Dialectics of Age

Matrix Shift Development and How Learning and Growth best happens when you are curiously, enthusiastically and emotionally motivated to go there. 

My daughter walked hundreds of miles on the Pacific Crest Trail to reach Canada!

Last year, my daughter walked hundreds of miles on the PCT with a great spirit of adventure. This was such an awe inspiring example of how she is moving out into the world with curiosity and wonder.

Matrix Shift Development

When I was in my early 20’s it was the book Magical Child by Joseph Chilton Pearce, where I first learned about how basic it is to grow from a place of curious exploration, rather than from begrudging obligation.

Very simply, he presented a model for how growth happens in general, from a baby in the womb, to a newborn, to a kindergartener at his/her first day of school, to a full blown adult. First you establish what he calls the matrix, the home base, the place where you are comfortable, feel safe and supported, and you know the territory well. Then, as this gets too comfortable, you find a natural motivation to reach out beyond the boundaries of this “matrix.” As you explore, you may encounter things which are frightening, or too much to understand, and so you come back to the home base, where you regroup.

Gradually, you get enough familiarity with the territory beyond your home base, where you then make a shift, moving from the smaller matrix to a more expanded one. So in this way growth is less linear and predictable.

When I was 18 – 24 years old, I made three trips from Massachusetts to the west coast where it was like the Australian aborigine “walkabout”. A journey to find myself, and to find a greater meaning to what all this is about. After the first two trips, I come back to my home turf in western Mass, where I would enroll in a semester of college, or just get a simple job and live while I got my bearings again.  It was after the third time out there that I finally landed in Berkeley, where for the first time, on Ashby and Shattuck, I found a home base where I could plant my feet.

It is after the new larger matrix is established, and you become super comfortable with it, then, you begin the process anew, extending out into new turf to see what novelties and wonders might be out there.

It was this model that helped me enormously through these rocky years, and gave welcome support to this guiding principle; do what you want.

It was this that led me into the incredible field of depth psychology where Jung has captivated my attention. It is also where I have delved extensively into the early Christianity, trying to sort through what might have been spin and what were authentic downloads.

So given my last post, with the picture of both the spruce tree’s new growth and the challenge of the comfort zone, what I have just laid out helps me to understand just how my learning and growing process has been really fulfilling.

Instead of seeing the “comfort zone” as something that presents a strong gravitational pull that keeps sucking you back in every time you try to break out of it, rather, see this as home base, from which it provides safety, security and support from which there can be a naturally curious, playful, even childlike extending outwards.  Rather than being “hard”, it is actually really invigorating and challenging.

The key is holding onto the child like mindset of playful curiosity where, there is a dance between fear and excitement, and where adventure into an unknown is like coming through the birth canal into an exciting new world.

Of course, if there is trauma or a “matrix” home base where there is a lack of healthy attachments, where parents might be alcoholics or there is abuse, then this can lead a person to keep trying to find security and comfort within that matrix, where there are far less resources for extending outwards. At the same time, there are so many stories of how a person had ONE key person, a teacher, an uncle, a coach, who believed in them, and how this was crucial in helping them find their footing to that they were able then grow out into the world and flourish.

I would like to look into how the book, The Master and the Emissary, with its new view of the right and left hemispheres of the brain, ties into all this in a truly valuable way.