Hard-earned truths I’ve learned about the universe

Image generated by Sarah A. Downey using Midjourney, 8/21/2024

After almost 40 years on this earth, I’ve realized I started seeing the same patterns around me about life, the universe, and, well…everything. Here are the ones that come to mind. They’ve cost me a lot to acquire (although I regret nothing), and I hope they’re helpful to you.

• If you don’t feel your feelings, they aren’t gone; they’re stored in your body/mind/spirit and they’ll catch up to you later, often when you’re not expecting it and off-balance.
• Having a small/compressed emotional range means lower lows but also less high highs and an almost total lack of access to some emotions.
• The world is a mirror: you see in it what you are. You don’t see the world as IT is; you see it as YOU are. This is everywhere; it’s projections within projections. This is why personality systems like the Enneagram matter, because they help you see things from other people’s perspectives.
• The process of awakening isn’t about building more around yourself; it’s about peeling back what’s already there. It’s waking up to your existing state and remembering it, not toiling to make something new.
• The universe likes and reuses certain patterns, so you see them reflected everywhere: fractals, toruses, “as within/so without,” “as above, so below,” etc.
• Creative acts aren’t just “nice to have’s.” They are our lifeblood as humans. Perfection kills creativity; creativity brings us as close as possible to perfection.
• The present is the most important thing to inhabit; everything else flows from that. Spending too much mental space in the past or the future unmoors you and tends to reduce satisfaction.
• We all contain multitudes. The inner child/children is a particularly important subset of that. Find and get in touch with yours.
• We are getting the messages and information that we want to hear from our guides/higher selves/the source all the time. The issue is that we can’t hear them because we aren’t listening. Listening requires stillness, silence, and alone time. Do less to hear more.
• You can’t make someone change. Let go of expectations or leave; you will be disappointed otherwise. If you stay, you can only accept them as they are, while gently nudging them and leaving breadcrumbs that they may choose to pick up. You will be there to help them if and when they are ready.
• Your awareness is basically you. Thus things/people that compete loudly or use gimmicks to steal your awareness are often of lower value. The things/people that are more subtle, self-contained, and secure are higher value.
• Pain is unavoidable, but your mindset towards pain is up to you. Happier people are more empowered and take more ownership of themselves and their mental states. Less happy people embody victim mindsets and blame others for their problems.
• Love is both an emotion and an energetic force, and nothing is more powerful than it.
• Meditation enables superpowers that include greatly reducing your reactivity in the moment (so increasing the distance between stimulus and response in you), letting you tap into states of pure bliss, rewiring your experience of suffering, and more. It’s not just about getting calm.
• If you want to feel better immediately about anything, disconnect from all news and all technology. Go outside in nature. Interact with actual people. Listen to the birds. The world of your immediate sensory experience is a lot more positive than the image we’re all being sold online.
• What you hate/can’t stand in other people is what you hate/can’t stand in yourself. If you delve more into your own darkness, fears, pain, etc., you gain more authentic tolerance for others. This is the shadow. (A great book on this is Meeting the Shadow, which is a collection of essays all about this topic.)
• So many fears and problems are entirely solved or highly minimized by knowing the absolute shit out of yourself and being able to tap into your essence and intuition. Your true essence is what remains when you aren’t doing anything or trying to be something; you’re just relaxed and authentically you.
• You are the world’s greatest expert on you and your body. Listen to your instincts about your health and advocate for yourself in the medical world. Be willing to try “alternative” and holistic medicine; it’s often way more personalized, humanizing, and effective.
• Everyone would be better off if they had the courage to look fully and honestly at themselves, especially their flaws. The places that people are most scared to go are the richest ones to mine for the exact things that will transform them. Most people don’t do this.
• The universe really does have our back and can tweak things around the margins (or way more significantly), but you have to ask for it clearly and consistently and believe it fully.
• Put your bare feet on the ground. Aim for 30 minutes a day. There’s a ton of research on how grounding supercharges everything from speed of healing to inflammation reduction. You’re discharging your body’s excess positive charge and bringing in negatively charged electrons.
• The more in touch you are with the fact that all of us will die one day and that anyone can die at any moment, the more you will appreciate life. Living each day like it could be your last (and it could) is one of the clearest paths to enjoying your life way, way more. It’s not morbid; it’s vitalizing. (The best book I’ve ever read on the psychology of death was Existential Psychotherapy by Irvin D. Yalom.)
• The partner and friends you attract and maintain are a reflection of you. If you want to raise your relationship bar, go inward and raise your own internal sense of self. This is a genuine process, not a fake image you’re projecting.
• Loop-closing is important. That could entail finishing your thought or concluding a movie or letting an emotion actually be felt in your body. There’s a “hanging on” energy that happens when you leave something going and it has a cost. Closing loops feels great.
• We’re all way more powerful than we think, yet we’re gated by our sense of our own limitations and of reality itself.
• There are higher versions of us that exist in dimensions where time is just another variable. We are puny/low complexity to them but we’re still a part of them, and they are rooting for us. We also have a long line of ancestors/archetypal divine figures/etc. behind us all. I have had my own gnosis of this concept, but I wouldn’t expect you to take my word for it without your own direct experience.
• So many fears and problems are entirely solved or highly minimized by knowing the absolute shit out of yourself, then making small in-the-moment decisions in alignment with your soul.

What helped me learn the things above were a combo of therapy, meditation, reading a wide variety of genres of books, psychedelics, the Enneagram personality model, investing a lot in fixing my autoimmune problems (which involved deep dives into holistic and functional healing), and most importantly, racking up a lot of weird, intense, insane, shatteringly painful, and unbelievably beautiful life experiences with many people who are deeply important to me.