Some money was transferred to me through Venmo, but after a week I couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t in my bank account. The Venmo said it was paid, but I wasn’t getting it. Went to the bank and they were as mystified as I was.

Yesterday I opened the Ap and started fiddling with it, and I noticed that I had the money in my account ready to go, but I needed to push the Transfer button. BAM! Now my account was empty and I was notified that the money had been transferred.

That is always the case, isn’t it. We have all the power we need, but we have to activate it. Our manual for life never has instructions on how to activate out power. We always have to fiddle with it. So that is the fine print instruction in the manual. When all else fails, fiddle with it.

Then we come upon the trigger that releases the lock. And we are always surprised that it was there all the time, on the other side of our assumptions.

The Revelation for me is that the world is not a hostile place. We are not aliens in our own home. That is an assumption. Who knows where I got it, but primarily we get it from the get go when we are born into this culture where like a fish we are shaped by the bowl we swim in. How does the fish get out of the bowl. It can’t. 

However, culture is like a bowl of glass in floating in an ocean. The fish can’t get to the ocean. It knows the ocean is there, but swims along the wall of glass, feeling the contraction but not knowing why, so it blames things inside the bowl for the pain of the bowl. 

The only way out of the bowl is to discover that there is no bowl. The bowl is the shape of our mind, like the womb shaped the fetus. Seeing that the bowl really isn’t there is like being born into the greater real world. You suddenly feel no invisible walls and restrictions. You discover that the bowl of culture and the bowl of your Ego is the same bowl. You are FREE. You look back and you can’t even see the bowl you were once entombed in.

Culture itself creates the sense that I’m alone, in exile, an alien in a hostile meaningless world. Given that terror, I create sub-cultures of meaning in which I can swim, but this just creates a sub-bowl culture that bumps into other sub-culture bowls, and each fears the other will break its glass and destroy the last wall against chaos and not-being.

So how does one break through the glass wall of assumptions? What does fiddle with it mean? You fiddle with something, with box you can’t open or with an idea in order to see what you don’t know, but the fiddling cannot happen when you assume you know. When I’m confronted with a box I can’t open (box is a metaphor), my karma is to assume I can’t open so I defer to my wife who assumes she can open it. But that is in the physical world. 

When it comes to Idea Boxes, I fiddle with them until they open to a new understanding. The closed box moves from closed to open. Culture opens to me and reveals a bright new expansive world that I could not see from inside the box of culture.

Fiddling with something means you are curious about it, and being curious about it means you have no personal investment in it. One can only fiddle with something is a state of Not Knowing. You fiddle with something in order to know it.

So if I want to know God…I’m going to have to fiddle with God from the place of Curiosity. My path began when I decided I was an agnostic or atheist, in college, agnostic I guess, because I then became totally curious, ultimately concerned curious, about God…I wanted to open this box, damn it. 

So every way you investigate the box, that is not it..not this belief..not that…not this…not that..you keep fiddling. One day, when you least expect it, the box pops open—Culture pops open—is a big blast of Insight. WOW…and then the box closes up again. But you are encouraged. You fiddle some more.