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?

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. Imagine your awareness moving up the branches of a tree towards the trunk.

At every intersection where branches merge, you would become aware of the larger communal self of that branch and become aware of the attributes of the smaller branches that you feed. We KNOW that we “belong” there but from downstream near smallest branches, that is experientially far away and is thus usually too subtle to be noticed. It seems to me that belonging is a form of resonant tuning, which is experienceable at an infinite number of levels. I think that we tend to look for evidence of that resonance to be manifested at every level from our deepest experience of it, down into our normal daily operating range. When we fall in love with someone, that sense of deep communion seems to rise up into every aspect of our lives. But over time we do seem to drift back towards the frequency ranges that we have most commonly inhabited. Does that love, that deep communion continue to manifest in our daily frequency ranges in ways that we can recognize in our daily lives? Are those we love saying so? Are there little acts of kindness?

Continue reading Layers of Belonging

Linking Energy and Language

Firstly, I want to acknowledge Jeff Carreira, whose eight month “Intensive” ended with a four day retreat last weekend (June 7-12). My book was an “articulation project”, which each participant created in some form. Writing it, and presenting it at the retreat, has left me with an experience of a deep emptiness. At this point Becoming’s urgency, at least as I had encountered its most intense aspects, has vanished from my experiential environment.

 

On the last day of the retreat, Jeff had us go for a “saunter” (R.W. Emerson style) with a partner and share the history of our spiritual path. One thing I’d forgotten in my reporting, but came at the end of the walk, was that at times when I was very young I often felt like I was at the bottom of a vortex of energy, much like water going down a drain. It seemed inescapable, as that intense flow was driving “me” downward.  The experience was what I would describe as depression. On occasion, however, I’d drop into a deep silence. I was safe there, but the world always called me out of that space – for dinner, chores or just the noise of parents and 5 siblings – and the doorway out of that space led me back through the depression energy.

When sharing this with my partner, what came to me was that I felt very much in tune with that silent space and that the energy of wanting to be a recluse, which has been growing very intense over the last 6 months or so, was the call to go “home” to that silence. My retirement is approaching and represents a time that I could actually do that for the first time in my life and I can remain there if I so choose, though I was not conscious this connection. What came up in thought form was “I want to go home”. It brought me to tears both the moment that I saw it, and when I shared it with the group shortly thereafter. What is most curious now is that the intensity of the pull to be a recluse disappeared for a time. I am having sensings of it, now and then, since the weekend but the cognitive understanding of the link quickly releases its gravitational pull.

Continue reading Linking Energy and Language

The Fluid Borders of I and We

I’ve long been clear that since all frequencies are moving – and my experience outside of that flux is extremely rare – whatever is experienced as “I” in a given moment is, in some way, also moving. But everything that comes out of my mouth is coming from a perspective – a particular flow – and “I” am clearly not any one perspective. Yet any given perspective often feels to be a result of other perspectives coming together in some kind of revealed frequency. At first I thought that the disparate frequencies merged into a concentrated form that blinded “me” to their former experiential distinctness but it seems that it’s a bit more complex than that. The more I observed the process the more it seemed as if there is a given moment in which a transformation occurs. It appeared that the perspectives were vying for the attention of an observer, that was allowing each to have their say, and at some point the observer enters the space and the noise is quelled by its presence. There then is a separate and distinct place from which a description arises adjacent to that relative silence, like a commentator at a sporting event, and that description defines the boarders of a new distinction.

Experientially, the many perspectives were converted from distinct particles (many transiting perspectives) to one very long wavelength (a singular perception) and was then articulated by an “I”, which I always and only describe as “me”. So it appears that there is a process from experiencing a collection of perspectives, to an observer and an assessor, which in a way declares the resulting point of view. Yet again, where focused attention lies is what determines how I experience myself at any given moment.

Continue reading The Fluid Borders of I and We

Speaking of Energy

 

If you have not read my book, please read the “PAGES” on the left, at a minimum “The Soup” and “Choice and Appreciation”. You will need them for context.

 

 

 

 

The book is a series of essays, just like the Blog, since my mind seems to bring things to me in these short, sometimes unconnected, moments of inspiration. Some of them are taken directly from this site but many more were written for the book.

You can read it here:  Speaking of Energy PDF  (right click to download)

OR get a paperback copy here Speaking of Energy

A Well Oiled Machine

The mind is often pointed to as a “problem” and it certainly can appear that way at times. But it seems to me to just be a machine that does what we command it to do. “I am….” fill in the blank, and it just does what we told it to do. Any choice, declaration, command etc. is an instrument by which we give it instructions, from “I’m reliable” to “He’s a jerk”. Part of its nature, which is what we sometimes disparage, is that it defends the commands that we give it, a form of a survival mechanism.

It seems to me that any distinction generates a boundary between itself and anything else and that perhaps some survival mechanism comes along with the act of distinguishing. In the case of a command/choice directed to the mind, this means that not only is it to be executed as instructed, but also to be defended against contrary perspectives. It’s the defense that is more obvious than our choice that created it in the first place since being “defensive” is frowned upon and threatens our inclination to be liked/included.

Part of our conflicted natures is due to the fact that we have made many choices that are contradictory. We are often a mass of internal conflicts of interest of our own making. Internally we can chastise ourselves for acts or words that we regret, when in actuality we have simply allowed one of our own choices to override another. Choosing between any two is sometimes conscious but more typically automated. The automation comes in the form of underlying preferences, which I’ve addressed before, and may depend on a range of things but at least one’s “mood”, how far upstream the command was placed and the amount of energy (intensity) with which it was put there. “He’s a jerk” is a pretty narrow focal range but “I’m reliable” is, though filtered, flavoring a wide variety of behaviors and part of the mind is always on the job watching out to defend the command. The ones that are less deep, like “He’s a jerk”, are often easily discarded by being present to either our deeper commitments or to qualities in that person that resonate with our deeper selves. But those that lie farther upstream can be more entrenched and hold more sway. As in the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey”, the computer ignored what it considered lower level commands of the astronauts and followed the instructions higher upstream in the command structure.

Continue reading A Well Oiled Machine