As is sometimes the case when I write, a single thought arises and then a cascade of bits of related matter appear around it. At least they appear related to me. I hope that as I string them together, they will cohere for you too.
For anyone who has had children, or has gazed into the eyes of a newborn, it is clear that they are completely open and almost entirely unable to focus. And from the moment they arrive, they each have a very different energy. Though their bodies are in this natural world, and know well enough how to exist in it, their attention is not anchored here in the same way.
It seems to me that from that open space, it takes them enormous effort to focus on the wavelengths where our attentions commonly reside and on where our presence calls on them to focus their attention. It takes them years to acclimate, and that, I argue, is why they sleep so much during their early years, as well as why they need less sleep as they become accustomed to operating in overall frequency ranges of this place. All of us need to sleep, and this is at least one component of why. It is the same as when you are extremely busy; completing everything seems almost hopeless, but you continue to push through. You get exhausted and must sleep. It takes a real effort to focus here, and there is only so long that you can do it continuously. This is not our home. It is more like a vacation in a very alien world – with a long-term commitment. This physical existence is natural in its own way and the body does require sleep too, but it does not appear to be the natural state of whatever you may want to call our “focused point of attention.” Some use the word soul or self.
I remember feeling somehow lost and overwhelmed by life when I was very young. At some early age, I thought that I could never make it in the world. When I was about 6 or so, I found out about the existence of retirement, which then was when you reached 60. After that, the desire to be 60 never left me for long. I tried not to dwell on it too much, as the length of time until I reached it was usually daunting. I was prone to slipping into depression fairly often when I was young and it was difficult to extract myself from that space. The summers of my elementary school years were particularly difficult to get through. Since for many of those years there were no others my age in the neighborhood, I was often alone and so thinking about the hope in that far distant future was hard to avoid. I specifically remember waking up one morning and thinking “Another endless day. I hope that I make it. But how will I make it through a lifetime of endless days?”
In my early teens, I realized that staying busy dramatically shortened the experiential lengths of my days. I then decided that I was going to stay as busy as I could – not easy for me being so often alone – primarily to avoid those time-stretched days and the hopelessness that they all too often led to. It worked because even when the overwhelming incoming sensory experiences – or the utter incomprehensibility and vastness of life – occasionally presenced themselves, I had too much to do to dwell on them for long. This was the norm until I finally did retire, one day before I turned 65. Though I never did experience that full downward spiraling vortex in middle to later years, as I approached retirement day I did wonder if I would slip back into it, but I haven’t.
Some years ago, it occurred to me that, in a very broad view, a good part of my life had been about agency practice, which is reflected in being busy. I think that because of the high stress career I had, raising children, and all of my various consciousness exploring activities, the inflowing nature of the little empathic observer became fairly adept at outflow. Though as a child outflow/agency was very difficult, I can readily do both now. Inflow, however, is still my most fundamental trait and is why being retired feels so natural to me. Looking back on it now, there are at least a few things to note. Agency practice got me through what would otherwise surely have been a very long and difficult life. It provided the wonderful life that I have had. It may be that agency practice here served a purpose beyond just this lifetime. And from another broad perspective, the outflowing nature of intent appears to suppress inflow to some degree, particularly those at more subtle wavelengths.
I have said before, and often, that longer wavelengths slow the rate at which I experience time passing, as well as dramatically altering experiencing itself in exotic and glorious ways and revealing unseen patterns. What I want to emphasize here is that the longer wavelengths are where, I believe, our attention originates, and is thus visible in the newborn. That natural state of ours is always beckoning us back in its direction, via our fundamental resonance with our source “frequency neighborhood.” I suspect that this is much less noticeable for those whose choice to be here might have been particularly potent, who I also think are more likely to be extroverts. But we do all eventually leave this place and return in the direction of home, so that gravitation must be present to some degree.
Several years ago, I began thinking that in coming here we eventually learn to acclimate to this playground and its rules. And once we are self-sufficient enough to at least get by here – better yet to actively explore and participate in the wonders of this place – we can deconstruct our detrimental and less useful habits in order to participate and engage from the deeper wavelengths from whence we came. We can then allow those deeper frequencies to be more fully expressed in these lives, with less impediments and disruptions, while keeping the skills that we have developed to navigate this playground with relative ease. I suspect that the more at ease one is here – the more open and porous we are – the more readily these bodies can access and acclimate to those downflows from the deep. What is also very notable of late is that as I am becoming more sensitive to these subtle flows, which also have embedded preferences. In the letting go, I am also opening up to corresponding child-like sensitivities, and associated vulnerabilities. One example is that being brought to tears has been noticeably increasing for me in the last few years, and particularly in the past year. I was watching something on live TV recently and was brought to tears. I said to my wife “the older I get, the more easily I am brought to tears.” She said “I have noticed that.”
Over the past several years I have become aware that I seem to be wanting to complete whatever it is that I am doing at a given moment, so that I have nothing to do. As the years go by, more and more often my attention will quite suddenly slip off of whatever I am attending to and into observation mode. It has the appearance of resulting from impatience, but I have always thought of impatience as waiting for one thing to be done in order to get to what I really wanted to do. The puzzle here was that doing nothing is not something to do so this slipping off made no sense to me. I knew that there had to be something else underlying that mechanism. Seen in the light of wanting to access and presence the longer wavelengths of my home while I am still here, that is what I really want to do. So, that sliding off experience seems to be a wavelength issue. The closer I move into my home wavelengths, the more temporally out of sync I am with most of the attention ranges of the people around me. This was clearly the case when I was a child and just emerging out of those longer wavelengths. Though I have indeed kept the learned skills to function within the common human thought-ranges around me, I do feel less and less in tune with them of late, much like I did when young. Fortunately, I can move readily between them when the environment calls for it.
For the most part, I have relayed my all-encompassing energetic life to few people, and not even most of those within the various spiritual or consciousness-focused communities that I have participated in over the years. I felt that the whole topic of the frequencies that I live with was just too weird for most people. Starting this blog was what I chose to do for my “articulation project” for a course that I was doing. Otherwise, it would never have happened. I feel fortunate that I can share tastes of what I experience within the very few exploratory groups, and a few individuals, where I am well known and comfortable enough to speak the words that are evoked by their presence at a given moment in time. Some of these seem to be stabilizers for me in my current range, wherever that may be. Others are clearly accelerants, but all are relational in some form. Of late, I am much more readily opened up in these spaces than in the past, both because of the porousness developed from my own ongoing explorations, and because that is also the case with the lovely folks who abide in, and contribute to, these spaces.
So, the resonance of longer wavelengths is calling on me to return home, demanding my attention. It is the call to bring forth my more innate frequency ranges, my other natural state. That state appears to be reflected in consciousness at birth, and to arise toward the surface near death, or for some when approaching old age. It is to expand the depth and range of the inflowing and outflowing, becoming more facile with moving between them all as my choices, or the moment’s environment, calls for. In all of this, I recognize that this is a bit skewed due to my nature as fundamentally an introvert, an inflowing observer.
I am grateful for all of the fellow explorers that I have come across, both inside and outside of spiritual domains. A playground is not nearly as fun without playmates.