15. A Bag For Life

  

 

‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ Hamlet (Act 1 Scene 5)

“It is not animals who are blind. Man, blinded by conscience is incapable of seeing the world” (Jean-Luc Goddard Goodbye to Love) 

 

Have you ever thought of something then saw it soon after?

Did someone mention something to you and then you saw it?

Have you ever been introduced to something for the first time and then experienced it again and again? 

Ever thought of a friend and then they called?

 

Things like this seem to happen to me all the time. So much so that even I don’t believe it myself sometimes. It used to be I would think of something I needed and it would appear in Aldi's central aisle soon after. It got to the point where I was starting to think Aldi had tapped my phone, my Alexa and possibly my cerebral cortex. 

I think my sensitivity to it developed soon after giving up alcohol. I cannot explain why. Maybe your memory returns after a while and you simply remember more as your short term memory returns. It has been explained through the years in terms of past lives, simulation theory, manifestation, cosmic ordering, the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, and the science of coincidence . But where does myth and spirituality leave us and neuroscience begin? And does the answer shed more light on our conscious and unconscious needs? Can we in fact use it to soothe ourselves and even drive our behaviour?

Example 1

Blowing in the wind

Bottles of prosecco clinked anxiously around in the boot of my car as it sharked around the corner. It had been an emergency trip to the supermarket to buy booze to toast the life of my dead brother who had died because he drank too much booze. The noise of the bottles made me conscious of the alcohol and even grief did not spare me the irony. The plan was to spread his ashes at the tenth post along from the entrance to Ainsdale beach under the shadow of the sand dunes we had launched ourselves off as kids. 

There was a beer advert out and it involved the actor Jeff Bridges as a 200 feet high Dude resting on the landscape like he was merely leaning on a table. I looked up to the rooftops and imagined my brother Haydn doing the same. Still around and looking down. My gaze dropped from the rooftops back to the road. I looked in the car’s side mirror as I turned off the main street. Lodged between the mirror and the car door was one of the biggest red admiral butterflies I have ever seen.

My urgency to get home to pick up the others slowed as I did not want to lose this butterfly. It looked precarious even at ten miles an hour. I thought it would not hold on until I got home. I turned down three more roads, but it held on. I thought it must be dead and trapped in a spider's web. I pulled into my drive and parked up and looked at it. It did not make any movement. I gently opened the door of the car trying not to disturb it. As I carefully closed the door it took off. Like two loosely sewed together leaves it flew, lifted up quickly buffeted by the wind. About ten feet above my head it turned into the wind and circled like it was fighting the wind, then it was gone.

The next day I looked over the photos of relatives and friends who had gathered on the beach that day. In the background above our heads a butterfly shaped kite flew, buffeted by the wind.

Example 2

Running up that Hill

A few months ago my wife and I decided we would run in the Lake District. We have walked them all previously and are now running them. I had planned a run near Thirlmere. I mapped the run and was ready, but a few days before I thought I should try somewhere nearer as it is getting into winter. I decided on a run based from Troutbeck. I had done a similar route and knew where to park. I told her and we were set. The night before I double checked my journal for the previous walk to get a postcode for the parking place. I looked at the date and saw we had done the exact same route on the exact same day in November 7 years before. Just for the record, of the 214 summits we walked, this was the only one done in November.

 

 

Example 3

The First Noel

This Christmas Eve we headed to the Bowling alley. I was getting out of the car when I got a DM from a friend asking whether I had read a book she had bought on Cosmic ordering. She said she was giving it a go but her husband had said Noel Edmonds does it so be warned. As we walked into the bowling alley the first slot machine I saw had a photo of Noel Edmonds. After bowling we played air hockey and my daughter’s boyfriend won the round robin we were doing. On Christmas morning he woke up and opened an air hockey game bought by his sister.

So what is happening?

Take A Chance on Me

Ok so let's just say all these things are coincidences. Coincidence is defined as two or more similar things happening at the same time in a way that is quite unlikely and surprising. This does not really nail what I think happens to me. I think the dictionary definition is concerned more with external, separate happenings. Like an unlikely collision of separate forces. For example you bump into an old friend in a large city away from home. 

What happens to me feels more like it comes from me or at least travels through me to an external source. So I would be stupid not to look into manifestation. Am I creating what I want to see? 

Law of Attraction

Manifestation, Cosmic Ordering or The Law of Attraction has seen a massive increase in popularity over the last few years. I first heard of it when Noel Edmonds started banging on about it many years ago. Everyone thought he was going the way of David Icke, but he pulled it back by hosting the very popular Deal or No Deal and everyone decided to forgive him as he had single handedly saved daytime television. You basically think of the thing you want, concentrate on it and even share it on social media and IRL and it should make its way to you. Rhonda Byrne’s book The Secret published in 2006 has sold in excess of 30 million copies making it one of the most successful self-help books ever written. The most alluring part of the “thoughts to things” theory is it involves little direct effort and even less cash. 

It is not surprising that given a global pandemic that Google searches for such related topics has gone through the roof as people manifest themselves into a house you only see on Selling Sunset. It offers us the idea we are in control of a seemingly uncontrollable world. Why wouldn’t we want a slice of that? It’s all harmless so long as we remember  that people don’t die of terminal diseases because they didn’t spend enough energy wishing themselves well.  I am interested in New Age spirituality not just because hot complicated and slighted odd women seem to be attracted to it, but because it offers a level of meaning and I am interested in people's idea of meaning.

Video Games

What if none of it means anything and we are all just a figment of someone or something’s imagination. It is the alluring thought of the twenty-four hour a day gamer. It was originally proposed by Nick Bostrom, an Oxford philosopher in 2003. If we can create avatars then it seems logical that maybe we could be avatars in someone else’s game or simulation. We could be living in an old usb drive forgotten in a drawer somewhere.

The day after enjoying the film A Glitch in the Matrix I was cycling along the Peak Forest Canal. Two miles apart I saw what looked like the same guy, painting the same barge the same colour of grey.  I briefly thought maybe our lives are like the lazily drawn backgrounds of Scooby Doo cartoons where you see the same door five times during the scene where Shaggy and Scooby are being chased by the monster, which isn’t a monster, but the janitor of the museum. The trouble is there is nothing to say it isn’t. This theory isn’t much different from the comment made by  Deepak Chopra that reality is “mind made”. The generation of a perpetually rendered reality is not that much different to the idea we already render one in our minds. After all, colour doesn’t exist in isolation. What we perceive as colour is a  translation of frequencies of light. 

Excuse where I wipe the Wotsits from my fingers and think about this for a second. It is all a bit unfalsifiable and let's face it, not particularly helpful. If we are to hover around the scientific paradigm then observations have to be falsifiable and therefore subject to test. I cannot test if I am in a simulation. Not unless the code allows me to and how will I ever know that? I take my hat off to those examining cosmic rays in the Utah desert trying to find bugs in the code of the universe and drop it over the rabbit hole they are creating.

In some ways it goes more towards explaining what happens for me as let's face it coincidence is not an explanation but a description. I feel I am a conduit not the cause, but it is my perception of reality that makes sense of it. The idea does start with me and then seems to pass into the real world but I am nervous about the idea of manifestation as it slides into the world of astrology and tarot. I do not mean to denigrate these beliefs, but they do not give me the level of meaning I need to comfortably understand the world. My level of meaning has a tendency to follow the scientific evidence, the most overused trope of the last two years.

Ra Ra R.A.S. put In

There are collections of neurons that form a sort of mesh at our brain stem. The grouping of these neurons are responsible for or attention, arousal, modulation of muscle tone, and the ability to focus. They act as a mesh or gatekeeper allowing certain images and thoughts through and blocking others. This mesh is referred to as the Reticular Activating System or RAS. The Reticular Activating System is responsible for our wakefulness, our ability to focus, our fight-flight response, and how we ultimately perceive the world. This subconscious filtering stops us being overwhelmed with information and allows us to concentrate. 

Imagine being in a busy, noisy restaurant. At your table your group is chatting and you selectively listen to the person next to you. If you chose to, you could hear the people on the adjacent table, but you block it out and focus on the person you are interested in. Without this ability you would just hear hundreds of voices and white noise. The RAS is similar to this. It is the selector of information that may be useful to us as we have already decided that we are interested in it. 

The RAS also plays a major part in our flight or fight response. It is a filter whereby we examine situations for possible danger. We see a guy holding a big knife in a restaurant's kitchen and we presume it is normal as he is probably the chef. Move him into the back alley or the street and he becomes a threat. Our fight, flight or freeze response is responsible for releasing chemicals in our bloodstream so we can act on this danger. There are times when these messages get confused, usually to do with a trauma. Trauma can confuse our normal/natural responses. For someone who has witnessed a knife crime just the sight of the knife will trigger a flight or flight response even though it is obvious to someone else that it is a chef in a kitchen. Trauma reprograms the RAS, but trauma is too big a topic to cover here.

The RAS plays a major role in creating our confirmation bias. For example we think we are bad at maths and we only select information from the things we experience to back that up, we ignore evidence to the contrary. This has big ramifications on our sense of self-worth and our overall self-esteem. If we believe ourselves to be unworthy we find example after example to add to this picture. Along with the weight of negative bias this can lead to depression.   

 

There is also thinking that the RAS controls the muscle movement in our REM sleep.  It is possible during the Rapid Eye Movement in the sleep cycle memories are moved from short term memory to long term memory. During this phase our muscles are paralyzed. If it did not do this we could act on the impulses and imagery created by REM sleep. When this goes wrong we end up sleep-walking.

The weird thing about the RAS is that most mentions of it involve the use of the example of buying a red car. The example that tends to be used is where a person goes to a car showroom to buy a red car. They have a think about it then start seeing the same colour red car everywhere. 

Before the neurological explanation it was often referred to as the Frequency Illusion or more interestingly the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. Baader-Meinhof were a West German gang. Someone had mentioned the name of the gang to a journalist and then he had heard the name from somewhere else later that day. I got the same sinking feeling years ago when I heard the term “Subprime mortgages”. When they start inventing words and terms it is probably a time to get worried.

Now, when my wife asks me the same question twice when I am watching TV and I don’t answer, I can now blame my RAS. She is being denied entry by my Reticular Activating System and has nothing to do with me ignoring her on purpose.

The RAS is exploited by advertisers and social media companies. Putting images of products in front of us has been done for a long time but the new algorithms and machine learning models used by Facebook/Instagram are increasingly sophisticated and are almost replacing our own. What does the Explorer feed on Instagram say about your preferences? This is a mirror of our current preferences and is a decent mirror image of our RAS.

The RAS helps explain our interest in Astrology. Planetary alignments and star signs offer us a cookie-cutter RAS. They act as a filter by which we interpret the world and ourselves. Turn over a tarot card with a fool on in the morning you may alter how you see the rest of your day. You may be more conscious of how you should act in a new situation. This is not by way of judgement, it just feels a little too artificial for me.  I am more interested in my own subconscious. How is it leading me, what is it reacting to, what is it trying to tell me?

 

 

 

Example 4

Bag for Life

For those of you outside the UK I will explain that ‘A Bag For Life’ (BFL) is the UK’s attempt to solve global warming by eradicating single use of plastic bags. We still sell these bags at checkouts but we charge for them. The BFL was introduced to encourage us to keep using the same bag forever. It is harder wearing and often plastic with canvas handles. These bags sell at around £1 and most supermarkets have their own version.  If yours wears out you can take it to the supermarket and get it exchanged for a new one. I suppose the supermarket is supposed to recycle your old one. It has actually added to the plastic problem, but this is not the point of this piece. I think everyone sort of knew that the old plastic bag should not just be used once, but again that is not my point.

It also might be a good idea to look at my Instagram Story Highlight called “Bag For Life” and it might make a bit more sense.

At the beginning of this year I was reading a book called The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. It is designed to get you questioning, thinking and eventually creating by setting you tasks each week. One of the tasks one week was to go on a nature walk and be open minded and observe what comes into your consciousness. I decided to add another level to this and wanted to listen to an album I had not listened to in years. The album was The Man Who by Travis. I was going to let it play all the way through like we used to back in the day of Vinyl, which is now, but the first time. You know what I mean. 

I walked through the park and around where I live. The song “Flowers in the Window” came on and that moment I looked up to a top floor window that had flowers in it. I was a bit weirded out. I turned the corner and there were two horses getting saddled up to pull a funeral carriage. The horses had purple tied manes. One was being backed out of a horse box. I asked the guys if I could take their picture and they agreed. It seemed to bring death home to me in a way that was old fashioned, more real and visceral. After seeing numbers piling up on television during the time of Covid had sort of desensitised me. I walked on and about a hundred yards and came to the back of a cemetery. It was one I pass regularly but have never been into. This path looked like it went around the circumference to the cemetery but did not go in, so I thought I would see where it ended up. As I walked around I noticed how new the graves looked. How many of them had recent drop offs of toys and even helium balloons. Were these the result of celebrations from stolen birthdays? I walked quicker as I felt I was not meant to be there. The path lead under a motorway bridge and back to the other side of the graveyard. I noticed a skip by the side of the graveyard and it seemed like it should not be there. I went up to look at what was in it. I peered over the edge and saw it was empty apart from a bag in the far corner. It was a Bag For Life. It looked new and it was full. It was as if the person arrived at the graveyard and deposited their bag before heading over to the thereafter. It seemed odd so I took a photo of it and put it on my Instagram story. The bag is greenish and covered with images of slices of watermelon. 

I left the graveyard and headed home and ended up walking behind a woman who was carrying the same exact bag. I would not have thought twice about it if I had not seen it just five minutes ago. So I took another photo.

Over the next few weeks it cropped up everywhere. I mentioned it to my daughter and she started seeing it. It became a thing. Like a good shared joke. So much so we put her birthday presents in a new one and attached a watermelon birthday balloon. By then we had found out that they are one of the Bags For Life sold in Morrisons. On the night of her birthday we were chilling after a grand feed and Catchphrase came on the TV. The contestants had to guess, yep you guessed it “Bag for Life” and directly under the TV sat my daughters presents now unwrapped but still in their watermelon bag for life.

Now this bag for life is a talisman of my connection to something deeper. When I see one it reminds me to come out of the current thought loop. If I notice one it means I am connected more to the universe. Feeling a connection to the universe is in my opinion the ultimate goal. It is part of my continued search for meaning. The meaning may stay forever out of reach and yours may be different to mine, but maybe it is the search that is the same and maybe it is the search that will bind us all together.

 

 

 

Take The Bag For Life Challenge

I am going to give you two imaginary bags. In the first bag put in anything that would have been any use to you from when you were born until now. For the sake of interest let us cancel the idea of wads of cash unless that is all you can think of. What thing did you need the most when you were growing up? At what ages would you send the bag back to? Have a think, do not just read on as it is something to take time over.

The second bag I am giving you, I would like you to put in anything you think you are going to need from now to the end. By the end I mean the end of your life. Is there an age you think you might need something? Is money more important to put in now than the first bag?

Let me know what you would put in your bags in the comments. Maybe not thinking of anything you need is a good thing. Maybe sending something to yourself at a certain age could bring up ideas about issues you have experienced at that age. Maybe placing things in the bag for the future is a reflection of our fears or hopes. It also helps us see need in terms of right now. Can there be a need not experienced yet or a need that has already gone? The main takeaway from this is that our life is between these two bags. It always has been and it always will be.

To those of you who are reading this in another country. I would like to say hello and offer you a bag for life. I will choose a couple of people at random who were kind enough to finish this article and let me know their thoughts in the comments. I feel at times I am writing this in a vacuum. To those people who are interested I will put in the comments at a later date what I would put in my bags.