The Cosmic Feedback Loop
The All-That-Is (call it what you wish -- God/dess, Reality, etc.) is giving me its evaluation every day, just as She gives every person, every organism, Her feedback every day. Every moment of pleasure, every moment of pain, is Her feedback. Every penny in the bank, feedback. Every kiss from a beloved, every harsh word exchanged, feedback. Every illness or pain, every delight, feedback. Every beautiful sunset, every horror we read in the news, feedback.
This ongoing, day-to-day communicative process is inevitable, and it is invaluable. In that cosmic feedback is precious information that can and must be used for me, you, each and all of us, to thrive in the way that every person, every being, wants to thrive.
Now, this feedback isn’t all narrow feedback specific to one being. It might be feedback to a culture, or even an entire species. And, then again, it might be distinctly personal. Toward one end of this spectrum, if you drink a couple of martinis one evening, the poor sleep and sluggishness that follows is pretty specific feedback to you as an individual. Toward the other end of the spectrum, a die-off of great swaths of the Great Barrier Reef is feedback to the global human community, of which you are a member, about humanity’s impact on the natural world.
This feedback from Reality is infinite. The entire Cosmos -- the infinite Outside in which we live and the infinite Inside that lives within each of us -- is engaged in one grand and holy conversation with itself, and we have access to only the tiniest part of that Cosmic Conversation. It is not ours to receive all of the feedback. What is our task, however, is to take in all that we can take in, and that might be actionable for the benefit of the All (again, I am referring the All of which each of us is a part and a participant).
We ignore this feedback at our own risk. If we ignore or cannot receive the feedback our physical body gives us, moment-to-moment, about our physical health, we risk illness and even a needless shortening of our time on this Earth. If we ignore or cannot receive the feedback our mental and emotional bodies give us, we risk all manner of life disruptions, depression, poor decision-making, and much more. If we ignore or cannot receive the feedback of our family, friends, colleagues, and lovers, we risk relational disruption. If we ignore or cannot receive the feedback of the flow of money in our lives, we risk financial insecurity and barriers to the achievement of dreams of abundance. If we ignore or cannot receive the feedback of the die-off in the Great Barrier Reef, we risk the transformation of our planet from a beautiful and precious garden, perfectly suited to human life, into a desolate dystopia, barely suited for any life, including our own.
So, I invite you to imagine the following process for gathering up the treasures that can be found in this cosmic feedback. In this process, you engage, both alone in your private moments and together with beloveds, teachers, and friends, in a shared, systemic process of seeking out and receiving this cosmic evaluation. Develop an approach that you undertake that essentially asks questions like, “how am I, how are we, doing?”, “what can we do better?”, and “what else does my/our need that is mine/ours to provide?” Receive that information, catalogue the information, share it with yourself in your private moments and with your community of collaborators in open conversation, and brainstorm about what to do with that information.
No one of us can do this alone, no matter how self-aware or broadly connected throughout our community we might be. I cannot know of the struggles of my mitochondria without the assistance of my functional medicine physician. Sitting in my home in Arizona, I cannot know of the die-off of the reef unless I read the news or watch a documentary on the topic of this great tragedy. This is not a bug in the system; it is a feature. It is a problem only if there’s no other place for that cosmic feedback to get into my awareness.
However, if I decide to engage myself and my “team” of feedback-collecting partners (my family and friends, my teachers, my community, and carefully selected information sources) in this process, together, the odds are radically increased that this critically important feedback will come into my conscious awareness, empowering me to develop, alone or in collaboration, a response, if one is called for.
So, that’s the basic idea.
Let us, each of us individually and all of us as members of the human family, start to look more carefully at our feedback mechanisms to see what we can do to improve our reception of these messages from Reality, from God. That endless stream of essential feedback is right there in front of us, even within us, if we only would open our eyes, our ears, our senses, and our relationships, to receive them.