Hi {{first_name}}, welcome back. I’ve got a conversation with one of the most pragmatic and leveled people I know paired with an essay that veers a little off the beaten path. Enjoy!

I’m back with a conversation from a few weeks ago. Blair Jeffery is an operator through and through. I’ve had the pleasure of working with him at two different companies now and greatly respect his integrity and intelligence. We talk about transitions, the importance of people we work with, and pace in the age of AI.

(If you’d like to watch, you can find the video version here)

Follow Blair on LinkedIn @BlairJeffery

Do you ever get the sense that you're more than flesh and blood? That your true nature is larger and more spectacular than pure biology? I'm not saying our organic material isn't real. But I am becoming aware of the evidence that shows at the base layer, we're really beings made up of energy.

As a creative and curious person, this should unlock a new reality. At least, that's what all the authors I'm reading claim. So why is it challenging for some of us (like me) to fully grasp this and let it change everything?

If you couldn't tell by this point, I have a blooming fascination with the immaterial. While my original intention with this newsletter is/was to explore what it feels like to be a creator or builder in the world today, I find myself frequently wanting to go beyond that into topics of consciousness, the divine, and supernatural nature. If you’ll indulge me, I’m going to dip a toe into that water today. (But I promise there’s a relationship)

When you look out on the world, what do you believe to be true? Is it that God created all, including us, and that we're separate as a result? Is it that what comes in through our five senses and can be observed and measured is the true nature of reality? Are you in the simulation theory camp? Soul planning and reincarnation? Consciousness playground? Existence is a pure and total accident?

What about your experiences and encounters, then? Are they purely the result of choices you've made? Are they out of your control and happening to you? The result of prayer or devoutness?How much influence over them do you believe you have?

In my creator conversation with Rhett (#4 of the series), he made some comments I keep coming back to. We hadn't discussed it in advance and I hadn't even asked about it directly. In case you missed it, here's an excerpt:

Energy, intention, attraction, manifestation. If you come from a background like mine, you can read one book or listen to one interview on the topic and walk away dismissing it because woo-woo doesn't fit the scientific or religious paradigm. (Unlike Rhett, I was cautioned away from the power of positive thinking genre growing up in favor of tactical religious texts and commentaries). But if you read a dozen of them, and listen to a host of interviews, including experiencers, scientists and researchers, where the same themes and findings keep turning up…. well, now it gets a bit more challenging.

This is where I've been spending a lot of my time lately. What I ultimately keep coming face to face with is that where our thoughts and emotions go, so goes our lived experience and reality. In simple language, this is because both emotions and thoughts are purely energetic in nature. And energy, not matter, is the true nature of reality.

(I've included some sources and references at the end. I want to ensure this stays anecdotal rather than reading like a scientific sway piece.)

Just as with the Spiderverse or a Marvel movie, there are quite literally thousands upon millions of potential futures we can experience. At any given moment, the choices we make are propelling us forward into one of them. It’s like an infinite web of crossroads we come to every second of the day. The things causing us to go left or right are our thoughts and emotions.

The idea of emotions having different energy signatures has been a brand new concept to me. From all I've gathered, "high" energies are comprised of emotions like love, joy, peace, patience, gratitude, and creativity. These are all resonating at a frequency on the upper end of the spectrum. Opposite these are emotions are those of fear, anger, bitterness, jealousy, doubt, worry, and hate. These resonate at a low frequency—dense and heavy. And frequencies, like magnets, attract and stimulate more of the same. (Here’s a visual example using tuning forks https://youtube.com/shorts/coDTlinuF2k?si=UYyH-RGtEwkhu9G9)

Much of my current reading falls into that category of power of positive thinking. The premise is that in our own personal spiderverse, if we're filled with alignment and belief in what we want, our reality will manifest it. Not by magic per se, but because that belief will subconsciously seep into every action we take and choice we make. As someone who grew up on the opposite end of that spectrum, I find it wildly interesting and encouraging, but hard to implement daily.

My decision making criteria for most of life has been rooted in a fear of making the wrong choice. I've become exceptional at talking myself out of nearly everything if given enough time. I can catch a glimpse something exciting and see myself going after it in full. But let me sleep on it (or just eat a sandwich), and I'll come up with all the reasons it's lame and won't work. It's the exact opposite of the power of positive thinking.

I've worked with Rhett. I can tell you there is something fundamentally different about how he operates compared to me. I know he's not making this up. And to be clear, and as he pointed out, manifestation isn't about chasing a result that looks like a Range Rover or vacation home or wrist watch collection. (Once upon a time, I have to confess this is what I thought about.) The success outcome I care about today is a family well cared for. A life of meaning and fulfillment. Where fear is vanquished and replaced with living in joyful abundance that comes from being aligned, content, and generous.

Can you imagine a single ~10 hour day where you operate with zero fear, no anxiety or worry, and complete absence of doubt or frustration? A day where you are just full blast excitement, joy, creativity, and confident no matter what. Most days I struggle to achieve that for 60 seconds at a time. I simply cannot comprehend an entire life built on it. Which is why throughout all this reading, I'm holding a steady side eye at the authors. It feels true in my core, but bringing it into reality proves difficult. Maybe it's because I'm still so early on into my journey?

One of the central tenants to making sense of this is where the source of energy is. If we rely on external validation and results to give us energy, that would be like running on battery power. At some point it runs out and requires charging back up. But if we learn to operate on internal energy—the belief that we're naturally filled with capability and can achieve whatever we truly desire—that's like running on AC power that never runs out. Always on, always available, always energizing.

What if that really is true for you and for me? What if our energy is unlimited if we just know what our nature is and how to access it?

As I move beyond the "if," I've been wrestling more with the "how". I've got a long way to go, but a few things that I've started learning and viewing differently along the way:

Maybe the biggest one is that I am still learning how to believe I'm inherently meaningful, capable, and worthy—just by being here. I am a creature of energy that's manifesting my reality through that belief. Just like you. No amount of external/battery energy is going to make a permanent change. I can feel that I'm going through something that is getting me closer. But I'm still holding the cord and looking for the outlet that I can plug into to charge from the inside.

-Justin

Frank Wilczek, The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces (New York: Basic Books, 2008). Shares a 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics. Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at MIT.

Art Hobson, "There Are No Particles, There Are Only Fields," American Journal of Physics 81 (March 2013).

Anil Seth (University of Sussex, Being You, 2021). Refers to perception as "controlled hallucination"

John A. Wheeler / "It from Bit." One of the 20th century's most important physicists at Princeton.

Lisa Feldman Barrett (Northeastern, How Emotions Are Made, 2017) Argues that emotions are constructed predictions rather than reactions.

HearthMath Institute (Science of the Heart, Energetic Communication)

Tom Campbell, My Big Picture Theory of Everything. Professional physicist and consciousness researcher.