If it is true that the universe started with a singularity, and has evolved over the eons into more diverse and complex forms, then back upstream we are obviously more communal and, at points, unified. Alan Watts said “…we grow out of this world exactly the same way that apples grow out of the apple tree.” We are growing out of this world, which is our source, as the Sun is the source of life on the planet, and the galaxy is the parent of the solar system, thus us.
It seems logical to me that the impact of every energetic range of any I/We is most noticeably experienced at the levels at which that particular attention is normally focused. The result is that there are a vast number of levels at which we experience belonging but we tend to be most aware of those in ranges in which we live our daily lives, which I have called our “frequency neighborhood”. As I’ve said before, the higher frequencies at which we normally operate are instinctually more present to us than, for instance, something like the frequency at which the Earth transits around the Sun, which we perceive as relatively slow and, only mentally at that.
So I think that we are pulled gravitationally towards our sense of every relatively unified “I” all along those many upstream layers of consciousness. The farther upstream that gravitation is, the less we are aware of it. Imagine your awareness moving up the branches of a tree towards the trunk.
At every intersection where branches merge, you would become aware of the larger communal self of that branch and become aware of the attributes of the smaller branches that you feed. We KNOW that we “belong” there but from downstream near smallest branches, that is experientially far away and is thus usually too subtle to be noticed. It seems to me that belonging is a form of resonant tuning, which is experienceable at an infinite number of levels. I think that we tend to look for evidence of that resonance to be manifested at every level from our deepest experience of it, down into our normal daily operating range. When we fall in love with someone, that sense of deep communion seems to rise up into every aspect of our lives. But over time we do seem to drift back towards the frequency ranges that we have most commonly inhabited. Does that love, that deep communion continue to manifest in our daily frequency ranges in ways that we can recognize in our daily lives? Are those we love saying so? Are there little acts of kindness?
Loving someone does not necessarily mean that you can live with the localized daily habits and defenses that they have been developed during the course of this life. I loved my parents but couldn’t wait to get out of that house so left as soon as I was 18. They both required an enormous amount of attention in the year or two before they died and it was very evident to me, despite my love for them, that it would be very difficult for me to live with either. Our paths diverged as we made our own choices after branching off. But the grief when they died, that loss of deep communion, impacted all of my everyday experiences for a while. If a break occurs at that deeper level, that loss of resonance, that dissonance reverberates downstream and seems to shake one’s entire identity. But over time we do typically tend to drift back to our normal operating ranges. Those ranges emit an immense gravity of their own, created via our long-term attention to them.
The gravity of belonging will always be drawing us in at an infinite number of levels of consciousness. Through us, Becoming was and is creating all of the way downstream to where we peer out now, and its infinite creations, including us, are what generates the separation that appears within every frequency range. It seems to me that we absolutely love finding each other at every level that we possibly can. The deeper the level, the more delighted we are. Sharing our discoveries of beauty and pleasure from those deep places, like being in love, brings us into a resonance of belonging all along our stream. From there, we can not only delight in that resonance, but we can also communally create something new, which can bring to bear the beauty at that collective knowing and manifest something here that can be appreciated all up and down that entire stream. It seems to require that we let go of our current sense of belonging, something that will not come naturally, so that we might discover the more subtle resonances that are hidden beneath what we already know. There will always be a new ones to discover.
Alan Watts video on “Appling”
Great article