Tag Archives: Psychology

THE SIX GHOSTS OF FEAR

“Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve with a planned definite purpose and a positive mental attitude.” This statement is true. I attest to this, and you can take it to the bank. It’s the core of Napoleon Hill’s Science of Personal Achievement set out in seventeen principles nailed within his timeless book Think And Grow Rich. The only specters stopping you from achieving your biggest dreams and your deepest desires are the six ghosts of fear.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” As wise as President Roosevelt was, he failed to qualify his statement. FDR never said six ghosts are manifesting in different ways to create fear in your mind. Napoleon Hill did. Napoleon Hill also said these six ghosts are caused by indecision and doubt, blending in your subconscious to become fear.

Ghosts exist only in your mind. They’re not real entities. They have no physical presence. But, if you give ghosts merit and lodge them in your mind, then they might as well be real. The same goes with the top six things people—like you—mentally fear.

Before I list the six ghosts of fear and drill down as to why they psychologically exist to haunt your personal achievement, let me tell you a story about how I got hooked on Napoleon Hill’s success philosophy, busted the six ghosts, and what led to today’s Dyingwords post.

“Amway.”

“Am…way?”

“Yeah. Amway.”

I hear your gasp and I feel your shudder. I taste your bile and I can see your wide-open eyes. I can even smell gas passing from the shock that anything good comes from Amway.

“Amway is a cult!” you say. “Garry Rodgers can’t possibly be in a cult! A multi-level marketing scam! A pyramid scheme! The terror! The horrifying fear! Say it’s not so!”

Okay. Relax. Breathe easy. Thirty years ago some friends got involved in Amway. With interest, Rita (my wife) and I watched them change from mediocre, basic-get-by folks to this highly-energized and enthusiastic pair of newly-made entrepreneurs. It wasn’t long before they “showed us the plan”.

I was skeptical, like most cops are skeptics of anything perceived to be sneaky. Problem was… my friend showing Rita and I the plan was also a cop—a cop I respected and I knew was no kook. They must be onto something, I thought.

Rita and I initially signed up as customers—not as distributors, or business owners as Amway terms its distribution line people—certainly not before we thoroughly checked this thing out. We went to a few town hall Amway meetings and one large convention in Portland. I had never seen a group of people so pumped about selling soap. It was enlightening.

“How does this happen?” I asked my Amway-distributing police pal. “How do so many people get so supercharged by this soap-selling business?”

“Mindset,” he said. “It’s all about mindset and belief. That and they’ve made a decision to build their Amway business, have no doubt that it works, and they’ve exorcised the six ghosts of fear that prevent people from achieving their dreams.”

“The six ghosts of fear?”

“Yeah. The six ghosts of fear.” That’s when my law enforcement colleague and Amway recruiter handed me a copy of Think And Grow Rich. “Read this,” he said. “Then we’ll talk.”

I read Think And Grow Rich. I’ve read its sequel, The Master Key To Riches, and I’ve read pretty much everything ever published by Napoleon Hill and the Napoleon Hill Foundation. I’ve watched Napoleon Hill’s grainy old videos, and I’ve listened to original cassette recordings of the old man professing his seventeen principles that form the basis of all success—regardless where you find “success” or how you define it.

Soon, Rita and I signed as distributors, but we never did anything with our Amway business, although I still believe there is enormous potential for the few who do Amway right. Life got in the way to spend the time required to build a distributor chain—life being a very busy detective job and the priority of raising two little kids on a cop’s salary with a stay-at-home mom. Our friends did climb the Amway ladder and, from them, we continued to buy the best soap and consumable products available on this planet.

Slowly, we parted ways with Amway’s outer world. I was never comfortable with Amway as an organization. The products were great, but the Amway delivery system sucked and their recruitment model was less than open. Deep down, I had a fear of this thing—especially the fear of criticism or what “they” would think or say. My fear of criticism was greater than my fear of poverty which is what Amway’s business model promised to fix—building astounding wealth… if you worked their plan properly.

But what Amway did was change my inner world. I got hooked on Napoleon Hill’s science of personal achievement philosophy. Without any shred of a doubt, my mindset changed when exposed to Think And Grow Rich. It’s responsible for what I’ve become and for what I’m up to today.

That’s creating the new netstream video, audio, print, and ebook series of hardboiled detective fiction titled City Of Danger. I’m treating this project as a new business venture outside of my regular writing and publishing work. Right now, I’m finishing a business plan for the City Of Danger series based on Napoleon Hill’s seventeen principles that have proven so successful—time and time and time again.

Part of my business plan formulation was reading a recently released book titled Think and Grow Through Art and Music. It’s released by the Napoleon Hill Foundation and aimed at motivating artists like writers and musicians. I’ve read it with my red pen and yellow highlighter. When I came to the final chapter titled The Six Ghosts Of Fear, I realized that, long ago, I’d destroyed those demons. Being ghost-free gives me the courage and confidence to tackle a massive project like City Of Danger.

So what are the six ghosts of fear? Let’s let Napoleon Hill introduce you.

“Before you can put any portion of my seventeen principles into successful use, your mind must be prepared to receive it. The preparation is not difficult. It begins with study, analysis, and understanding of three enemies you have to clear out. These are indecision, doubt, and fear. Members of this unholy trio are closely related; where one is found, the other two are close at hand.

Indecision is the seedling of fear. Indecision crystallizes into doubt, the two blend and become fear. The blending process often is slow and makes the three enemies so dangerous because they germinate and grow without their presence being observed.

There are six main categories of fear. All six reside in the mind, and none have any more reality than a ghost. These six ghosts of fear, on their own or in some combination with each other, are non-realities every person suffers with at some time. Most people are fortunate if they do not suffer from the entire six.”

———

Fears are nothing more than states of mind. One’s mind state is subject to control and direction combined with one’s mental attitude and definite purpose. Here are the six ghosts of fear in order of their most common appearance.

The Fear of Poverty

Poverty bites. I relate to a quote from Vancouver billionaire Jimmy Pattison who said, “I’ve been rich. I’ve been poor. Rich is better.”

I think there are two people types. There are those with success consciousness and those with poverty consciousness. This consciousness resides in the mind and is influenced by three things:

  1. Who you associate with
  2. Your mind input
  3. The decisions you make

Poverty is the most destructive ghost and the most difficult fear to master. It’s amplified by indifference, indecision, doubt, worry, over-caution, procrastination, and plain laziness. Poverty is overcome by living within means, applying a definite purpose, having confidence, doing the hard work, associating with the right people, adopting a positive mental attitude, and making sensible decisions.

Poverty is the opposite of riches. It’s more than having money or having no money. Poverty and riches extend beyond financial means. They include your physical health, your mental state, and your spiritual well-being.

The Fear of Criticism

What “they” say or think. I was fearful of what they would think and say about my, and Rita’s, brush with Amway. This was all in my head. I never had one person say to me or anyone else (that I know of) that I was getting sucked into a cult.

Who are “they”? They are entirely imaginary beings—just like ghosts—but they’re surprisingly powerful. They stupefy enthusiasm. They cut down personal initiative. They destroy your imagination. And they make it practically impossible to achieve anything beyond mediocrity.

While poverty is the most entrapping ghost, the fear of criticism is the most common ghost that holds you back—the fear of how other people might judge your work, your creativity, and your ideas of how to wildly succeed as an entrepreneurial business person.

The criticism ghost browbeats you. It inseminates a lack of poise, undermines self-consciousness, quashes personalities, instills inferiority complexes, and dives home a void of ambition and initiative.

The Fear of Ill-Health

Disease. “Dis-Ease”. It’s the pill Big Pharma wants us to swallow, and those companies know people are motivated to buy their snake oil products because of health-fear motivation. Sickness is a multi-trillion dollar industry.

Many illnesses are not real. They’re figments of people’s imaginations—just like ghosts. But the fear of disease and the many imagined maladies that infect human minds can manifest as realistic, symptomatic presentations in their bodies. People think themselves into illness and when the symptoms illusionary appear, they’re convinced. And the circle continues.

I read a quote from entertainer Naomi Judd. She said, “Your body hears everything your mind says.” She’s right. Autosuggestion works both ways, and you can talk yourself out of ill health fear or what’s called hypochondria.

I respect people who meditate and do yoga. I also respect people who eat right, exercise, and get proper sleep. And I respect people who put their mind into a positive state where they don’t fear poverty or care about what “they” say.

The Fear of Loss of Love

This is the painful ghost. This specter is so excruciatingly cruel. It can cause it’s possessed one to take their own life. This ghost prevails misery and devastation and soulful destruction.

Jealousy doesn’t require a reason. It’s the most unreasonable emotion and sets up irrational fears where it’s a devastating ghost—devastating where there is, or is not, any basis. Real or unreal, the fear of loss of love is awful.

I experienced the loss of love a long time ago. I now call her “She Whose Name Shall Not Be Mentioned”. Losing her was the best thing that ever happened in my life because I wouldn’t have met Rita if I hadn’t lost her. Finding Rita was even better than discovering Napoleon Hill and smashing the six ghosts of fear.

They say if you have to convince someone to stay with you, then they’ve already left. In this case, I have to agree with they. Security in a relationship is a treasure without an appraised value, and I treasure my relationship with Rita above my own life. I don’t fear it. I love it.

The Fear of Old Age

Your fear of being alone in old age, or being debilitated through wear-out, is understandable. It’s especially understandable if you’ve lived a life filled with the fear of poverty, the fear of criticism, the fear of ill health, and the fear of the loss of love. The combination of these four ghosts—these non-real ghosts—are life-threatening.

Napoleon Hill said, “I don’t know why men and women should be so afraid that they’re gonna dry up and blow away when they get to that ripe old age of forty to fifty. The real achievements of the world were the results of men and women who had gone beyond sixty. The greatest achievement age is between sixty-five and seventy, so I don’t know why anyone should be afraid of old age. Yet they are.”

Fearing old age is a ghost. There is no reasonable reason to buy into this BS. Sure, as we age we slow down physically but we’re completely capable of being mentally active as long as we don’t allow the fear ghosts of poverty, criticism, ill-health, and love loss to cripple our mindset.

I turned sixty-five this year. I drank the Napoleon Hill Kool-Aid in my thirties, and it was the best thirst quencher ever. I’m just getting started in life, although it took me this long to get my act together.

The Fear of Death

“It’s the rarest thing in the world to find a person who hasn’t, at one time or another, been afraid of death.”  ~Napoleon Hill

“Matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed. They can only be changed from one form of reality to another.”  ~Albert Einstein

In my experience in the death business, I’ve been asked a lot of questions, done a lot of research, and soul searched. I believe there is a soul beyond physical matter and energetic action, and I believe it’s a non-physical combination of Infinite Intelligence, or The Creator, employing two functions called consciousness and entropy. But, that’s for another post.

I don’t fear becoming a ghost after death. I look at it like this. I was somewhere before I was born into consciousness as a lump of matter, and I’m living an energetic life constantly being broken down by entropy. When this consciousness I now have finally extinguishes—because entropy’s universal change ultimately conquers a rigid combination of matter and energy—I’ll go back to where I was before I was born, and I’m not afraid.

There are no specters. No illusions. There is only you.

Only in your mind live The Six Ghosts Of Fear.

Conquer them.

USING OCCAM’S RAZOR WITHOUT CUTTING YOUR OWN THROAT

Occam’s razor is the law of parsimony. It’s a mental model of reasoning. At its core, Occam’s—also spelled Ockham’s or Ocham’s—states, “Among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected.” Simpler yet, when solving a problem, the simplest solution is usually the right solution… but not too simple lest you cut your own throat.

A razor is a philosophical principle, or heuristic (shortcut) rule of thumb, that allows you to cut to the chase of the matter and shave off, or eliminate, unlikely explanations for a phenomenon and/or avoid unnecessary actions. Razors include three reasoning forms: deductive, inductive, and abductive. We’ll get to those in a bit, but cutting to the chase of this piece, the simplest example of Occam’s razor is the duck test.

If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, swims like a duck, has feathers, and quacks, then it’s probably a duck. There’s also the zebra test commonly used in medical fields to avoid unnecessarily complicated diagnosis—when hearing hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.

That’s all fine and dandy when examining webbed birds and hooved mammals. How about using Occam’s razor in everyday situations like homicide investigations?

I was taught back in Murder School 101 to always use Occam’s razor for solving crimes. My mentor was an old sergeant named Fred Mahle. Wonderful guy, rest his soul. BTW, Fred was the RCMP detective who got child serial killer Clifford Olson to confess and turn over ten bodies for a fee of a hundred grand. Best business deal ever. Ten families got closure. Olson got life and painfully died in jail from pancreatic cancer.

Fred was right when he said, “Looking at murder cases, the simplest answer is usually the right answer, but be careful with that logic. It could backfire, and you could cut your own throat.” Fred also taught me that the more bizarre a situation, the closer the answer was to home. Additionally, Fred said, “You get more bees with honey than you do with vinegar” and, “You slide further on bullshit than you do on gravel”.

Anyway, back to Occam’s razor and how this logic works.

William of Occam was a fourteenth-century Franciscan friar who had trouble with conventional Christian doctrine like miracles. As a scholastic philosopher and theologian, William took a heuristic (mental shortcut) approach to explain the unexplainable. History credits William of Occam with wise quips like, “It is vain to do more with what can be done with fewer”, “A plurality is not to be posited without necessity”, “Circumstances being equal, that is better and more valuable which requires fewer”, and “Entities are not to be unnecessarily multiplied”.

Greats like Aristotle, Newton, Einstein, Hawking, and Sagan all bought into the law of parsimony—parsimony being defined as, “Quality of being careful with money or resources: Thrift. State of being stingy, economy in the use of a means to an end. Economy of explanation in conformity with Occam’s razor”. These thinkers knew the simplest explanation to a problem was preferable to one that’s more complex. (Usually).

Minds like these deferred to core mental models which are the way we see the world and interpret reality. Mental models include concepts like core competence, first principles thinking, thought experiment, second-order thinking, probabilistic thinking, inversion, and Occam’s razor. Great minds also employed the three forms of reasoning.

Deductive, inductive, and abductive reasoning support any analytical application of Occam’s razor. Rather than paraphrase what deductive, inductive, and abductive reasoning mean, I’ll simply copy and paste this piece from Merriam-Webster:

Deductive Reasoning

Deduction is generally defined as “the deriving of a conclusion by reasoning.” Its specific meaning in logic is “inference in which the conclusion about particulars follows necessarily from general or universal premises.” Simply put, deduction—or the process of deducing—is the formation of a conclusion based on generally accepted statements or facts. It occurs when you are planning out trips, for instance. Say you have a 10 o’clock appointment with the dentist and you know that it takes 30 minutes to drive from your house to the dentist’s. From those two facts, you deduce that you will have to leave your house at 9:30, at the latest, to be at the dentist’s on time.

Deductive reasoning always follows necessarily from general or universal premises. If a sandwich is defined as “two or more slices of bread or a split roll having a filling in between,” and a hot dog is defined as “a frankfurter; especially a frankfurter heated and served in a long split roll” then one must deduce that any hot dog served in a split roll is a sandwich.

Inductive Reasoning

Whereas in deduction the truth of the conclusion is guaranteed by the truth of the statements or facts considered (the hot dog is served in a split roll and a split roll with a filling in the middle is a sandwich), induction is a method of reasoning involving an element of probability. In logic, induction refers specifically to “inference of a generalized conclusion from particular instances.” In other words, it means forming a generalization based on what is known or observed.

For example, at lunch you observe 4 of your 6 coworkers ordering the same sandwich. From your observation, you then induce that the sandwich is probably good—and you decide to try it yourself. Induction is at play here since your reasoning is based on an observation of a small group, as opposed to universal premises.

Abductive Reasoning

The third method of reasoning, abduction, is defined as “a syllogism in which the major premise is evident but the minor premise and therefore the conclusion only probable.” Basically, it involves forming a conclusion from the information that is known. A familiar example of abduction is a detective’s identification of a criminal by piecing together evidence at a crime scene. In an everyday scenario, you may be puzzled by a half-eaten sandwich on the kitchen counter. Abduction will lead you to the best explanation. Your reasoning might be that your teenage son made the sandwich and then saw that he was late for work. In a rush, he put the sandwich on the counter and left.

If you have trouble differentiating deduction, induction, and abduction, thinking about their roots might help. All three words are based on Latin ducere, meaning “to lead.” The prefix de- means “from,” and deduction derives from generally accepted statements or facts. The prefix in- means “to” or “toward,” and induction leads you to a generalization. The prefix ab- means “away,” and you take away the best explanation in abduction.

Whether you reason by deduction, induction, or abduction, you can always learn from what the greats had to say about using Occam’s razor. Here are three reasonable quotes worth noting:

Albert Einstein referred to Occam’s razor when developing his theory of special relativity. He formulated his own version: “It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience. Or, everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

Physicist Stephen Hawking advocated for Occam’s razor in his book, A Brief History of Time: “We could still imagine that there is a set of laws that determines events completely for some supernatural being, who could observe the present state of the universe without disturbing it. However, such models of the universe are not of much interest to us mortals. It seems better to employ the principle known as Occam’s razor and cut out all the features of the theory that cannot be observed.”

Isaac Newton used Occam’s razor, too, when developing his theories. Newton stated: “We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.” Newton sought to make his theories, including the three laws of motion, as simple as possible, with only the necessary minimum of underlying assumptions.

Furthermore, simple is as simple does. A conclusion can’t rely just on its simplicity. It must be backed by empirical evidence. And when using Occam’s razor to make deductions, we must avoid falling prey to confirmation bias. In the case of the NASA moon landing conspiracy theory, for example, some people consider it simpler for the moon landing to have been faked, others for it to have been real.

Lisa Randall best expressed the issues with the narrow application of Occam’s razor in her book, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe: “Another concern about Occam’s Razor is just a matter of fact. The world is more complicated than any of us would have been likely to conceive. Some particles and properties don’t seem necessary to any physical processes that matter—at least according to what we’ve deduced so far. Yet they exist. Sometimes the simplest model just isn’t the correct one. This is why it’s important to remember that opting for simpler explanations still requires work. They may be easier to falsify, but still require effort. And that the simpler explanation, although having a higher chance of being correct, is not always true.”

Occam’s razor is not intended to be a substitute for critical thinking. It is merely a tool to help make that thinking more efficient.

Harlan Coben has disputed many criticisms of Occam’s razor by stating that people fail to understand its exact purpose: “Most people oversimplify Occam’s razor to mean the simplest answer is usually correct. But the real meaning, what the Franciscan friar William of Ockham really wanted to emphasize, is that you shouldn’t complicate, that you shouldn’t “stack” a theory if a simpler explanation was at the ready. Pare it down. Prune the excess.”

Occam didn’t have the only razor in the think-tank shop. Other greats contributed to the critical thinking crowd. Here are some examples:

Hanlon’s razor — Never attribute to malice which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

Hitchen’s razor — What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

Hume’s razor — What ought to be cannot be deduced from what is.

Alder’s razor — If something cannot be settled by experiment or observation, then it’s not worthy of debate.

Sagan’s razor — Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Okay. This is all philosophical and eggheady. What about some real-life examples of critical thinking used to disprove flawed logic using Occam’s razor? To combat the Walmart of Weird Beliefs and the Grab Bag of Fake News? I’m not going to try and explain bizarre behavior like QAnon, Proud Boys, or crazy conspiracy theorists who wear tinfoil hats. As my wise, redneck brother-in-law Darryl says, “Ya can’t fix stupid.”

But I will touch on two high-profile puzzles that can be solved through the application of the law of parsimony—Occam’s razor. One is the JFK assassination. I’m a life-long student of that event and, at one time, I wasted hours debating the case on an internet board. Like Darryl says, “Ya can’t fix stupid”, so I gave up.

The Kennedy assassination brings out craziness in people. Conspiracy Theorists (CTs) will have you believe in a massive cover-up by the Illuminati, a hit by the Mafia, a plot by the military-industrial alliance, LBJ did it, and on and on and on and on…

Using Occam’s razor applied to the case facts, Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. A deranged man brought his cheap rifle to work and shot the President of the United States—arguably the most powerful and important person in the world—from a tall building. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, right? After 57 years there hasn’t been one single irrefutable piece of evidence that anyone other than Oswald was involved. Nothing. The simplest answer here is the correct answer.

Another Occam’s application is explaining the enigma of Donald Trump. Trump supporters will have you believe the man is an impeccably-crafted genius with sight farther than the furthest horizon. Others, using Occam’s razor, simply say the man is a natural-born grifter and a common asshole. I know which explanation I’ll accept.

Remember, Occam’s razor is complemented by other mental models, including fundamental error distribution, especially Hanlon’s razor, confirmation bias, availability heuristic thinking, and hindsight bias. The nature of mental models is that they tend to all interlock in a lattice and work best in conjunction.

It is important to note, like any mental model, Occam’s razor is not foolproof. Like Fred said, use it with care, lest you cut your own throat. This is especially crucial when it comes to important or risky decisions. There are exceptions to any rule, and we should never blindly follow the results of applying a mental model which logic, experience, or empirical evidence contradict.

Using Occam’s razor, though, you’ll generally call out quackery with the duck test, and when you hear hoofbeats behind you, in most cases you should think horses, not zebras—unless you’re on the African savannah.

INTERCONNECT — FINDING YOUR PLACE, PURPOSE AND MEANING IN THE UNIVERSE

This piece is downloadable in full-length PDF format by clicking the blue bar button at the screen’s top or as a Kindle eBook and PDF through links at the end.

Once upon a time, a youth lay on their back and gazed in awe at the starry sky. The moon waned as a dim crescent—God’s Thumbnail, some call it—which let the universal brilliance of consciousness resonate in the youth’s eyes. Billions of fireballs blazed above, and countless more stars couldn’t be seen. The cosmos had cracked its coat. Like a galactic exhibitionist teasing eternal entropy, the universe flashed a perfect picture of order defying chaos and displayed an unbashful interconnection with all its occupants, including the star-gazing youth.

If you remember… that youth was you. Regardless if your years are still young, you’ve reached middle-age or are now advanced in time, the wonder of universal questions remains etched in your mind. Who are you? Where did you come from? Where are you going? And what is your interconnected place, purpose and meaning in the universe?

These are timeless queries people like you’ve asked since humans first consciously observed the heavenly heights. Long ago, your ancestors used their emerging awareness to question universal curiosities. It’s a natural thing for humankind to look for simple answers to straightforward questions and, no doubt, you’ve queried them many times during your earthly existence without receiving any clear response.

For centuries, sages and scientists pondered the meaning of existence within the universe. They’ve debated scientific theories and proposed philosophical solutions to deep puzzles boldly presented in the macro and micro worlds. You’ll find narrow common ground on who’s right and who’s wrong which leaves you to wonder what nature’s realities truly are.

Albert Einstein equated that science without philosophy was lame and philosophy without science was blind. That great scientific sage also spent the second half of his life looking for the Grand Unified Theory (GUT) that interconnects everything in the universe. That includes your place, purpose and meaning.

As wise and astute as Einstein was, he didn’t complete his mission of tying the universe into a nicely packaged bow. It’s not that he didn’t believe all parts of the universe were intrinsically interconnected. Einstein knew in his gut that all physical laws and natural processes reported to one central command. That, ultimately, is the universal dominance of consciousness that allowed your creation and will one day destroy you through eternal entropy.

This isn’t a religious treatise you’re reading. No, far from it. It’s simply one person’s later-in-life reflection on three interconnected and universal curiosities. What’s your place? What’s your purpose? And, what’s the meaning in your life?

To find sensible suggestions, it’s necessary to dissect what’s learned (so far) of universal properties and what’s known about you as a human. You’re a conscious being housed in a physical vessel and controlled by universal principles. You had no choice in how you came to be here, but you certainly have choices now. Those include placing yourself in a safe and prosperous environment, developing a productive purpose and enjoying a rewarding meaning from the limited time you’re granted to be alive.

At the end of this discourse you’ll find a conclusion about your place, purpose and meaning in the universe. It might be one person’s opinion, but it’s based on extensive research and over six decades of personal experience. However, for the conclusion to make sense you need to take a little tour through the universal truths.

Ahead are a layman’s look at the origin of the universe, classical and quantum physics, chemistry, biology, anatomy, neuroscience and the life-changing principle of entropy. It’s also a dive into what’s not known about the biggest scientific and philosophical mystery of all—how consciousness manifests through the human brain and how entropy tries to kill it. Now, if you’re ready to interconnect with the universe, here’s what your place, purpose and meaning truly are.

The universe is enormous. It’s absolutely huge. There aren’t proper adjectives in the English language to describe just how big the universe really is. Perhaps the right word is astronomical which means exceeding great or enormous.

People often use the word “cosmos” interchangeably with “universe”. That’s not correct. Cosmos refers to the visible world extending beyond Earth and outward to the heavens. The universe incorporates all that’s in the macroscopic or outward realm, but the term also drills down and incorporates everything within the micro-regions of molecules, atoms and then into sub-atomic realities where quantum stuff gets seriously strange.

In Chemistry, Biology and Physics 101, you learned you’re created of energized matter built of complex material formed by atomic and molecular chains. So is every set-piece in the micro and macro universe. All visible matter contains material made of atomic structures that strictly obey standard operating procedures set down during the universe’s birth.

How that happened is explained by a few different theories. Religious accounts, depending on the flavor, hold that an omniscient supernatural power created the universe at will and for a vain purpose. Current scientific accounts dismiss all supernatural contribution and exchange it with a series of natural orders called the laws of physics and non-tangible processes of the universe.

Most scientists don’t attach an intentional purpose to the universe. They leave that to philosophers who tend to argue with abstract thoughts that aren’t backed by hard evidence. Then, there are those who think the universe is simply a grand thought.

No matter who’s right and who’s wrong, there are a few facts you can personally bank on. One is that you exist in a physical form and use consciousness to be self-aware. That includes knowing you have a place in the universe, a purpose for being here and there’s a meaning to your life.

As said, this isn’t a religious paper. Religion can be a matter of faith but, then, so can science. The difference is that science relies on direct observation, proven experiments and the ability to replicate results. Science also depends on building hypothesizes, turning them into theories and then certifying them as facts.

No particular physicist claims sole authorship of the Big Bang Theory. Currently, the Big Bang Theory is the leading account for the universe’s origin, and it’s generally accepted throughout the scientific community as being the best explanation—so far—of where your structural matter originated. It goes something like this.

In the early 1900s, an astronomer named Edwin Hubble (the space telescope guy) was busy measuring galactic light and came upon his profound realization that the observable universe was expanding. Not only was the universe growing, Hubble exclaimed, but it was also accelerating its expansion rate. That led to a logical conclusion that the universe must have started in a singular place and at a specific time.

Some of science’s brightest folks worked on mathematical extrapolations and built the theory postulating that all matter and energy in today’s observable universe must have been once compressed in a singularity that exploded. That big bang started the time clock, created space, released energy and formed matter. It’s been growing ever since and, along the journey, you were created as an interconnected part.

This sounds like a pretty big undertaking. It also sounds pretty far out to think everything in the known universe was stuck in the space smaller than an atom where it was exceedingly hot and heavy. Well, guys like Einstein and Steven Hawking accepted the Big Bang Theory as fact, although Einstein famously quipped, “God knows where that came from.”

Without any other scientific direction to go on, what you see in the universe got started from a single point and is enormously here in its present form and place. The best-educated guesses place the universe’s age at about 13.77 billion years, give or take a few hundred thousand. This rough age-estimate comes from measuring Cepheid Variable Pulsating Stars (CVPS) with the Hubble Space Telescope which has proven to be quite useful once NASA got its foggy lens fixed.

The size of the observable macro, or outer, universe is impressive. Current measurements find the most distant visible electromagnetic radiation to be 46 billion light-years from Earth. That’s in every direction where the radio telescopes pick up the Cosmic Background Radiation (CBR) signal. Astronomers believe the CBR is a leftover mess occurring about 300,000 years after the Big Bang. If the true universal distance radius is 46 billion light-years, then the entire trip across occupied space is around 92 billion light-years in diameter.

That is a massive distance. It’s gigantic, humongous and colossal. Light, which is electromagnetic radiation, travels at 186,000 miles per second or 300,000 kilometers per second. That means that in one year a light particle can travel 5.88 trillion miles or 9.5 trillion kilometers. Multiply that by 92 billion and you’ll see that it’s a long, long way across the visible universe.

That’s just the macro universe that astronomers can see with current technology. Most scientists agree they’ve only explored something like four to five percent of the visible universe, and there’s far more out there than known today. This is an ongoing search with exciting discoveries emerging all the time.

To get a feel of where your physical place is in the macro universe is, you’re on the surface of a planet called Earth. Your home base is 93 million miles or 150 million kilometers from the sun which is a common-type star. It takes eight minutes for light to leave the sun and meet your eyes. To put this distance in perspective, a light particle can circle the Earth seven and a half times in one second.

The solar system extends a long way out. Pluto, which has returned its classification into the planet family, is seven hours distant from the sun via light speed. Going further, your planetary arrangement orbiting the sun is in one part of your home galaxy called the Milky Way. The sun is approximately 30,000 light-years from the big black hole at the Milky Way’s center, and you’re actually closer to the nearest independent galaxy than you are to the Milky Way’s core.

No one knows how many stars there are in the Milky Way. It’s a countless number. The current consensus is there may be a trillion stars in your home galaxy. Some astronomers feel there could be a trillion or more galaxies in the visible universe.

The Milky Way is part of a galactic bunch called the Local Group. These 54 assorted-shape star arrangements form part of a larger galactic collection known as the Virgo Supercluster. This is a big, big crowd but nowhere near what’s really going on out there.

Recent astronomical observations confirmed that beyond the Virgo Supercluster lies a monster called “Laniakea” which is Hawaiian for “Immeasurable Heaven”. This stupendous structure sits in a part of space called the “Zone of Avoidance” where the clouds of dust and gas are so thick that visible light is impossible to perceive. Astonishingly, Laniakea and the Virgo Supercluster are being pulled together across space and time by a behemoth force nicely titled the “Great Attractor”. No one knows what that force field is, but it’s powerful.

As you lay on the Earth’s surface and gaze at the starry sky, you’re not seeing reality. You’re only seeing light that left its emission point a long time ago. If you spot Andromeda, the only independent galaxy visible with your naked eye, you’re seeing that structure as it was two million years ago. For all you know, Andromeda may no longer exist.

The universe can play a lot of tricks on an observer. But one thing the universe never does is change its basic operating rules. Space, time, energy and matter follow strict laws that apply everywhere throughout the universe. Whether you’re on Earth, in Andromeda or around Laniakea, all fundamental forces behave the same way.

There are four fundamental forces in the entire universe—both in the macro and micro worlds. Those are electromagnetism, gravity, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force. Space, time, energy and matter all adhere to these four forces from which many physicists have tried to find a common denominator to frame the Grand Unified Theory (GUT).

So far, no luck. Einstein spent the second half of his life working on a unified theory. His intuition told him unification lay in an infinite pool of information which is the non-visible and non-tangible factor that gives space, time, energy and matter its direction. This information or intelligence principle certainly seems to be real, and it’s captured in the acronym STEMI for Space, Time, Energy, Matter and Information or intelligence. It might also be universal consciousness.

Information permeates the entire universe. It somehow laid down the four forces emerging from the Big Bang and then made other rules or laws of physics which carried throughout the entire regions of reality. However, what the rules say about operating the outward cosmos are not exactly the same rules as those governing sub-atomics.

What directs your existence in the macro world adheres to classical or Newtonian physics. Down in the microcosm realm, though, your matter and energy have different masters. The wee parts of you behave according to quantum physics which are somehow interconnected back into classic physics and STEMI.

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