Weekly SPARK - Experiment 102
You are not making enough mistakes.
SPARK EXPERIMENT
Specific Practical Application of Radical Knowledge
SPARK- Experiment 102
You are not making enough mistakes.
(Matrix Code SPARK102.00)
Notes: You are not making enough mistakes to unfold who you are, to discover those qualities of yourself that you don’t already know.
Mother Nature uses mistakes as a resource. You can too. Mistakes provide variations out of which Mother Nature can select evolutionary inventions. But there is a difference between animal instinct and human volition. Humans have the flexibility to conform their nature unnaturally. This phenomenon is clearly recognized, but the consequences of unconsciously conforming are not admitted.
Instead of being yourself you have been trained to contour your presence and your participation to an imagined ideal of not making mistakes. You were taught that avoiding mistakes is more important than authentic aliveness.
A mistake is any result not contained in the original expectations. Not making mistakes means sustaining expectations, creating no change, staying controlled.
Mistakes are defined contextually. Produced under different expectations the same action may be regarded as a success. For example, patting a child’s head is a social offense in Indonesia and a loving affection in France. A failed glue that would not stick became Post-It® notes. Van Gogh was nearly unknown in his lifetime but today is regarded as having enormously influenced impressionism. Tap-dancing might be frowned upon in a bank, but applauded on a stage.
It is usual to be so conditioned to regard your current operating context as if it were the only possible context that you fail to recognize how vast your variety of possible operating contexts is. This way you abdicate responsibility for choosing which context you operate within and let the surroundings choose for you. It becomes habitual to subvert your extemporaneous creativity for almost no reward. You exchange your ability to respond in any way to any situation for the illusion of security that comes from behaving in the ordinary way prescribed by your local environment. For years you conform your expression until it fossilizes and can take no other form. This is not bad; it is just unconscious herd behavior, and does not pay respects to your full intelligence.
What can you do? Even the revolutionary motto: Question Authority, is weak compared to the more responsible challenge: Become Authority. Becoming the autonomous authority of yourself is radical responsibility. You can retain the option to choose whether or not you adapt the quality of your presence to local norms. This is Gandhi’s nonviolent noncompliance (ahimsa satyagraha). Disagreeing without requiring that others agree with your disagreement. Having a different opinion.
Considering this possibility for yourself may immediately awaken profound fears of being outcast, fears of being regarded as insane, fears of becoming a lawless run-amuck, fears of being labeled a sociopath. These are formidable fears, more than enough threat to keep most people painting themselves as white sheep.
You stop fearing mistakes when you recognize it is the mind that erects impossibly perfect goals for you to measure yourself against. The mind so easily uses perfect concepts like always, or never, or one. There is no always, no such thing as one. You think of one apple and you assume that what you think is real. But there is no such thing as one apple! An apple does not end at its skin. An apple is a chemical factory pumping sweet perfumes into the air to attract any eater who will deposit its seeds where they can sprout and make more apples. An apple cannot appear except from an apple tree, grown from an apple seed in an entire ecosystem of sunlight, rain and soil. An apple is a flow from the morphogenetic apple field using humans to help evolve apple genes. There is no such thing as one apple.
The mind imagines that an action has a beginning and an end. But there is no simple beginning or end. There are so many layers and levels of energies involved: subtle, auric, etheric, karmic, cosmic, an evolving ecology of entities and creatures in multiple dimensions of worlds all interacting within us, through us and around us with every action, thought, feeling and choice. Everything is connected to everything else, and it was this way long before there were people to think about it.
When you get it that making no mistakes is only the mind’s perfect illusion then the mind becomes the mistake. Life does not conform to the mind. If you struggle to conform to the mind’s concept of making no mistakes life may be passing you by.
Experiment: You don’t have to do this experiment. Society needs white sheep. This experiment may get you into the kind of trouble that your parents warned you about. You may end up having bigger tasks on your “to do” list, less time to watch TV, a leadership position in bringing your own destiny to life, and impulses to question the less ethical or more self-serving actions of others. On the other hand, you could consider this experiment as an antidote to boredom and just go ahead.
The experiment is to make more mistakes. Be a little more daring with your own genius. Bring an extra handful of faith into your day – faith that you will survive the consequences of being less adaptive to conventional restrictions, less predictable, providing fewer justifications. What does this experiment look like in practical terms? Here are some examples to play with:
- Accept that you have a pirate part, a clown part, an adventurer part, and a renegade part. Give these wild parts more voice. Let them have more control of where you place your attention and what you do with your energy, what you say and do. Let your little dog pull open the curtain to reveal the nervous men controlling fake scary monsters. Stay in relationship with the nervous men. Help them wake up about what they are doing. Do this in public. Make mistakes.
- Remind yourself that even though governments burned witches at the stake and heretics were hideously tortured by the church during hundreds of years, these days there is more room to play around without so much fear for your life. Speak to other people about what you see that could work better and what is not working so well. Figure out what you can do now to make a difference in your own life and just do it.
- Consider that you may be the only one who sees a particular opportunity for improving things. You may be seeing it because it is your responsibility to do something about it. The universe is counting on you to respond. If you muffle your own response you take yourself out of the flow. Respond before you think. Keep moving in the flow. Keep making mistakes.
- Take on a bigger enemy. If your present enemy is your partner or your child, then go to the next level and take on your partner’s boss or your child’s teacher. If you are already at that level, then confront the company board of directors or the county school committee. Keep moving up through the hierarchies and sourcing conversations that matter. Make more mistakes.
- Move without hesitation using the momentum of your responsible urges. Many urges are irresponsible Gremlin urges. Skip those. Many urges are responsible masculine or feminine urges. Let these move you. If you are serving the greater good then what you want is actually being wanted by the greater good. Learn to notice how many times each day you get an impulse to make a change but you repress the action, even with simple things, like straightening a chair or welcoming a newcomer. Experiment with alternating, that is, repress one urge, and then follow through with the next one so you become more conscious of deciding between repressing and taking action.
- Exhibit nonviolent non-cooperation towards seductions into irresponsibility. Start with small things, such as not conforming to traditional taste in clothing styles, not assuming that putting something in the trash makes it disappear, or addressing taboo subjects such as parenting behavior or communication habits. Then simply do not comply with the implicit expectations to stay silent or to stay the same. Do not fit in only so as to fit in. Gradually let your experiments continue longer and get bigger. Make more mistakes.
- Try things for which you are decidedly under-certified. Use absorptive listening and authentic relationship as catalysts to amplify the diverse intelligences of others. Transfer the sensitive touch of your expertise in, say, woodworking, cooking, or music, to the delicacy with which you navigate conversations with people individually and in groups. Then take leadership risks on the group’s behalf, falling repeatedly into their feedback and coaching like a tightrope walker falls gleefully into a safety net, only to climb back up the ladder to try again.
- Create your own experiments for making mistakes.
SPARK - Experiment 102 in other languages!
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Experiment boldly,
Your random SPARK Generator.
Solid reframe on mistakes as evolution rather than failure. That line about humans having the flexibility to conform unnaturally hit hard, I've definately noticed how that plays out in corporate settings where everyone optimizes for not being wrong instead of acually being right. The challenge isn't just making more mistakes but recognizing which context we're operating in and whether we even chose it consciously.