Chapter 10 - Unfinished Business
Coincidence Speaks
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Happy Friday friends!
Last week I hopped on the Substackian lovewagon and shared a few pieces that I found especially moving. And decided that from here on out I’m going to be really intentional around sharing the work I come across that moves me, to an italicized degree.
Soon after I came upon this piece by
which is this week’s iteration of that commitment. In this short and unassuming storyline she simultaneously manages to burn down and rekindle my faith in humanity. Tough to do. 10/10 would recommend.
That said, we now return to the latest release of Coincidence Speaks. Chapters are crafted to be read on a standalone basis. For the full experience head this way to start at the beginning!↩️
Chapter 10 finds Paul… getting back to work.
Chapter 10
Unfinished Business
As the New Year began, Paul was thrilled to jump back into his career. In fact he couldn’t imagine anyone on the planet more excited about the good ‘ole Working Man’s Nine to Five. Except, of course, Clara—after the hellish ordeal they’d been through, he was sure she was more than ready to have him out of the house and back as a functioning member of society again.
“But how the heck am I going to function in the office now, with everything I’ve been through? With freaking Obi-Wan Kenobi being right about the Force being real, and these strange Jedi time tricks that keep happening out of the blue?” he wondered.
Paul’s old tried-and-true business strategy had been a frenetic attempt to plot out and control every possible variable with forced effort and personal willpower. This new, naturally expressive and accepting state was from a completely different time zone.
More than that, it was from a different planet.
He laughed aloud, that type of little laugh that is uncertain whether or not it’s a cough, thinking about incorporating “every moment is its own timeless miracle” woo woo-ness into the no-nonsense business world. A place of serious deadlines, of social hierarchies, of financial strategy and measurable outcomes. Surely though in this new enlightened-ish state of equanimity he could handle anything the corporate world might throw at him.
He was a little surprised when it didn’t turn out to be an issue at all. He just didn’t sweat the small stuff, or the big stuff anymore—large or small, it was all just stuff. And as far as sweat was concerned, he remained positively ecstatic that his leg no longer soaked through his bedsheets at night.
Elated, he found his hard-won enthusiasm energizing his career. Within a few months, Paul was fully retrenched and absorbed in the world of sales production, relationship building, and financial trend analysis. And loving it.
He couldn’t tell exactly when it happened.
Somehow, some time over the course of those first few months back, that vital felt-sense of interconnection slipped away in the night, slowly but surely overshadowed by the fast-paced world of the family man swallowed whole by demanding career, family, and social responsibilities.
In its place was an echo—a pale remembrance—that there was something much more to the world. But he couldn't quite reach it or feel it anymore. Something hovered on the precipice of his awareness, but it disappeared when he tried to look directly at it, dancing maddeningly on the loose edges of his mind.
But he couldn’t ever fully forget now. The entire experience had been imprinted in his cellular memory. The world he thought he’d known had been ripped apart at the seams and permanently warped into a new shape, just like his Dad Edition New Balance shoe when his ankle had imploded in the Gold’s Gym. The sole had become unmoored, and it wasn’t going to fit anymore. No matter how hard he might try to cram it back on.
Paul went on to lead his business team in sales that year. With his performance numbers way up, he didn’t have much of a problem keeping up the appearance of normality in the business world. Career-wise, at least from the outside looking in, he was more productive than he had ever been.
But from the inside out, Paul now burned with intense curiosity, a near manic obsession with gathering more information. More understanding.
The mysterious bioelectrical explosion of his nervous system had been a spontaneous combustion of every assumption he’d ever held about life, and his brain simply would not rest until it had more clarity around what the heck had happened to him. He had to know more about the source of such immense power, where it all came from, and most importantly—what the point of it all was!
It seemed to Paul like much of the traditional science he’d been taught in his standardized public education, with its emphasis on observation of physical matter properties, wasn’t quite accessing the full picture. What he’d always been taught in school was that everything was made up of physical matter, and that for something to be considered “true,” a series of linear effects in the physical world had to be demonstrated and observed repeatedly.
But Paul had personally experienced something quite different—he had witnessed directly observable, very real physical effects coming from an invisible, seemingly subjective inner world. Like the placebo effect on steroids.
And as he followed conventional science into its further reaches, reading about mind-bending concepts like quantum mechanics and string theory and fractal geometry and multidimensionality, science itself seemed to “toe the line” and become more conceptual, more theoretical, more philosophical in nature. Its own event horizon bordered on the mysterious quantum realm, where the observer and the observed were somehow inextricably linked together in real time… and it was there where rubber met road.
Paul knew that’s where his answers would be.
Whereas just about all of Paul’s previous mental bandwidth had been occupied by perfectly reasonable pursuits like career, family, financial matters, sports, when and where the next happy hour might be, and of course, movie quotes—now it had begun to turn inwards for an understanding and validation of his lived outer experiences. Every spare moment he could wrest away from his busy life, Paul plunged headfirst into researching the world of psychology and consciousness—the inner world of awareness, of thought, sensation, and emotion—with the exact same burning curiosity that Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy had quite forcibly evoked in him.
He threw the proverbial kitchen sink at it—willing to break the internet for answers, sifting through countless different approaches and perspectives, both accepted and alternative. Whether it was the New England Journal of Medicine or the New Testament, a cascade of contentious Twitter comments or an English translation of the Bhagavad Gita, a Ted Talk on new breakthroughs in neuroscience or Patanjali’s 12 Limbs of Yoga, airy fairy New Age channelings or theoretical studies on the impact of time dilation, Paul didn’t fully discount anything he read or watched, no matter how far-fetched the content might seem at first.
“There are seeds of truth in everything, just waiting to be uncovered,” he wrote in his journal. “Lies can’t survive without leeching onto a kernel of pre-existing truth.”
Over weeks and months of reading and questioning and contemplation, he gradually began to notice a pattern coming into shape.
“All of the steps I took to recover from RSD—all the visualization techniques I was using, the inner sensory imagery, the focused one-pointed attention and mindfulness, the conscious cultivation of coherent emotions like gratitude and joy, the purification of my diet, and especially the reduction in the noise and complexity in my immediate environment—these are actually all practices common to many spiritual, religious, and esoteric disciplines!”
And as Paul saw it, “All of this can be simplified into one fundamental purpose…
Expanding individual awareness to be of benefit to the greater interconnected whole.”
The western approach tended to be through prayer and application of the Golden Rule. The eastern approach leaned more towards meditation and yoga. The wide-ranging new age culture lumped together a melting pot of practices like positive thinking and the law of attraction, using unfamiliar terms like “raising vibration” and “ascension.”
Science used the words entropy and negentropy to describe the universal phenomena of expansion and contraction, the pulsation of the universe. Somewhere dancing within the two was an invisible third force, a balancing force. A connective force.
A synchronizing force.
If Paul had had any clue as to what he was actually getting himself into, he might’ve stopped asking questions altogether and gotten on with traditional life. But the visceral pull to journey, to quest into uncharted inner territory was irresistible.
Just like the self-therapy regimen he’d intuitively created for Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy, he felt irrevocably drawn to design an awareness expansion practice for application within his own daily life. To understand more about how life worked from the inside out. To know and to feel, not just think and theorize.
He’d been humbled time and time again to realize that it was one thing to read and understand and “know” something at an intellectual level—and something quite different altogether to live it out directly. True knowledge really only came from direct experience, and anything other than that was just speculation. Educated speculation, certainly, and not to be discounted—but speculation nonetheless.
Paul didn’t want to speculate anymore. He wanted to know.
There was one core element common to everything he’d come across in his internet searches. And it was pretty much the most natural and fundamental thing of all: breathing. Whether it was coming into presence with mindfulness techniques, reaching the elusive “flow state” experienced in sports and video games, or the gamma brainwave frequency of seasoned Buddhist meditators—breathing seemed to be the universal key for unlocking different states of consciousness.
And a focused awareness on the breath made perfect sense to him from what he’d learned through RSD—after all, he’d found out firsthand how a conscious shift in breathing patterns would activate the parasympathetic nervous system. Which happened to be one of the most powerful antidotes to the sympathetic fight or flight response. The antidote to fear.
Knowing that he himself was most definitely just an “educated speculator,” if even that, Paul resolved to keep things as simple as possible. He would be his own test subject once more, and his direct experience would provide the data for analysis and conclusion.
So Paul started out his “official” Awareness Expansion Practice with two of the simplest tasks in the world: sitting, and breathing. Twice a day, for ten minutes.
What could possibly be easier than sitting around with eyes closed?
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***End Chapter 10
Chapter 11 will post Friday, April 19th. Thanks for being here in interactive real time! Comments and feedback always welcome.
In gratitude,
E.T. Allen
“…he was being irrevocably drawn to design an awareness expansion practice for application within his own daily life. To understand more about how life worked from the inside out. To know and to feel, not just think and theorize.” This desire to know truth from within is not for the faint of heart. I admire Paul’s determination!
I loved Meg's piece and subscribed. Thanks for sharing it.