Mind Meld 9 | Evolving New Senses With Shane Mauss and Michael Garfield

Comedian, Shane Mauss has appeared on Conan, hosts the Here We Are Podcast and tours the country doing stand up. Silver-tongued polymath, Michael Garfield is an artist, musician and speaker based out of Austin.

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Welcome friends and thank you for once again entangling your consciousness with ours!

This week’s trialogue between Michael Garfield Shane Mauss and myself was a blast and it definitely got my wonder gland frothing, I also think there were more smiles per minute in this cast than any other episode of this show I’ve done.

The concept I’ve really been pondering ever since this conversation is the mind’s constant need for novelty.  We chase down anything that shines and engage with it for however long it holds our attention. Then, we inevitably get sick of it and move on. You have to admit, it’s useful. It’s that restless desire that pushes things collectively forward and keeps us on our ever-evolving recursive quest toward infinite improvement.

But, It’s incredibly important to balance that yang with its respective yin. That is, the place you go when your mind is still. The place you get to via meditation. The place of slower brainwaves and deep integration with yourself and your own nature. If you spend all of your time running away from that primordial place, you’re going to become an incredibly ego-driven, lopsided being who’s only concerned with novelty and avoiding boredom. Not only is that unhealthy, it’s not even possible. 

The thing is, the two are not mutually exclusive. It’s all about how you use your novelty. Unfortunately, most of us, myself included, tend to dive down rabbit holes of dissociative binge gaming or Netflix-ing. We use novelty as a means of disengaging from ourselves and our obligations when we should be using it as a way to continually appreciate, augment and contemplate our own position in the universe.

For more on this rant, dive into this week’s mind meld and join the discussion.