Frequency Soup

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.

I have become more and more aware of my reactions to sensings that I will describe as “not preferred” and how their varied intensity appears to alter what seems to be instinctive responses. These reactions are certainly automated, and though I was aware of most of them before, I had not seen them in such a way as to allow for this broader perspective of them until now.

There are some unnoticeable thresholds where what is sensed arises from subconscious to semi-conscious and then from semi-conscious to conscious. Those thresholds are many and certainly mutable. My sensitivity to what has been semi-conscious appears to be shifting in such a way that I am rapidly becoming consciously aware of things that I had not observed before. In the mildest cases they are still ignored, much like brushing your leg against tall grass when out for a walk. It’s there and sensed, but barely draws your attention so is easily dismissed. I am now starting to sense energetic experiences that rise just above thresholds like that, as well as my seemingly preprogrammed reactions.

Below are the varied reactions that I have recently noticed, or remember from the past, as the level of the experiential intensity of the un-preferred increases. I am listing the aspects that I will loosely call outflowing, as they evoke some action. The ones that appear more like an inflow, that cause some form of withdrawal, like resignation, despair, etc., I will not address here. I also want to make it clear that there are no specific borders between the layers as I have labeled them. Though fluid, like the ocean, there are differences in those experiential motions that are sensed by some faculty of the bodies (gross, subtle, causal) and witnessed by the Observer.

Noticed but deliberately ignored

Uneasiness

Acute wariness

Internal effort to suppress the incoming sensings

Internal suppression of associated thoughts

Irritation

Cynicism

Internal disparaging commentary

External expression of cynicism

External disparaging commentary

Anger

Rage

I did not include fear in this list, but it may be true that all of these are gradations of, and reactions to, fear in some form.

 

I am wondering if the sensing/reaction mechanism described above is an aspect of the fight or flight response, and its other unknown associated instinctual responses. This makes some sense to me, because it all seems so deeply embedded and automated. The rationalization process that our thoughts add to these experiences seem to hold the residue of the experience in place much longer than necessary. I imagine that the physical stimuli in a fight or flight encounter in the animal world would dissipate fairly rapidly compared to how long we seem to hold onto thoughts. These days, our thoughts are often the triggers of these un-preferred sensations, such as when we take offense at some comment. They are also reflected in the outward expressions of what gets triggered by the sensing of our body’s reactions. In these cases, the survival component seems to be primarily protective of our chosen identity and not any actual physical threat. What also seems evident to me, is that all of these reactions are attempts to avoid the un-preferred in all of its forms. In the case of a clear choice, or an automated one where a preferred option is dominant, none of this arises.

Now I will relay some thoughts that came to me while walking in the woods the other day that seem to be related. I’ll preface them by noting that in my last post I pointed out that shorter frequencies become visible when one experiences moving back into the longer ones. If as our Universe has evolved there has been more and more differentiation, as appears to be the case, then our past must have been less differentiated. Our solar system oscillates in the plane of the galaxy and I think that it would not be unreasonable to assume that our star did the same before the Earth was formed – but certainly way before there was life on this planet. Our internal oscillations, like the frequency ranges of our thoughts and cells, are all within that solar oscillation. The Earth’s formation and our existence here are aspects of its differentiation process. So, I am positing that some extremely long oscillation of awareness, individual and perhaps planetary, may be beginning a shift away from the arc of evolutionary differentiation, and toward re-collecting the differentiated and moving back toward the less differentiated in the direction of a Oneness. This idea does have me wonder if it is the manifestation of self-reflexive awareness that makes this shift in orientation possible. This would infer that the incipient form of this evolution in awareness was the continuing differentiation of living things, along with their complexification as some differentiated parts came together. It has me thinking that thoughts, and whatever developments that led to them, have accelerated the differentiating process while collections of the differentiated were giving birth to the kind of awareness that we now have in order to accelerate the motion toward re-union, via directed attention and intention. This conjectured motion appears to be further evolving in the direction of some kind of collective self-reflexive awareness. It seems to me that this is reflected in the rapid growth of the many spiritual and mystical movements that I have seen in my lifetime and, I’m sure, a multitude that I have not.

If this is the case, I think that it would be best if our attention is directed toward both the deliberate intention to become aware of, and to loosen the grip of, the machinations – some of which are mentioned above – that we have generated during our long evolutionary and enculturation process, and some bodily awareness practices to reveal how and where the associated sensing of these thought patterns manifest in our bodies so that they too may be loosened, giving way to more and more options to consciously make choices that lead in the direction that we are already going. This should accelerate the process, which appears to be what is intended by some trait of this neighborhood of the universe.

I will switch now to another experiential aspect to this, which initiated this whole thought process. Several months ago I became a hospice volunteer. This service is to provide the caregiver a couple of hours off, to run errands or just take a break. I have noticed that being with the dying, whether their memory allows them to be cognizant that they are dying or not, I can feel the presence of something that seems primordial. What struck me almost immediately was that it was undifferentiated – not oscillating – and just below whatever is being outwardly expressed. That space remains with me long after I leave. Indeed, it has not left me at all. It’s just the intensity that varies. I do sense that it is drawing me in and is also likely playing a part in these sensings that are now becoming visible in my experiencing. There is something very Earthy about it, which is, fortunately, grounding me in some way. I find this shifting into slower, thicker time-sense really fascinating, but also somewhat destabilizing at times. What I’m guessing is that the loss of some kind of experiential stabilizers makes me feel wobbly, but in the next moment I may be more surrounded by this less differentiated space. That brings me at least into the edges of a sense of being more complete, more whole. It’s the disconnected, free-floating interim state between the two that seems to be unnerving me.

What I am sensing as the undifferentiated here feels undisturbed, like being in the woods early on a warm, wet and foggy morning. It may well be one manifestation of what has been gravitationally drawing me in these many years. It does feel familiar. But given my observation that everything oscillates, it seems likely that the more I allow this space to inhabit me, the more quickly I will shift directions toward what I expect will be the lighter and more joyful end of this waveform, as some level of my awareness exits the trough and shifts upwards. As this occurs, the attraction of the crest’s energy will take over and draw me in its direction, as the gravitational force of the former loosens it grip with the increasing relative distance, as I am imagining it. On and on it goes, heading, I think, toward some form of interim re-Union. I am in no hurry, at least at this moment.

These insights present some new complications and it is not at all clear where those inquiries will lead. It could be that I am off base and it will fall apart, or that there is some pattern just too far outside my range at the moment. I’ll just have to wait, but I find the overall notion fascinating.

I will argue that a new six minute video by astrophysicist Sabine Hossenfelder supports, in a way, one of the things that I have been saying for decades about longer wavelengths.

Please watch her video before continuing.

Time Runs Slower in the Past

Though not precisely what she is pointing to, I think that her example that time stretches as a waveform lengthens, like slowing the ticks of a clock, is useful here. That stretching of time matches my experience that longer wavelengths slow the rate at which I experience time passing. In my case, it is not the stretching of a light wave, but the experience of the oscillations of wavelengths that are naturally longer than others as the focal point of my conscious attention shifts into them. The longer the wavelength, the slower I experience time passing and the faster the world around me seems to move, as was the case with my experiences with hallucinogens many decades ago. Like those experiences, there must be an increase in velocity to achieve the momentum needed to reach the longer ones. It’s a bit like using a manual transmission. You need to get the car moving at a certain speed in order to shift into the next gear. In this case, however, I have to gather a certain amount of momentum through a frequency range in order to stably reach a longer frequency range, in which my awareness is more expansive.

A number of other notions have long flowed out of my experience of frequencies and I’m just going to express some, in their current renditions, since Sabine’s video has re-presenced them. It is all conjecture, but they have, to varying degrees at different times, had a feel of reality to them for a long time and this seems like a good opportunity to share the ones that are in my awareness at the moment.

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Shorter wavelengths tend to become visible from the perspective of the longer. This is much like a purpose of meditation, which is to slow down and let the thoughts pass through unattended to. The observer steps back, experientially, into a quieter, slower wavelength from which the rate of oscillations of the faster are readily apparent relative to the one that your attention has moved into. Another example would be if you were a parent watching your children on the playground. Their excited, and often frenetic, movements are readily visible in your at-rest state. It is very different when you are fully engaged in a game with them. In that case many details escape your notice because of your participation in it. Immersion tends to mask. 

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This brings me to my climbing wavelengths observation of consciousness. There is a kind of gravitation that seems to have been pulling me towards longer wavelengths over most of my life. It is, perhaps, the same energy that has moved our evolution from cells to minds and, more recently, towards Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere. Who knows. But it is clearly what draws me to spaces where there are collectives of people practicing and exploring some new edges of consciousness. It may be that these edges already exist and are just becoming visible, or that they are being formed by our focused attention, and underlying intentions, as well as the creative aspects of the planet, our galaxy and the surrounding cosmos. I suspect that it is all of these. I will note here that time also dilates in the gravity of a Singularity, as presented in the video. One lies at the heart of our galaxy and may be at least an interim destination of our individuated awarenesses that is within our cosmological locale, a relative Singular-ness on our way to some grander Oneness: an idea which I have written about in some detail before.

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Time dilation is also reflected in the old saying, “Time flies when you are having fun.” It seems to me that any flow state is a tapping into a much longer wavelength, like choosing a bigger wave while surfing. You can ride it longer because it is longer and has more energy. The smaller waves are still there but that’s not where your attention is. I think that flow states are frequency dependent, in that they form deeper than the general frequency neighborhood at which your attention is normally focused. This has to do with the wavelengths that your attention is most attuned to, generally at this time of your life, and specifically in different moments of your life. But in every case of what is called flow, that energy cascades downstream into some expression in the physical or linguistic realms. I see it as a deeper intention expressing itself “here,” usually in alignment with some downstream intention(s). These alignments across frequency ranges form an open corridor for deeper energies to flow through and manifest. 

 

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I suspect that experiments that seem to show that there is activity in the brain, preceding a choice to press some button, are the result of the option being selected at a longer wavelength. The delay in the action may indeed be in the firing time of neurons, but it may also be due to coming from a different energetic rate of temporal flow downstream into the density of physicality.

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You can get drawn back into frequencies that you no longer primarily reside in now, but did in the past. So, the “like attracts like” rule applies when familiar trigger points, or the presence of certain people, evoke the old habitual frequency ranges associated with them, and you go back to briefly reinhabiting those wavelengths.

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Transmission: These days I have found that I have reached a point at which the energetic transmission of individuals who reside in longer wavelengths do not presence enough of a difference in wave lengthening energy to compel my attention enough to get excited by simply being around them. This was sometimes the case when I was younger. They may now provide enough energetic propulsion to nudge me forward just a bit, but it feels like I am in need of continuing acceleration. It has become more and more apparent to me that it takes the energy of collective attention to exhibit enough gravitation that my energetic homing mechanism for lower frequencies is excitedly engaged. Now some dialogues that I am engaged in, or observe, certainly can excite me, as can the further dialogical exploration of those conversations with interested others. Some of these are organized by individuals whose energy does clearly enhance the interplay. The more frequently I participate, the more acceleration is experienced. It can occur in just a pair, but more participants with a common focus increases the gravitation, and thus the experience of motion. This is no different that meditating with many people. It’s just more potent. So, though perhaps it was true in the past, it seems to me that there comes a point when the transmission of a single radiant soul is no longer enough to generate sufficient forward motion for most souls who are actively engaged in the explorations that many of us currently find ourselves in. In this light “the next Buddha is the Sanga” makes perfect sense.

 

I do not need to know what beckons me in this direction. I trust my instincts and that is enough.

For this piece I’m going to start back near the beginning of my frequencies journey. Very soon after LSD opened me up to this new way of experiencing, I dropped it because marijuana was sufficient for me to access the waves, as I initially called them, that my body was becoming sensitized to. I continued that for perhaps 2 years, tapering it down over time as I increased the yoga practice, which I had begun as a way to cultivate these experiences while straight. At that time, I had a large, foldable pyramid a friend had made that I would meditate in. Typically, I would take a single toke of marijuana and sit in it. What began to happen, on occasion, was the arrival of three very intense frequencies. All of them where most concentrated at the spine, but vibrating the entire body. The one that came from directly behind and out the front was always the first. I don’t remember the order of the next two, but one came from the left rear, exiting right front, and the last from above, straight down through the body. These were the first, and only, experiences of true terror in my life. Once I felt the first one, I knew that the others would follow. Each time I would attempt to sit with them for as long as I could to see if they would dissipate as they passed through, but my memory tells me that I never lasted more than two minutes or so. If I waited too long, I had to get out of the apartment and walk, or run, so that the physicality of that would draw my focus away from the tuning to those waves. The last time it happened I walked in the park across the street for perhaps fifteen minutes and when I stopped, my feet and lower legs seemed to vanish entirely from any form of experience. I toppled forward and was able to continue walking. That prompted me to permanently ended my drug use.

Shortly after I created this website, I wrote a Post called Preferences, which noted, in part, that when flowing as energy there are different ways of moving towards a particular resonant flow, or avoiding a dissonant or less attractive pathway. While some closures are very subtle, like centering your car in your lane as it drifts ever so slightly right or left, others are more like trying to avoid a car that is wandering into your lane and require a more conscious effort. Similarly, in the most subtle instances of energetic preferences, the velocity is such that a path is taken, or closed off, with the sense of the alteration of direction but without witnessing any act of choosing. In experiences where there is a bit less velocity,  there is often what seems like a micro second in which I feel that a gentle, but somehow deliberate, choice of direction is made.  

Over the years of opening to longer and more varied wavelengths, I have noticed some resistance to the “closing off” feeling, as if opening was given a stature that made closing a kind of negative impulse that should be avoided. I see a number of reasons this might be so, but there are a few that are most prominent for me. One has to do with our innate drive to seek pleasure (joy/resonance) and avoid pain (dissonance). There is a broader view that is in line with the pleasure/pain principle, which I have long been fond of and is expressed in Satprem’s quote from his book on Aurobindo, “For such is the goal of our evolution in the end: joy.” With this in mind, choosing resonance and avoiding dissonance seems like the natural pathway, unless choosing dissonance is for the express purpose of serving joy in the long term.

Another possibility is that it may have originated as multipurpose survival mechanism, one function of which is to block out dangerous or disruptive energies, under normal circumstances, like the three intensities mentioned above. Also, what is quite obvious to me is that closing off always takes more effort than flowing towards resonance. Effort takes calories, so from an evolutionary perspective most situations that require more calories would instinctively be avoided when possible.

In my particular case, a reason for resisting this closing off is the notion that opening up, often called “surrender,” was said to be the way to “higher” consciousness. It is prevalent in many communities whose adherents I have come to know over the decades, including some that I participated in and lived in. 

What has become clear to me is that the closing off mechanism is a natural function of life and is not to be eschewed. It is part of the unconscious steering mechanism by which I am guided, and in which I actively participate.

The history of previous experiences that are somehow written in these bodies (gross, subtle, and causal) all contribute to the range of preferences that are experientially accessible to us. This history would include everything from the survival mechanisms of single cell organisms through our hominid ancestry and the habits that they developed over time, as well as the habits that each of us have chosen or unconsciously adopted in this life. As I move into the range of longer and longer wavelengths, relative to my current experiential frequency range, the more subtle of those preferences become visible as I reach the wavelengths that they are energetically attuned to. I then become aware of them and the choice to move towards one path or another comes into the range where it can shift from unconscious and automated towards conscious and deliberate. This process seems like a kind of reverse engineering of my history. 

It was about 10 years ago that I realized the detrimental energetic affects that cynicism had on me. What came to me with this recent insight is that cynicism is a knee-jerk verbal expression used to justify that closure energy in a particular circumstance. I have said before that words tend to make the frequencies from which they arise hang around longer, and also that deliberately chosen words can create frequencies that their expression generates. So, words can act as fixative and generative, for both benefit and detriment. I will note that both of these cases take effort.

What is now visible to me is that the function of energetic closure is varied and should not be assigned negative connotations, as I appeared to be doing, simply because it takes effort, avoids “surrender” or activates a cynical justification system. Though many words add focus, thus energy, which attempt to solidify motion, words of cynicism add temporal weight with a particularly dissonant feel. If the words cease to be associated with a particular experience, any experience, the anchoring of that experience will ease and it will drift away into the background energetic ecosystem oriented around a particular focused point of conscious attention. 

This is a longwinded way of pointing out that though justifying thoughts are useful, and in some cases are required, it appears that cynical or negative justifying thoughts arise from a closing off energy and are impediments to moving in the direction of joy. 

Being and Becoming are descriptions I have heard for decades for the passive and active, receiving and expressing, aspects of the universe. I have a notion to share that begins with what I have pieced together, in part, from Steve McIntosh, John O’Donohue and Aurobindo, all of which I have already written about here. I’ll begin this piece with that foundation, then bring in my ideas about how this notion relates to Love and Joy.

Steve McIntosh:
“What does a universe of existential perfection do for an encore? It transcends itself through the development of creatures who can experience becoming perfect in time. That is, to achieve evolutionary perfection freely by choice, by effort, and even occasionally struggle, is to create an aspect of reality that did not exist in the state of existential perfection that we recognize as prevailing in the universe prior to the Big Bang.”
“Evolution is drawn toward perfection through the choices of consciousness….”

John O’Donohue:
“…the ultimate passion of the Cosmos is the creativity of divine beauty.”

Aurobindo – via Sat Prem:
“She hurls herself forth outside Him in a burst of joy, to play at finding Him again in Time – He and She, two in one.”
“What then was the commencement of the whole matter? Existence that multiplied itself for the sheer delight of being and plunged into numberless trillions of forms so that it might find itself innumerably…The strong soul conscious of its own immortal stuff and the inexhaustible ocean of its ever-flowing energies, is seized by it with the thrill of an inconceivable rapture. It hears behind the thought, the childlike laughter and ecstasy of the Infinite…Once launched, the play will not cease until all the possibilities have been accomplished…”


It has always seemed to me that the Observer is distinct from Being and Becoming. I have not read the entirety of their works, so perhaps don’t know what they have said about an Observer, if anything. But I think that the Observer stands on its own and does not seem to be included in the interplay of creative outflow and the allowing inflow. It might be said that it is Awareness, as it existed before the Big Bang, and therefore suffuses all of creation. Though that must be its origin, I think that the Observer is also an integral, and separate, part of the ongoing dancing of particulars that seems to be mostly credited to Being and Becoming, at least in what I have read. Using the excerpts above, I imagined this story that Becoming is creating the next most beautiful thing/experience in order to bring Joy to the beloved, Being. But Becoming feels insatiably creative to me. Perhaps it looks back to see if Being is satisfied with its most recent creation, yet its velocity, its exuberance to bring Joy, seems so unrestrained that pausing seems outside of its nature.

So, as I picture it, Joy is everything and everyone that has been created by Becoming. In my take on Aurobindo, as I have written about before, we are creating and enjoying the infinite delights of our explorations of consciousness, as well as deliberately releasing the Joy that is bound up in matter. It too is released to be enJoyed. We exhibit both the outflowing and the inflowing energies as they oscillate, both within our sphere of attention and as the aperture of our attention. So, we are a fractal, a microcosm, of the dance of Becoming and Being, of that which creates and that which appreciates. We create in Joy, experience Joy, and Joy is the “material” that our creations are made from. “Existence that multiplied itself for the sheer delight of being and plunged into numberless trillions of forms so that it might find itself innumerably…The strong soul conscious of its own immortal stuff and the inexhaustible ocean of its ever-flowing energies, is seized by it with the thrill of an inconceivable rapture. It hears behind the thought, the childlike laughter and ecstasy of the Infinite…”

In my current view, the Observer’s presence is liberally strewn between the two at every frequency range that we may inhabit. Thus, like the other two, it is also frequency range (context) dependent. But it provides a stepping back and a distancing from the dynamic interactions that we are immersed in at a given moment in time, and are therefore mostly blind to. It appears to “step back” a bit from the our current focal range, and to me this is a separation from both the lively Becoming energy and the softer, quieter Being energy. Though Being’s inflow is always relatively still in comparison to outflow, there always seems to be some motion there, some flow. In the most pure form that I have experienced it, the Observer has no motion. It simply witnesses what it beholds and does nothing at all. That source-like essence provides an essential shift in perspective to step outside of motion and, in its less pure forms, provides a momentary respite in which to reassess.


So, I now come to Love and Joy.

In my experience, Love and Joy are experiences of motion and are reflected in Being and Becoming. Love is the motion that I experience moving, metaphorically, towards the depths of Unity, Oneness, Singularity. In me it is most often evoked by a sense of deep resonance with a particular person within whom I sense a shared energetic home that brings me back in the direction of my origin as a separate self, or is at least at a similarly very long wavelength. Along the differentiation path that brought “me” into some measure of distinctness, there are innumerable frequency ranges or way-stations that I have passed through. The depth of resonance with a particular person, or sometimes a group, varies the strength of the gravitational energy that pulls me towards their locale. The farther back in my particular evolutionary journey that resonance lies, the greater the gravitation, thus the greater velocity of that motion, the greater Love, that the person evokes in me. Love is not, as I see it now, the destination frequency range itself, but it is the motion toward it. 

For decades a phrase that has arisen in me from time to time is “Joy is in the Many.” There is delight in our explorations and discoveries along our journeys, which seem exponentially multiplied by sharing experiences and in the mutual creations of Becoming’s expressions through us. In my Post Integrating the WE I wrote of the many people in my life whose very essence, when remembering them, brought me Joy. Love showed up just a bit in the afterglow of the Joy, but, from today’s vantage point, their essence has flavored my essence so there is no distance to travel, thus no velocity to elicit the experience of love. There is simply relatedness, a soft equanimity, a relative unity.

If love is the motion of an individual towards Unity, or its resonance within another, to me Joy is the motion of the individual towards that same Unity, that same One, but with and through the Many, with others. I imagine it much like the many stars that are returning, joyfully, to the Singularity at the center of our galaxy, with “…the childlike laughter and ecstasy of the Infinite…” – heading to that deeply common home where the currently known laws of physics cease to exist, and so is ineffable. Since this is simply one galaxy among many billions, it may too just be a way-station. But as in an article I recently quoted here says, some physicists believe that the heart of all singularities is the same (except the Big Bang Singularity) so perhaps it’s not a way-station at all.


“I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day” – E.B. White

The Observe cleanses the palate so that one might more freely choose.

Near the beginning of a recent session in one of Bonnitta Roy’s classes, when it was open to talk about anything, I shared a version of the following story:

Our home phone rang and, not having my glasses on, thought that it was the number of my wife’s friend and handed it to her. It turned out to be Feeding America. We gave them a lot of money during the COVID years and since my name was on those donations, they wanted to talk to me. The reason that I still have a home phone is so that I can give it to all public entities so that I can avoid texts or calls on my cell phone from anyone that I don’t know. But she handed it back to me, telling me who it was. I started to talk but he had started his sales pitch. I attempted to stop him again but he ignored me again. I then got mad and said “Stop talking and listen to me!” which he did. I said that I had given them money in the past, that I would continue to do so but to stop calling. He meekly replied that he would take me off of the call list. When I hung up my wife said “you didn’t need to be like that.” I realized that she was absolutely right.

A cascade of insights followed, leading all the way back to, it seemed to me, my preverbal or near verbal childhood. I clearly remember being overwhelmed by my environment, which included several siblings and more than a bit of chaos. The incoming sensations were just too much and, in particular, I found sadness and anger the most distressing. I had the feeling that I was out of place and somehow needed to escape. That was hopeless, and so was I much of the time. At some point thoughts like “I don’t belong here” showed up, then something that I said often when a little bit older, “Go away and leave me alone.” “Get me outta here” showed up later and, as I came to understand, one component of my love affair with yoga was to keep the world and its emotions at bay. In that pursuit, I eventually gave away everything that I owned and moved into the ashram.

I am really anal about my privacy, and will not go into all of the ways that I use to avoid being tracked online. But it became clear in this moment that it was all an attempt to keep the “unpreferred” sensings of the world at bay. It was “go away and leave me alone,” again.

Later in that session, someone spoke of a call towards worship and at the end, devotion was mentioned. What came to mind was “I’m not devoted to anything and I don’t worship anything.” Those thoughts were immediately followed by my wife’s voice saying “You don’t need to be like that.” I shared this too, at the very end of the call.


This week I listened to a podcast where Jordan Hall, who is someone I have listened to a number of times in the past and respect, shared about his conversion to Christianity. This story was a surprise to me, and to my friends who know of him. In this Podcast he spoke with Jim Rutt, a friend of his and an agnostic, who did pose many penetrating questions, all within the recognition of their mutual respect. My initial reaction was that Jordan was clearly resonating with a church community where it seems that he, his wife and child, could live a full-filled life. Good for him! The way that I understood this was that due to his feelings about this community, he then CHOSE to try on the beliefs and practices that were anchor-like within that space and, due to that, its resonance sphere was further inhabiting him.

I followed that the next day by watching a video conversation between Jordan and John Vervaeke on the same topic. They too were friends and there was a wondering at the beginning if that could survive this transition. It was beautiful. I deeply felt Jordan’s new found wholeness, much more than I did in the conversation with Rutt…and for me the word worship, for some unknown reason, was its moniker. This had me wonder – if I worshiped something, how would that alter my reality? What first came to mind was an experience I had 8 years or so ago, where it felt like a vast inflow of de-light-filled photons were raining down on and through me. I remember thinking – maybe this is what they mean by grace. It has recurred a handful of times since. In my breathwork practice the next day I invited in that same sensation, reaching out my memory of it towards the photon-streaming star of ours, and putting myself in the imagined state of worshiping the sun’s rays. The grace experience easily returned, with a slightly different flavoring.

Though I believe that consciousness is a fundamental aspect of the universe, I have always leaned towards the belief that the universe, as a whole, is not self-reflexively aware. But Jordan accepted that he had a personal relationship with god. Could I do that with the universe? No, at least not now. It’s too big for me to conceive of as personal. But I could “imagine” the possibility of having a personal relationship with our star, and certainly this Earth, which has graced me with life. So, I tried it on.

It seems to me that Jordan, and now I, collapsed a portion of our individual latent stream of potential states, out of its Superposition and into reality by that act of choosing. I am shifting into some new reality where a personal relationship with this Earth is just beginning to inhabit me…and at least gratitude for that relationship, if not quite worship.

I can always feel Spring when it comes. It is so different than Winter. I can feel the particle-like joy arising from the Earth this time of year. Today is the 15^th anniversary of my mother’s death. I went out to the cemetery, sat with her for a while, as my dear Earth welcomed home a prodigal son.

Superposition is a term from quantum physics that is used to describe a particle’s position when fired through a slotted barrier in the famous double-slit experiment. In this experiment the particle acts like a wave until it is measured (observed), “the wave function collapses” and the particle is then found in one place.

I was reading “On the Origin of Time: Stephen Hawking’s Final Theory” and came across these lines: “Before one measures the particle’s position there is no sense in even asking where it is. It does not have a definite position, only potential positions described by a probability wave that encodes the likelihood that the particle, if it were examined, would be found here or there.”

But this is the one that really struck me: “…[Richard] Feynman’s understanding of the double-slit was that individual electrons follow not one but every (emphasis mine) possible path from the gun to the screen. One path takes the electron through the left slit, another through the right, and yet another might take it first through the right, back out through the left, into a U-turn, and through the left slit once more. Every single possible path – aka history – of the electron, no matter how absurd, must be considered, Feynman advanced, and all those paths contribute to what we see on the screen…the electron does anything it likes. It just goes in any direction at any speed, forward or backward in time…”

What this brought to mind is my experiences of perspectives. Lately I have imagined my perspectives like slots on a roulette wheel, where my attention will bounce here and there but ultimately land somewhere relatively firm. I can often hear what the slots at the last two bounces or so have to say, and take them into consideration after the marble is secure in its landing spot. I can then do a conscious assessment to see if that is the best of the options presented. But the landing spot does seem to be a preferred location somehow, and much too often it is secure there without consideration of any others.

Is it possible that my awareness of a particular circumstance is in a kind of superposition containing all possible perspectives, just like the electron? I have said before that focused attention generates energy, which thus creates a gravitational pull, however small. I imagine that a lifetime of directing my attention, initiated by others and/or my own choices, generates gravitational preferences that act like the observer (measurement) function in the double-slit example. It may not constrict the perspective to a single point, as with the electron, but it often seems to, at least initially. At a minimum, repeated attention over time must surely narrow the possible landing sites that result in my “having” a particular perspective.

I have often thought that all of my practices, explorations and interactions with fellow explorers over these many decades were loosening the grip of the enculturation and narrowing processes. So, I love the feel that all of this is moving my awareness towards a kind of inherent superposition, such that until a state is reached where a perspective is observed by my conscious attention, “there is no sense in even asking where it is.” This also makes every perspective’s landing spot less securely held, in the knowing that those “possible paths” were, and are still, available, even though “unobserved.” The more options that my attention does become aware of, the freer I am to travel in consciousness in a more unencumbered way, sampling a multitude of perspectives before choosing one…if that is necessary.

This one may be a bit of stretch, but I like how it feels. And in looking back at what I have written before, this piece is quite obviously a continuation of posts on Joy that I have already written. It does continue to amaze me that I so easily forget much of what I have written, but I do.

The previous related posts that I will ask you to read now are: On the Way To Joy, Joy Conversion, The Cycle of Joy to Joy and most recently Dancing Towards Home. I realize that this will be a lot of reading. But each is an earlier vision of Joy, bubbling up through the sometimes cloudy surface layers of my thoughts. And it will be the only way to take in the entirety of what I am pointing to in this episode of an apparently ever-unfolding story.

To begin: I noticed something fairly common when doing my pranayama practice recently, but this time an insight arose along with it that made it uncommon. I typically have my eyes closed when doing the practice – and though there is always a dark background, within that background – I usually see/feel energy in continuous oscillating flows and/or particle-like showers, passing through or mixing together in seemingly infinite variations of blacks, grays, and whites, along with some other colors in very muted tones. On some occasions a particularly dark area will appear inside a much lighter area, both located in the central part of my “visual” field. Both are more or less round but the borders of each are irregularly shaped.

At times, the area will be very black, with a brilliant white halo around it. On rarer occasions both will become crystal clear, as if I was focusing binoculars on them. In these cases, all motion within that image stops. This is noteworthy since the vast majority of the time over these many decades, there is motion everywhere and nothing stops. But on this recent occasion there was a tiny dark spot within the white and it struck me that it was, somehow, a black hole. The thought that arrived with it was “The I AM in each person is the “I” of a black hole, taking in, but unperturbed by, the dancing joy outside of its interior.” It did not arrive with any understanding, just those words.

Some time later that tiny speck of a black hole felt familiar, and I recalled another memory of it from a very different perspective. I see patterns in energy all the time. Sometimes words arise with them, but most often they do not. Occasionally, the patterns are fractal-like and I have seen the pattern before in a different wavelength range where I may already have associated understandings. But in the instances when these experiences come into that crystal clarity, there is no motion at all in the white or the black aspects of the image. In very rare instances of this phenomena there is a sense of absolute certainty that something was recognized, but without motion there are no distinctions to be had. This time, for the very first time, there was that sense of recognition and words.

Here I will muse a bit on these words. If, in fact, this universe did begin with a Big Bang, as most cosmologists seem to believe, then it arose out of a singularity. And a singularity lies at the heart of every black hole, where space and time are said not to exist.* And there is a singularity at the heart of every galaxy with a disc of bright material flowing into the event horizon of its surrounding black hole due to the immense gravitational field. It seems to me that in this material the Many, that I have spoken of before, are returning to the singularity in a joyful reunion after their explorations in time. In this evolving story, we all originated from that initial Big Bang singularity. So as our point of origin it should be at the heart of each of us, our cosmological DNA, as should our galaxy with its singularity. Though it appears that the features of all black holes are different, the singularity within each may very well be the same. While acknowledging that theories on singularities are varied, one article that I read infers this, saying “…singularities are said to be the same infinite density point.”

So, I am now thinking that the black hole that I am seeing in my practice may be both my source, “within” me and a destination, off in the “distance” of my experiential future. And the flowing energies may, and I think should, be going in both directions, oscillating like most other energies in the universe. In between the internal and external black holes are the dancing manifestations of the Many that are being attracted by both, commensurate with the current frequency range of their associated physicality, size, and relative experiential proximities.

In the post Integrating the We I wrote about the many souls from my past whose joyful essence lie within me, as inseparable parts of me. I am now thinking of myself as a kind of black-hole-access-aperture, modulated by my attention, attracting the joyful “many” who are within my gravitational field and happen to be tuned to the Justin-specific resonances that are traits of my essence and/or part of my personal, internal “many-ness” that orbit my own black hole event horizon.**

In a recent session of Bonnitta Roy’s Pop-Up School, it occurred to me that some essence of that group is part of me now, and that this group joyful essence-gathering is much like collecting the joyful essence of individuals that I have found myself to have been doing all along. They are all deeply entwined parts of me now.

So, I went back and looked at my joy-list, now a couple of years old, and nearly all of these folks did belong to a group that I was associated with. I see now that I can sense the essential, joyful energetic churnings of each of those groups too. It looks like I am pulling in the joys of external singulars and external plurals, along with all of their internal plurals. So, I’ve collected those individuals’ joy, and at least the collective joy of the group that I shared with them, into my own interior. And, I assume, on their side of the equation they were reciprocally dancing with me in the same way.  All the while I am likely being gravitationally pulled towards, and attracting, the essential joy of other individuals and groups that I have interacted with but am not consciously aware of. I clearly feel the gravity of our planet and we assuredly must all be being inexorably pulled towards the black hole, and its singularity, of our galaxy in a kind of Joy-sharing galactic family dance of nearly infinite attractions, inflowing and outflowing, in all directions.

I have no doubt that, to a large degree, what comes out of my mouth is evoked by my environment and that I have an affinity for certain energetic environs that increase the range of my black-hole gravitational field, attracting and taking in a wider band of potential frequency ranges to be experienced. I think this is likely true for environments of all kinds, but it is just much more evident to me when I am interacting with individuals and groups. In all of this process, I suspect that my internal black hole and the external black hole are moving toward each other, as well as toward an experiential re-union, and the singular home, outside of space/time, from which we joyfully leapt forth.

I will end this one by requesting that you read one last piece on Joy, Tell Us of Your Joy.

 

* The Big Bang singularity is said to be different than any other singularity and, of course, debates abound on all of this.

** I am just now delving deeper into ideas about white holes and I don’t have a good feel for them yet.

I will begin with two quotes:
“She hurls herself forth outside Him in a burst of joy, to play at finding Him again in Time – He and She, two in one.” – Satprem, from his book Sri Aurobindo or The Adventure of Consciousness.

“We are all just walking each other home.” – Ram Dass

I do not know all of the paths that my children have traveled or their experiences on those paths. But I know them deeply and always welcome their visits, and all of the adventures and experiences of any kind that they may care to share with us. So too, it seems to me, we are somehow known from our beginning, when we leapt forth to play as separate entities. There is a kind of discovering on our travels, of aspects of Self, long lost to us, that have explored other paths, many very unlike ours, but whose essence is familiar, known and loved, some more easily recognized than others.

In the natural exploratory and playful ways of our individuated selves, we have crossed paths with family members from that original home, but also from the interim homes where we have loved and dwelt for a time with favored playmates along the way. Those homes may be other places and times here on Earth, other worlds, stars or galaxies, with, perhaps, this universe as the ultimate home.

In a post “Integrating the We” I wrote that in remembering my past acquaintances, co-workers, family and friends from this lifetime, the memory of nearly every one of them brought me some flavor of joy:

So, I’m now seeing that before I could consciously recognize that I had always been “Integrating the We” of them, I had to have integrated myself to some degree. I had to do the work of extracting what was not essentially me in order to get close to the range where essence-to-essence resonance would be the norm in order to see them in me, as me. Time has also clearly played a part in that. But now, as I bring them all in, I am enhancing this I to be more whole, in the acknowledgement of their contribution to this I. How many will I be able to include as sustenance to the WE that I continue to become? It seems like the more of the essence of this emerging WEcosystem that I bring in, the more folks I include into the I/WE-ness of which I am aware, the more accessible my affinity is, that agape, to reach out and sense the joyful selves of others in my environment. I can then actively invite their energies into this evolving I/We and gift back to them the vibrations of this enhanced Self to which they have contributed. And note that they too are composites of relationships accrued in their life’s journey and thus the vastness of the ever-interacting WEcosystem becomes more apparent. The more Selves-aware I become, the more Self-aware I become and the more Selves-aware all of the WEcosystem becomes.

What has become clearer of late is how the sharing of our discoveries, past and especially present, opens up our sensing abilities to ever deeper familial connections, and fosters a seeing and being seen that draws us back towards the time of our initial leaping forth. This kind of sharing seems to increase the velocity and intensity of the love, joy and playfulness of reuniting. It’s a kind of deliberate, reciprocal depth perception practice for the re-Joy-ning of the many. That feels particularly true for those with whom I have played before and with whom I have shared some interim home, a frequency neighborhood if you will, before this lifetime. With them there is a natural accelerant in just being together, but the sharing amplifies the sense of moving towards our once unified state.

Though many may still be exploring outward, away from our origin point, I myself do feel that, in the words of Ram Dass, I am walking home, hand in hand with others who are going my way, so to speak. The pace at which I playfully, and sometimes seriously, move towards home is magnified when I come into contact with not just individuals, but with groups that resonate at similar frequencies to where I now find myself, after having imbibed the delightful essences of others along my journey just as they have. I can sense my resonance with them but am also very sensitive to that underlying pull towards home. I have long felt that the Earth is not my home and though I do have some affinity for it, I now seem to be more sensitive to some other interim home or homes, where I stayed for a time while meandering out from that mysterious origin point.

Now I’ll pivot to gravitation. I’ve had the notion for quite some time that focused attention generates a form of energy, and as theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder has said, “All kinds of energy have a gravitational pull.” If my conjecture is correct, focused attention, individual and collective, must have some measure of gravity, however small.  And given the intense gravity of black holes, I have mused that they might be the most conscious “things” in the universe, being, perhaps, portals for the pure attention of consciousness. A new theory in astrophysics points in a similar direction, it seems to me.

On one of the astrophysics channels that I watch on occasion, I came across a video that I feel has profound implications for this idea. I have put a link for you below to watch (it is less than 10 minutes long). But first I will put some context for those who may not have my interest in physics. In quantum mechanics everything exists as a possibility until there is an observation. Only when an observation occurs is there a shift from that space of potential into physical existence where it can then be seen/measured. You may get a bit lost with some of the technicalities of physics that he is talking about, but the overall concept of what is observing is all that I am asking you to take in.

Why the quantum world collapses into reality

So, it may well be that our reality is held in place by black holes, including the one in the center of the Milky Way, and that it is possibly one of our “interim homes” to which we are being gravitationally drawn. It seems nearly impossible, at least while in these bodies, to recall all of our playful journeys from the point at which we split off from some vaster aspect of consciousness. But we can feel the pull of that gravitation, the call of wholeness, and walk back in that direction in the company of, and with the help of, loved and resonant siblings who we attract, and are attracted by, along the way.

I’ll start with a quote from “Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness” by Satprem: “She hurls herself forth outside Him in a burst of joy, to play at finding Him again in Time – He and She, two in one. What then was the commencement of the whole matter? Existence that multiplied itself for the sheer delight of being and plunged into numberless trillions of forms so that it might find itself innumerably…The strong soul conscious of its own immortal stuff and the inexhaustible ocean of its ever-flowing energies, is seized by it with the thrill of an inconceivable rapture. It hears behind the thought, the childlike laughter and ecstasy of the Infinite…Once launched, the play will not cease until all the possibilities have been accomplished…”

I will not attempt to explicate his planes of consciousness, and don’t think that I could, but will list them here.

The Absolute (Sat-Chit-Ananda*)
Supermind
Overmind
Intuitive Mind
Illumined Mind
Higher Mind
Mind
Life
Matter
Subconscient
Inconscient
Nescient

My take on this is that everything is Joy and that matter is bound up, deliberately concealed Joy.

Two thoughts about this came to mind recently.

The first is that the Joy that is to be released from bondage appears to be layered in some way, given his description of planes. That would seem to indicate that each plane is mining Joy from the ones below for their own processing and en-Joy-ment, and then release it into the next higher plane. Thus, every individuated consciousness is, in some fashion, dependent on the ones below to provide the fodder for releasing Joy at their plane. This thought came about when thinking of the practice that many people have of generating gratitude. If what I just said is accurate, then at each plane those above are grateful for those of us working on the front lines below, like here where we are dealing with Life, Matter, and using the basic “Mind.” So, it strikes me that gratitude is not unidirectional, as I perceive gratitude practice to be, but bidirectional. The Joy and gratitude that they have for us is the fuel that allows us to do the often difficult Joy-mining that we have chosen, and they are grateful for that nutrient stream from which they further release Joy at a different frequency range. It’s like the Joy and gratitude flowing downstream tickles the Joy that is buried in matter and due to its resonance with itself, it is called forth to meet its match. As we can attest, it sometimes takes concerted efforts to extract Joy from the stickiness of density and unconsciousness, but the resulting Joy is apparently worth it. The entirety of the stream appears to have been created for that purpose.

“The soul attracted leaned to the Abyss: It longed for the adventure of Ignorance.” – Aurobindo 

Continue reading Joy Conversion