Frequency Soup

Near the beginning of a recent session in one of Bonnitta Roy’s classes, when it was open to talk about anything, I shared a version of the following story:

Our home phone rang and, not having my glasses on, thought that it was the number of my wife’s friend and handed it to her. It turned out to be Feeding America. We gave them a lot of money during the COVID years and since my name was on those donations, they wanted to talk to me. The reason that I still have a home phone is so that I can give it to all public entities so that I can avoid texts or calls on my cell phone from anyone that I don’t know. But she handed it back to me, telling me who it was. I started to talk but he had started his sales pitch. I attempted to stop him again but he ignored me again. I then got mad and said “Stop talking and listen to me!” which he did. I said that I had given them money in the past, that I would continue to do so but to stop calling. He meekly replied that he would take me off of the call list. When I hung up my wife said “you didn’t need to be like that.” I realized that she was absolutely right.

A cascade of insights followed, leading all the way back to, it seemed to me, my preverbal or near verbal childhood. I clearly remember being overwhelmed by my environment, which included several siblings and more than a bit of chaos. The incoming sensations were just too much and, in particular, I found sadness and anger the most distressing. I had the feeling that I was out of place and somehow needed to escape. That was hopeless, and so was I much of the time. At some point thoughts like “I don’t belong here” showed up, then something that I said often when a little bit older, “Go away and leave me alone.” “Get me outta here” showed up later and, as I came to understand, one component of my love affair with yoga was to keep the world and its emotions at bay. In that pursuit, I eventually gave away everything that I owned and moved into the ashram.

I am really anal about my privacy, and will not go into all of the ways that I use to avoid being tracked online. But it became clear in this moment that it was all an attempt to keep the “unpreferred” sensings of the world at bay. It was “go away and leave me alone,” again.

Later in that session, someone spoke of a call towards worship and at the end, devotion was mentioned. What came to mind was “I’m not devoted to anything and I don’t worship anything.” Those thoughts were immediately followed by my wife’s voice saying “You don’t need to be like that.” I shared this too, at the very end of the call.


This week I listened to a podcast where Jordan Hall, who is someone I have listened to a number of times in the past and respect, shared about his conversion to Christianity. This story was a surprise to me, and to my friends who know of him. In this Podcast he spoke with Jim Rutt, a friend of his and an agnostic, who did pose many penetrating questions, all within the recognition of their mutual respect. My initial reaction was that Jordan was clearly resonating with a church community where it seems that he, his wife and child, could live a full-filled life. Good for him! The way that I understood this was that due to his feelings about this community, he then CHOSE to try on the beliefs and practices that were anchor-like within that space and, due to that, its resonance sphere was further inhabiting him.

I followed that the next day by watching a video conversation between Jordan and John Vervaeke on the same topic. They too were friends and there was a wondering at the beginning if that could survive this transition. It was beautiful. I deeply felt Jordan’s new found wholeness, much more than I did in the conversation with Rutt…and for me the word worship, for some unknown reason, was its moniker. This had me wonder – if I worshiped something, how would that alter my reality? What first came to mind was an experience I had 8 years or so ago, where it felt like a vast inflow of de-light-filled photons were raining down on and through me. I remember thinking – maybe this is what they mean by grace. It has recurred a handful of times since. In my breathwork practice the next day I invited in that same sensation, reaching out my memory of it towards the photon-streaming star of ours, and putting myself in the imagined state of worshiping the sun’s rays. The grace experience easily returned, with a slightly different flavoring.

Though I believe that consciousness is a fundamental aspect of the universe, I have always leaned towards the belief that the universe, as a whole, is not self-reflexively aware. But Jordan accepted that he had a personal relationship with god. Could I do that with the universe? No, at least not now. It’s too big for me to conceive of as personal. But I could “imagine” the possibility of having a personal relationship with our star, and certainly this Earth, which has graced me with life. So, I tried it on.

It seems to me that Jordan, and now I, collapsed a portion of our individual latent stream of potential states, out of its Superposition and into reality by that act of choosing. I am shifting into some new reality where a personal relationship with this Earth is just beginning to inhabit me…and at least gratitude for that relationship, if not quite worship.

I can always feel Spring when it comes. It is so different than Winter. I can feel the particle-like joy arising from the Earth this time of year. Today is the 15^th anniversary of my mother’s death. I went out to the cemetery, sat with her for a while, as my dear Earth welcomed home a prodigal son.

Superposition is a term from quantum physics that is used to describe a particle’s position when fired through a slotted barrier in the famous double-slit experiment. In this experiment the particle acts like a wave until it is measured (observed), “the wave function collapses” and the particle is then found in one place.

I was reading “On the Origin of Time: Stephen Hawking’s Final Theory” and came across these lines: “Before one measures the particle’s position there is no sense in even asking where it is. It does not have a definite position, only potential positions described by a probability wave that encodes the likelihood that the particle, if it were examined, would be found here or there.”

But this is the one that really struck me: “…[Richard] Feynman’s understanding of the double-slit was that individual electrons follow not one but every (emphasis mine) possible path from the gun to the screen. One path takes the electron through the left slit, another through the right, and yet another might take it first through the right, back out through the left, into a U-turn, and through the left slit once more. Every single possible path – aka history – of the electron, no matter how absurd, must be considered, Feynman advanced, and all those paths contribute to what we see on the screen…the electron does anything it likes. It just goes in any direction at any speed, forward or backward in time…”

What this brought to mind is my experiences of perspectives. Lately I have imagined my perspectives like slots on a roulette wheel, where my attention will bounce here and there but ultimately land somewhere relatively firm. I can often hear what the slots at the last two bounces or so have to say, and take them into consideration after the marble is secure in its landing spot. I can then do a conscious assessment to see if that is the best of the options presented. But the landing spot does seem to be a preferred location somehow, and much too often it is secure there without consideration of any others.

Is it possible that my awareness of a particular circumstance is in a kind of superposition containing all possible perspectives, just like the electron? I have said before that focused attention generates energy, which thus creates a gravitational pull, however small. I imagine that a lifetime of directing my attention, initiated by others and/or my own choices, generates gravitational preferences that act like the observer (measurement) function in the double-slit example. It may not constrict the perspective to a single point, as with the electron, but it often seems to, at least initially. At a minimum, repeated attention over time must surely narrow the possible landing sites that result in my “having” a particular perspective.

I have often thought that all of my practices, explorations and interactions with fellow explorers over these many decades were loosening the grip of the enculturation and narrowing processes. So, I love the feel that all of this is moving my awareness towards a kind of inherent superposition, such that until a state is reached where a perspective is observed by my conscious attention, “there is no sense in even asking where it is.” This also makes every perspective’s landing spot less securely held, in the knowing that those “possible paths” were, and are still, available, even though “unobserved.” The more options that my attention does become aware of, the freer I am to travel in consciousness in a more unencumbered way, sampling a multitude of perspectives before choosing one…if that is necessary.

This one may be a bit of stretch, but I like how it feels. And in looking back at what I have written before, this piece is quite obviously a continuation of posts on Joy that I have already written. It does continue to amaze me that I so easily forget much of what I have written, but I do.

The previous related posts that I will ask you to read now are: On the Way To Joy, Joy Conversion, The Cycle of Joy to Joy and most recently Dancing Towards Home. I realize that this will be a lot of reading. But each is an earlier vision of Joy, bubbling up through the sometimes cloudy surface layers of my thoughts. And it will be the only way to take in the entirety of what I am pointing to in this episode of an apparently ever-unfolding story.

To begin: I noticed something fairly common when doing my pranayama practice recently, but this time an insight arose along with it that made it uncommon. I typically have my eyes closed when doing the practice – and though there is always a dark background, within that background – I usually see/feel energy in continuous oscillating flows and/or particle-like showers, passing through or mixing together in seemingly infinite variations of blacks, grays, and whites, along with some other colors in very muted tones. On some occasions a particularly dark area will appear inside a much lighter area, both located in the central part of my “visual” field. Both are more or less round but the borders of each are irregularly shaped.

At times, the area will be very black, with a brilliant white halo around it. On rarer occasions both will become crystal clear, as if I was focusing binoculars on them. In these cases, all motion within that image stops. This is noteworthy since the vast majority of the time over these many decades, there is motion everywhere and nothing stops. But on this recent occasion there was a tiny dark spot within the white and it struck me that it was, somehow, a black hole. The thought that arrived with it was “The I AM in each person is the “I” of a black hole, taking in, but unperturbed by, the dancing joy outside of its interior.” It did not arrive with any understanding, just those words.

Some time later that tiny speck of a black hole felt familiar, and I recalled another memory of it from a very different perspective. I see patterns in energy all the time. Sometimes words arise with them, but most often they do not. Occasionally, the patterns are fractal-like and I have seen the pattern before in a different wavelength range where I may already have associated understandings. But in the instances when these experiences come into that crystal clarity, there is no motion at all in the white or the black aspects of the image. In very rare instances of this phenomena there is a sense of absolute certainty that something was recognized, but without motion there are no distinctions to be had. This time, for the very first time, there was that sense of recognition and words.

Here I will muse a bit on these words. If, in fact, this universe did begin with a Big Bang, as most cosmologists seem to believe, then it arose out of a singularity. And a singularity lies at the heart of every black hole, where space and time are said not to exist.* And there is a singularity at the heart of every galaxy with a disc of bright material flowing into the event horizon of its surrounding black hole due to the immense gravitational field. It seems to me that in this material the Many, that I have spoken of before, are returning to the singularity in a joyful reunion after their explorations in time. In this evolving story, we all originated from that initial Big Bang singularity. So as our point of origin it should be at the heart of each of us, our cosmological DNA, as should our galaxy with its singularity. Though it appears that the features of all black holes are different, the singularity within each may very well be the same. While acknowledging that theories on singularities are varied, one article that I read infers this, saying “…singularities are said to be the same infinite density point.”

So, I am now thinking that the black hole that I am seeing in my practice may be both my source, “within” me and a destination, off in the “distance” of my experiential future. And the flowing energies may, and I think should, be going in both directions, oscillating like most other energies in the universe. In between the internal and external black holes are the dancing manifestations of the Many that are being attracted by both, commensurate with the current frequency range of their associated physicality, size, and relative experiential proximities.

In the post Integrating the We I wrote about the many souls from my past whose joyful essence lie within me, as inseparable parts of me. I am now thinking of myself as a kind of black-hole-access-aperture, modulated by my attention, attracting the joyful “many” who are within my gravitational field and happen to be tuned to the Justin-specific resonances that are traits of my essence and/or part of my personal, internal “many-ness” that orbit my own black hole event horizon.**

In a recent session of Bonnitta Roy’s Pop-Up School, it occurred to me that some essence of that group is part of me now, and that this group joyful essence-gathering is much like collecting the joyful essence of individuals that I have found myself to have been doing all along. They are all deeply entwined parts of me now.

So, I went back and looked at my joy-list, now a couple of years old, and nearly all of these folks did belong to a group that I was associated with. I see now that I can sense the essential, joyful energetic churnings of each of those groups too. It looks like I am pulling in the joys of external singulars and external plurals, along with all of their internal plurals. So, I’ve collected those individuals’ joy, and at least the collective joy of the group that I shared with them, into my own interior. And, I assume, on their side of the equation they were reciprocally dancing with me in the same way.  All the while I am likely being gravitationally pulled towards, and attracting, the essential joy of other individuals and groups that I have interacted with but am not consciously aware of. I clearly feel the gravity of our planet and we assuredly must all be being inexorably pulled towards the black hole, and its singularity, of our galaxy in a kind of Joy-sharing galactic family dance of nearly infinite attractions, inflowing and outflowing, in all directions.

I have no doubt that, to a large degree, what comes out of my mouth is evoked by my environment and that I have an affinity for certain energetic environs that increase the range of my black-hole gravitational field, attracting and taking in a wider band of potential frequency ranges to be experienced. I think this is likely true for environments of all kinds, but it is just much more evident to me when I am interacting with individuals and groups. In all of this process, I suspect that my internal black hole and the external black hole are moving toward each other, as well as toward an experiential re-union, and the singular home, outside of space/time, from which we joyfully leapt forth.

I will end this one by requesting that you read one last piece on Joy, Tell Us of Your Joy.

 

* The Big Bang singularity is said to be different than any other singularity and, of course, debates abound on all of this.

** I am just now delving deeper into ideas about white holes and I don’t have a good feel for them yet.

I will begin with two quotes:
“She hurls herself forth outside Him in a burst of joy, to play at finding Him again in Time – He and She, two in one.” – Satprem, from his book Sri Aurobindo or The Adventure of Consciousness.

“We are all just walking each other home.” – Ram Dass

I do not know all of the paths that my children have traveled or their experiences on those paths. But I know them deeply and always welcome their visits, and all of the adventures and experiences of any kind that they may care to share with us. So too, it seems to me, we are somehow known from our beginning, when we leapt forth to play as separate entities. There is a kind of discovering on our travels, of aspects of Self, long lost to us, that have explored other paths, many very unlike ours, but whose essence is familiar, known and loved, some more easily recognized than others.

In the natural exploratory and playful ways of our individuated selves, we have crossed paths with family members from that original home, but also from the interim homes where we have loved and dwelt for a time with favored playmates along the way. Those homes may be other places and times here on Earth, other worlds, stars or galaxies, with, perhaps, this universe as the ultimate home.

In a post “Integrating the We” I wrote that in remembering my past acquaintances, co-workers, family and friends from this lifetime, the memory of nearly every one of them brought me some flavor of joy:

So, I’m now seeing that before I could consciously recognize that I had always been “Integrating the We” of them, I had to have integrated myself to some degree. I had to do the work of extracting what was not essentially me in order to get close to the range where essence-to-essence resonance would be the norm in order to see them in me, as me. Time has also clearly played a part in that. But now, as I bring them all in, I am enhancing this I to be more whole, in the acknowledgement of their contribution to this I. How many will I be able to include as sustenance to the WE that I continue to become? It seems like the more of the essence of this emerging WEcosystem that I bring in, the more folks I include into the I/WE-ness of which I am aware, the more accessible my affinity is, that agape, to reach out and sense the joyful selves of others in my environment. I can then actively invite their energies into this evolving I/We and gift back to them the vibrations of this enhanced Self to which they have contributed. And note that they too are composites of relationships accrued in their life’s journey and thus the vastness of the ever-interacting WEcosystem becomes more apparent. The more Selves-aware I become, the more Self-aware I become and the more Selves-aware all of the WEcosystem becomes.

What has become clearer of late is how the sharing of our discoveries, past and especially present, opens up our sensing abilities to ever deeper familial connections, and fosters a seeing and being seen that draws us back towards the time of our initial leaping forth. This kind of sharing seems to increase the velocity and intensity of the love, joy and playfulness of reuniting. It’s a kind of deliberate, reciprocal depth perception practice for the re-Joy-ning of the many. That feels particularly true for those with whom I have played before and with whom I have shared some interim home, a frequency neighborhood if you will, before this lifetime. With them there is a natural accelerant in just being together, but the sharing amplifies the sense of moving towards our once unified state.

Though many may still be exploring outward, away from our origin point, I myself do feel that, in the words of Ram Dass, I am walking home, hand in hand with others who are going my way, so to speak. The pace at which I playfully, and sometimes seriously, move towards home is magnified when I come into contact with not just individuals, but with groups that resonate at similar frequencies to where I now find myself, after having imbibed the delightful essences of others along my journey just as they have. I can sense my resonance with them but am also very sensitive to that underlying pull towards home. I have long felt that the Earth is not my home and though I do have some affinity for it, I now seem to be more sensitive to some other interim home or homes, where I stayed for a time while meandering out from that mysterious origin point.

Now I’ll pivot to gravitation. I’ve had the notion for quite some time that focused attention generates a form of energy, and as theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder has said, “All kinds of energy have a gravitational pull.” If my conjecture is correct, focused attention, individual and collective, must have some measure of gravity, however small.  And given the intense gravity of black holes, I have mused that they might be the most conscious “things” in the universe, being, perhaps, portals for the pure attention of consciousness. A new theory in astrophysics points in a similar direction, it seems to me.

On one of the astrophysics channels that I watch on occasion, I came across a video that I feel has profound implications for this idea. I have put a link for you below to watch (it is less than 10 minutes long). But first I will put some context for those who may not have my interest in physics. In quantum mechanics everything exists as a possibility until there is an observation. Only when an observation occurs is there a shift from that space of potential into physical existence where it can then be seen/measured. You may get a bit lost with some of the technicalities of physics that he is talking about, but the overall concept of what is observing is all that I am asking you to take in.

Why the quantum world collapses into reality

So, it may well be that our reality is held in place by black holes, including the one in the center of the Milky Way, and that it is possibly one of our “interim homes” to which we are being gravitationally drawn. It seems nearly impossible, at least while in these bodies, to recall all of our playful journeys from the point at which we split off from some vaster aspect of consciousness. But we can feel the pull of that gravitation, the call of wholeness, and walk back in that direction in the company of, and with the help of, loved and resonant siblings who we attract, and are attracted by, along the way.

I’ll start with a quote from “Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness” by Satprem: “She hurls herself forth outside Him in a burst of joy, to play at finding Him again in Time – He and She, two in one. What then was the commencement of the whole matter? Existence that multiplied itself for the sheer delight of being and plunged into numberless trillions of forms so that it might find itself innumerably…The strong soul conscious of its own immortal stuff and the inexhaustible ocean of its ever-flowing energies, is seized by it with the thrill of an inconceivable rapture. It hears behind the thought, the childlike laughter and ecstasy of the Infinite…Once launched, the play will not cease until all the possibilities have been accomplished…”

I will not attempt to explicate his planes of consciousness, and don’t think that I could, but will list them here.

The Absolute (Sat-Chit-Ananda*)
Supermind
Overmind
Intuitive Mind
Illumined Mind
Higher Mind
Mind
Life
Matter
Subconscient
Inconscient
Nescient

My take on this is that everything is Joy and that matter is bound up, deliberately concealed Joy.

Two thoughts about this came to mind recently.

The first is that the Joy that is to be released from bondage appears to be layered in some way, given his description of planes. That would seem to indicate that each plane is mining Joy from the ones below for their own processing and en-Joy-ment, and then release it into the next higher plane. Thus, every individuated consciousness is, in some fashion, dependent on the ones below to provide the fodder for releasing Joy at their plane. This thought came about when thinking of the practice that many people have of generating gratitude. If what I just said is accurate, then at each plane those above are grateful for those of us working on the front lines below, like here where we are dealing with Life, Matter, and using the basic “Mind.” So, it strikes me that gratitude is not unidirectional, as I perceive gratitude practice to be, but bidirectional. The Joy and gratitude that they have for us is the fuel that allows us to do the often difficult Joy-mining that we have chosen, and they are grateful for that nutrient stream from which they further release Joy at a different frequency range. It’s like the Joy and gratitude flowing downstream tickles the Joy that is buried in matter and due to its resonance with itself, it is called forth to meet its match. As we can attest, it sometimes takes concerted efforts to extract Joy from the stickiness of density and unconsciousness, but the resulting Joy is apparently worth it. The entirety of the stream appears to have been created for that purpose.

“The soul attracted leaned to the Abyss: It longed for the adventure of Ignorance.” – Aurobindo 

Continue reading Joy Conversion

This will meander a bit, but I will attempt to point to the relatedness of all of the pieces by the end, though they will not be tidily wrapped up.

I’m going to start this first piece with a notion that I have expressed on many occasions, that we, as focused points of attention, are the result of 13.8 billion years of choices, or something energetically akin to choices. It is common knowledge that the physical Universe began when a Singularity burst forth in a Big Bang. [This may or may not be true but it is widely accepted in cosmology so I have used it as a framework] I have posited that something like “let there be light” was the first choice and that everything else has formed, evolved, differentiated from similar subsequent emanations.

And it is fairly common knowledge that without mass there is no gravity and without gravity there is no time. A photon, for example, has no mass so does not “experience” time. I saw a short video with Neil DeGrasse Tyson where he says that it takes about 30K years for a photon to get from the center of our galaxy to a telescope here on Earth, and from the perspective of the photon, the instant that it is created in a star and the instant that it reaches our telescope is the same instant. So, they seem to exist in an eternal “present” of some kind.

But our telescopes are also capturing photons that were emitted billions of years in the past, which is also the same instant for them. So, I’m wondering if we, like photons, could move towards an eternal present experientially if we became more photon-like…en-light-ened perhaps? I do experience time passing at different rates. This was most dramatically experienced in the LSD days of my youth but I notice it often in a variety of ways and settings. The experience of personal time slowing, as the world around me appears to speed up, has become much more obvious as I have aged and have been “lightened” by many decades of spiritual practices. If this is so generally, we should be able to swim back “upstream” in time by becoming less dense and, in the process, retrace all of our individual and collective choices. Each layer that I transit in this fashion will lighten me, bring a vaster view of the universe as I move back towards a less differentiated time, and accelerate my awareness towards the direction of light speed. In effect, it has the possibility of re-presencing moments of experience that a less differentiated “I” had “then.” Continue reading Time and Attention

I will begin this piece with my current view on what I will call the fundamentals of consciousness. It is, in part, the blending of perspectives from Steve McIntosh and Aurobindo, along with my own, which has its origins in a multitude of collected, and personally generated, insights over time.

I originally founded this Blog based on a single moment’s revelation when reading Steve McIntosh’s book Evolution’s Purpose. Some untold number of parts came into a coherent sensed perspective in that moment, in which I felt the wholeness of a pattern. Many of the parts were fleshed out in more detail in the days that followed and have continued to this day.

From the Blog Page Choice and Appreciation, some of McIntosh and O’Donohue:

“What does a universe of existential perfection do for an encore? It transcends itself through the development of creatures who can experience becoming perfect in time. That is, to achieve evolutionary perfection freely by choice, by effort, and even occasionally struggle, is to create an aspect of reality that did not exist in the state of existential perfection that we recognize as prevailing in the universe prior to the Big Bang.”

“Evolution is drawn toward perfection through the choices of consciousness….”

And I’ll add one here one by the Irish poet John O’Donohue.

“…the ultimate passion of the Cosmos is the creativity of divine beauty”.

I will now blend in some things that I’ve envisioned since returning to some of Aurobindo’s work that I had read when I was younger. I will note here that Aurobindo talks of joy, McIntosh uses perfection, and O’Donohue says beauty. I will use all three, as I think that they are pointing towards the same energy.

The purpose of Becoming is to create the next most perfect thing so that it might bring joy to Being, the beloved. So, an inherent part of what Becoming does is sharing. It creates something perfect, something amazing or beautiful, in order to share it, thereby to bring joy. In previous posts when I have listed what I saw as some of the fundamental traits of children, I included not only things like playfulness and curiosity, but also a child’s natural impulse to share. And in doing so, they want you to be as excited as they are about their discoveries, or their creations. They seek to delight their mothers, as they have been delighted by whatever they have discovered or created. And the appreciation shown by the mother delights the child due to the experience of shared joy. At least for a moment, they are “Oned” in joy, to use a term from Julian of Norwich. This brings about a circle of joying between an aspect of Becoming – that which is creating/sharing – and an aspect of Being – that which is appreciating/loving. Some form of perfection is discovered or created anew and then shared. The mother loves both what was shared and the one who shared it, which brings her joy. The one presenting the gift is, in turn, joyed by the delight of the mother and the cycle begins again. Each brings joy to the other, with a form of perceived perfection or beauty as the medium. Continue reading A Cycle of Joy-to-Joy

When we show up here as infants, we are raw and open. We have no mental cognition, but what I will call our essential, or core selves are energetically attuning to the natural frequency ranges of physicality and the basic hominid instincts that our consciousness cannot avoid. Over time, societal and personal enculturation comes into play and those manifestations are formed downstream from the essential self and those built-in hominid features. Our narrowing of attention continues to create many streams of focused attention in order to handle the wide variety of circumstances that we encounter in individual and societal situations. That narrowing of attention towards these focal points constricts the full flow of the essential self. All of the thinking and planning that goes into creating, firming up and justifying these habits will further dilute the deep essential energy of the core self that reaches our localized experience. All aspects of our lives are still fed from the fields of that essential self. It’s just expressed in a less purified form.

As we explore farther into our essential natures, the more “truth” we find. The clarity in those spaces can be experienced as profound, as we inherently know that we are closer to that essential self. But the resonances of the frequency ranges that we have developed over our lifetimes call us back to the habits that were formed in various kinds of situations. Family gatherings are a perfect example. I tend to engage with my family in the well-known historical grooves of those energetic spaces. It is mostly enjoyable, but I do sometimes get caught up in debates that bring out some of our older disagreements and resistances. In those cases, I find myself saying things that match those energies rather than from the fields that I tend to inhabit now. I will sometimes get a bit upset with myself for doing that. But the gravitation of practiced and repetitive attention is strong and unrelenting. That is its nature. And the fact that we formed those patterns, in that environment, grounds us all the more in their gravitational fields. And we all instinctively train ourselves to act automatically for two reasons that I heard John Vervaeke articulate. One, automatic behaviors reduce reaction time and two, thinking uses more calories than automated behavior, both of which are beneficial for survival. As an example, your instinctive reaction to a car careening towards yours will be much faster and more efficient after years of driving than it was when you were first behind the wheel.

Continue reading The Gravity of Habitual Attention

I have written before about the aspects of human nature that I see as fundamental, primarily because they are so visible in the behavior of young children. I have mentioned curiosity, play and joy, to name a few. But one that came up recently that I never thought of is vulnerability. At birth we are entirely vulnerable, so it is clearly elemental.

What brought this to mind was noticing how we react to different types of experiences that people have, and a curiosity about whether there is some kind of internal hierarchy in our responses to them. If there is some kind of accident or tragedy in the life of people that we know well, there is an innate reaction to come to their side and lend any kind of support that we can. There is some deep resonance with people when they are in pain. Some would say “my heart goes out to them.” When someone is being curious, playful, or overjoyed, there are a wide variety of ways that we might respond, but all are very different than our response to pain. When someone is pondering a life change, like changing jobs or moving, we react one way. If they are contemplating a divorce, we react quite differently.

What I am wondering is, is there some hidden criteria by which we naturally determine what is “more real?” Is our “authentic” self any more reflected in our vulnerability than it is in our curious self, our playful self, or our joyful self? When someone is being playful we will respond one way, but if there is a misunderstanding, and the mood suddenly shifts to vulnerability, pain or grief, everything changes in an instant. What is it about pain or grief that makes them any more “real” than the playfulness? Why do we react as if they are “more important” or “more authentic?” How do we navigate abrupt changes like this and what are those actions based on? Spontaneity is generally considered authentic. But do we curtail spontaneity in order to avoid the possibility of causing pain when around someone that we know is prone to depression? Is that a form of hierarchy that is built in to an enculturated human being? Could something akin to that even exist in other animals? What comes to mind are the many cats that my wife and I have had over the years. When they were roughhousing, a single “yip” of pain from one would stop the other.

It does seem evident that there is something about vulnerability, pain and grief that, for nearly everyone, immediately alters how they are being. I remember just days after the World Trade Center towers came down, I heard on the radio that there was a minute of silence, somewhere in Europe, where cars pulled off to the side of the road to acknowledge the moment. That brought me to tears. A natural reaction, I think, but is that really any more essential to my nature than joy?

I have often cited Aurobindo’s belief that everything is Joy. If he is correct, perhaps what touches us in the experience of grief is that we inherently know that the absence of joy requires the re-infusion of joy to be made whole again. If so, there is an argument to be made that our joyful self is most in resonance with the nature of the universe, thus our natural response to re-joy someone is too, as it arises from that same alignment with the cosmos. Thus, this pattern could be reflected in some hierarchical fashion in most, perhaps all, of our ways of relating to each other.

 

 

Over this past year I have more and more frequently found myself starting things and then my attention quickly slides off, much like the trying to catch a greased pig metaphor. One moment I’m reading, and the next I’m just staring blankly at text on a page. One of those things is writing a blogpost. I started many and though the ideas made sense to me, I’d slip off before I really got anywhere near a finished product. This sliding off experience has been so common of late that I have been trying to simply sense the experience of the energy that was tugging me away. What came to me was “This isn’t it.” Whatever I was doing was not taking me where I wanted to go. But where did I want to go? In that moment it seemed like the year and a half of Zoom calls, both attentively listening and doing practices, had been taking me to different, deeper frequency ranges. And whatever experiences that had once called to me were no longer sufficient to satisfy whatever it was that I was being drawn towards. It seems that what had been a suitable pathway had done its job to get me to a certain station on the road, but the terrain now went beyond the vibrational lure that led me to this point. And then, a flash of understanding.

For nearly all of my life I’ve been wondering what the hell I’m doing on this planet, and the answer that arose was: just to have experiences. That insight flowed into me and I could feel myself being washed clean of any notion that I had ever had about how things are. It is so simple that it’s hard to fathom that I did not see it before. I’m still just sitting with the inflow, as it “news” me. Though some patterns and thoughts I have seen in the past may still hold true, they must all be reassessed from what a friend called this new “un-framing.” I suspect that many will be discarded and that many will remain true, but all will have a different take. And now that I’ve arrived at this space to which I was drawn, will I be led elsewhere when the acclimation to this space is farther along? Perhaps, but that can unfold when it does.

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