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.

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. Continue reading Family Traits

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

Language, a Tool of Consciousness

I’m going to start this piece off with a story:

Some time in early 2015 I saw an interview on TV with Lin Manuel Miranda talking about his play “Hamilton”. He said that the show was moving to Broadway in the summer. Now I have no interest in that kind of entertainment but I do follow politics and it sounded like it was a part of the story of our political history. It was also mentioned that both Bill Clinton and Rupert Murdoch had given it excellent reviews. I found that second part most intriguing. I was going to be in New York for a weekend in July so got online and purchased two of the remaining 23 seats available for the only evening that both my wife and I had free. That was the entirety of what I knew before entering the theater. I had no idea what I was about to experience that night. It was breathtaking.

Since then I’ve seen many stories, interviews and video clips of the show. What came to me was that some aspect of this identity was, through these gateways, trying to recreate the experience that I had that evening. That simply wasn’t going to happen. I had become attached to the forms of articulation pointing to the experience in an apparent attempt to recreate that experience. No experience hangs around. It occurs and is gone in the very next moment and yet I seemed to be trying to retrieve one.

With that example, I’ll go back to something that I have addressed before, both in the book and this Blog, and that is the relationships between language and experience. Here are two passages that I’ll begin with. The first points to the primacy of experience and the second to the way language seems to act like a link to experience. Continue reading Language, a Tool of Consciousness

Who Are WE?

There is a practice in the Evolutionary Collective that is called a Mutual Awakening Practice (MAP). This is done weekly for about 8 weeks with a partner, randomly assigned, after which partners are changed. I typically do one or two additional practices each week with partners that I’ve had before or friends that I’ve introduced to it. It is a thirty minute exercise with each person answering the question “What is present?” followed by “What are we experiencing?”

In this practice my words often seem to arise of their own accord, without any intervening mental assessing occurring. The experience is very immediate. These resonances are often very deep and intimate. The energy of one space had “me” say “I can’t imagine anything more intimate than this”. It was exquisite.

It feels to me that the space we are transiting through/creating has something to say and we have chosen, by our commitment to each other and the practice, to allow it to have its say. As a listener, I feel the space from which the other’s words arise and deliberately allow my fluid self to become entwined in the energetic flow that is being offered. The words act as an invitation to find where our common path is leading us. We follow each other’s lead, in this back-and-forth, in a kind of playful dance. The dance that we “are” seems to delight in the space that is being generated and also in the pleasure of having a partner with which to enjoy it.

Continue reading Who Are WE?

The Experience of Time

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” – Soren Kierkegaard

Lately I’ve been noticing the layers of preferences and how they appear to reflect rates at which I experience the flow of time. If a preference – the result of an earlier choice – is immediate, like what on your dinner plate you will eat first, the distance between the choice, the completion and the enjoyment are minimal and there is very little, if any, deliberate thinking going on. If the choice is that you’d like to change careers, it will take a while before you can enjoy the results.

T

The time between the initiation of the choice and its fruition is much longer. It will take planning, and a multitude of choices along the way. The result of each choice will have its own brief experience of fulfillment, if one takes the moment to enjoy them, but the end result will be enjoyed after transiting a vast number of choice/appreciation cycles (frequencies).

Now one of the results of long-term planning is that some choices will become automated along the way. That is, they will no longer require conscious thought since they are a single component that is in line with the long-term intent. If you are training for a new line of work, taking your books to class is not something you think about, you just do it. It is a choice that has become a habit and is just part of the process towards your goal. Your long-term pursuit is to have that new career and the fruit of that intent. Its enjoyment will be experienced when you land a job doing what you want to do. You may or may not take the time to experience the satisfaction of individual results along the way. That will depend on what you are focused on in the moment. The long-term goal’s satisfaction will be commensurate with the effort you’ve put into it, but you’ll have to wait until that goal is achieved. Continue reading The Experience of Time

The Quest for Beauty

I’m going to return to the point I was making in my original essay on Creation and Appreciation, as it keeps coming back to me as a point of focus.

What if every moment of your life could be narrowed down to creating the next most perfect experience to have, and then to enjoy it, as well as the creations that already exist in the world?

I suspect that it is. We are pleasure seekers at heart. Every choice that we make is some form of perfecting life – making it more beautiful – so that it can be appreciated.  It could be making the perfect breakfast out of ingredients that are available, within the time constraints that you have and sitting down to enjoy it. It may be that reading the paper while you eat, though it distracts you from the pure enjoyment of the food, is what you prefer to do. Each of these perfection choices tends to be so fast as to appear automated, if they are even noticed. But they are each choices and collectively the end result IS the sum of what you chose. It may also be true that your intent to get to work on time minimizes your full enjoyment of the pleasure of that reading/eating experience, but that intent to be on time is also a choice that is aligned with a larger perspective of what is perfect. Any choices that become repetitive and ordinary, like eating breakfast, tying your shoes or going to work, may drift into habits and eventually, perhaps, into instinct. You will then lose both the recognition that it is a choice, and perhaps the appreciation of that which you manifested as a result of your choice. Continue reading The Quest for Beauty

Where Are Your Feelings?

It seems that providing an easier way to understand frequencies will be useful. I’ve lived with them so long that I have failed to take notice of the difficulty that getting a sense of them can pose.

One clear place to look at them is an old saying, “the eyes are the windows to the soul”. When someone is exuberant, you know it. You don’t have to be told. When someone is suffering, it’s the same. If you are in any conversation, particularly a difficult one, you are constantly assessing another’s reaction to what you have said and “where they are coming from” when they are talking. All of this is taken into account in each moment and your responses will be dictated by what you are “getting” from them. In my experience, each and every nuance is a blend of frequencies. You are not just assessing body language, you are inherently sensing the energies that are being evoked and expressed, along with those that are being comingled between you. This is not something that you needed to be taught. It is a compilation of all of your enculturation and personal experience since you’ve been on the planet.

Yes, you can clearly see it in the eyes of another, and that may be how you would normally describe it. But I suspect that you mostly aren’t conscious of the give and take of this process as it is occurring. You just interact naturally. I clearly remember overhearing half of a phone conversation my daughter was having with a friend when she was in her early teens. I was aware that she was bouncing thoughts off of her friend and adjusting them based on the response. I remember thinking that I was watching her develop her public persona by this interaction, of which I’m sure there were hundreds. She was sorting out what was being well received and what wasn’t and modifying her presentation as she conversed. She was becoming someone new as she went along and she did not need to see those eyes to sense where her friend was coming from. These sensings, these feelings cannot even be articulated by an infant or young child but to anyone who has interacted with babies, it is clear that there is a give-and-take in which each participant is gauging reaction and responding accordingly. Any parent knows that babies and very young children are easily distracted. They can be drawn away from a particular object of their attention with relative ease, which is very useful tool that every parent has used. Today we might call that “changing the topic”. The same method can still be used to divert attention away from a line of discussion that is not preferred. We picked this up from our parents long ago and have not abandoned it because it can still be useful, whether we are doing it automatically or deliberately. Continue reading Where Are Your Feelings?