Creation-Appreciation – Frequency Soup

On The Way To Joy

It appears that a revelation has been slowly weaving itself into me for at least a couple of years, likely much longer. Here is one view of how it unfolded, blogpost by blogpost.

Several months ago, when totally engrossed in three different Great Courses Plus lecture series, I noticed that I love the experience of being fascinated and that I didn’t really care what got me there. I remembered, vaguely, something similar in some blogpost I wrote, found it and saw that this was not much different than what I’d written about then.

In that post, “Back to Basics” , early last year I said: I recently noticed that I was delighted in the experience of discovery itself. This delight occurred in the instant after the recognition that I had discovered something that was new to me. What came to mind was that maybe it does not matter at all what I was exploring, or had discovered, but that perhaps what I was seeking was simply delight. It also brought to mind that Freud’s “pleasure principle” – that entities seek pleasure and avoid pain – is visible in this pattern.

A year earlier, in the post “Family Traits” I wrote: If, to borrow a phrase, we were “made in the image and likeness of God,” then it makes sense that we still reflect the “likeness” of our parent energy, which some call god. It also makes sense, from a purely evolutionary point of view, that the essence of what we evolved from would still be embedded in us, much like the DNA in our bodies. And where those likenesses are most visible in a relatively undiluted form is in young children. Initially it takes time to bring their attention into our perceptual ranges, but as they do they are insatiably curious. They observe, then explore and enjoy. They investigate and try things out long before they have the use of language. Their behavior exhibits a pure “what is this?” – the true beginners mind – and “what can I do with it?” There is typically some level of delight or fear in discovery. I take that delight to be a form of appreciation, as are love, enjoyment, humor, laughter, and the like…

As my mind currently sees it, observation, curiosity, imagination, creativity (choice), and delight (appreciation) can present themselves with little distortion through the many layers of consciousness into our current levels of experience.

And now another part of “Back to Basics”: My guess is that the following are innate to all human beings, and perhaps other creatures as well: Observation, distinguishing, curiosity, imagination, creativity, discovery, wonder, awe, engagement, enjoyment (pleasure), sharing and play. Of these, I might say that wonder and awe may not be attributed to other animals, but most of these traits seem to at least show up in the juveniles of many mammals.

What I’m “wondering” is if these experiences are all, each in their own way, enjoyable. Discovery is a delightful experience – the “Oh Wow!” experience – creativity is fulfilling, imagination is expansive and freeing. There are innumerable ways that human beings use to arrive at these pleasures but it does seem, at least to me in this moment, that the pathways may ultimately be of little particular interest to us. Perhaps it is the longing for the experience itself that drives us to act as we do. The experience following a discovery, for example, and not the route to it, may be what is calling to us. We rationalize the particular path that we are invested in but in reality we may be just gravitating to common pleasurable experiences, which may differ only in the space from which we approach them.

Now I am back in this same dance, having forgotten that I have been here before. So again, it seems like there are certain common experiences that we tend to prefer, such that much of what we seek is not necessarily a wide range of particular “things” to experience, but that we explore numerous pathways towards certain types of experience, which we pursue solely for the sake of having that experience.

Here was my recent potential short list of things that most people seem to be attracted to in some manner and degree: Observation, Distinguishing, Curiosity, Imagination, Creativity, Discovery, Wonder, Awe, Joy/Delight, Sharing, Play, Humor, Love, Beauty and Goodness.

Continue reading On The Way To Joy

Experiences of Being

What is emerging of late is that I have been getting “lost” in experience. It is reminiscent of “time flies when you’re having fun” except that it has been much more frequent and there has been a rapid oscillation between experience and then noticing that I was just lost in “it”. There appears to be no “I” in the experience. Rather, the experience is noticed after the fact and there is then a re-cognition of the lack of identity during the experience, which is really no surprise given the immediate nature of experiencing. But what is new is the sense that whatever it is that holds identity in place lets go and simply allows experience to occur. It feels like what life or consciousness desires is access to experience, here in this place, through portals such as us and that it uses every available avenue to do just that. But in one case, it was not just me. I was doing a “What is present?” practice with someone and there was a mutual experience of free-flowing dancing in the expanse of imagination, one leading and one following. We experienced exchanging the roles of leader and follower, which began to accelerate back and forth so fast that, in an instant, leader and follower were merged. Both of us were gone. There was no I and no We. After the fact, it seemed that dance was simply occurring, as if consciousness had been set free to enjoy itself.

On the active side of this inter-play, my partner and I did set up the parameters in which this experience could happen by choosing to get on a call and do the practice. In our lives we do choose how to modify our environment and how to put ourselves into situations where we are most likely to enjoy ourselves. Thus, from this perspective, it appears that enjoyment is one of the activities by which Being accesses earthly experience, through us, and that we are actively engaged in creating that opening. Other avenues might include curiosity, gratitude and love. We, as particular aspects of identity, can set up the circumstances, initiate a flow, then stand aside and be overtaken by life experiencing itself through us.

In a way, we are the experiences of Being, individually and collectively.

Appreciation and Gratitude

For all of my adult life, I’ve had an antipathy toward God, or “The Divine”, as people now tend to call it.

It started some time in elementary school, a Catholic institution, with what I considered the irrational notion that an “all loving” god would send someone to burn eternally in “hell” for a single transgression.

We were told that this was the end result of committing a “mortal sin” that we did not repent before death.

I’ll not go into the whole “divine rant” as to how this antipathy developed over the years, but eventually I ended up with the idea that in the grand scheme of things we are points of consciousness in a particular type of manifestation “downstream”, and within, eons of somehow intentional creative choices. We are a collection of those choices and the perspectives that they have transformed into. Those collections of perspectives can be experienced both as a collective – a WE – and also as a unified singular consciousness – an I – anywhere in that stream where some particular collection of perspectives coheres in a particular instant and then looks out upon “its” current chosen terrain.

The notion of “The Divine” infers that we are not part of that eternal continuum of consciousness, that we are distinct from it, and thus somehow not divine. From that perspective only our distinctness is acknowledged and not our unity with the entire stream – the ecosystem of consciousness, if you will. Energetically, I see no evidence that there is a demarcation line between this entity, currently named Justin, and anything. Thus the notion of some “higher” and separate god is, in a way, an impediment to the experience of Unity that is sought by so many. A belief that we are not divine will inhibit us from crossing that imaginary line into a Unity state since we have declared “it” as separate from “us”. It is all one flow so either everything is divine or nothing is. At some point, I’m saying, that declared barrier must be discarded. This will allow for the continuing flow of a particular “I” to commune with some vaster collective, a new WE, and then a transition will occur into its broader collective unity, our next momentary I. Each experience of WE or I is an aspect of divinity, if one wants to use that term for consciousness. It’s all arising in the same inescapable ecosystem. Now I do recognize that a star-sized WE would certainly feel like it was divine due to its size, but it’s really just a more inclusive I/WE. The entirety of all possible perspectives could be considered The Divine, but if that ultimate Unity were fully experienced, there would be no remaining distinct perspective to call it that.

Continue reading Appreciation and Gratitude

Back to Basics

I recently noticed that I was delighted in the experience of discovery itself. This delight occurred in the instant after the recognition that I had discovered something that was new to me. What came to mind was that maybe it does not matter at all what I was exploring, or had discovered, but that perhaps what I was seeking was simply delight. This took me right back to the premise I made in Choice and Appreciation that appreciation (described as delight in this current experience) was part of the fundamental process of creating beauty so that it might be appreciated. It also brought to mind that Freud’s “pleasure principle” – that entities seek pleasure and avoid pain – is visible in this pattern.

I wondered if it was possible that the Family Traits that I had pointed to in an earlier essay also had the same feature, that of evoking delight, pleasure, enjoyment, appreciation, or whatever other adjectives point to that range of experiences.

Here is an excerpt from that essay:

If, to borrow a phrase, we were “made in the image and likeness of God,” then it makes sense that we still reflect the “likeness” of our parent energy, which some call god. It also makes sense, from a purely evolutionary point of view, that the essence of what we evolved from would still be embedded in us, much like the DNA in our bodies. And where those likenesses are most visible in a relatively undiluted form is in young children. Initially it takes time to bring their attention into our perceptual ranges, but as they do they are insatiably curious. They observe, then explore and enjoy. They investigate and try things out long before they have the use of language. Continue reading Back to Basics

It’s Just Your Imagination

Imagination is something that children appear to have in great abundance, but what we “imagine” that they are doing is, in my view, only one form of imagination. I think that we are all using forms of it most of the time. What a child seems to be doing, which adults also do, is to “bring possibilities to mind”. That opening into possibility is clearly innate in children. They seem to swim in a sea of it. Adults reach into that same expanse, using a familiar and long practiced way, to allow a particular type of imaginative flow to arise from it. It is still innate in us too. Artists do this type of accessing with more apparent ease than most of the rest of us. “What’s possible here?” does not always need to be asked. They simply open up, I imagine, to the space of possibility, just like children do.

But that is not the only flavor of imagination. Think about when you are listening to someone describing just about anything. You cannot have their experience so you are using your imagination in order to access some semblance of what they are describing. It’s an opening up of possibility too, but it is being directed by your sensings of the expressions of another. Listening, to any degree, will guide one towards the space from which those words and expressions are arising. Continue reading It’s Just Your Imagination

Family Traits

This essay is taken from my book (pictures added). These primary traits have been a recurring presence in my mind of late so I began a new Post, which became unnecessary when looking back at this piece.

In the essay above on Looking Good, I stated that I think that all of the most basic traits of consciousness flow through every level of awareness. Thus, my curiosity wonders which of these were present before the Big Bang and which might have developed later. So it is again time for more “creations of imagination”. [I’m going to ignore the idea of a multiverse, since if that possibility is mentioned in mystical writings, it’s not discernible to me in any that I am familiar with.] In that vein I’ll repeat what I suggested in Creation and Appreciation: “For any choice to occur there must have been, at a very minimum, the options of creating or not creating. Options require distinctions between one “thing” and another, so the possibility of making distinctions must have existed before that initial choice.” For distinctions to be possible, observation must also have been an aspect of consciousness.

Language, a Tool of Consciousness

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

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

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

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

Grace

I’ll start out this piece by noting that all experiences are transitory. I will also say that due to the fact that everything is in constant motion, any assessment or meaning that I assign to a particular experience comes to me in one instant that will never be repeated again in precisely the same way. So this description, like everything else that I have to say, may be temporarily useful but it will eventually transit out of existence regardless of how much energy I apply in order to keep it congealed for a time.

In my current thinking, as I have stated before, Becoming is incessantly creative, and all of the energies created by that intent down through the eons are still experienceable; though those that are most upstream are mostly imperceptible in the maelstrom of the more localized frequency ranges in which we typically play. At every level along that pathway, the manifestations of Becoming’s creative nature are displays of beauty, and therefore intended to be appreciated. At my current location I have access to the experience of beauty on all of the levels at which I have current conscious awareness, and that obviously includes those expressions which are perceptible to the senses of this physical body. I can hear a beautiful song, feel a warm spring breeze, see the majesty of the Milky Way and taste the glorious flavor of Ben and Jerry’s “Chocolate Therapy”. Each has its own impact on me, depending on how focused I am, and how much I choose to immerse “myself” into the experience of appreciation. That immersion momentarily extracts “me” – my current point of attention – from the creative downstream flow of Becoming, “I” drift upstream a bit and contemplate the beauty of what is observed, and appreciate it (and/or assess it for modification in line with further perfection).

Now I’ll flip the perspective to being on the receiving end of appreciation instead of doing the appreciating. When my children were little there was often an invitation, sometimes verbal, of “look what I can do!” or “look at me!” They seemed to drink deeply of any praise given. They clearly yearned for it. It is, as I see it, a microcosm of the inherent cycle of creating and appreciating, on which my writing rests. The child does or makes something about which they are excited, and then shares it in order to have that creation appreciated. They soak up appreciation and are pleased with themselves, I would say, for making a contribution and being recognized for doing so. This process exists in an inconceivable number of ways, and on an inconceivable number of levels of awareness; the grander the creation – that is, the larger it appears relative to my current perspective – the grander the potential for appreciation. And given the stream of consciousness from the dawn of time until this moment, focused points of awareness at every level and perspective are appreciating what “they/it” observe and are always being appreciated from “above” – upstream – at the same time.

Continue reading Grace

Delight, Dissatisfaction and Meditation

The purpose of meditation and similar mind quieting practices is, at least in part, to extricate oneself from the relentlessness of the mind’s thinking. There is true value in that but it does not mean one should view thinking as a negative thing. What is almost never appreciated, is that thinking is also an integral part of Becoming’s beautification process. That being the case, I don’t “think” that we should disparage thinking (the mind), as many seem to do. If, as I’ve proposed, Becoming’s choices down through the eons have localized a focal point in this place (me), then along that pathway I, and we, have chosen the tools necessary to complete both our personal desires of perfection, and our less conscious or unconscious broader communal commitments as well. Thinking is clearly used in the way humans both assess what our current status is and the direction that we intend to go next. It is the tool by which we assess, inquire and then take action on what was perfect a moment ago but, after appreciation, leaves us looking for the next best thing.

Now we should always stop and first delight in (appreciate) what we did create, as that is why we’re creating. We have every right, and it is our nature to delight in all that has been created, whether by us, other humans, the planet or the broader universal intent of Being. Thus pleasure seeking is also fundamental to our individual experience of Being’s delight. This tends to be disparaged in some circles, and was the case in my ashram days. A renunciate gave up all desires of the flesh and that path was to be admired by the rest of us. This process was intended to aide in letting go of all participation in this “illusion” we found ourselves in, and that work was seen as a serious business.

Continue reading Delight, Dissatisfaction and Meditation