When The Puzzle Breaks
In the original vision that flooded my brain in the pool that night I was furiously taking notes to describe what I was seeing. The part I understood the least was when I would look back at the Puzzle as I was moving through and I’d see pieces that were either crumbling and falling away, glowing red or on fire, or just completely missing.
Obviously something was wrong, but it took a lot of reflection to understand each one.
Sometimes we've chosen our intention, are paying attention, but we're stuck. We don't have the piece we need to move forward. Pieces are some combination of knowledge/skill/resources. It's a gap in the Puzzle. You have to work around it. You have to find the closest piece you can, which usually just connects to a couple of tabs in the piece you need. So you only partially complete it. Do this repeatedly, and you start to lose connection to that Puzzle path. What’s missing is that you have to go out and find the piece. You can’t just keep thinking you have everything you need and it will fall into place eventually. You need to practice honest reflection on what’s really needed. Mentors, classes, friends, colleagues, you have to search for the piece or you may continue to fall short of your Intentions.
My favorite example of this is when I have tried intention journaling. It feels so productive and positive - write down every morning your high-level intentions and try to like send it to the universe or something. I have done this twice in my life for about a year each. Both times completely failed on really any progress towards those intentions. It’s not just reminding yourself what you want that’s powerful. It’s being present then reflecting on whether those activities helped or not. This is when my brain is able to say ‘yo, wtf Mason, you keep saying you want this thing but then you do nothing to get there….’
Another Puzzle break is when we're forcing pieces that don't belong. We think we have the right piece - we do the thing and move on. Or we genuinely think we're continuing to place the right pieces, and it's only when there's a major break in our Puzzle that we realize it was wrong all along. To me this felt like the glowing-red pieces or they were damaged. If we take the time to look back at it, use our self-reflection superpower regularly, it will be clear something doesn't look/feel right. This is my most common failure. I think I’m placing the right pieces, I ignore the signals otherwise, and the Puzzle eventually breaks wide open. I usually don’t self-reflect enough as an always-in-motion entrepreneur. How I’ve tried to repair this sisyphean habit is with sensory deprivation tanks. With nowhere to turn and nothing to distract me, my sub-conscious can finally talk to me. It’s always right about my conscious faults, annoyingly.
Sometimes we lose a connection; someone close to us dies, relationships sour, paths diverge, or the outside world changes beyond our ability to deal. I believe the universe does not care about our Puzzles more or less than anyone else’s, we must adjust our paths to the Collective Puzzle..waves or whims. These leave gaps in the Puzzle that we have to figure out how to fill or change our whole path. Pain can be powerful, as we discussed here, but it can also have a lasting effect on us. Some people never get over a loss and their whole Puzzle is just dim or they stop caring and aren’t even engaged with the world anymore. Most of us have had some trauma in our lives, this also felt appropriate for the ‘on-fire’ pieces. It can turn into pieces for us or it can shackle us and reduce our puzzle down to ‘skating through life.’ We hopefully can reflect on that fire - that thing which keeps drawing our attention but is hard to grasp - and learn from the flames.
These much larger changes to our Puzzle may require a much more intense ‘zoom-out.’ Time away to process, mushroom or ayahuasca journeys, MDMA or Cognitive Behavioral therapies can all help you figure out if you move forward or change course. Time away never did me right, I spiral. Mushrooms/psychedelics help me see the collective puzzle and creates better perspective for the trauma. MDMA or CBT have helped me process & integrate the pain itself. It usually doesn’t take long for my Puzzle to show me I absolutely must stop and confront the breakage. Once I have that realization I stop everything to address it. Moving through life without confronting trauma just causes more pain, I think. Confronting it, of course, doesn’t make it go away. Trying to make it go away just puts it off. Confronting it allows my brain to use it, to create pieces from it. Then time can do it’s thing and chip away at the pain by reusing the neural pathways for the productive things we’ve identified can come from it.