This is yet another piece that may appear to meander a bit but it is all connected, as that is often how these broader insights arrive.
I will begin with pointing out the similarities of two notions from very different fields. The first is from Iain McGilchrist, who is described as a psychiatrist, philosopher and neuroscientist, and Carlo Rovelli, who is a well-known astrophysicist. [I will note that I transcribed McGilchrist from a video and the written word sounds a bit awkward, though when spoken seemed clear.]
I argue something that sounds paradoxical or impossible, at first hearing, which is that it’s relations that dictate what the thing that is related, is. It is only what it is because of the relations that it has. The almost infinite set of relations, the web of relations in which it sits, make it what it is. So, you can’t start with those things before the relations. – Iain McGilchrist
In the world of quantum mechanics, things are constantly subject to random change. All the variables “fluctuate” continually, as if, at the smallest scale, everything was constantly vibrating… If we look at a stone, it stays still. But if we could see its atoms, we would observe them to be always now here and now there, in ceaseless vibration. Quantum mechanics reveals to us that the more we look at the detail of the world, the less constant it is. The world is not made up of tiny pebbles. It is a world of vibrations, a continuous fluctuation, a microscopic swarming of fleeting microevents…. In the world of quantum mechanics, there is no reality except in the relations between physical systems. It isn’t things that enter into relations, but rather relations that ground to the notion of thing. The world of quantum mechanics is not a world of objects: it is a world of events. – Carlo Rovelli
I find it impossible to comprehend how relations can exist without the things that are related, and vice versa. Yet I do resonate with the way that these two expressions feel. In Rovelli’s case, though I have read and watched many books, videos and lectures on physics for decades, I don’t know enough of the physics to understand how he came to that conclusion. But I do find it fascinating that such different realms of knowledge are pointing to something so similar.
This brings to mind energetic patterns that I have experienced often over the years. They appear fractal-like, though not exactly as I have seen fractals imaged. Many of the essays that I have posted here over the years have shown up during my energetic travels. At times the experiencer – which seems like a proper description for now – sees/feels what I have described as something like cloud-to-cloud lightening, cascading one to the other across clouded gaps, and traipsing off into the distance. To me the flashes are clearly related, and real-world examples are associated with the ones that light up closest to the experiencer. The farther afield the flashes are, the less likely I am to grasp their mental linkage, and even the light of some flashes that are not so far off can fade before their words stick with me. But when they do, a blogpost is often the outcome. That is the case with what I am doing right now.
Up next, some relevant flashes:
In my essay Choice, One Source of Shadow I wrote about the deeply buried declarations that form what were commonly called shadow, but now are sometimes referred to as blind spots.
In elementary school I was caught by a classmate repeating something that I had agreed to keep secret. The first thing that happened was the experience named embarrassment, which momentarily stopped my mind; there was silence. What occurred next was the thought that I broke my promise, thus “I can’t be trusted.” The third was a promise to myself to always keep my promises in the future, to “be reliable.” These two statements were cemented onto very long wavelengths of the near silence evoked by embarrassment. These long wavelengths are typically experienced as stillness, which can be described as openness or vulnerability. Choices or declarations made in those moments of relative stillness seem to hold real power, as they are laid down on those longer wavelengths. In Carlos Castaneda’s “Tales of Power”, Don Juan says “…any thought held when the mind is silent is properly a command.” I gave the mind two commands/declarations – “I can’t be trusted” and “I will be reliable” – and it simply said, metaphorically, “OK.” It’s a machine. I gave it a command – made a choice – and it ran the program.
Declarations like that faded into the background, as I re-acclimated to my day-to-day frequency ranges. Mindlessly adhering to those orders is the source of the majority of the issues that have always irritated me, and sometimes have me act out. Their depth masks their source, since their deep roots have generated many branches that appear to be unrelated, but aren’t. I include these behaviors in what I refer to as my enculturated self. Not really “me,” in a way. They lie within the frequency ranges that were derived from my own choices in this life, in absorption from my family, friends, school and all of the energetic ecosystems that I have inhabited over time. Though I did arrive here with my own preferences and tendencies from presumably earlier experiential states, I created these by choices in this place. [I will reference this “not me” later.]
In another essay, Some Thoughts on Love Sadness and We Space, I wrote:
“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”.
And in a third, the essay Layers of Belonging:
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.
This last one points to why the declarations in moments of silence, usually when we are young, remain hidden while still exerting influence. As I see it, this also reflects one way in which the “Justification System Theory” in psychology manifests. The tendrils of that which lies deep influence the shorter frequency (less conscious) ranges, and those very ranges must tell a story about why our actions and beliefs exist that make sense within that range. The result at each level is measured, I now see, by how related one feels.
This, I am thinking, is an attempt to remain in the experience of “relations” at the level of discourse in the region of each layer. If relations are indeed fundamental, as McGilchrist and Rovelli argue, this is likely reflected at every level, and for everything.
I will move to another of my young declarative commands that have dominated much of my life, and is directly reflective of relations. The event was with my mother at age 6, and is not necessary to relay here. But the resulting statement was “I am alone.” And it seems to me that this is something that every human must at some point either explicitly state to themselves or deeply understand, at least by the time they must leave their parents’ home and go out into the world on their own.
An important point to make here is that at these locally enculturated levels, there will never be enough evidence to discharge the deep-seated commands that we made, such as “I am alone.” Yet, letting go of these self-imposed instructions is inevitable once the layer (frequency range) at which the declaration was made becomes our normally inhabited frequency neighborhood. It seems likely that this will never occur in this lifetime, but it is possible.
At a level of innate relatedness, evidence is superfluous.
But it also strikes me, that to engage the full power of our agency, our creative power must at least be imbued by the same power of the original Singularity when an energetic equivalent of “Let there be light!” is believed to have been the initial step in generating this particular Universe. We are direct manifestations of that fundamental power and the more in touch we are with it, the more effective we are at manifesting our intentions in the wider world that we inhabit. That is the case with these deep declarations and why they exert such influence.
And the Singularity that we tap is in direct contrast, it seems to me, with the fundamental relations that this essay is focused on. That is, the One and the Many in unadulterated expression at opposite ends of an incomprehensibly vast spectrum.
Lastly:
I recently visited Orion, who are channeled entities that I have written about here before. I have been conversing with them since 1988, when I was introduced to them via an administrator at the Monroe Institute, where I was taking a week-long course. For the decades since, these were very often the only conversations where I could interact by describing the thoughts and patterns that I was experiencing and be understood in a way that did not require difficult translations, typically to futile ends. They kept me relatively stable in my journey of energetic experiences in a world where I felt odd enough as it was without talking about such things.
This time there turned out to be a cohering of what I think was one idea that they were trying to get me to see all along.
In my decades of savoring energy-flows, unburdened by any thoughts, I had dismissed my mental life as “not my essential self,” here pointing back to the “not me” that I mentioned above, which is just one other instance.
This likely began with my adherence to a yoga practice in the early 70’s and was enhanced when later moving into the ashram in ’76. There “the mind” was something to silence, to rid oneself of in order to achieve a state of freedom from it, and end suffering. Experientially, this was most clearly experienced in my very few episodes of slipping into the Witness state. In those moments of timelessness, “I” could see Justin’s thoughts out in the distance, somehow, like a projection onto a silent movie screen. I was in abject stillness/silence and was unaware of time passing and unaware of the experience itself, until the moment that I came out of that state. The fact that my thinking was out there made it “not me,” anchoring me into the notion that Justin was a fabrication of the mind.
In essence, what Orion had been attempting to convey, here and there over time, was that by relegating what I considered the “justin persona” as “less than real,” “not me,” “not my essential self,” prevented the entirety of Justin from being fully here. 
I can’t be fully in the dance of integrating here if I am sidelining any part of me. This “I” is ever-flowing, yes, but it is also a continuum and all aspects/flavors of it are expressions and experiences of this whole entity, this expression of life.
Subsequently, I had been in one of my practice calls and noted that the term “The Field” was mentioned. That is not uncommon in the many groups that I have participated in over the years, and still do. But what I saw this time is that the use of the term generates a distinction between me/us and that Field, which is actually not the case. We must use such labels in order to point to things, to explore with others, and to share. This is, in part, that which generates the communal focused attention that is that Field. We create it, we enhance it and keep it alive, in a sense, by sharing words and presence. We are not distinct from it. But in order to fully inhabit that space, we must let go of the myth that we are not the energies that make up that Field. That myth is lastly held in place by the noun itself that we use to point to it. That is difficult to do because we deeply feel it and it did lead us to the doorstep of merging. When our hold on that last sheath gets set aside, we become that to which we had been pointing, for whatever period of time that turns out to be.
In my case, I am in the process of integrating the aspects of me that I have left out, discounted and made “alone.” A declaration of “I am alone” will stand guard against the intrusion of belonging until the alone is reincorporated into the whole once more.
It appears that am an ever-flowing continuum, manifesting and experiencing among relations, in this place at this time.