Since entering the world of web3 this year—after hanging around the edge of the pool in 2020-2021, dipping my toes into the water but never taking the plunge and jumping in—I will admit that it’s also facilitated the expansion of my internal world.

Quite simply, the world seems to have new dimensions that I didn’t previously have access to—and it has rewired the ways I navigate, and think of myself, in the world.

In web3, even as it is very much focused on the individual—rights, assets, ability to participate in DAOs, traverse metaverses, etc; it also creates conditions within which the entire notion of one’s self can be unshackled, from all of one’s predispositions.

Never will I ever forget the feeling—quite literally—of having purchased my first NFT, which was actually free, as it only cost the nominal gas fee to transfer it to myself. It is a pixelated image of the Rembrandt self-portrait hanging in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. It was created by my, now acquaintance, Scott Baker.

The way that I had nearly always thought of the internet up until then, immediately shifted. No longer did I only think of the internet as being an amalgam of podcasts, Twitter and search engines, online shopping—whoops—and constant video feeds.

Suddenly the internet felt less like a landscape of media, and things to buy, out there, in the actual physical world, beyond my body. Suddenly, portions of my soul that are somehow in this body of mine yet not of it—felt as if they no longer needed to flee.

The human brain’s right hemisphere relates to and experiences everything in the now; present: ‘right here, right now’. It is also, my connection to the universe, and all that is beyond my body. Every human’s left hemisphere pulls out the details of details, and it finds further details about those details; it’s concerned with the past and the future. All of this, according to the brain scientist, Jill Bolte Taylor. The occasional longing to leave one’s body comes from the reality that all humans are energy inside of a body.

It’s the reason, I now know when I sit on a sun-drenched terrace during autumn, and suddenly a tree leaf fluttering in the wind catches my eye… I follow it; it’s graceful and melodic, as it meanders through the air, swirling up, down, and back around. That is also my brain’s right hemisphere, wishing to merge my soul, with the leaf’s movement.

In that moment of actually feeling like I am fluttering in the wind, just like the leaf that caught my eye, silently inviting me to follow and flow with it: I am close, with the Tao.

Using both hemisphere’s of one’s brain, in a whole and balanced way—and each of a human brain’s hemispheres, has both a thinking and emotional portion—is the secret.

As she has previously stated and is often quoted as saying in her TED Talk: ‘We have the power to choose, moment by moment, who and how we want to be in the world.’

When we use these two halves, equally, by mastering our internal world, humans truly can accomplish anything that they put their mind to—leading to, a whole-brained life.

How do I bring this ‘whole’ version of myself, into the metaverse—the internet in 3D?