Frequency Soup

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