Shouldn't…but Do

Is Curiosity Precognitive?

I have no special talents.  I am only passionately curious – Albert Einstein

It encompasses all – how, why, what, when – yet is satisfied by none.  True curiosity is never slaked, only whetted.  Exhilaration, exhaustion, endlessly nested paper boxes, opening on distant ideas, strung on, strung out, never clear, never possible, but somehow, somehow related.

Inquisitive, solicitous, attention or desire to learn or know about an object of interest – the experience defies its label.   The very word curious does not capture, settle, or contain the action of the mystery it seeks to describe.

Curious is a word often used to describe an urge, better – a yearning – toward something.  But is that urge, that yearning, something other than natural curiosity?

We often consider preoccupation of quiet attention, or curiosity, as indication of path – career or avocation.  But career and hobby are mere overlays to the greater business – life, both noun and verb – the churning, restless formation and dissolution of energy into activity, objects, on into years well lived, or not well lived.  Curiosity is concerned not just with activity and objects, but the subject of life itself.

Noted mythologist Joseph Campbell wrote follow your bliss…he did not instruct us to charge blindly at the future.  No life is trackless. We follow a scent, we leave footprints.

Go This Way

Do we choose our direction, or do we serve our curiosity?

It is inevitable that the words fate and destiny creep into discussions of this nature.  Let’s just say fate is what we are dealt, destiny is what we do with it. If you did not see it coming, it is fate.  Destiny reveals itself in how you respond.  The aphorism fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me, works here, as does the black sheep of that family be careful what you ask for, you just might get it.  Fate is biological potential, dust to dust.  Destiny transforms dust beyond imagination.

The Lady of Note is considering credentialing as a yoga instructor.  From my perch, she seems a natural, it would be a balanced move for her, and a gift to those she instructs.  Her interest – the curiosity and disposition – is there.  If events conspire, perhaps it will be so.

In pursuing her inclination, the Lady of Note is doing what feels right to her.  There is an apparent coherency between life circumstance and how the Lady of Note wants to expend her energy. The Lady of Note is both choosing her direction and attending to her own curiosity – easy enough.

But as the Lady of Note carries her desire into action, is she, as agent, consciously moving her curiosity forward or is she yielding to a latent physiologic or environmental factor of greater complexity?  Is it possible a path, pattern, or schema precedes conscious recognition of desire?

In the 1970’s, pioneering neurophysiologist Dr. Benjamin Libet famously found unconscious brain activity precedes conscious thought by about 200 milliseconds.  The shorthand on this suggests our actions are chosen before we choose to act, or simply, that unconscious intent antedates volition.

And the same lapse between event and registration occurs externally.  Try this at home:  touch your arm.  Feel that?  It sure seemed like you touched and felt at the same time.  But about 500 milliseconds elapsed between stimuli and experience of stimuli.  Neuroplasticity matched sensation with visual image to support your perception of simultaneity.

Inconsistency annoys neurons that reside in the brain.  They routinely match up, and drop out things we see, hear, and sense, in pursuit of a more believable picture. It is the kind of process that makes objective reality an oxymoron, and the reason why it is literally impossible for any two people to see, or feel, exactly the same thing. No worries though, just a little neurological fine-tuning, pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.

Despite kicking the door wide open on the question of free agency, a lifetime of work led Libet to believe free will can be maintained, because consciousness bestows veto power – sort of like the difference between fate and destiny.

Nonetheless, this research reveals we don’t write the story, we arrive in the middle as it emerges in our lives.  We move forward on a path that lies behind us.

I once heard scientist and alternative therapy researcher Dr. Beverly Rubik say where thought goes blood flows.  Where thoughts run, so goes energy, intent, and eventually hands or feet, perhaps over to Starbucks for that much-needed latte.

The Man (or Woman) Behind the Curtain

So if curiosity is indeed a golden thread we are following, who, or what is weaving the thread?

Some might say divinity – but we should probably be looking for either an immanent or tutelary demi-deity – something grounded both in and out of mortality – after all, it does make its presence known through process of nature and neuron alike.  Something like the daimon, Self, archetype, neural field, or any emergent property greater than the sum of its parts. All of those critters are purported to accompany us at birth.

Angel or demon, pick your poison. By whatever name, it is a multi-faceted, multi-talented figure, energy, or condition conferring varying degrees of motivation, from easy curiosity to hard-gripped obsession, or as those of a Jungian bent would say, possession. A force that shapes by question, and strikes down by answer.

It is the work of a lifetime to neuro-anatomically, and thus psychologically, build a relationship between that which moves ceaselessly below consciousness and that which articulates it.

And Beyond That…

Curiosity – the siren call of the daimon, the music or task to away in any myth or folktale.  A fatal rapture begging for a conspiracy of events, of objects to align, albeit briefly, to reveal the always arcane connection beyond view.

The further from view, or the more distant the desired understanding – the harder the fall.  That events and people conspire is certitude.  It is, after all, curiosity that killed the cat – the merciless thrill of dying to one’s own art.

The glinting thing unseen by others on the road, but for which you curiously hunger, it is your future – and you didn’t lose it there, it has been waiting a long, long time.

Will you stop long enough to pick it, like Persephone’s flower and be swept into the abyss? Or will you gaze at it long after dusk and become drunk with loss on an infernal dark road within looming wood?

What will you craft with your golden unraveling thread?  A noose or a great sail to explore? Is your life a tapestry or a hapless tangle?

Unappreciated by most, curiosity is both destroyer and deliverer.  That which guides our life, unrepentant curiosity, also guts it.  But the architecture of destruction also carries the means to deal, the gift is in the wound.

Is curiosity precognitive? That one was easy, of course it is.  If you want to know the future, just watch where you are going.

Curiosity is little more than another name for Hope.
– Augustus William

…we now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.