The Ordinary Magic of Synaptic Receptivity and Connection.
As I walk down the street, or through a garden path, as I drive to the store or wander through the park, I become lost in my head, waging battles no one can see. This self obsession creates a moat between me and the life all around me. As I work out the details of my goals, the small and ordinary things of my life are passed by unseen. As though the birds and flowers and trees are less important than I am.
Children have a natural inquisitiveness. They are one in the joy of learning to learn, when everything is a discovery; the unbridled joy of discovering their own feet. When did we forget to be amazed by our own feet? When did we get so mentally complex that we forgot to be amazed at all? When did we become so self-important that the very ordinary things of life became inconsequential? With meditation practice, we can reclaim this synaptic receptivity—the openness and willingness to connect deeply with the world around us. This is the ordinary magic of connection, allowing us to notice the moments that connect us to life, as it happens, in real time, all around us.
We usually cloud our connections with an overlay of bias, judgement, misapprehension. This misapprehension stems from the mind referring to itself in a limited loop, rather than connecting out to the life that is there. The mind wants what it wants, and so it limits information gathering to only that which supports its thesis. Instead of an open and childlike wisdom gathering, many adult minds are limited and dull. With regard to healthy brains, this dullness is a choice.
Isolation, Habit, and Self-Limiting Patterns keep us locked in cycles of ignorance.
Albert Einstein’s brain was ordinary in size and structure, but it had a profound synaptic receptivity—an openness to learn, notice, and connect. During his lifetime, Einstein’s ordinary mind had developed an extraordinary amount of neural connections. Is genius was making connections others missed. His mind had developed a willingness to learn. We often lose this willingness. We replace connection with isolation and curiosity with self-limiting beliefs, compulsions, and habits. We look for answers we believe we already know, filtering reality through prejudice and bias. But the remedy is right in front of us. Literally. Here in the unspecial ordinary moments of life. By training the mind to notice even the inconsequential things, we are connecting to life itself, as it is. The mind loves connection. It learns and accumulates knowledge, but it is the ability to connect to new things, new ideas, new moments that physically develops its structure. This keeps it young, regardless of chronology.
A fundamental tenet of recovery from substance addiction is connection versus isolation. Isolation breeds addictive behavior, which further isolates us. This applies to all of us, regardless of substance use. Attachment to habitual thinking and compulsive behaviors closes the mind’s receptivity. When we over-stimulate certain neural pathways through repetitive behavior, the options around those pathways begin to atrophy. Our world becomes narrow, centered on hunger, fear, and the constant search for comfort. The trajectory of this mind’s development is toward dullness and depression. Chogyam Trungpa referred to this trajectory as heading toward the “setting sun” as opposed to the rising sun of awakening.
This is neurosis: isolation that absorbs our attention and keeps us from noticing reality; birds building nests, clouds moving across the sky, or squirrels in frantic mating dances. We are drawn into fantasies, believing self-limiting stories: that enlightenment is beyond us and that the beauty of the world is unavailable until we sort the papers on our desk. A setting sun mind remains frightened, hungry, and disconnected.
Training Synaptic Receptivity Through Humble Openness
Recovery from isolation is possible. It has been proven that an act of surrender, originating in desperation and defeat, can grow into ongoing acts of opening. This can be to actively thwart ego’s acquisitiveness and developing its inquisitiveness. Instead of grabbing onto fantasies, we turn our mind to what’s here. Magic happens in the small ordinary places we are often too self-important to notice. As meditators, we employ the repetitive, simple behaviors to frustrate ego and retrain the mind to be here with what is; the breath, the body, the moment. We are turning the mind to be inquisitive about life beyond the cushion. By directing our minds to see life as it is, we are positioned to see what we are becoming. We are facing the rising sun of possibility. We train ourselves to be open, perceiving without bias, as if we were a pure lens, opening to the sacredness of ordinary moments.
In Meditation, each time we see ourselves caught in fantasy, we are strengthening our capacity to recognize what the mind is doing. Without judgment, we simply notice and return to the present. This choice to return builds neural pathways for connection and wakefulness. Recognition and returning render intentionality and agency. Realizations come and go, but our life is all around us, offering countless moments to build connectivity. Coming back to the present—even to the simple presence of the breath, our body, or our feet on the ground—builds the openness needed to experience the grand possibilities of mind.
To develop synaptic receptivity, we need connection. Connection to the breath, to the moment, to the ordinary magic of life around us. We learn to see the world, like Einstein did, as something to be part of, not to grab or conquer. When we have the humility to open to each moment, as it is, we discover that the beauty of the world in every step.
The ordinary becomes the gateway to discovery. This is Magic.