Bill Custer's thought sphere

Everybody’s done it. In ways large and small, and even microscopic, living entities of information do this: think, and then act to make or get that thing we want. Doesn’t work every time for me though, just like you. Sometimes our desires aren’t realized, but other times our little dream or even a big one comes true. It doesn’t always work to be intentional to get what you desire, we all know that. But if you aren’t intentional then you only get random luck. But it doesn’t always work. Not even if you tried the same technique as someone else like a role model, who did succeed. We might try that technique anyway, right? They are a role model for us and others, they can say what they did right, but that might or might not work for us. Why not though?

We can improve our chances if only we can see the trees in the forest. If only we can see the complexity in our connections. If we can, then we have the needed clarity in our vision and relationships, the keys which make our dreams come true. We haven’t figured out how to do this 100%, but there are many who claim to know. They offer to teach you something, or ask you to watch certain videos, and read certain materials. They hope to share their thoughts plus get some money from you. Sometimes what you learn works, and sometimes it doesn’t though. There’s more to it than certain behaviors, techniques, attitudes and perspectives. There are many dynamic factors affecting your information flows: the content of your connections with your collaborating people trying to achieve a mutual goal or just have a healthy connection.

I have experienced minor and major “miracles” in my life, we all have. I am not special in this regard, and no one is. People enjoy relating their own stories to me about their wow moments, and I love hearing about them, it’s awesome. What I’m interested in is the way it happens. The hows and whys of this way that “Thought over Energy over Matter” creates that wow. I study the hows and whys we experience a big or little miracle, these dreams come true.

I found after years of research that this What is core to the phenomena of creating the dream come true. And I do like the way works like the Law of Attraction or The Secret illuminate many of the important concepts. Others explore what happens when you do things right with your intentions, and there are many related works about manifesting your needs and desires. The scholarly suggestions and wisdom in these works are very relatable to most people’s experience, unlike say math, and that’s why these works are popular. As I was doing my research while these works were published, I waited until the work was complete to see if there was consistency in my findings and their ideas. I think they match up pretty good. I did the math too though, that’s really the main difference.

The Why and the How are much more complex though than those works present because they are mathematical at their roots, but no need to discuss math here. The why and the how are much more complicated than those scholars suggest, but they are doing their best. Really we all are. Yet you will be starved of critical knowledge if you are only reading empirical ideas or guesses about the real why and how. “Dreams come true” depends on those situational complexities, and so you really do need to dive down there to see. You see, the why and the how must be repeatable by any other expert in that domain, like a mechanic fixing a car. If it’s real, it is repeatable by a different expert which is a fundamental criterion in proving any scientific truth. It can’t be true if no one else can do the same things and then get the same claimed result: that certainly isn’t useful.

If you only know the what, but not the why and the how, then you are an artist and hopefully a great master of your art. You will know to paint with a particular blue but not how to process a cyanide compound to create that particular hue of blue. Unless you are both an artist and a chemist and a mineral scientist etc. You don’t need to, to be an artist in the modern world, but you know the ancients knew, they made their own dyes and paints. See how that got complicated pretty fast? The uncertainties are in the details, and when we aren’t clear about those, then we will not have that dream come true.

We all have different roles needed to create that painting and get it distributed to create awareness of this new art, get it hanging in folk’s houses and such. The artists, scientists, sales, marketing and logistics people are all essential to spreading this “art”, this information. We are all on the same team when it comes to beneficial changes that help individuals and more, and it takes all of us to get those best outcomes. It is akin to a rain dance, something done with intention. We have confidence that our intentions, with our relationships involved, will cascade to the outcome we desired, and made the dream come true. Sometimes it really does work to just be confident, you know, “fake it til you make it”. Yet we all know our important intentions and dreams have too many complexities for that to be a real strategy.

Thought over energy: ideas set things in motion and our words impel actions and reactions. Energy over matter: a balance but the energy had to happen first to power those electrons to fly around the center so fast they make lots of space, and now the tiny particles can form something as hard and solid as a rock or metal. Because that is what a rock is, and everything else we call “matter”. Lots of space and those tiny particles would be invisible or for practical purposes non-existent, if not for the energy of those electrons spinning through a tiny space creating molecules, molecules that create our bodies too. These two aspects of our universe are intertwined: you cannot increase matter without reducing energy and vice versa. If you burn the log in the fire, you made energy. The log became ashes, steam, and organic/metal chemicals released into the air. You can’t have your log back or reassemble it from the ashes and emissions: one increases and so the other must decrease.

Ideas are different. Information is fundamentally different than the zero-sum conservation of energy and matter, the Einstein equation. Yet information obviously drives where the energy goes and what configurations of matter are created, whether by astrophysical dynamics or by the intentions of living entities.

Information drives human activities, this is where our energy gets its focus, force, and direction. We create works as lasting as the pyramids and more importantly the multitude of samples of DNA we are discovering these days that are from 40,000 years ago and even millions of years ago. Information is actually really hard to delete or destroy even if you thought you did. It’s not like burning matter to create energy (and the matter is mostly destroyed), even though that delete key is right there under your fingertips, or that shredder is in the office. We see it every day. Even crimes committed 40 years ago are being solved now, now that we can interpret the information that never really was destroyed, it was merely hidden.

Thought over energy over matter. Have a creative inspiration, then write a recipe and buy the food. Cooking activities, and then finally enjoying your meal. The dream came true, yes? Albeit perhaps a little minor miracle to you. Pictures, money, designs, kindness, art, music, body language and even things like common ideas we all share in cultures such as “pretty, cool, attractive, sick, or brilliant” etc., these are all kinds of thoughts really. At the end of the day, it was thoughts that shaped our experiences and even created our very own individual existence. Thoughts drive our perspectives, behaviors, relationships and connections. They drive what things we put our valuable energy into, to strive for that miracle. They drive the success or failure of our situations, those in which we invested all those thoughts, energy and matter. We always hope for success, like making dinner for the family or taking them out to a favorite place where everyone is happy.

Let’s do another food analogy. This process is illuminated by what an outstanding chef does to make her creations that are so delicious. If you have that chef’s creation, you will absolutely know the what, you can taste it all. The why it tastes good, etc. may forever remain a mystery. For me, I’m not curious about making the little puffy foams you see on cooking shows. I think most of us will never attempt such artistic food things. Now, your chef chose certain ingredients and flavors to make the delicious meal. So, this is the Why analogy. She knows which cooking techniques to consider and select, and she has awareness of special equipment needed. Her knowledge came first to choose all of these, and then her actions and energy went into creating your foodie experience. Honestly, you have no authentic perspective on why she used minced turnip root or not, yes? You only realized the What, where that was a subtle flavor which you probably couldn’t have discriminated among the others unless you are a super taster. So, the Why came from our chef’s realms of knowledge, experience and creativity in her cooking and meal designs.

You also don’t know the How. She went to a chef’s culinary academy and of course neither you or I have been (unless you are a chef, lol). We don’t know the how, the right temperatures, ingredients, equipment, processes and sequence of things, and critically the timing of everything to deliver a fully integrated and tasty meal of a chef’s caliber. I do try and you do too, but chefs actually do know the whole why and how, while our limited knowledge is incomplete. We know stuff the chef doesn’t about other things though, right? She needs us like we need her.

Everything else is not much different than this cooking scenario, such as predicting the weather, growing a garden, developing a missile or a medicine, or crafting a new breakfast cereal. Trying anything truly new and game-changing, something that is a real innovation or new experience, is a creative leap of thought. These creative and complex experiences are so common we can use these abilities like other animals use instincts or reflexes. These abilities have great and highly complex individual variations to great and small degrees; these are the things that make us people and not just creatures. We are people, not something simply biological, although really nothing that is living is just a machine. All have intentions great and small that shape each individual’s reality.

We do want to look at the how and why. We do slow down on the freeway when an accident happened, even one that went off the road and didn’t block the freeway. We all had to take a gander, gape at it, wondering about the how and the why. My dad called it a “gaper” block. Everyone slows down, and everyone takes at least one glance to try to see the why and the how. You might wait 30 minutes to get past a fender bender.

You see, it’s not just in the what, but also the why and the how where we come to understand what we must do, so our thoughts will lead to the true and real creations we envision. These are best outcomes and final decisions that moves everyone forward. You bought the meal the chef made, yes? You sold the art discussed above to the customer, yes? Yet sometimes relative truths happen along the way. These temporary outcomes can be good or bad, and always suboptimal for some parties in the situation. We figure out eventually we were off-track or it turned out these mini-situations were simply stepping stones or baby steps. The overall situation that encompasses these will then end with the absolute truth instead, not a relative truth. The best outcome that satisfies all the people in the situation. Now we can all move forward into the next situation that was enabled by the one we just finished.

Sometimes we see innovation by leaps and bounds, and sometimes we need generations of concerted efforts to create our best futures. Such as centuries of breeding chickens or turning the same ancient vegetable into varieties like broccoli, Brussels sprouts, kale and cauliflower. Consider how developing these resources was actually very difficult, and how much the why and how mattered. Information is physical, and it shapes all of the energy and matter in our worlds. The health and status of factors in our connections is very complex, in which our shared information flows. Clarity about the how and why in our connections is the key to getting that miracle. Thought is over Energy, and Energy is over Matter in the order of the universe. Knowing the how and the why is the real secret.