feet…

…. we realize that our world is so much more expansive. Awe-inspiring. Full of delicious potential. Interconnected. Joyful and enlivening.

… and we become enlivened and emboldened ourselves to allow our minds to be blown with that cacophony of alternatives.

This Ain’t Peter Max. Or Is It?

The 1970s pop artist Peter Max was famous for painting his version of reality, eventually re-branded as psychedelic art and which perhaps influenced U.S. culture as enormously as did the Beatles.

As examples of his influence, the “World of Peter Max” exhibit opened in a San Francisco museum and was then displayed at forty other museums. His artwork appeared on magazine covers, and dozens of consumer products, and on three covers of the New York City Yellow Pages spanning 1970–2001. Max created the first USPS environmental stamp to commemorate Expo ’74 in Spokane WA, initiated the renovation of the Statue of Liberty (after painting her figure in true psychedelic form,) and was celebrated in the White House Rose Garden by Ronald Reagan.

But his genius didn’t emerge from a linear conformist path. Despite having been influenced by calligraphy in China (where he grew up,) art education in Israel and then at the Parisian Louvre, then under Frank J Reilly, a Norman Rockwell protege, Max’s primary influence was that of the Yoga master Swami Satchidananda who taught him “a whole new way to draw.”… empowering him “to feel the cosmic consciousness within, and to allow that to flow out of me into my art.”

It is unknown whether Peter Max required entheogenic substances to aid in his mind-blowing artistic capacity. What is certain is that he allowed himself to uncork his conception of art. Redefine the boundaries. Unshackle his brain. Reimagine possibility.

He never would’ve created a new zeitgeist of art and culture had he clung to the first, second third or even fourth (and all renowned) styles of art in which he’d been indoctrinated.

Peter Max popped the top off the existing mental schema of art for art’s sake, even in the psychedelic era where rules were in short supply.

And thus, he blew the minds of every facet of the culture, from government institutions to teen clothing.

Me included. At 13, I had a Peter Max bag and thought I was a cool kitten.

What We Must Do Now

Wanting to create solutions for a world that’s seemingly falling apart isn’t easy.

We desire to imagine a future that doesn’t exist, and create solutions that have no roadmap.

Yet the hurdles and effort required to birth our deepest desires or live into our unspoken and audacious dreams feel overwhelming and require us to address our own internal voices that keep us feeling less than capable.

We know we CAN create solutions that address global problems, yet the future is emerging so fast that we can’t seem to keep up with the shifts. We know we have to reimagine how we show up with an awakened awareness that is beyond our current capacity.

But nobody taught us (yet) how to move past our own limitations to become the powerful human who’s able to look around the corner that doesn’t yet exist.

We need to overcome the remaining disparate voices within to become the Creator who’s capable of envisioning the future.

To become the nimble, agile and resilient Being that can navigate what’s next, while being grounded in the authentic truth of our divine channel.

If I may so boldly suggest, we know how to do this.

I can guide you to translating your audacious dreams into world-changing innovations WHILE healing your deepest shadows, living into your sacred power AND becoming tethered with evolved Souls committed to leading the way to a new future.

Stay tuned. Help is on the way.

About the Author

I’m the Author of the bestseller, The Golden Thread: Where to Find Purpose in the Stages of Your Life. Download this free audio course to learn about your own Golden Thread of purpose.

I’ve spent my life imagining a world where we could all become who we’re meant to be, awake and alive in a way that allows us to express our most innate, natural and purposeful gifts.

I believe the bridge to our future exists in becoming rooted in our purpose, and more prepared for the unknown. Download the Navigate Our Wild Future Playbook to gain tools to help you prepare.

And very soon we’re unleashing an immersive and experiential initiative called Sacred Human Expedition, designed to help us all learn to navigate from love, not fear, and become the audacious and inspired Creators the world needs now.

Stay tuned or contact me to learn more.

Explore at Emergence Institute.