Movement and Evolving Consciousness

I’ve been participating in the Evolutionary Collective for several years but in January I went to my first “public” event, of which there have been relatively few. In that event we did some practices that are typical of what we normally do, either online or by phone weekly, or in person at our periodic weekends together. But the energy in the room seemed to have a different dynamic than what I had normally experienced in the EC work.

What came to mind is something that I mentioned in Some Thoughts on Love, Sadness and We-Space, and that is about energetic distances. In that essay I wrote about the experience of “falling in love” with my wife and that after many years the sensation of “falling” was no longer experienced. We’d fallen into orbit around each other so there was little distance between our energetic home bases.

Similarly, in this EC event the energetic distance, which those new to the territory needed to traverse towards this collective We-Space, would have been greater than that which occurs for those of us who are already in some energetic proximity to each other.
The EC members present had all practiced regularly together for at least a year, and for some of us much longer.

However, we could all feel that movement. It occurred to me that perhaps the added energy of those new to the work generated a wider aperture or focal range for consciousness. It is as if the more people with a common intent, the wider the opening through which consciousness has access to align that intent. We were all caught up in that expanded portal and were carried along towards a place of collective unity, which for the EC members present was both familiar and yet new.

I’m thinking that a similar dynamic occurs at retreats too. By simply  choosing to participate in a retreat there is some level of commitment to what the teacher intends to point the group towards. The greater the distance to traverse, and the more people present, the greater volume and velocity of motion is experienced towards that common destination. There will be, therefore, a higher volume of movement and thus more excitement felt.

Let me pause here for a moment and state that we are always in motion. There is never a single moment when we are not. At the most fundamental levels, we are orbiting a star, which is in a spinning galaxy, in a universe that is expanding – and as Einstein said, it’s all energy. Any stillness we may experience is merely relative.

With that said, we are exhilarated by a vast array of “moving” experiences, both individually and as a species. We love particular types of energetic motion, such as watching a favored team win a championship, our child’s success in mastering a bicycle, or getting emotional when witnessing love expressed. From my perspective, energy in motion is the only way that we can experience anything at all and our preferred types of motion are both how we experience pleasure and even how we determine what pleasure is.

And now to my primary point, with regards to the evolution of consciousness, I think that there is a cautionary note to be made about our typically preferred types of moving experiences precisely because they are pleasurable. I think that we tend to get focused on the rate and volume of movement that induce our preferred pleasures rather than the location in awareness to which they take us. That “high”, like a drug high, will not last but since it is our nature to seek pleasure, we tend to want to repeat the experience of that rapid motion over and over again.

Another thing about movement in consciousness is that the more distance that one traverses in a single event, the less familiar the territory is so the less likely it will be that we can easily re-tune to that space later. Once one is tuned, and thus stabilized into a new experiential neighborhood, the progress will once again tend to be slow and steady, so less exhilarating. It may seem like no progress is occurring and so one might begin looking for the next experience which evokes pleasurable “movement”.

The process then repeats and little permanent developmental progress occurs, so retreat hopping may not be as useful as it might feel. It seems to me that a stable level of consciousness will not be sexy. It becomes the new normal as we regularly inhabit it so there is a lesser amount of the motion we seem to crave, and ascribe significance to. A step-by-step consistent practice is more likely to move us, ever so slowly, along to a new “permanent trait”, as Ken Wilber calls it. It may seem boring or un-“moving” but I do think that a regular practice is crucial to long-term stable growth. The scale and rate at which that steady motion occurs may just make its pleasures too subtle to be sensed in the presence of pleasures experienced in the frequency ranges that we normally inhabit.

Now, I’m not saying that retreats and the like are not valuable. That particular  experience of movement does, as a mini “state” change, open up vistas that we’ve not seen before. The long-term value of this movement is the insights that arise from those new vistas while we are there, and which can thereafter provide a trail of proverbial bread crumbs to lead us back there. Though we may not be able to immediately recreate the experience from which the insights arose, we can cognitively remind ourselves how to return there via those insights, just as many of the revelatory books that we read do. Our bodies – subtle and perhaps causal – remember those frequencies and can re-tune to them when in proximity.

Be patient, have a regular awareness practice, and stick with it.