The Inner Place

There’s one thing about reality that can be really challenging… It’s that it barely ever does what you think it’s going to do.

You can plan things, dream about things, work really hard towards it and in the last moment it falls apart.

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For some people it could mean a cancer diagnosis, for others it’s a life partner who tells them they want to go their own way, or losing a job when you’ve got a huge mortgage and schools bills to pay. For some it their country going to war, some new tariff imposed or trade deal that renders your company useless, practically anything can happen and often does.

I’m not sure if it was Sod, Moore or Murphy, but his law holds more veracity than anything Newton or Einstein came up with.

So inevitably, you will be faced with such a situation. Perhaps you’re an athlete who spent a life time preparing for the Olympics only to catch a cold the day of the competition. Or the song you wrote is on the radio but it ain’t you who’s performing or getting the credit. A friend that you thought was a friend isn’t one…

The feeling of disappointment and dejection can be overwhelming. Gutting. That’s a good English word for it because your stomach feels like it’s been disemboweled.

Reality doesn’t match up with whatever expectations you had. Whatever motivation you had or hard work that was put in, seems to be lost. Whatever trust you had in yourself or others gets dissolved.

The question is what you do with it.

If you read any scripture, mythology or ever watched a Hollywood movie, you may notice a pattern. This is usually the moment in the story where the hero has an epiphany and goes on to save the day or become a great sage. A trope called, The Hero’s Journey.

But often, that epiphany feels really far way or nonexistent, you are not the hero of this tale, you are but the victim. The story is a Tragedy.

Saying all that, Vikid didn’t believe is tragedies.

And to him epiphanies were also short lived, he had had many. The euphoria of sudden understanding was eventually replaced by the mundane.

As they say, before enlightenment, chop wood, after enlightenment, chop wood.

He thought that there had to be a better way to deal with disappointment.

He called it the Inner Place.

The inner place is where you hang out. Just you and your mind. The place where you yap forwards and backwards to yourself. The place where you feel your gut, where instinct and inspiration reside. It’s the place where both joy and disaster are felt.

It’s the place where wise and stupid decisions are made. Where love arises and resentment blooms.

It’s the generating station, it’s the sink hole.

It can be anything and everything and often is.

There was a time when he thought that the Inner Place was a space to control, to mold…

That bad thoughts were bad and good thoughts were good. Where you had to avoid one type and promote another.

However as he got a little older and perhaps wiser, he started to realize this really just isn’t so.

The inner place is just the arena. A place where the observer is the observed and vice versa. In some senses it is the entire universe. When you feel anger, disappointment or even elation, it is an opportunity to study it.

For example, Vikid was always uncomfortable with flying. At the age of eight, he was caught up in a colossal storm sitting next to the window of a plane. He can still vividly remember looking at the wings flapping around like a wet cloth in the dark of the night, contorting into shapes that shouldn’t be possible, the screams of other passengers as they were being flung around their seats. He can remember the terror of it.

It came to pass that this terror would resurface every time there was the slightest of turbulence in a flight. As he was flying nearly every month. The terror would multiply, sometimes several times during the same flight.

In the beginning, to deal with this situation a couple of glasses of gin worked. Not for long though. There’s a point when the medicine stops working. At that point he would simply become a jackass, a terrified one. Never a great option.

But learning didn’t come easy for Vikid. Much more stupidity came between.

It’s only much later he decided to lean into the fear.

What he would do is observe, as the panic mounted, he would retreat to the inner place and watch it. Watch the physiology, the stomach turning inside out, watch the mind going places, praying to god, writing a will, imagining the funeral and what his family would be saying.

As he got a little more skillful in observing, he actively started ignoring the story part of the experience, focusing solely on the feelings of terror being generated in the body. He watched the heart beat, the lump in his throat, any tension in the body.

Slowly the fear started to subside, but not completely. That’s when another realization hit him. This was one of the few places he really got to study fear. Visceral fear. Not the fear you opt in for, but the fear you can’t avoid. The fight or flight responses ingrained by millions of years of evolution with no one to fight and strapped in at 30,000ft.

It was an opportunity to study the real thing. Thus the fear became a blessing rather than a curse.

And slowly he started bringing this understanding to other areas of his life. Depression, disappointment, anger and other types of fear or shame became topics of interest.

Rather than avoiding them, one could study them when they arose. One could go to the inner place and watch as the observer and the observed.

The inner place is where they meet. It’s the theatre in which you are the director, the playwright, the audio-visual technician and the full cast of actors.

Every feeling generated, every memory evoked, every conclusion made, is drawn from this deep infinite well. The analytic and conscious part of the inner space is but a tiny part, albeit, an important one.

There is one other thing that probably warrants some attention.

In order for the brain to function coherently, it has a strong inhibitory function. Without it there would be chaos in your upper chambers. Many types of seizures are related to the neurons in the brain over firing. So as you can imagine the brain is quite keen on not letting that happen.

The function is a type of speed limiter designed so that you stay on track and don’t drive straight off the mountain or tell your boss exactly what you are thinking as you are thinking it.

However it’s quite likely you’ve got the calibration all wrong. The brain is crawling where it can run, and running where it should probably stop.

The inner space is where you can notice this. If you pay attention you can sense when the brakes are being put on or being taken off, where for example, the mind goes into a loop. The constant repetition of a tune, some regret or anxiety. Is a good indication of the runaway train. Or when you have to do something important and you freeze a little. When hesitation or doubt creeps in, are good examples of the brakes being hit.

You can notice the roads your mind likes to go down when in default mode and what you absolutely avoid, even in the privacy of your own mind.

The observation is enough. Much happens with observation alone.

Another small example:

Vikid was practicing a popular song on the guitar. There’s a signature lick in the chorus which he could never execute, that he never tried to execute because it was “too hard”, 10 years in.

He entered the inner place and heard a voice, his own…

“It’s too difficult, do something else, you’re a strummer, licks are not in your lane…”

The observation was enough.

He decided to question it by just trying to execute. Noticing where the difficulty arose and releasing preconceived notions. Solving just for the hesitation.

It didn’t take long (a hour) for the lick to start feeling manageable. Some more practice was needed, but nothing like the impossibility seen before. Now it felt like it was inevitable that he could do it.

Apparently the mind had been bullshitting him all along.

He slowly started to realize we rarely tell ourselves the truth forget others.

The Inner Place was where we found out. Where the layers of the onion could be peeled and studied. Where tragedy could be transmuted to Enlightenment through the art of Observation.

Where one could become an Alchemist.

And that’s,

The Vikid Truth

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