So you think you know what's going on...

• We can't see (and don't know) what makes up most of the universe
  
• We can't see most of life on our planet
• We can't trust much of what's in our mind
• We can't see much of what drives our behaviour

Feeling dizzy yet? Let me quickly take you through the four points above.

The universe
No matter how they cut the data, scientists can't figure out most of what makes up the universe. By some calculations, they're 99% short of the stuff they need to make sense of the universe we're in. The missing mass was first named by the Swiss Astronomer Fritz Zwicky as "dark matter" - a fabulously poetic name.

The two main explanations of what makes up dark matter prove, if nothing else, that some scientists have a sense of humour. They're either WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, i.e. specks of invisible matter left over from the Big Bang) or MACHOs (Massive Compact Halo Objects - i.e. black holes and very dim stars that don't reflect enough life for us to see them).

Life on our planet
In Bill Bryson's book A Short History of Nearly Everything, he mentions that the vast majority of life - perhaps as high as 80% - is invisible. This became most apparent when, in 1976, microbiologist Carl Woese redrew the so called "tree of life" with twenty-three main domains. The entire visible world - plants, animals, and fungi - represents just three of the twenty-three branches. Most of the rest are microbes. As Bryson puts it, most of life is "small, unicellular and unfamiliar."

Dodgy memory.
If you feel your memory is going on you, it may not just be a sign of increasing age. A good deal of what you remember may be false. In Diane Ackerman's Alchemy of the Mind, she quotes some fascinating studies done to show how unreliable memory is.

Ulric Neisser of Cornell University tested memory by asking people for their memories the day after the space shuttle Challenger exploded. Three years later he surveyed them again, and about two-thirds were totally wrong about where they heard the news, when, with whom and so on. And more tellingly, they were totally confident that they could remember the details correctly. (Neisser also found that if you tell a story about an event, you're more likely to remember it. Narrative, one of the brain's key strategies, helps engrave memory).

Our shadow
The final realm of darkness is within - the Jungian shadow. This is a complex and fascinating area, and one to which I can do no justice in a single paragraph. But to attempt to sum it up, Jung argues that we all have parts of ourselves that are unclaimed, elements of who we are that for one reason or another we've decided to disown.

One of Carl Jung's insights is that it is through embracing and incorporating our shadow that we become whole. As he said, "One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light but by making the darkness conscious." There's a lot of good stuff written in this area, one of the most accessible being Debbie Ford's The Dark Side of the Light Chasers.

Action Acceleration challenge:

• Think of something that's challenging you right now, something you'd like to get unstuck on.
• What are you not seeing?
• If you step back from the situation, float above it at 30,000 feet, what do you notice? What do you now see that you couldn't see before? What are new factors? How do you sense this will end?
• If you step up to it, pick up a single piece of it and study it closely, what do you notice? What do you now see that you couldn't before? What are the new factors? What are you most curious about?
• What role are you playing in this? What part of yourself are you not acknowledging in this? The greedy, arrogant, scared, angry, controlling side? The weak, pathetic, confused, scared side? The compassionate, gentle, leader, inspirational side?
• Now: having gone through that process, what's the one action you're going to take as a result?
  

You can download the Action Acceleration Sheet(TM) for free at www.GetUnstuckandGetGoing.com and use it to work through your action challenge.

Michael Bungay Stanier is author of the
best selling coaching tool, Get Unstuck & Get Going ...on the stuff that matters available at www.getunstuckandgetgoing.com. A keynote speaker, certified coach and Rhodes Scholar, he works with coaches, trainers, teams and organizations to help them get unstuck and get going on the stuff that matters. Sign up for Michael's fr^ee Outside the Lines ezine at www.BoxOfCrayons.biz .

(c) 2005 Michael Bungay Stanier, Box of Crayons. Reprint permission available by request. Article must be complete and must include all contact information above. Apply to info@BoxOfCrayons.biz