Justin Frank

Experiences of Being

What is emerging of late is that I have been getting “lost” in experience. 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.

On the active side of this inter-play, my partner and I did set up the parameters in which this experience could happen by choosing to get on a call and do the practice. In our lives we do choose how to modify our environment and how to put ourselves into situations where we are most likely to enjoy ourselves. Thus, from this perspective, it appears that enjoyment is one of the activities by which Being accesses earthly experience, through us, and that we are actively engaged in creating that opening. Other avenues might include curiosity, gratitude and love. We, as particular aspects of identity, can set up the circumstances, initiate a flow, then stand aside and be overtaken by life experiencing itself through us.

In a way, we are the experiences of Being, individually and collectively.

Appreciation and Gratitude

For all of my adult life, I’ve had an antipathy toward God, or “The Divine”, as people now tend to call it.

It started some time in elementary school, a Catholic institution, with what I considered the irrational notion that an “all loving” god would send someone to burn eternally in “hell” for a single transgression.

We were told that this was the end result of committing a “mortal sin” that we did not repent before death.

I’ll not go into the whole “divine rant” as to how this antipathy developed over the years, but eventually I ended up with the idea that in the grand scheme of things we are points of consciousness in a particular type of manifestation “downstream”, and within, eons of somehow intentional creative choices. We are a collection of those choices and the perspectives that they have transformed into. Those collections of perspectives can be experienced both as a collective – a WE – and also as a unified singular consciousness – an I – anywhere in that stream where some particular collection of perspectives coheres in a particular instant and then looks out upon “its” current chosen terrain.

The notion of “The Divine” infers that we are not part of that eternal continuum of consciousness, that we are distinct from it, and thus somehow not divine. From that perspective only our distinctness is acknowledged and not our unity with the entire stream – the ecosystem of consciousness, if you will. Energetically, I see no evidence that there is a demarcation line between this entity, currently named Justin, and anything. Thus the notion of some “higher” and separate god is, in a way, an impediment to the experience of Unity that is sought by so many. A belief that we are not divine will inhibit us from crossing that imaginary line into a Unity state since we have declared “it” as separate from “us”. It is all one flow so either everything is divine or nothing is. At some point, I’m saying, that declared barrier must be discarded. This will allow for the continuing flow of a particular “I” to commune with some vaster collective, a new WE, and then a transition will occur into its broader collective unity, our next momentary I. Each experience of WE or I is an aspect of divinity, if one wants to use that term for consciousness. It’s all arising in the same inescapable ecosystem. Now I do recognize that a star-sized WE would certainly feel like it was divine due to its size, but it’s really just a more inclusive I/WE. The entirety of all possible perspectives could be considered The Divine, but if that ultimate Unity were fully experienced, there would be no remaining distinct perspective to call it that.

Continue reading Appreciation and Gratitude

Free Will

As I have expressed before, there is nothing more powerful than choice. It originates as what one might call divine intent, the initial expression of which called forth our physical universe.

It could be argued that curiosity and imagination would have been necessary for the notion of creation, and of what to create, to arise in the first place, but in terms of raw power it seems to me that choice reigns supreme. Love, which many people point to as primary, might well have come into existence in the moments after the Big Bang and perhaps existed as a possibility before the Big Bang, but without duality there would have been nothing in existence that might have evoked the experience of love.

Since we are aspects of consciousness, it seems logical to me that we tap that same power of choice in order to do things in our everyday lives, used with particular potency in our declarative choices. And all the while we are also being impacted by every single one of the choices upstream in “our” historical past. We would be, after all, the product of a long lineage of choices starting with some “let there be light” type of choice from which they all began, as I have articulated in previous writings. Thus it makes sense to me that all of those ancestral choices are still sourcing us and therefore should be “sense-able” at more and more subtle levels as we take our awareness back upstream towards that Source. I have noted before that the most discernable way that these choices appear comes in the form of preferences. Some of them we would call instincts and some we might actually recall choosing ourselves in this lifetime. The power to impact us at any given moment will depend on the power of that declarative choice when originally made, and how and where our attention is focused in our immediate circumstances. Continue reading Free Will

Back to Basics

I recently noticed that I was delighted in the experience of discovery itself. This delight occurred in the instant after the recognition that I had discovered something that was new to me. What came to mind was that maybe it does not matter at all what I was exploring, or had discovered, but that perhaps what I was seeking was simply delight. This took me right back to the premise I made in Choice and Appreciation that appreciation (described as delight in this current experience) was part of the fundamental process of creating beauty so that it might be appreciated. It also brought to mind that Freud’s “pleasure principle” – that entities seek pleasure and avoid pain – is visible in this pattern.

I wondered if it was possible that the Family Traits that I had pointed to in an earlier essay also had the same feature, that of evoking delight, pleasure, enjoyment, appreciation, or whatever other adjectives point to that range of experiences.

Here is an excerpt from that essay:

If, to borrow a phrase, we were “made in the image and likeness of God,” then it makes sense that we still reflect the “likeness” of our parent energy, which some call god. It also makes sense, from a purely evolutionary point of view, that the essence of what we evolved from would still be embedded in us, much like the DNA in our bodies. And where those likenesses are most visible in a relatively undiluted form is in young children. Initially it takes time to bring their attention into our perceptual ranges, but as they do they are insatiably curious. They observe, then explore and enjoy. They investigate and try things out long before they have the use of language. Continue reading Back to Basics

All and………

There is a saying that has become common of late, “both and”, which is intended to replace “either or”. It is intended to be inclusive.

I think that it is all a matter of how many perspectives you can hold at once. From a Spiral Dynamics perspective, one transcends and includes all components of the spiral from which one has arisen over time. All are “included” from the broader perspective from which one peers out at a given “moment”. Thus, none are excluded and the more developed a consciousness is, the more particles and parts are included. They are its components; its cells, if you will.

Now, how do we describe our experiences? We enjoy, we observe, we examine etc. As with the levels of the Spiral, we ARE the experience that we are having AND we are observing it, examining it, assessing it etc. and can access any of these at any “time” or, perhaps, all at the same time. In my view, the rate of experiential time that we choose to dwell in determines if we are multi-tasking – holding many views – or allowing a single one, or a few, to dominate. Continue reading All and………

It’s Just Your Imagination

Imagination is something that children appear to have in great abundance, but what we “imagine” that they are doing is, in my view, only one form of imagination. I think that we are all using forms of it most of the time. What a child seems to be doing, which adults also do, is to “bring possibilities to mind”. That opening into possibility is clearly innate in children. They seem to swim in a sea of it. Adults reach into that same expanse, using a familiar and long practiced way, to allow a particular type of imaginative flow to arise from it. It is still innate in us too. Artists do this type of accessing with more apparent ease than most of the rest of us. “What’s possible here?” does not always need to be asked. They simply open up, I imagine, to the space of possibility, just like children do.

But that is not the only flavor of imagination. Think about when you are listening to someone describing just about anything. You cannot have their experience so you are using your imagination in order to access some semblance of what they are describing. It’s an opening up of possibility too, but it is being directed by your sensings of the expressions of another. Listening, to any degree, will guide one towards the space from which those words and expressions are arising. Continue reading It’s Just Your Imagination

Integrating the We*

Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.” – Walt Whitman

I recently noticed, when observing my internal monologue, that sometimes the pronoun “We” is used rather than “I”. Once noticed, I attempted to be aware of the frequency of this usage. My guess at the moment is that it is approximately twenty percent. Now, I have previously written about my observation that “my” identity seems to operate as an I/We, as it appears to be a collection of ever-shifting perspectives (We) but expresses itself as fixed and singular (I). It had not, however, come to my attention that “We” had snuck into my automated self-talk.

This new observation about the naturally arising plural pronoun became much more apparent in a recent seven-day meditation retreat with Jeff Carreira that I attended. The subtly nuanced undertones that lie beneath my monologues became easily distinguishable in that vast and quiet space, and certain centers of gravity became visible.

I have also said before that thoughts have a kind of gravity, which continues to exist in the surrounding energetic environs after their creation. Habitual thinking, like concentrated matter, has gravity commensurate with its mass, thus more focused thinking results in more gravity and that gravitational force will thereby more firmly hold our attention. It’s a bit of a trap, as our attention generates gravity and the gravity draws our attention. Our identity, whatever that is, will primarily dwell around these most frequented “centers of gravity”. Continue reading Integrating the We*

Motion and Stillness

Following up on the last Post, here I’ll look at a feature of consciousness that is also fundamental, motion.

I’ll begin with one of my favorite Einstein quotes: “Everything is energy and that is all there is to it. Match the frequency of the reality that you want and you cannot help but get that reality. This is not philosophy. It is physics.” (turns out this is not an Einstein quote)

The foundation of this Blog is that we live in constantly moving energetic fields. At the most fundamental physical levels, the Earth is rotating and also orbiting the Sun, which in turn is rotating in our spiral galaxy, which exists in a universe that is expanding. Add to that the fairly recent measurement of gravitational waves from two black holes that merged 1.3 billion years ago and rippled space/time here on Earth in Sept. of 2015. Apparently there are innumerable large-scale interactions occurring in space that have this type of impact. Given that they are now measureable, it means that they are, and have always been, sense-able as energetic motion. This kind of motion, of course, does not include all of the smaller flows of weather, wildlife, people, our respiration, our moods and the like, with which we are more familiar. Though the scales are obviously quite different, our bodies (gross, subtle or causal) can tune to any of it, in my view, even though our attention tends to habitually remain focused in particular energetic ranges. The bottom line here is that everything is moving and what moves is experienceable by the very fact that it is moving, in relation to some given point of perception. Continue reading Motion and Stillness

Family Traits

This essay is taken from my book (pictures added). These primary traits have been a recurring presence in my mind of late so I began a new Post, which became unnecessary when looking back at this piece.

In the essay above on Looking Good, I stated that I think that all of the most basic traits of consciousness flow through every level of awareness. Thus, my curiosity wonders which of these were present before the Big Bang and which might have developed later. So it is again time for more “creations of imagination”. [I’m going to ignore the idea of a multiverse, since if that possibility is mentioned in mystical writings, it’s not discernible to me in any that I am familiar with.] In that vein I’ll repeat what I suggested in Creation and Appreciation: “For any choice to occur there must have been, at a very minimum, the options of creating or not creating. Options require distinctions between one “thing” and another, so the possibility of making distinctions must have existed before that initial choice.” For distinctions to be possible, observation must also have been an aspect of consciousness.

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. Continue reading Movement and Evolving Consciousness