The Power of Context for Effortless Change
The effort to be willing to stop willing and efforting
We are creating the context to make the idea of bipolar, mania, spiritual emergency, transformational crisis, or whatever else you want to call being part of human potential, not human illness.
Summary
From Pathography to Ecstasography – Replacing the illness-centered biography with a self-authored life narrative that centers gifts, visions, and creative unfoldment.
Meaning + Meaning = Context – Building personal context by layering self-generated meaning until it naturally displaces disempowering narratives.
Re-Languaging for Re-Contextualizing – Transforming diagnostic terms (e.g., “flight of ideas” → “flight of memes”) to create empowering frameworks.
Context as a Lens – Using self-authored context to shift perception, interpretation, and response to future extraordinary experiences.
Mastering the Gravity of Newness – Adapting to the intensity of novel meanings and insights the way we master gravity when learning to walk, bike, or surf.
Context-Building as Daily Practice – Integrating new memes and meanings one drop at a time to create a steady flow of insight outside manic states.
Not-Knowing as a Solution State – Valuing confusion and uncertainty as the fertile ground for insight and transformation.
Transforming Content into Context – Moving ideas from fixed positions into living frameworks that shape possibility and action.
Self-Authored Context as Sovereignty – Recognizing that only the individual can create their true context—without permission, agreement, or consensus.
The Time-Has-Come Principle – Building context until living one’s ecstasography becomes an idea whose time has arrived, both personally and collectively.
Exploration
If we want to radically change our life, living predominantly in the mental patient pathography, meaning a “biography that focuses on a person's illnesses, misfortunes, or failure” according to Merriam-Webster, then we need to alter the context.
Here we are going to build on our exploration of meaning and show how it relates to context.
As humans, we tend to focus on content, on the foreground. We think change involves force, willpower, motivation, drive, effort. As we will come to see, there is another approach to reverse engineering mania, and bringing the benefits into our daily life.
If we understand the power of context, we can effortlessly build bridges towards the life our our dreams, which I‘ve coined our <ecstasography> meaning “biography that focuses on ones unique gifts, superpowers, dreams, visions, creative unfoldment, and ecstasy.”
Life is the opportunity of a lifetime. Let‘s not waste it encased in someone else‘s curated illness narrative, parroting scarative talking points.
Often when we consider change, we think of changing our mind, having a different opinion, or doing something different. With effort, we try to shift our ego to see or do something differently. Due to discontent, we try to change our inner content. I might tell myself I want to stop eating sugar tomorrow, try force myself not to for 5 minutes only to realize the obvious—nothing has changed.
I could say to myself, I want to be a Christian tomorrow, but just holding the bible is not enough to have the perspective. Without reading the Bible line by line, studying the content with its meaning and context, I will never absorb that way of being.
In mania, we experience “flight of ideas.” We transformed the meme “flight of ideas” to “flight of memes” after studying that memes are the building blocks of ideas. In this one sentence is all of what I‘m sharing. The first ideas is from the pathography, the second is self-authored, leaning into our <ecstasography>. This is how we change the meaning, and each time we do this, we contribute to building our own context. This is re-languaging, re-contextualizing.
So meaning + meaning + meaning builds context. A different context effortlessly shifts us from fate to destiny. As we build context, we crowd out what does not serve us—what severs us from ourselves that we did not build ourselves.
Let’s extrapolate on three definitions of context, now that we understand why we are emphasizing it.
Context:
Oxford Languages: the circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood and assessed.
Manix Languages: the memetic circumstances that form the setting for understanding mania, special messages, and ideas in terms of which they can be fully assessed and understood in realtime.
Merriam-Webster: the interrelated conditions in which something exists or occurs: environment, setting.
Manix: the self-authored conditions in which I exist and occur: memetic environment, setting.
Cambridge Dictionary: the situation within which something exists or happens, and that can help explain it.
Manix: This definition points to that we can explain our extraordinary experiences, and if we can explain them, we understand them.
What is the relationship between meaning and context? In the paper Meaning and Context-Three Different Perspectives, Abdullah Soliman Nouraldeen says the following (1):
Meaning is more than a definition in a dictionary; it is also found in a context. Meaning and context are interdependent, i.e., meaning cannot be communicated without context, and context cannot be established without meaning. Travis, in his book Unshadowed Thought, affirmed that meaning is thoroughly contextual (Williams, 2004, p. 107). The meaning of a word can be inferred by context. There are different types of contexts that relate to meaning, such as nonlinguistic or situational contexts, but the majority of studies limit the meaning of contexts to the linguistic contexts of a word, i.e., the words before and after a word (Charles, 2000, pp. 506-507).
What does that mean about context? Basically meaning and context are two sides of the same coin. Because they are inseparable, as you make meaning with your innate participatory subjectivity, you build context. As you build context, you change your perceptual possibilities, behavior, you learn differently, and your life enters a different flow—a whirled of your own wish. We can’t let the context we are given after our experiences, namely illness, remain unbalanced by our subjective meanings.
In his article The Power of Context: Transforming Perception and Perspective, John Hibbs says, "The brain associates and organises information according to context, so if you can change the context of any given situation you can change how you perceive it.” The article is a quick read and has some great points to extrapolate.
Now let’s connect context to our dialogue on meaning.
The relationship between meaning and context according to Colins Dictionary is, “The context of a word, sentence, or text consists of the words, sentences, or text before and after it which help to make its meaning clear.” If we have unfolded many words, sentences, and memes of our our meaning, we will be clear with in ourselves how we wish to understand and integrate the unknown-extraordinary.
We’ve discussed perception before, and we can see that building context by making our own meaning changes what we will see and how we will see it, and how we can make meaning out of it as the future becomes the present. If we make meaning-context, it acts as a lens to see and act on new experiences. We can act with understanding, living unfolding our ecstasography, or we can act out of fear, which is lack of understanding, or lack of the ability to understand due to lack of context, and fall into the pathography.
As you build meaning and create context, you get a different meaning out of a similar future experience. Once fearful we default to illness. Now something similar is understandable and meaningful within our context.
Imagine a child learning to ride a bicycle, falling to the ground, scraping her knee. The adult says, “that’s gravity, it’s a dangerous defect of reality.” The child is discouraged from mastering gravity through the bicycle. It’s the same with new meaning in consciousness. The gravity of the new meaning and memes is intense. Psychiatry comes along and says that intensity, magnetism, newness is illness, and we are experiencing it due to a defect in our brain. In the same way as we can learn to ride a bike, we can master the gravity of our sense of subjective meaning making with our body-brain-being vehicle.
Initially, it feels like surfing a tsunami, but so did learning to ride a bike, relatively speaking. As we build context, we build the ocean of our awareness, and we become the tsunami of meaning and the surfer of it. We master gravity in many ways as humans—walking, jumping, skating. We’ve been conditioned to stop learning—thinking that learning is the education system, believing that we stop learning as adults. As J. Krishnamurti said, “The whole movement of life is learning.” If we want to get with the movement of life, we must learn, and learn we must mastering the gravity the new in our consciousness.
We are creating the context to make the idea of bipolar, mania, spiritual emergency, transformational crisis, or whatever else you want to call being part of human potential, not human illness as an idea whose time has come. Then, we will crowd out our failure to see for ourselves that we cannot fail. The time has come for humans to be connected to a new source of ideas and inspiration. I write is to create context, a vast web of meaning, not content.
By listening to the book Radical Honesty by Brad Blanton I discovered an essay by Werner Erhard called The Hunger Project: Nothing is so Powerful as an Idea Whose Time Has Come. I love this essay and I recommend reading the whole thing linked here. The essay emphasizes the importance of context in manifesting ending hunger by making it an idea whose time has come.
Though I’d love to end hunger, and in mania I feel particularly called to help people experiencing homelessness, we are, as always, extrapolating the essays ideas on context to our context—to make living our esctasography, informed by and reverse engineered from the context of mania, an idea whose time has come—or however we wish to state this transformative shift. That was just at the tip of my fingers.
What’s amazing about our context is that, you can do this entirely for yourself. You, and only you, can change the context of your relationship to extraordinary experiences, to the newness of life calling you. You don’t have to solve everyone’s mental illness diagnosis. If you extricate yourself from it, and the next person does the same, we’ve each done what is ours to do-what’s within our circle of influence.
So much energy is wasted waiting for others to change. We can change effortlessly through building context, and see that living our dreams, our destiny is an idea whose time has come—and we live it out actually, for real, beyond any idea of idea.
By endeavoring to philosophize and create context, we are causing mania and human potential to draw closer until the connection or idea’s time has come as an epiphenomenon. Remember, what we discover anew subtly contributes to human consciousness, eventually giving others permission, or release from their prison, to live themselves out truly. By building meaning and ecstasography context you are serving humanity.
Then we can be who we are in a totally different context and lens, and that changes everything. Instead of being disjointed in confusion, all our perceptions and actions will make complete sense. The question of what causes an idea’s time to come is elaborated upon in the essay by Erhard. He says something very important that underlies the very process of mania; being confused and not knowing. Around the question of what causes an idea’s time to come, Erhard says:
The answer to this class of question is, instead, a principle more powerful than all the forces in the world. To answer this class of question, you have to give up your normal way of arriving at answers. Rather than knowing more and then more as you go along, you will need instead to be willing to know less and then less (that is to say, to become somewhat more confused as you go along). Finally you will have struggled enough to be clear that you don't know. In the state of knowing that you don't know, you get, as a flash of insight, the principle (i.e., the abstraction) out of which the answer comes.
His point is corroborated by neuroscientist Beau Lotto when he says, “Nothing interesting begins with knowing. Accordingly he adds “that you know less than you think you know now.”
Mania is a state of not knowing, uncertainty, and confusion, and that’s why we have access to new and creative information. We are less attached to what we know and more curious about what is possible to discover. In a way, mania is the solution state, because interest begins with not knowing, and insight begins with confusion. At times we may not know how we know certain things.
Not knowing is a powerful state and may be the answer because that’s where our own answers come to us. They are alive and highly unique to us in our particular situation. Erhard says that the transformation of content to context is what causes an idea’s time to come. And that happens through flashes of insight. I get flashes of insight in mania, don’t you? Well, now I can get insights anytime, I don’t need the energy of mania, because I’ve built the context to allow for the epiphenomenon of consistent flashes of insight, surprise, eureka, aha, serendipity, synchronicity. It’s no longer released only when the floodgates of mania open. I have access to it as it drips into my awareness.
And that’s another point. I sense the cause of loneliness, identity crisis, meaninglessness, etc., is because we aren’t connected to the source of newness. When we are, we are always learning. Learning, real learning, and loneliness are mutually exclusive. I’m often alone, never lonely. It doesn’t exist in a subjective-participatory perception of actuality which crowded out concepts like boredom, inattention, and loneliness. Erhard’s essay is about ending hunger. When we think about boredom and loneliness, it’s a type of hunger. We are starved for type of fuel, nourishment, that we aren’t able to access. We can’t access the resource of other people or we can access the capacity our brain has to see novelty and learn.
Novelty is everywhere. We can learn about the details of the paint on our wall, the electronics we use, the birds, photosynthesis, or prompt AI to give us a hint. But we remain bored. We are disconnected. In mania, our hunger for meaning, creativity, novelty, and so many other domains that humans are seeking or wish they had access to, either naturally, or by trying something to “get there,” is overstuffed. We have subjective meaning overload. We need to make the idea that this meaning overload can be adapted to, an idea whose time has come. Then we meet manic energy somewhere in the middle, by building context, drop by drop, in daily life. Currently, we get tranquilized, and the possible meaning is oppressed, repressed, feared and never adapted to. All humans need this capacity. People who go into mania get too much of it, and those dying of meaninglessness need some of it. We all need to meet somewhere in a new context.
How do we go about it? Well, Erhard’s essay is so brilliant at unfolding the power of context. And again, for us, new context is built one meme at a time, one understanding at a time. It’s a factor of the present moment and our presence.
Erhard says, “When an idea exists as a position (when it is a content) then it is an idea whose time has not come. When an idea is transformed from content to context, then it is an idea whose time has come." Mania is a context that allows so many ideas to be and come forth. If we build it into a context, then the way we are in mania is in context, not out of context in our profoundly sick society. We appear crazy because the world is crazy, killing each other instead of celebrating. We are the being that bring the context to drop the violence and dance naked in the streets. When we first experience mania, we may celebrate prematurely, not realize the seed is birthed in us, in our minds, like the Christ consciousness, but has yet to actualize. Yes, we are meant to do the great things of Christ and more, just like he said, but we don’t listen. We focus on his story and history, but fail to see the mystery and miss the story that could be actuality. Anyone who manifests the abilities of Christ is quickly tranquilized. I’m not sure why I went biblical. I had an insight that Christ was the first with Christ consciousness. A seed of light. And, since the world wasn’t ready, he walked to the cross and expunged himself through autogenic death. People couldn’t listen, so he shut himself up. The point of Christ was to make more Christs, not Christians. I don’t know what I’m talking about so perhaps my channeled entity Alethia interjected here. Since I’m not writing content, which should abide by a certain structure, but context, which is uncertain, I’ll leave it.
Let’s imbibe Werner Erhard a little bit more:
I tell you the power of context is real.
What you can do that no other entity can do is create a context. Only you have the power to create a context. It cannot be done by a group. It cannot be done by an organization. It must happen within the Self. The home of context is Self.
You don't need anyone's agreement to create a context. You don't need anything from anybody.
Instead, it creates a context in which you get to answer that question yourself, so that the answer is your own answer.
Create a context and you have mastery.
Thank you for reading this far. I wish for sparx of insight showering down like neutrinos. We are building context to go with courses I’m creating to facilitate a pragmanic life.
(1) Nouraldeen, A. S. (May 2015). Meaning and Context-Three Different Perspectives. Published by European Centre for Research Training and Development UK. British Journal of English Linguistics. Vol.3, No.2, p.13-1. www.eajournals.org