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In a video conversation between Iain McGilchrist, Daniel Schmachtenberger and John Vervaeke, McGilchrist said that “relations are the foundation of everything” and “relationships are prior to relata.” I don’t necessarily agree with the second phrase, since in the less than trillionths of a second after the Big Bang there were some “things,” though that soup is often called plasma. But it is clear that there could be no “things” without relations since at a minimum each thing must be distinct from some other thing in order to be recognized “as a thing.” But the statement seems at least experientially true.

I will here provide some examples that I think point to the fundamental nature of relatedness.

The first is part of one essay from my book (read the words We, communion and communal as a form of relatedness).

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“Falling in love” does, in fact, have a sense of motion associated with it, which is why this term exists. It’s like our depths are naturally in resonance with the depths of another and our normal experiential range feels that gravitational pull into the deep. Since our own depths underpin all of our daily conscious experiences, all of those experiences feel the stability of those longer wavelengths.  The motion we rightfully call “falling” seems to bubble up through every experience we have and the normal solidity of our sense of self becomes more transparent and we “fall” through its dissolving support into the newly revealed depths.

 I felt that instantly when I first met my wife. I just knew that we were related. We “fell” for many years and at some point, long ago, reached a relative energetic equilibrium.  As I see it, our depths are no longer experientially deep. Rather they are very present for us in our everyday lives – as we are in orbit around each other like binary stars. That feel of falling is no longer experienced since we are in proximity and there is no longer a distance over which to travel, or “fall”. We are in communion and that communion provides the solidity of being close; we are a “We”.

 It is true that we do naturally resonate more easily with some people than with others right off the bat.  The co-mingling of frequencies occurs on an unfathomable number of wavelengths and the ones that lie in our depths are just closer to some people’s than others. With these sorts of connections, we do have an easier access to those very deep communal spaces but, given our common ancestry in growing out of this planet, ultimately we arise from a common source so that the closer our experience comes to that source, the more “We” experience blending into a singular I.

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On my very first visit as a Hospice Volunteer, I called one hour ahead, as was must always do, and my contact told me it was okay to come over. The purpose of these visits is to give the caretaker a two hour break to run errands or just to get away for a while. We are typically left alone with the patient. When I arrived, a young man, who was not my contact, answered the door. He looked puzzled so I introduced myself as the hospice volunteer. He introduced himself as the son of the patient, and told me that his father had passed away just two hours before. I could hear talking in the kitchen, and back where the bedrooms seemed to be, so I was aware that a number of others were there. I teared up and said “I am so sorry,” then opened my arms to hug him. We each took the two steps to embrace. After a few moments I said “I don’t know what to say,” and I thought that I would just let him break the hug when he was ready. It lasted 30 or 40 seconds and as he released me I said “I’m glad the family was here.” He said “Yes, we were all here” paused for a moment and softly said “Thank you for your presence,” and I left.

I sat in my car for a while and noticed that there had been no real thoughts. It seemed like I had quickly passed through a layer of grief into a direct and profound relatedness with this young man. So, I was not leaving with his grief. I was imbued with the simple and deep presence of another human being, one that I did not know. The presence of grief seemed to have lowered the normal mental congestion and allowed us to be intimately related, so in a sensory way he is still with me, though indistinct.

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Another hospice patient I visit is a 93 year old, whose memory is almost entirely from long ago. I arrived after being away the previous week and she greeted me by saying “Hi! You haven’t been here in a while.” The caregiver said, “You know, the social worker was here this morning. She does not remember the social worker and she does not remember the nurse, but she does remember you.” In hospice volunteer training it is emphasized, we meet them where they are. I just sit with her and talk to her when she feels like it. I have no job to do other than to be present. So perhaps it is not what you are doing or saying, but just being present with anyone, at the deepest level that you can sense them, is what generates the experience of relatedness.

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About a week ago I got a call from my sister, immediately after she had a conversation with one of my brothers. His son had tried to commit suicide by driving his car into a brick wall. The circumstances that caused him to do this are almost too tragic to fathom. I did speak to my brother later, and at that moment he was broken. Words were useless. All I could do was listen, and allow the deep relatedness that has always existed to emerge in its fullness, sensed but unspoken. It seems to me now that he needs to be grounded in relatedness before he can move forward in a way that will reconstitute his agency in the world; take in the apparent dissolution of agency and start over from a place of being fundamentally related.

It seems to me that we are all growing out of this Earth and thus must be related. What this brought to mind is the possibility that the Earth’s gravity may very well be the same gravitational pull that I have experienced beckoning me in the direction of wholeness, toward relatedness and the feel of home, for at least my entire adult life. It must be true that our individual variability and distinctness creates infinite pathways toward relatedness, and at many levels we may always be moving toward more distinctness or more relatedness. Distinctness has the feel of particles to me, in a quantum sense, which I have most often experienced as joyful and as coming more from our star than the Earth. But from other ways of sensing, distinctness may generate the feeling of difference, and an experience of a motion away from relatedness. The possibilities in the oscillating dancing toward and away from greater unity must be nearly endless. But the Earth in its wholeness will always be the home from which at least our bodies all arose and in which we all necessarily belong. Our star is another matter, but we are related in these environs, no matter how we may dance in this frequency soup.

Find joy in the dancing, and your partners, as often as you can.

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. 

Continue reading The Time Dilation of Longer Frequencies

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.

Continue reading The Roots of Cynicism

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. Continue reading Love, Joy, and the Observer

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.

Continue reading A Personal Earth

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.”

Continue reading Joy, Black Holes and Singularities

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.

Continue reading Dancing Towards Home