
Soul Cuisine
Obsession is the rocket fuel of our creativity.
Jordan Ritter
We exists in several planes. There is the obvious conscious plane, the subconscious and the unconscious. We tend to focus so much attention on the conscious level of our minds.
I had an experience over a decade ago when I was in my final year at university that made me understand the power of the subconscious and the unconscious. I’ll call them both the subconscious going forward for simplification.
The whole class was taking a course (EEE 551 I think). It was a programming course; C# .NET to be precise. I had already started my journey into tech so I had a bit of a head start over the rest of the class. However, there were also a number of other wizzes in the class.
We were given an assignment to produce images of shapes on the GUI (Graphical User Interface) from entering dimensions in a text field. This was easy, till we got to multi-dimensional shapes. No one could perfectly draw a sphere or a cube. I remember the entire class was so flummoxed by this assignment that we sought the help of a masters student who was arguably the best programmer on campus. He produced a 2-dimensional form of the 3-dimensional shapes. We happily accepted his solution but I was so begrudged cos I knew there was a better solution.
I remember obsessing over this problem, for days on end, thinking about it incessantly. Then one night, while I was asleep, my eureka moment came. I figured out the algorithm required to produce perfect 3-dimensional shapes. I woke up in a fit, coding crazily to achieve it and after several hours, it worked, I produced a perfect 3-dimensional sphere on the GUI. My assignment was the envy of the whole class. I remember my classmates forced me to give tutorials on that course.
Now, the crux of this story is, when I was faced with a challenge that I obsessed over, yet my conscious mind couldn’t solve, my subconscious took over and went ahead and solved it.
I’ve employed my subconscious to produce results my conscious mind can’t fathom several times after that. It almost has a spiritual feel to it. I can feel the shift in the burden going from my conscious to subconscious when I face a “wicked” problem I obsess over.
The trick to using this method is; OBSESSION. The desire to get an answer or solution must consume you, you must think upon it fervently and feverishly, while holding a positive disposition and believing absolutely that you can figure it out.
Why I titled this post Soul Cuisine is; I see this process as a process of feeding your soul with something to ruminate upon and produce results your conscious mind can’t. The soul takes up what you feed it and multiplies it, makes it efficient and manifests it in the real world.
The grand question is; what does your soul’s cuisine look like. What do you ruminate upon, is your mind filled with pleasure and entertainment? or is it filled with desire for greatness and astronomical ambitions. Trust me, whatever desire you’re consumed with, your soul will get to work to figure it out. You just have to do your part and feed it right.
I am always making conscious efforts to guide what I feed my soul. I think everyone should do the same.