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In a recent Zoom call, we were placed into breakout rooms with a sentence stem to complete: “What I know is…” The only words that arose for me were: “I know that there are sensings, but what I don’t know is if that which perceives is distinct from those sensings.” In essence, I cannot have experiences without some form of sensory input, and without a perceiver those sensings do not exist as sensings. So, are these two actually distinct or do they arise together as a single feature of consciousness?

As is often the case for me, over several days other ideas began orbiting around this notion, all of them beginning to swirl slowly toward each other. I will weave these together here bit by bit.

I’ll begin with Arthur Koestler’s notion of Holons, which I first heard about via Ken Wilber. I’m sure many who would read this post are familiar with this concept. It basically states that the physical Universe is made up of “whole-parts.” The standard example is that atoms comprise molecules, which comprise cells, etc. Each is whole in itself, yet is part of a larger whole. Our bodies are part of the Earth, much like our cells are part of our body, though we don’t see it quite like that. Alan Watts said, “We grow out of this world in exactly the same way as the apples grow on the apple tree.” There is no doubt that we arose from the Earth and are also a component of it.

This led my mind to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s notion of the “Noosphere.” He posits that this term represents a mental sphere of the planet, arising from the “Biosphere,” which itself arose from the “Geosphere.” He also posits that this Noosphere is moving in an evolutionary trajectory toward an Omega Point, where the diversified Universe will ultimately be re-unified – beginning, in our case, with the Earth. The inference is that human mental energy is the planet, potentially, moving toward at least a similar kind self-awareness as ours. We are, after all, just a bunch of holons arising from this planet in our evolving physical forms. And, if the pattern holds, slowly bringing into form a new more complex holon, much like the cells in our body brought us to our current state. Although I cannot fathom how that might manifest itself, it seems that the way and rate at which we are exchanging mental energy is obviously increasing rapidly. Imagine yourself as a single neuron in the Earth’s emerging brain.

What also came to mind is Ramana Maharshi’s response when he was asked: “How are we to treat others?” His response was: “There are no others.” It is reported that he was in deep meditation in a cave for so long – and was so detached from his body – that insects were eating it, his fingernails were growing long, and his body was wasting away. He was found and brought into the monastery. In the monastery, he was cared for and did eat and speak to people so he could clearly shift his awareness. Or perhaps a “focused point of conscious attention,” as Alan Watts once described the mind, simply moved from one region of attention to another. As we currently understand consciousness, our cells are not aware of the atoms of which they are comprised. To me, this seems no different that Ramana Maharshi’s broader awareness not experiencing his body.

A dear friend once said “Where you put your attention is where life shows itself.” But as noted with Ramana Maharshi, the word “focused” can cover a lot of territory. With that observation, I will go back to the foundational essay upon which I began this blog in 2016: Choice and Appreciation. I would recommend reading it now, but am inserting a portion of it here, as it is useful for the point that I am making.

The Hindus say that the only true statement in the universe is “I am.” The premise, typical of monotheistic religions, is that in the beginning there was just God/Being/Consciousness/Self/Source (fill in your favorite label) or the like; whole, solitary and self-aware.

If we accept the premise that there was conscious awareness, which I will, I would think that the initial creative act that set the physical universe into motion must have been initiated with intent, choice, or at least its energetic equivalent…

… Each point of awareness observes the environs of its locale and, in some way, selects new paths moment by moment, continuing that “downstream” current sourced by its headwaters, Being’s initial intent. Long forgotten in its focus on the immediate is any awareness of all of the upstream perspectives that it has traversed. The momentum of the energetic flow carries it along.

The choice of the next most perfect possible creation, in any particular place, for any particular aspect of the physical universe, must depend upon a particular perspective or set of perspectives from that locale.

I’ll use a worldwide company, like Siemens, as an example. A service technician knows what specific miscellaneous parts and what tools he needs to work on a piece of equipment, and likely his supervisor does too. The technician may prefer a certain specific tool, but his supervisor will factor in the costs, his budget, his perspective of the need, and perhaps a long term cost benefit ratio. The local salesman of the equipment will likely know little or nothing about a tech’s tools, or the minute details of the equipment’s set up or repair; a sales manager will know even less. Going upstream, the general manager of that branch office knows less than the sales manager, a regional manager knows even less and the CEO will know virtually nothing about the minutia that helps a technician do his job. Each in his own arena knows what’s needed for the best performance, based on the view from his level. The CEO is feeding his intentions downstream but it is primarily the folks in each area that determine what’s needed to improve things – make them more perfect – at that level. Yet it is all being driven by the intent of the CEO whose broad perspective is, in turn, not perceptible to our technician.

So, though the overall intent/choice energy stream is fed from Being, in the form and flow of Becoming, the choices of what will make one’s current environment more perfect must, again, be derived individually and locally.  We forget the upstream choices in our focus on the immediate choice at hand, like “I’m stopping for groceries.” But those upstream choices are still flowing down to us, as subtle as those experiences may be.

I’m going to stop here for a moment and point to something fundamental about focused attention. When one is focused on any particular thing, everything else has less attention paid to it, and often none at all. Thus, focused attention has a sort of blindness as one of its traits, so no matter how much any particular “I” may be perceiving, it is blind to nearly everything that it is not paying attention to at a given moment. Even appreciation of the created seems displaced when one is fully absorbed in some creative act.

So, if you can fathom all of the creative intent generated in the Big Bang, spreading out over about 13.8 billion years in all directions with all sorts of intertwining on micro and macro levels, it’s easy to see that the most distant choices are those to which we are most blind. They are still sense-able, since their upstream flow is feeding us, but they are so subtle that they reside deep in the apparent stillness that lies within us (very, very long wavelengths).

Now on the one hand, we have the downstream flow of Becoming’s energy, infusing every individuated perspective with creative intent searching for perfection. And it accesses those perspectives from every angle that it can because that is most effective for the larger purposes that are feeding the stream. And on the other hand, we have individuated entities’ perspectives (points of Becoming’s attention) making choices about what is most perfect for them. There will be subtle preferences flowing from upstream, but it seems these may be overridden by the immediate downstream consciousness since that’s the place where perfection is being assessed and choices on perfection made. For choice to impact a particular frequency range, it must be focused to vibrate within that that frequency range.

Becoming will access all possible perspectives through each portal available. Each perspective, or portal, will generate its own observations and creative choices along the way. Though each “I” moves among a multitude of perspectives, it will generally be making its choices in the particular range of frequencies that it is most attuned to.

What is also true, in my experience, is that focused attention generates an energetic flow in the direction of my intent, and this current has attributes. Firstly, it changes intensity based on the level and duration of attention exerted. Becoming a lawyer, for example, requires longer and more intense attention than mowing the lawn. Thus, the higher intensity generates a broader and more significant flow.

Secondly, the generated flow does not end when my attention leaves it. It keeps flowing off into the surrounding energetic field on its original trajectory. Some flows are easy to detach from and others are not. For instance, most people have had the experience of eating at a restaurant and realizing they have had enough to eat before their plate is empty. They may even stop eating but will occasionally start picking at what’s left until it’s all gone, or just enough is left so that they can tell themselves that they didn’t eat all of it. That one is relatively easy to detach from compared, for instance, to missing an Olympic team you’ve trained years for.

So each generated flow has gravity of its own, and the more energy that I’ve put into it, the more that energetic wake will pull me in as it seemingly meanders off into the nearby energetic environment.

The manifested form of the “I AM” noted above could be considered the Holon of all holons in Koestler’s model. But from our own little holonic regions, I will point to what I have said before about a newborn. It is almost entirely unfocused on our perceived here-and-nowness at the moment that it is born. We are constantly bringing the newborn’s attention in the direction of our attention, and those frequency ranges that we are energetically habituated to. Practices such as yoga are intended to draw our attention back in the direction of the expanded awareness we had when we arrived in this place, while we hold onto the skills, capacities, and kinds of awareness that our portal of attention has developed while here.

Now onto another part of this frequency journey. I have been a consumer of astrophysics – for layman – nearly all of my adult life. In my limited knowledge of it, it appears to me that most of the measurable energy in the Universe oscillates. It is certain that the entire electromagnetic spectrum oscillates and we do measure gravitational waves.

In a book called Dark Energy and the Dinosaurs, astrophysicist Lisa Randall says that our solar system oscillates in the plane of the galaxy approximately once every 72 million years. From the frequency ranges that we inhabit here, an oscillation of that length will not be sensed at all. It could conceivably appear as abject stillness, but so would the spinning of the Earth and all energies between those two and beyond. They are far beyond the normal focal range of our attention.

On the microscale, imagine what you see pond life doing under a microscope along with their relative ranges. This happens to be a decent example of how I perceive my point of attention shifting from relatively faster frequencies to longer ones. The long waveforms are relatively more still, and the thoughts and patterns embedded in the shorter ones become visible to awareness from that still, observer-like state. But I had never before thought of longer wavelengths, which I have long been beckoned toward, as perhaps the tendrils of a next larger holon. But the very notion of a singular sensings/perceiver aspect of consciousness has brought that forth now. This languaged notion is a useful access-way that is assisting me in reconnecting to this space. I am already becoming accustomed to how its leading edge feels and am finding myself more often shifting into this new experiential realm. It is an undulating and mutable region that I am now flowing in and out of. I am becoming able to see/feel the difference between the more personal orientations and the ones that are more like subtle inclinations of a present moment itself. There is likely both inflowing and outflowing aspects to this new state, but it’s way too early to sense any of that.

I have no idea what Ramana Maharshi’s experience was like. It does seem clear that in his expression of consciousness, the “I” awareness shifted “its” attention over a vast range of frequencies. Who knows what he could perceive. But it does appear to me, in this shifting moment, that to proceed into what is next we must give up the notion of a soul and a separate self, as he appears to have done, while still being able to move in and out of it. This will give us a measure of fluidity to more freely move about the Universe – to play and explore – both as an expanded, individuated entity and as the next larger holon’s energy field doing whatever it is already doing…and perhaps beyond.

I will end with the last line from Choice and Appreciation: Every act of creativity is to be shared and appreciated as a form of localized beautification/perfection of the energetic playground within which each aspect of consciousness has chosen to be focused.

Those of you who have read my words here will know that last January I wrote what I expected to be my last blogpost. Why it ended up getting posted in June, I explained in the one just before it, posted the same day. I have not, since that time, had any urge to write again, until now. From one conversation, a Zoom meeting, and a long walk in the woods, the bits of the following arose. As is often the case, they all felt related and I felt compelled to weave them together.

I have often stated that I sense a particular gravitation drawing me toward what I refer to as a direction: a direction toward silence. But perceiving in to my deepest experience of that silence, I see/feel two flavors. The gravitation that I speak of here lies in the silence of inflowing. The simple taking in of raw perceptions, qualia, sensed as moving through the energy system of this body and away from it, far into the distant stillness behind me. There is also the silence of an outflowing fullness, that which is the origin of the localized expressions of all that this entity is. How I express here is but a muted reflection of that outflow, interacting with, and being impacted by, the local energetic ecosystems and the choices that I have declared into existence while here.

In both cases, sensing “back” toward longer wavelengths, words begin to fail as the sensing of the frequencies’ oscillations do not provide enough distinctness that fall within the range of perception where my mind is currently accustomed to attending. Inflowing, it does not matter. There is nothing to be said about that deep emptiness. On the outflowing, however, there is a range – wherein resides what I have named my “translation mechanism” – that can tune to words that seem to ride within the undulations that, in a way, have something that calls for expression in language.

In one of the calls noted above, I noticed that I have an innate attraction to vastness. In that moment, I remembered a quote from John Verveake where he said that curiosity leads to wonder, wonder leads to awe and awe leads to wisdom. I liked that from the first time I heard it, but when it came to mind this time, it seemed like it was missing the mark. Though not limited to words, wisdom is typically perceived as the ability to articulate, and usually to exemplify, broad ideas that feel true to many. Thus, in my view, unlike curiosity, wonder or awe, wisdom does not convey as a state of experience. Vastness seemed like a more appropriate metaphor to follow awe in that progression. That felt right to me. Wisdom, then, would seem to be the articulation of an experience one has having entered into a current region of vastness.

I have been saying since I began writing that I seem to be moving in the direction of longer wavelengths, and have been for at least most of my adult life. The frequency ranges that I most frequently inhabit at a given time of life have become longer and longer, relatively speaking. In my day-to-day experience, the current range that I tend to inhabit is simply “normal.” Thus, in my frequency-riding experiences, the Vastness of which I speak is like a horizon. It can never be reached. But I can sense its vicinity at times when I am quickly moved in its direction, where my translation mechanism is activated, but my mental articulations have been left behind due to the loss of purchase on the slippery slopes of waves outside its current experiential range.

In the phone call, I had the realization that if the depths of which I speak are the source of me, and my expressions here are mere muted reflections, then “I” am never really here and never have been. That brought the experience of melancholy, as I felt out of touch with my “self.” I have not had that experience of melancholy in many years. But as a very young child I spent a lot of time marinading in melancholy. Looking at it this way now, it makes sense that I was experiencing a loss, a quite fundamental “something is missing.” My essential “I” was not present and an aspect of me knew that. This new perspective of the motion toward Vastness, with its traipsing in and out of experiences of curiosity, wonder, and awe, is another lovely development in this one’s expanding playground in consciousness.

A couple of days after starting this piece it occurred to me that “the infinite” feels unreachable, but vastness does not. The infinite is commonly tossed around in spiritual circles, but that very notion, at least as my mind perceives it, puts it far beyond the reach of my sensings. Vastness, however, I can feel.

 

Instances of magic seem to increase when in the vicinity of the ineffable.

My nephew died suddenly in the Fall of 2023. And in the previous year and a half we had been assisting our neighbor next door in many ways, due to her rapidly deteriorating memory. It got to the point where the State judged that it was unsafe for her to be living alone, so she was moved to a memory care facility. At the time my nephew died, her house had been vacant for a couple of months but was still full of her belongings. These two events had me think that I did not want my wife or children to have to clean out all of my stuff if I, too, died suddenly. I did a major purge, tossing all sorts of stuff from closets, bookshelves, and the attic, and emptying electronic devices of pictures and old emails, keeping only what I was fairly sure that I would want in the, possibly short, future. There was also one individual who I needed to apologize to for a long-ago, very intense argument right before she moved to another State, and I did so. This entire process was very lighten-ing, and the sense that I may leave this place at any time has continued to grow since then, and this has been particularly acute in the past few months. Several weeks ago, I felt the need to create a contact list of the people who I wanted to be notified if I did depart that my wife did not have contact info for or, in some cases, even know. I printed a copy and showed her where it was.

I described this briefly in a few online groups that I have long participated in. In the last one I stated that I felt “complete” with this life. The use of that word had a real finality about it. Almost immediately, I felt amazingly joyful.

For my entire life of deliberate spiritual practices, some 51 years now, I often struggled with the question “What the f*** am I doing on this planet.” In the earlier decades, I would often feel like I was strapped the front of a fast-moving freight train and could only see the track directly in front of me. So, I almost always knew where to put my foot next, but had no idea where I was heading. This was totally frustrating, but I could always feel the direction toward my unknown destination and rarely lost the sensing of it. In the same way, I sense this state of completion. It’s just there, present.

This sense of being complete has brought to the fore a true sense of freedom, since there is nothing that I have to do, to want or to be. For a couple of days it felt like joy was bursting through the top of my head and outflowing everywhere. A cascade of insights have followed, which have expanded and become a bit too complicated to include here in their entirety. But I’ll start with the portion that feels coherent enough to share, and that relays an overall sense of the journey to this state…and that begins a long time ago.

The experience of separateness was ever-present when I was very young. I suppose that sad and lonely were the common labels that I had for myself back then. Regardless of what I may have called it, it seems to me that that feeling extended back before my development of language. I would describe it now as being compressed by an overload of sensory experiences that created a kind of boundary between me and the world around me, despite living in an active household with my parents and five siblings. We all did get along reasonably well so there were no enormous stressors, though I found out much later that my parents were barely scraping by financially.

I remember waking up one summer morning thinking “Another endless day. I hope I make it. But how will I make it through an entire lifetime of endless days?” When I was around 6 or so, I heard about something called “retirement” and I longed to be retired from that day until I did retire, one day before turning 65.

By my early teens, the inflows had, for the most part, subsided. And if they did begin to emerge, I could usually block them out by deliberately staying busy until the incursion faded away. Focused attention, on anything, pushed them into the background. In my later teen years, marijuana and hallucinogens provided me with a few friends who were a stabilizing group for me and they kept me from feeling quite so alien. And the drugs were also a way to slowly reacclimate to those non-ordinary experiences, though at that time I was not relating them to those earliest experiences. To keep it short, I started doing yoga in 1973 and weened myself off of the drugs, as the impact of my yoga practice bore fruit in the direction of my unknown destination. I continued cultivating this way of sensing, and over just a few years I came to be experiencing my existence here as the constant flowing of energies, though I very rarely spoke of it. I was luckily introduced to the “est training” in 1975, and used both it and yoga to explore, clean out, and develop different aspects of my psyche and being. I continued my explorations with other inquiry groups and practices, and continue to do so to this day.

Yes, I am heading somewhere with all of this.

At my youngest brother’s wedding reception, I was talking to my new sister-in-law and my mother. I don’t recall what I said, but my sister-in-law looked at my mother and said: “Has Justin always been so serious?” Her response was: “Justin was born serious.” That was not the word that would have occurred to me as a child, but it did aptly describe the space that I inhabited back then. And at some point, in my 40’s I think, my mother, with a kindly hint of exasperation after some comment that I made, said: “Justin, you were as old as the hills the day you were born!” In that moment there was a deep, silent sense of its truth. But things were beginning to lighten, ever so slowly, over time. I had met my dear wife at the yoga center where I had been living, and was still participating. There had been an immediate sense of swirling motion that rapidly became falling in love, that became a deep sensing of relatedness that still exists today. Our two children followed and inserted an ongoing vibrant joy into our lives.

Overall, what I am seeing now is that my life appears to have been on a slow, but steady, trajectory from a dense gravity and that seriousness, towards today’s lightness and joy. The recent statement of completion has put a period at the end of that journey. It feels like a real freedom from any purpose, direction, or intent in this life. And now there is often a widening of my attention sphere, which slides over some gap into a space where perception is present…of a clear, pristine, and empty space, while I am wide awake in the world.

I will now weave a very brief summation of the last few years of this journey to completion, using selected ideas that I have presented in past posts.

On the Love side of the love/joy oscillation, I’ll start with some lines from Love, Joy and the Observer:

In my experience, Love and Joy are experiences of motion and are reflected in Being and Becoming. Love is the motion that I experience moving, metaphorically, towards the depths of Being, Unity, Oneness, Singularity. In me it most often is evoked by a sense of deep resonance with a particular person within whom I sense a shared energetic home that brings me back in the direction of my original separate sense of self, and perhaps beyond…The depth of resonance with a particular person, or sometimes a group, varies the strength of the gravitational energy that pulls me towards that locale. The farther back in my particular evolutionary journey that resonance lies, the greater the gravitation, thus the greater velocity of that motion, the greater Love, that the person evokes in me. Love is not, as I see it now, that frequency range itself, but it is the motion toward it.

With love as the “motion toward” and the end point as a sense of deep relatedness, I bring you back to the loneliness of my youth. Back then I often sensed a loneliness in others, perhaps because of the space of quiet solitude in which I mostly resided. But I was sensing a resonance with that place of deep quiet in them and though it was not always apparent in their observable demeanor I could clearly feel its presence in the background. I don’t recall experiencing a “moving toward,” perhaps because I was so embedded in the energetic state of quiet that there was no distance to traverse. But when people were actually experiencing sadness, I could listen to them in such a way that it seemed to relieve their suffering to some degree. Today I might describe that as “meeting them where they are,” and thus I provided an experience of relatedness that appeared to leave them more at peace. It was not uncommon, with the few friends that I had, that they would open up about their current dilemmas or suffering. But it also happened with people that I did not know so well, and sometimes with relative strangers. I was an open and willing listener for the weary. And perhaps because of that space where I tended to dwell, I attracted those who needed an ear. I always felt better at seeming to have soothed them, but it also seemed to anchor me more in that weighty region of sadness.

On the Joy side – also from Love, Joy and the Observer:

If love is the motion of an individual towards Unity, or its resonance within another, to me Joy is the motion of the individual towards the Unity, the One, the Singularity with and through the Many.

On the Many, I will point to the post I Love Therefore I Am:

“It certainly seems that I am the We of those I love and who love me, both the living and those who have passed on. I am sure that it extends beyond them but it certainly begins with those with whom I most naturally resonate. I am a fluid singular I that in some way is that We, as our resonances are always entwined.”

And lastly to Integrating the WE:

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 and I could then see them in me, and 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 right now. 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 obviously intertwined. The more Selves-aware I become, the more Self-aware I become and the more Selves-aware all of the WEcosystem becomes.

I often don’t know where these essays will end up when I start writing. What comes to me, as this one has been revealing its words, is that my journey through this lifetime, from mostly heavy seriousness to mostly light joyfulness, always with ever-present oscillations, may actually have been my primary intent for being here. I have allowed myself to be inhabited by many lovely souls, and have marinated in their essences, which has presenced my love for them and the joy that their presence in my life has evoked in me. They are now part of my WEcosystem, as I am part of theirs, hopefully becoming more joyful and Selves-aware. It thus may be that the entirety of my experience on this journey is this internally experienced energetic, thus outwardly invisible, aspect of my purpose. The intensity of that train analogy above, tapered off a bit after I started the blog, then disappeared almost entirely when I finished the book a year later. So perhaps all of these writings were suitable enough expressions of my internal energetic experiences, manifested out in the “real” world, to satisfy my intent in that way too. And it declared itself complete. I have always said that sharing is one of the fundamental traits of very young children, and therefore innate to human beings. It brings them, and most often those around them, joy. And whether or not my writing has brought joy to those who have found it, any insight that loosens the gravitation of the heavy and solitary will assist in the lighten-ing that will more fully let the joy in.

I have always known that writing provides me a relatively stable, though temporary, lily pad on which to balance for a time – while attempting to reach out into the next unknowns and bring forth their words, from this one’s perspective, as it transits them on its way to some grander fullness of joy. And it appears in this moment that I have transformed from the childhood space of a deep, dark and solitary-singular, to the wide open spaces of a composite-singular, dancing amongst the joy-filled fields of the Many. So, I now see my writing as my external contribution to the joys of the larger WEcosystem, the Many.

I am Complete

On Dec. 30 I found out that the website of my friend, who hosted mine, had been infected with a virus, along with all of the other sites he hosted.

He worked on recovering all of his subaccounts, of which mine was, by far, the least important. I was not deriving any income from mine, as others were from theirs. About 2 weeks later, while still expecting my site to be recovered, I wrote what I expected to be my last blogpost. I had had an insight which had me feel like I was actually done with what appeared to be my primary purpose in this life. Though I have received input from others relaying their doubts about that, which may be valid, I actually feel more done now than I did when I wrote it back in January.

Within days, in some cases weeks, my friend had gotten all of his sites back up, except mine and one other. I was told it was irretrievable. Though it did appear that there was a potential way to get it back up, I was hitting one roadblock after another, after another, after another. Eventually I came to rest in the realization that I was not intended to recover it.  So, in early March I did finally acknowledge that it was gone for good.

I sent that “final” post to the few friends that I remembered were subscribers, ending it with Frequency Soup RIP. Since I did not have access to the subscribers list on the site, most of you did not get it.

To keep this short, some things broke loose a couple of weeks ago, which presented a way to recover the website. I had been referred to a company earlier in the year that might be able to help, but at that time the technical situation and the data were not sufficient for them to make use of. I was now in a position to give them what they needed. Though more difficulties ensued, it is now back to where it was at the end of last year.

One oddity is that what was recovered had more subscribers than I recall having. So perhaps some receiving this had unsubscribed in the past. If that is the case for you, you will need to do that again.

That “final” blogpost will follow, exactly as I sent it out to friends, under the title that I originally gave it. Whether it will actually be my last, is yet to be determined. I have not been inclined to write since then, but time will tell…perhaps.

In a video conversation between Iain McGilchrist, Daniel Schmachtenberger and John Vervaeke, McGilchrist said that “relations are the foundation of everything” and “relationships are prior to relata.” I don’t necessarily agree with the second phrase, since in the less than trillionths of a second after the Big Bang there were some “things,” though that soup is often called plasma. But it is clear that there could be no “things” without relations since at a minimum each thing must be distinct from some other thing in order to be recognized “as a thing.” But the statement seems at least experientially true.

I will here provide some examples that I think point to the fundamental nature of relatedness.

The first is part of one essay from my book (read the words We, communion and communal as a form of relatedness).

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“Falling in love” does, in fact, have a sense of motion associated with it, which is why this term exists. It’s like our depths are naturally in resonance with the depths of another and our normal experiential range feels that gravitational pull into the deep. Since our own depths underpin all of our daily conscious experiences, all of those experiences feel the stability of those longer wavelengths.  The motion we rightfully call “falling” seems to bubble up through every experience we have and the normal solidity of our sense of self becomes more transparent and we “fall” through its dissolving support into the newly revealed depths.

 I felt that instantly when I first met my wife. I just knew that we were related. We “fell” for many years and at some point, long ago, reached a relative energetic equilibrium.  As I see it, our depths are no longer experientially deep. Rather they are very present for us in our everyday lives – as we are in orbit around each other like binary stars. That feel of falling is no longer experienced since we are in proximity and there is no longer a distance over which to travel, or “fall”. We are in communion and that communion provides the solidity of being close; we are a “We”.

 It is true that we do naturally resonate more easily with some people than with others right off the bat.  The co-mingling of frequencies occurs on an unfathomable number of wavelengths and the ones that lie in our depths are just closer to some people’s than others. With these sorts of connections, we do have an easier access to those very deep communal spaces but, given our common ancestry in growing out of this planet, ultimately we arise from a common source so that the closer our experience comes to that source, the more “We” experience blending into a singular I.

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On my very first visit as a Hospice Volunteer, I called one hour ahead, as was must always do, and my contact told me it was okay to come over. The purpose of these visits is to give the caretaker a two hour break to run errands or just to get away for a while. We are typically left alone with the patient. When I arrived, a young man, who was not my contact, answered the door. He looked puzzled so I introduced myself as the hospice volunteer. He introduced himself as the son of the patient, and told me that his father had passed away just two hours before. I could hear talking in the kitchen, and back where the bedrooms seemed to be, so I was aware that a number of others were there. I teared up and said “I am so sorry,” then opened my arms to hug him. We each took the two steps to embrace. After a few moments I said “I don’t know what to say,” and I thought that I would just let him break the hug when he was ready. It lasted 30 or 40 seconds and as he released me I said “I’m glad the family was here.” He said “Yes, we were all here” paused for a moment and softly said “Thank you for your presence,” and I left.

I sat in my car for a while and noticed that there had been no real thoughts. It seemed like I had quickly passed through a layer of grief into a direct and profound relatedness with this young man. So, I was not leaving with his grief. I was imbued with the simple and deep presence of another human being, one that I did not know. The presence of grief seemed to have lowered the normal mental congestion and allowed us to be intimately related, so in a sensory way he is still with me, though indistinct. Continue reading On Relatedness

As is sometimes the case when I write, a single thought arises and then a cascade of bits of related matter appear around it. At least they appear related to me. I hope that as I string them together, they will cohere for you too.

For anyone who has had children, or has gazed into the eyes of a newborn, it is clear that they are completely open and almost entirely unable to focus. And from the moment they arrive, they each have a very different energy. Though their bodies are in this natural world, and know well enough how to exist in it, their attention is not anchored here in the same way.

It seems to me that from that open space, it takes them enormous effort to focus on the wavelengths where our attentions commonly reside and on where our presence calls on them to focus their attention. It takes them years to acclimate, and that, I argue, is why they sleep so much during their early years, as well as why they need less sleep as they become accustomed to operating in overall frequency ranges of this place. All of us need to sleep, and this is at least one component of why. It is the same as when you are extremely busy; completing everything seems almost hopeless, but you continue to push through. You get exhausted and must sleep. It takes a real effort to focus here, and there is only so long that you can do it continuously. This is not our home. It is more like a vacation in a very alien world – with a long-term commitment. This physical existence is natural in its own way and the body does require sleep too, but it does not appear to be the natural state of whatever you may want to call our “focused point of attention.” Some use the word soul or self.

I remember feeling somehow lost and overwhelmed by life when I was very young. At some early age, I thought that I could never make it in the world. When I was about 6 or so, I found out about the existence of retirement, which then was when you reached 60. After that, the desire to be 60 never left me for long. I tried not to dwell on it too much, as the length of time until I reached it was usually daunting. I was prone to slipping into depression fairly often when I was young and it was difficult to extract myself from that space. The summers of my elementary school years were particularly difficult to get through. Since for many of those years there were no others my age in the neighborhood, I was often alone and so thinking about the hope in that far distant future was hard to avoid. I specifically remember waking up one morning and thinking “Another endless day. I hope that I make it. But how will I make it through a lifetime of endless days?”

In my early teens, I realized that staying busy dramatically shortened the experiential lengths of my days. I then decided that I was going to stay as busy as I could – not easy for me being so often alone – primarily to avoid those time-stretched days and the hopelessness that they all too often led to. It worked because even when the overwhelming incoming sensory experiences – or the utter incomprehensibility and vastness of life – occasionally presenced themselves, I had too much to do to dwell on them for long. This was the norm until I finally did retire, one day before I turned 65. Though I never did experience that full downward spiraling vortex in middle to later years, as I approached retirement day I did wonder if I would slip back into it, but I haven’t.

Some years ago, it occurred to me that, in a very broad view, a good part of my life had been about agency practice, which is reflected in being busy. I think that because of the high stress career I had, raising children, and all of my various consciousness exploring activities, the inflowing nature of the little empathic observer became fairly adept at outflow. Though as a child outflow/agency was very difficult, I can readily do both now. Inflow, however, is still my most fundamental trait and is why being retired feels so natural to me. Looking back on it now, there are at least a few things to note. Agency practice got me through what would otherwise surely have been a very long and difficult life. It provided the wonderful life that I have had. It may be that agency practice here served a purpose beyond just this lifetime. And from another broad perspective, the outflowing nature of intent appears to suppress inflow to some degree, particularly those at more subtle wavelengths.

I have said before, and often, that longer wavelengths slow the rate at which I experience time passing, as well as dramatically altering experiencing itself in exotic and glorious ways and revealing unseen patterns. What I want to emphasize here is that the longer wavelengths are where, I believe, our attention originates, and is thus visible in the newborn. That natural state of ours is always beckoning us back in its direction, via our fundamental resonance with our source “frequency neighborhood.” I suspect that this is much less noticeable for those whose choice to be here might have been particularly potent, who I also think are more likely to be extroverts. But we do all eventually leave this place and return in the direction of home, so that gravitation must be present to some degree. Continue reading Homing

I have become more and more aware of my reactions to sensings that I will describe as “not preferred” and how their varied intensity appears to alter what seems to be instinctive responses. These reactions are certainly automated, and though I was aware of most of them before, I had not seen them in such a way as to allow for this broader perspective of them until now.

There are some unnoticeable thresholds where what is sensed arises from subconscious to semi-conscious and then from semi-conscious to conscious. Those thresholds are many and certainly mutable. My sensitivity to what has been semi-conscious appears to be shifting in such a way that I am rapidly becoming consciously aware of things that I had not observed before. In the mildest cases they are still ignored, much like brushing your leg against tall grass when out for a walk. It’s there and sensed, but barely draws your attention so is easily dismissed. I am now starting to sense energetic experiences that rise just above thresholds like that, as well as my seemingly preprogrammed reactions.

Below are the varied reactions that I have recently noticed, or remember from the past, as the level of the experiential intensity of the un-preferred increases. I am listing the aspects that I will loosely call outflowing, as they evoke some action. The ones that appear more like an inflow, that cause some form of withdrawal, like resignation, despair, etc., I will not address here. I also want to make it clear that there are no specific borders between the layers as I have labeled them. Though fluid, like the ocean, there are differences in those experiential motions that are sensed by some faculty of the bodies (gross, subtle, causal) and witnessed by the Observer.

Noticed but deliberately ignored

Uneasiness

Acute wariness

Internal effort to suppress the incoming sensings

Internal suppression of associated thoughts

Irritation

Cynicism

Internal disparaging commentary

External expression of cynicism

External disparaging commentary

Anger

Rage

I did not include fear in this list, but it may be true that all of these are gradations of, and reactions to, fear in some form.

 

I am wondering if the sensing/reaction mechanism described above is an aspect of the fight or flight response, and its other unknown associated instinctual responses. This makes some sense to me, because it all seems so deeply embedded and automated. The rationalization process that our thoughts add to these experiences seem to hold the residue of the experience in place much longer than necessary. I imagine that the physical stimuli in a fight or flight encounter in the animal world would dissipate fairly rapidly compared to how long we seem to hold onto thoughts. These days, our thoughts are often the triggers of these un-preferred sensations, such as when we take offense at some comment. They are also reflected in the outward expressions of what gets triggered by the sensing of our body’s reactions. In these cases, the survival component seems to be primarily protective of our chosen identity and not any actual physical threat. What also seems evident to me, is that all of these reactions are attempts to avoid the un-preferred in all of its forms. In the case of a clear choice, or an automated one where a preferred option is dominant, none of this arises. Continue reading Toward the Undifferentiated

I will argue that a new six minute video by astrophysicist Sabine Hossenfelder supports, in a way, one of the things that I have been saying for decades about longer wavelengths.

Please watch her video before continuing.

Time Runs Slower in the Past

Though not precisely what she is pointing to, I think that her example that time stretches as a waveform lengthens, like slowing the ticks of a clock, is useful here. That stretching of time matches my experience that longer wavelengths slow the rate at which I experience time passing. In my case, it is not the stretching of a light wave, but the experience of the oscillations of wavelengths that are naturally longer than others as the focal point of my conscious attention shifts into them. The longer the wavelength, the slower I experience time passing and the faster the world around me seems to move, as was the case with my experiences with hallucinogens many decades ago. Like those experiences, there must be an increase in velocity to achieve the momentum needed to reach the longer ones. It’s a bit like using a manual transmission. You need to get the car moving at a certain speed in order to shift into the next gear. In this case, however, I have to gather a certain amount of momentum through a frequency range in order to stably reach a longer frequency range, in which my awareness is more expansive.

A number of other notions have long flowed out of my experience of frequencies and I’m just going to express some, in their current renditions, since Sabine’s video has re-presenced them. It is all conjecture, but they have, to varying degrees at different times, had a feel of reality to them for a long time and this seems like a good opportunity to share the ones that are in my awareness at the moment.

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Shorter wavelengths tend to become visible from the perspective of the longer. This is much like a purpose of meditation, which is to slow down and let the thoughts pass through unattended to. The observer steps back, experientially, into a quieter, slower wavelength from which the rate of oscillations of the faster are readily apparent relative to the one that your attention has moved into. Another example would be if you were a parent watching your children on the playground. Their excited, and often frenetic, movements are readily visible in your at-rest state. It is very different when you are fully engaged in a game with them. In that case many details escape your notice because of your participation in it. Immersion tends to mask. 

Continue reading The Time Dilation of Longer Frequencies

For this piece I’m going to start back near the beginning of my frequencies journey. Very soon after LSD opened me up to this new way of experiencing, I dropped it because marijuana was sufficient for me to access the waves, as I initially called them, that my body was becoming sensitized to. I continued that for perhaps 2 years, tapering it down over time as I increased the yoga practice, which I had begun as a way to cultivate these experiences while straight. At that time, I had a large, foldable pyramid a friend had made that I would meditate in. Typically, I would take a single toke of marijuana and sit in it. What began to happen, on occasion, was the arrival of three very intense frequencies. All of them where most concentrated at the spine, but vibrating the entire body. The one that came from directly behind and out the front was always the first. I don’t remember the order of the next two, but one came from the left rear, exiting right front, and the last from above, straight down through the body. These were the first, and only, experiences of true terror in my life. Once I felt the first one, I knew that the others would follow. Each time I would attempt to sit with them for as long as I could to see if they would dissipate as they passed through, but my memory tells me that I never lasted more than two minutes or so. If I waited too long, I had to get out of the apartment and walk, or run, so that the physicality of that would draw my focus away from the tuning to those waves. The last time it happened I walked in the park across the street for perhaps fifteen minutes and when I stopped, my feet and lower legs seemed to vanish entirely from any form of experience. I toppled forward and was able to continue walking. That prompted me to permanently ended my drug use.

Shortly after I created this website, I wrote a Post called Preferences, which noted, in part, that when flowing as energy there are different ways of moving towards a particular resonant flow, or avoiding a dissonant or less attractive pathway. While some closures are very subtle, like centering your car in your lane as it drifts ever so slightly right or left, others are more like trying to avoid a car that is wandering into your lane and require a more conscious effort. Similarly, in the most subtle instances of energetic preferences, the velocity is such that a path is taken, or closed off, with the sense of the alteration of direction but without witnessing any act of choosing. In experiences where there is a bit less velocity,  there is often what seems like a micro second in which I feel that a gentle, but somehow deliberate, choice of direction is made.  

Over the years of opening to longer and more varied wavelengths, I have noticed some resistance to the “closing off” feeling, as if opening was given a stature that made closing a kind of negative impulse that should be avoided. I see a number of reasons this might be so, but there are a few that are most prominent for me. One has to do with our innate drive to seek pleasure (joy/resonance) and avoid pain (dissonance). There is a broader view that is in line with the pleasure/pain principle, which I have long been fond of and is expressed in Satprem’s quote from his book on Aurobindo, “For such is the goal of our evolution in the end: joy.” With this in mind, choosing resonance and avoiding dissonance seems like the natural pathway, unless choosing dissonance is for the express purpose of serving joy in the long term.

Continue reading The Roots of Cynicism

Being and Becoming are descriptions I have heard for decades for the passive and active, receiving and expressing, aspects of the universe. I have a notion to share that begins with what I have pieced together, in part, from Steve McIntosh, John O’Donohue and Aurobindo, all of which I have already written about here. I’ll begin this piece with that foundation, then bring in my ideas about how this notion relates to Love and Joy.

Steve McIntosh:
“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….”

John O’Donohue:
“…the ultimate passion of the Cosmos is the creativity of divine beauty.”

Aurobindo – via Sat Prem:
“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…”


It has always seemed to me that the Observer is distinct from Being and Becoming. I have not read the entirety of their works, so perhaps don’t know what they have said about an Observer, if anything. But I think that the Observer stands on its own and does not seem to be included in the interplay of creative outflow and the allowing inflow. It might be said that it is Awareness, as it existed before the Big Bang, and therefore suffuses all of creation. Though that must be its origin, I think that the Observer is also an integral, and separate, part of the ongoing dancing of particulars that seems to be mostly credited to Being and Becoming, at least in what I have read. Using the excerpts above, I imagined this story that Becoming is creating the next most beautiful thing/experience in order to bring Joy to the beloved, Being. But Becoming feels insatiably creative to me. Perhaps it looks back to see if Being is satisfied with its most recent creation, yet its velocity, its exuberance to bring Joy, seems so unrestrained that pausing seems outside of its nature. Continue reading Love, Joy, and the Observer