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The idea of the mind infers that “it” is something separate from us. This terminology is used in all kinds of spiritual practices and psychological therapies, which mostly tend to refer to “it” as something to be dealt with rather than an integral aspect of ourselves or even as a tool to be used. As far as I can tell, there is no discernable demarcation line between what is referred to as “I” and that mind. Now there are certainly other “its” that we refer to, such as our bodies, but much like I recently pointed out how the word “belonging” can be limiting, here I want to pick the mind out for a similar kind of observation.

In the foundational essay of this Blog, Choice and Appreciation, I write:

I would like to provide here a few quotes from Steve McIntosh’s wonderful book “Evolution’s Purpose”. Not only because he so brilliantly conveys evolution’s nature and process, but also because it made sense of the mechanisms that I was seeing.

“…..I cannot see how the first cause could be anything less than personal, since we are personal. Indeed, how could the part be greater than the whole?”

“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 a quote here by Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue
“….the ultimate passion of the Cosmos is the creativity of divine beauty”.

To me, McIntosh is saying that manifesting experienceable perfection is at the center of Being’s choice to create the universe, and thus is Becoming’s active intent.

Distinguishing and choosing, in some energetic fashion, down the eons has manifested an uncountable number of pathways, spreading and diverging in all directions. Each component of awareness produces a myriad of points of physicality, along with the extended perceptual and experiential capacity, though muted, of its origin, Being.

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.

What I was saying is that what some call our individual small “s” selves are the result of some 13.8 billion years of choices, in my view. Many of the more ancient ones, such as fight, flight or freeze, appear to be at least pre-mammalian in origin. Most of these tend to be called instincts. The ones that were influenced via familial or cultural conditioning are more likely to be referred to as habits. All were put in place by the steering mechanisms of earlier choices, often semi-consciously or from kinds of consciousness that came before what we understand as self-reflective consciousness. These usually will manifest unconsciously, or semi-consciously, as preferences. Our more deliberate choices will be made based upon the viable options presented by this same underlying stream. 

Continue reading Embracing the Mind

Just days ago I had a thought that was a subtle alteration of my view of the word belonging but it had a very dynamic impact on me. In an instant, it was like popping the cork on a well shaken bottle of champagne. What follows is what came forth from that fountain, but was not the cause of it. I really don’t know what happened.

One definition of belonging is: Acceptance as a natural member or part.

Wikipedia’s description of belongingness also popped up when I did the search:
Belongingness is the human emotional need to be an accepted member of a group. Whether it is family, friends, co-workers, a religion, or something else, people tend to have an ‘inherent’ desire to belong and be an important part of something greater than themselves.


I “belong” to a number of groups. One of them is Ria Baeck’s Collective Presencing, and in this particular instance it was a Deep Dive, which is a short term closed group of 15. We were engaging with a question that included the word “we.” Strangely, I paused at that word when pondering it shortly before getting on Zoom for our call. On this Blog I have often written about the I, the We, the I/We, and the oscillation between the two, so that way of blending came to mind. It occurred to me that the word belonging itself was an impediment to that oscillation. Note in the definition above the use of the word “member”. A member is a distinct thus separate part.

I have previously described an experience in which there was a loss of identity, where there was simply experience occurring without, at moments, even the awareness that it was occurring. This is how I described it in the Post Experiences of Being :

It is reminiscent of “time flies when you’re having fun” except that it has been much more frequent and there has been a rapid oscillation between experience and then noticing that I was just lost in “it”. There appears to be no “I” in the experience. Rather, the experience is noticed after the fact and there is then a re-cognition of the lack of identity during the experience, which is really no surprise given the immediate nature of experiencing. But what is new is the sense that whatever it is that holds identity in place lets go and simply allows experience to occur. It feels like what life or consciousness desires is access to experience, here in this place, through portals such as us, and that it uses every available avenue to do just that. But in one case, it was not just me. I was doing a “What is present?” practice with someone and there was a mutual experience of free-flowing dancing in the expanse of imagination, one leading and one following. We experienced exchanging the roles of leader and follower, which began to accelerate back and forth so fast that, in an instant, leader and follower were merged. Both of us were gone. There was no I and no We. After the fact, it seemed that dance was simply occurring, as if consciousness had been set free to enjoy itself.

Continue reading Beyond Belonging

I’ll begin with pointing to a blogpost from last year called I Love Therefore I Am. In it I say, “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.”

A few months ago, a secretary that I worked with in the late 70’s, named Sally, came to mind. I don’t recall what led up to that thought, but the image I pictured was one of her laughing. It was a quite infectious laugh. I experienced a rush of affinity, which surprised me. I don’t recall feeling anything like that during those days. She just was another coworker doing her job and I didn’t interact with her nearly as much as I did with many others in the company. My job had me outside of the office more than in, so I did have to walk by her desk when entering and exiting the building, thus at least saw her often. I found that affinity interesting so started recalling others with whom I had worked there. Nearly everyone brought back a sense of delight and affection. It did remind me of the earlier blogpost noted above, and I shared that with a few friends who are interested in such things and let my pattern-linking mechanism assign it a spot for future reference.

For a long while it has been my belief that I chose to be here in this body at this time. Whatever I was thinking when making that choice, I clearly was not operating in this physical environment. Learning how to operate within the physical parameters here required my full focused attention, which disconnected me, to a great degree, from that place of choosing. Now Plato had this notion that things which exist on Earth were a kind of shadow, or imperfect representation, of the perfect “forms” or “ideas” from which they are derived. Using my own two children as an example, they were completely different from each other the day they were born. As I see it, they were more “Form-like”, using Plato’s rough analogy, than they are now. I watched as it took many years for them to acclimate to the kind of focused attention required here. How do I, or they, get back to that essential self while keeping the skills, the talents and the ability to focus and choose here, that we’ve all developed along the way?

Continue reading Integrating the WE

Oscillation has been a repeating theme this past year. I have noticed some additional relationships that I will point to here. As with my last post, this may appear to meander a bit but it is going somewhere and there are ideas that I want to include as I go.

I’ll begin with an experience where I noticed how sensitized I was becoming to shifts in perceived exclusion. I was on a Zoom call with a teacher that I have long followed and noticed that there were 142 participants. Some time later I noticed that the number had gone down to 136 and I felt what I would describe as a mild sense of loss. Somehow, at a rate too fast for me to notice, I concluded that people leaving was some kind of rejection of the teacher and my instinctive reaction was to generate the experience of empathy. The inclusion/exclusion component of this action matches up with Maslow’s notion of the need to belong so at one level my reaction should be no surprise. But when looking at the actual experience itself, there was just an energy flowing out of me, nothing more or less than that, just the “motion away” of a particular energy that I noticed only in retrospect. So in micro moments I had made an assessment and evoked the related “motional” experience that I associated with that notion of his loss and sent something out towards him. Both the assessment and the corresponding motion of energy had to be habitual for it to occur that fast, and automatically.

As another example, one motion towards that clearly a young child can feel is that of a reprimand, which would feel like being pushed away, a moderate form of exclusion, depending on the volume and the child. It is a common childhood experience that flows out of a parent’s mouth as an outgoing force. I remember being reprimanded as a child and did the same to my own children. When an experience is repeated often enough, it appears that a fixed cognitive association is made which can then elicit the experience which has been linked to it. In a similar vein, but deeper and more universal, is the experience of grief. We just had to put down our 17 year old cat and waves of grief came and went. Grief is a label too, but it seems like one that I adopted rather than applied myself. Not only is it universal in humans, some animals seem to act as if they are having an experience like loss or grief so it is much more deeply embedded in the planet’s evolutionary history. Now in the case of the cat, sometimes that grief came right after I thought of her, but sometimes it seemingly came out of nowhere.  Maybe it doesn’t matter whether the motional experience or association comes first. There is a linkage and, perhaps, one always elicits the other. Given the speed at which it is occurring, I am not able to tell. My suspicion now is, “it depends”…on circumstances and moments in time. The point is that we do use labels or associations, they are linked to frequencies, or “motions”, and that linkage is automated and predominantly invisible. The more ancient the association, the more likely the trait is to have an additional label, natural.

In a class that I took several months back on “Sensemaking” with Rebel Wisdom, Diane Musho Hamilton used the terms “sameness” and “difference” which points to something similar, but less emotionally activating. Some flow, which I might automatically interpret as exclusionary, could simply be re-interpreted as a flow of difference. Sameness and difference, as terms, feel much different than included or excluded. So is it really just a matter of assigning different associations to energy, like tabs on a file folder, to alter the “e”motional reaction? It certainly seems plausible. But better yet, could I skip the re-assigning phase and go straight to the root and just allow the experience of that energy flowing in with no labels or associations at all? (Hamilton did also talk about how the body feels.) Each incident will have its distinct feel, intensity and velocity, but maybe all I have to do is slow down enough to catch the experience/labelling synchronizing mechanism as it is occurring – more easily said than done, no doubt – and decouple the associations. Can I become aware enough of this mechanism that I can revert to my pre-verbal days, when I choose to, where there are simply experiences of moving energy that exist without rigid associations or linguistic labels? It seems like it would be more difficult with the ancient ones, as their wavelengths lie deeper in the background so I would have to slow down my temporal flow rate more than I am currently able for them to be visible. But if it’s possible with the short ones, it should also be with the longer ones. Energy is just energy so should have similar traits up and down the spectrums.

Along a different stream, I recently noticed something in the in-and-out flow which is perceived as that of We and I. What I expressed in “I Love, Therefore I Am” was that some essence of those I have loved, and even those that I just spent a lot of time around in my work environments, became, and still is, part of my own essence. But the “in-and-out flow” that I have recently distinguished feels more like bringing in resonant traits of anyone within my energetic perceptual range. The inward flow is sensed as a drawing in of “Other” or most often “Many”, which is then concentrated into the experience of this singular identity, Justin. Like the example of those I’ve pointed to in my past, “who I am” is permanently imbued by the resonances that some aspect of me chooses to “allow in”. It now seems to me that there is some natural mechanism that allows for this blending of energies to occur that “I” have some intentional control over, though I have not been aware of the permanence of the impact until now. But in all of this processing what is left in the end is always “just me” so the experience of that Many doesn’t  ever come to mind, even though that Many, that sensed We, seems to be constantly flowing in to nourish and reconstitute the I. Like any nourishment, I take in what I choose to and leave the rest, which then makes up my body, or in this case, my Self. What remains, and anything that  flows out, is then flavored by those nutrients.

All of this led me to wonder: How else might the experience of flowing in and flowing out of my perceptive sphere be experienced and be automatically interpreted and perhaps acted on? I certainly feel flowing in or flowing out of a myriad of waves and particles and in all sorts of different directions and have for over 45 years.

Continue reading Flow, Attention and Intention

In a recent spontaneous writing circle, in one moment of time, an expression arose from this fluid form of attention while in the presence of a few other lovely souls, who evoked it. I don’t recall what poem was read that prompted it, doesn’t really matter.


What is wisdom? What is love? Love seems to come in many forms. Is not delight a form of love, its radiant form? Is not joy the same? We delight IN, we are joyful FOR. How about gratitude? Does it not arise from experiences like joy and delight? Do we not appreciate those we love, what we delight in, what we are joyful for and what we are grateful for?

Perhaps one form of wisdom is to see the manifestation of love in the myriad forms it takes. To enjoy each form for what it brings us. To share the delight and love for every form with others, in the way that most suits their ears, their hearts so that WE may be joy’d in unison.

Shared delight is magnified love. As we share the forms of love it radiates out of us calling forth that resonance in others. Love invites, love beckons. Its presence melts the concerns of others and they are opened to share into that radiant space. They are welcomed home into the collective heart, where they can rest and play in the loving arms from which they once wandered out to discover the delights of every form of love that graces the world.

The wise ones know. They allow each to find their own path, taste their own delights and gently nudge each soul when it fails to see love and joy in the many forms in which it manifests.
Go out and play, find love, taste delight, share what you find with others and then come home and tell us of your joy.

I found a number of fascinating ideas in Michael Pollan’s book, How to Change Your Mind. I am going to simply list a number of quotes from the chapter on “The Neuroscience” then add some thoughts around them.

“[Marcus] Raichle had noticed that several areas in the brain exhibited heightened activity precisely when his subjects were doing nothing mentally. This was the brain’s “default mode,” the network of brain structures that light up with activity when there are no demands on our attention and we have no mental task to perform. Put another way, Raichle had discovered the place where our minds go to wander – to daydream, ruminate, travel in time, reflect on ourselves, and worry. It may be through these very structures that the stream of our consciousness flows.

The default network stands in a kind of seesaw relationship with the attentional networks that wake up whenever the outside world demands our attention; when one is active, the other goes quiet, and vice versa.”

“…working at a remove from our sensory processing of the outside world, the default mode is most active when we are engaged in higher-level “metacognitive” processes, such as self-reflection, mental time travel, mental constructions (such as the self or ego), moral reasoning, and “theory of mind” – the ability to attribute mental states to others, as when we try to imagine “what it is like” to be someone else.”

 “ ‘The brain is a hierarchical system’ [Robin] Carhart-Harris explained in one of our interviews. ‘The highest-level parts’ – those developed late in our evolution, typically located in the cortex – ‘exert an inhibitory influence on the lower-level [and older] parts, like emotion and memory.’ ”

 “…the default mode network appears to play a role in the creation of mental constructs or projections, the most important of which is the construct we call the self, or ego….Nodes in the default network are thought to be responsible for autobiographical memory, the material from which we compose the story of who we are, by linking our past experiences with what happens to us and with projections of our future goals.”

 “Taken as a whole, the default mode network exerts in inhibitory influence on other parts of the brain, notably including the limbic regions involved in emotion and memory, in much the same way Freud conceived of the ego keeping the anarchic forces of the unconscious id in check.”

It appears to me that what is being offered in these quotes is that the inhibitory nature of the default mode network (DMN) both suppresses the immediate appetites of the Id, and allows us to distinguish a “self” out of all the incoming data streaming from our immediate sensings. When the outside world does not demand our attention, our attention goes to “…composing the story of who we are…”

In talking about the DMN, Pollan also adds “If not for the brain’s filtering mechanisms, the torrent of information the senses make available to our brains at any given moment might prove difficult to process – as indeed is sometimes the case during the psychedelic experience.” I can attest to this torrent from my own experiences with hallucinogens when I was young. The rate at which that torrent flowed was often much too fast for any assessment, descriptions or meaning-making to occur, which would, on occasion, be unsettling.  The suppression of that torrent is apparently how the ego arose and so it seems to be fundamental to self-reflective awareness.  Remember that this suppression comes from ‘The highest-level parts’ [of the brain] – those developed late in our evolution, typically located in the cortex”, which makes sense.

Continue reading The Oscillation of Attention

It appears that everything is energy and though physicists may differentiate between particles and waves, the famous double slit experiment appears to indicate that there is at least a wave component to everything. So here I will ignore the particulate for the moment and note some of the basic characteristics of a wave or frequency. By definition a frequency oscillates, so it is always in motion. At a minimum, it also has bandwidth, amplitude, directional shifts and polarities. By these features it can be distinguished, so it could be said that, in part, we make distinctions via our perceptions of frequencies and, since we ourselves are distinguishable, we too should have these same traits. So, in a way, we are collections of frequencies, observing and interacting with other frequencies.

In my own energetic experiences, frequencies of shorter bandwidths ride along on those of longer bandwidths. It may be similar to the multiple sizes of waves on the ocean, though it doesn’t exactly feel like that. It might be that they are on, or in, or blended with them. I can’t really tell but I will use some analogies that I have used before. Though we experience some of the same frequency ranges, a mouse or a hummingbird is most naturally tuned to a different set of ranges than we are. Their heartbeats, for example, are much faster than ours, just as those of whales are slower than ours. Some animals see in the infrared and some in the ultraviolet. We see neither. Bacteria or cells in our bodies clearly resonate at very different frequency rates than we do, yet we all ride along in the cycle of our planet’s daily spin, its annual trip around the sun and the solar system’s trip spiraling around the center of our galaxy. We are in those longer wavelengths, which will last much longer than we will, and we’re not getting out of them. Their wavelengths are so long that we do not consciously sense them, much like our cells do not experience our whole body. Their vastness, thus relative stillness, makes us blind to them. All frequencies exist together in a cosmological ecosystem that we are immersed in and inseparable from, and at least some of the more subtle are distinguishable in our experience should we seek them out via yoga, meditation or other “letting go” practices.

Here I will quote Alan Watts again, “the ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention.” It appears to me that the focused attention of consciousness is precisely how we are expressed as a particular identity in this universe. What frequencies I happen to be attending to determine what I am distinguishing, thus experiencing, at any given moment. Our daily lives tend to keep us focused on those frequencies that are habitual, resulting from being in a physical body and by being immersed since infancy into a family, a culture and the relationships that we have chosen, or fallen into, throughout our lives. Thus there is a “frequency neighborhood” that I am most attuned to and what is familiar tends to mask the expanse of the unknown that lies beyond. I am not minimizing the importance of the familiar, for without the focal ranges that I am aligned in and the integration of my self-selected habits, I could not adequately function, much less survive, in this world. I am pointing out that part of that vast unknown is made up of an endless parade of meta-waves, each of a longer, thus more subtle, wavelength than the one before – in this example in the direction of vastness. Each is a deeper aspect of the foundation from which this particular point of attention somehow became differentiated. Those deep foundational layers have useful meta-perspectives to impart. They, like their waveforms, tend to be broad and naturally “transcend and include” the perspectives that I am currently conscious of. And they come slowly to the forefront as I dip my awareness back into their long undulations via my chosen practices.

Within the vastness of experience, there are experiences that I am totally unaware of (the spinning of our galaxy), ones that I am semi-conscious of (the light of the sun on a cloudy day), ones that I am conscious of (a casual conversation), ones that I am hyper-conscious of (immersion in a particular task) and, lastly, the apex of focused attention, a deliberate choice. It seems clear that the more our attention is brought to bear, the more energy is added. To me this added energy feels like it is drawn from some of those longer wavelengths on which we travel and is funneled into the ranges of our everyday lives via focused attention and choice. Choice seems to bring the essence of creativity itself from our deepest spaces, penetrating all intervening experiential terrain, and inserting the power of that declaration into our current space-time neighborhood. This additional energy generates an increasing mass, along with the gravitation that comes naturally with a larger mass. Along with that added gravity comes the commensurate difficulty to extract oneself from it. In his book The Four Agreements, Don Miguel Ruiz says “Breaking agreements is very difficult because we put the power of the word (which is the power of our will) into every agreement we have made. We need the same amount of power to change an agreement.” Our deliberate choices, our “agreements”, can bring the power of our will up from the deepest and longest of wavelengths, as I experience it, and imbue a relatively solid groundedness, a kind of particle-ness, into our here-and-now experience. Thus, without  “…the same amount of power…” they will be difficult to extract ourselves from.

Continue reading Layers of Oscillation

 

If you have not read my book, please read the “PAGES” on the left, at a minimum “The Soup” and “Choice and Appreciation”. You will need them for context.

 

 

 

 

The book is a series of essays, just like the Blog, since my mind seems to bring things to me in these short, sometimes unconnected, moments of inspiration. Some of them are taken directly from this site but many more were written for the book.

You can read it here:  Speaking of Energy PDF  (right click to download)

OR get a paperback copy here Speaking of Energy

I’m going to point to two facets of truth, and am not saying there aren’t more. Becoming’s truth is a full throated intent, created by pure Will, which imagines what might exist next and that truth comes into being upon the manifestation of that intent.

The second is related to the first in that it is a discovery of an existing (could be described as earlier) intent of Becoming from a downstream perspective looking back upstream to its source. As I’ve stated before, the shorter wavelengths exist within, or are riders on, longer wavelengths. The longer wavelengths are reflective of broader collective intent (the Earth’s orbit around the Sun rides along inside of the rotation of our galaxy). Thus the long wavelengths appear downstream as more stable – reside in relative stillness – so the articulations of the experience of those wavelengths feel more true.

What I’m suggesting is that what we experience as true is based on the relative wavelengths we are opened into by someone’s expression or what wavelength we tap into that speaks its expression to us.

Truth is truth, but always momentary. However, truths at the longest wavelengths are seen downstream as really true because they are true for a longer period of relative time. They will appear stable due to their depth but will be discarded as one, hopefully, transits on to the next ranges of relatively longer wavelengths. In this model the longest wavelength might be the motion of the expanding universe, whose expression would be most true.