Oscillation has been a repeating theme this past year. I have noticed some additional relationships that I will point to here. As with my last post, this may appear to meander a bit but it is going somewhere and there are ideas that I want to include as I go.
I’ll begin with an experience where I noticed how sensitized I was becoming to shifts in perceived exclusion. I was on a Zoom call with a teacher that I have long followed and noticed that there were 142 participants. Some time later I noticed that the number had gone down to 136 and I felt what I would describe as a mild sense of loss. Somehow, at a rate too fast for me to notice, I concluded that people leaving was some kind of rejection of the teacher and my instinctive reaction was to generate the experience of empathy. The inclusion/exclusion component of this action matches up with Maslow’s notion of the need to belong so at one level my reaction should be no surprise. But when looking at the actual experience itself, there was just an energy flowing out of me, nothing more or less than that, just the “motion away” of a particular energy that I noticed only in retrospect. So in micro moments I had made an assessment and evoked the related “motional” experience that I associated with that notion of his loss and sent something out towards him. Both the assessment and the corresponding motion of energy had to be habitual for it to occur that fast, and automatically.
As another example, one motion towards that clearly a young child can feel is that of a reprimand, which would feel like being pushed away, a moderate form of exclusion, depending on the volume and the child. It is a common childhood experience that flows out of a parent’s mouth as an outgoing force. I remember being reprimanded as a child and did the same to my own children. When an experience is repeated often enough, it appears that a fixed cognitive association is made which can then elicit the experience which has been linked to it. In a similar vein, but deeper and more universal, is the experience of grief. We just had to put down our 17 year old cat and waves of grief came and went. Grief is a label too, but it seems like one that I adopted rather than applied myself. Not only is it universal in humans, some animals seem to act as if they are having an experience like loss or grief so it is much more deeply embedded in the planet’s evolutionary history. Now in the case of the cat, sometimes that grief came right after I thought of her, but sometimes it seemingly came out of nowhere. Maybe it doesn’t matter whether the motional experience or association comes first. There is a linkage and, perhaps, one always elicits the other. Given the speed at which it is occurring, I am not able to tell. My suspicion now is, “it depends”…on circumstances and moments in time. The point is that we do use labels or associations, they are linked to frequencies, or “motions”, and that linkage is automated and predominantly invisible. The more ancient the association, the more likely the trait is to have an additional label, natural.
In a class that I took several months back on “Sensemaking” with Rebel Wisdom, Diane Musho Hamilton used the terms “sameness” and “difference” which points to something similar, but less emotionally activating. Some flow, which I might automatically interpret as exclusionary, could simply be re-interpreted as a flow of difference. Sameness and difference, as terms, feel much different than included or excluded. So is it really just a matter of assigning different associations to energy, like tabs on a file folder, to alter the “e”motional reaction? It certainly seems plausible. But better yet, could I skip the re-assigning phase and go straight to the root and just allow the experience of that energy flowing in with no labels or associations at all? (Hamilton did also talk about how the body feels.) Each incident will have its distinct feel, intensity and velocity, but maybe all I have to do is slow down enough to catch the experience/labelling synchronizing mechanism as it is occurring – more easily said than done, no doubt – and decouple the associations. Can I become aware enough of this mechanism that I can revert to my pre-verbal days, when I choose to, where there are simply experiences of moving energy that exist without rigid associations or linguistic labels? It seems like it would be more difficult with the ancient ones, as their wavelengths lie deeper in the background so I would have to slow down my temporal flow rate more than I am currently able for them to be visible. But if it’s possible with the short ones, it should also be with the longer ones. Energy is just energy so should have similar traits up and down the spectrums.
Along a different stream, I recently noticed something in the in-and-out flow which is perceived as that of We and I. What I expressed in “I Love, Therefore I Am” was that some essence of those I have loved, and even those that I just spent a lot of time around in my work environments, became, and still is, part of my own essence. But the “in-and-out flow” that I have recently distinguished feels more like bringing in resonant traits of anyone within my energetic perceptual range. The inward flow is sensed as a drawing in of “Other” or most often “Many”, which is then concentrated into the experience of this singular identity, Justin. Like the example of those I’ve pointed to in my past, “who I am” is permanently imbued by the resonances that some aspect of me chooses to “allow in”. It now seems to me that there is some natural mechanism that allows for this blending of energies to occur that “I” have some intentional control over, though I have not been aware of the permanence of the impact until now. But in all of this processing what is left in the end is always “just me” so the experience of that Many doesn’t ever come to mind, even though that Many, that sensed We, seems to be constantly flowing in to nourish and reconstitute the I. Like any nourishment, I take in what I choose to and leave the rest, which then makes up my body, or in this case, my Self. What remains, and anything that flows out, is then flavored by those nutrients.
All of this led me to wonder: How else might the experience of flowing in and flowing out of my perceptive sphere be experienced and be automatically interpreted and perhaps acted on? I certainly feel flowing in or flowing out of a myriad of waves and particles and in all sorts of different directions and have for over 45 years.
So perhaps there are just a few things going on here. The flowing in and flowing out of energy within my perceptive sphere, in vast varieties and intensities, and the focusing (narrowing) and letting go (widening) of attention. At the moment what it feels like – each in many flavors – is: Listening is a flowing in, speaking is a flowing out. Receiving is a flowing in and Giving is a flowing out. Being is a flowing in and Becoming is a flowing out. Communion is a flowing in and Agency is a flowing out. Uncertainty is a flowing in and Certainty is a flowing out. The feeling of Fullness is the result of a flowing in and the feeling of Emptiness is the result of a flowing out.
As noted in the past few blogposts, I have been in the grips of joy lately. It now feels like the We (the Many) is an inflow and the I is an outflow. 
I tend to reach for, and allow in, joyful resonances which feel momentarily distinct. As these aspects, perceived as a We, flow in, the resonances and flavors of their Joy flow in, and the outflow of Love is generated and sent forth to them in the energetic realm of their perceived distinctness, which they experience as joy. “Falling” in love is a flowing out into another person, a kind of emptying. The reciprocal inflow is the simple joy that their presence “brings”, a kind of filling up by their transmuted love. Joy flows in. Love is generated and flows out. It seems to begin with the flow of attention, “allowing” joy in or “pouring” love out. It appears that either love flowing out or joy flowing in can initiate that natural oscillation, which the body then tunes to and can later re-resonate with more easily at that particular wavelength. I keep the oscillation going by intentionally adding energy, like spinning a prayer wheel.
Oscillation, this flowing in and flowing out of energy, seems to be occurring at all wavelengths, those too big for me to sense and those too small. If the larger waves contain all of the smaller, in a “transcend and include” fashion, then each of the “ins” and “outs” described above dissolve into indistinctness in those longer, deeper wavelengths but their subtle impact is present and some can be felt when I am quite still. The flowing in of joy and the flowing out of love is what I would currently assign as the high point in the Flowing in and Flowing out hierarchy regardless of wavelength, at least that is this moment’s preferred labeling. But there is another choice that is available here. As I noted above, I might just let go of the love and the joy descriptions and simply experience, or BE, their unlabeled energy. But this new notion has been added to the core of a worldview that temporarily anchors this fluid identity in its current form so I’ll hold onto it, at least until that idea itself flows out and reveals something new.
But there are fundamental questions that I have deliberately sidestepped which must now be addressed. It takes intent or choice to control the narrowing or widening of attention. Some experiences pass through my perceptive field unaltered so intention is not engaged, but attention must be, otherwise I would not have observed them passing through. And certainly any deliberate outflow, even if set in place by a previously chosen habit, requires intent. What is the difference or relationship between attention and intention? Though to me focused attention has a feel that is very much like intent, they do not feel identical. At the moment attention and intention feel like an oscillating pair too. I said above that communion felt like a flowing in and agency a flowing out. Agency represents the energy of intent and letting go of intent automatically allows it to disperse towards some equilibrium within the surrounding terrain, or in a communal-like blending that could be called entropy. Interestingly, insight can occur both in the intense focus of intentional inquiry as well as in this drifting back from intent, as attention views the afterglow of intent’s impact on the energetic environment. Attention appears ubiquitous.
So what is the source of intent? In Choice and Appreciation I presented the idea that our identities are the result of 13.8 billion years of creative choices, starting with something akin to the declaration “Let there be light”, and that the energetic impact of all of those choices flow “downstream” to the frequency neighborhoods that we now live in, where they continue their influence by steering and limiting our choice-options in this lifetime.
The longest of wavelengths, such as the spinning of our galaxy, are much too subtle for us to sense in these bodies. Yet we exist within that turning and are thus energetically impacted by it. Much like that, I used the example of the CEO of a multinational corporation and an employee. Though an equipment technician is being generally directed by the CEO’s choices, he is most likely unaware of those choices so to him they do not appear to impact his choices, though those of his direct superior will to a more noticeable degree.
Using this assumption, the choices that I have made in my/our eons-long past, even before this specific identity existed, are still influencing me. But they are altered by the intervening choices as they flow down the choicestream to my current frequency range. Just like you don’t explain things to a 3 year old the way you do to a teenager or adult, one must operate within a frequency range in such a way as to impact the local energy spectrum. Like energy must be used to impact like energy. You don’t actually make a table by imagining it. Even though your intent must pass through imagination to physically manifest a table, those are two different kinds of energy. So though there are varying influences from all of my past choices, which could be interpreted as eliminating any notion of “free will”, there still must be a localized choosing that is made and is in synch with its environment. At times, when an upstream, less filtered, intent penetrates cleanly through into the relatively denser terrain that we most typically inhabit, that intent, that choice, might feel like an unfettered one, something like free will. Is it ever actually free? Perhaps.
That will still leave us with original choice or intent that, in theory, started it all “In the Beginning” and would be a logical initiation point of what is called free will. I’m left with two likely unanswerable questions. Where did the original, latent energy itself come from, and what spark instigated that latent energy into manifesting in the universe as we perceive it? In its latent form, it seems like attention (consciousness) was present. But without the impetus of intent we would not be here. So perhaps the oscillation of attention and intention are simply the fundamental undulations of Being and Becoming, the passive and the active aspects of consciousness. Using different labels, those perhaps in next closest proximity to origin, we might also call them love and joy. These, then, are the underpinnings of all oscillations, all of the inflows and outflows that we perceive around us, with Being flowing in and Becoming, generating from that latent energy source, flowing out. Flowing in and out of what? Points of attention created by streaming intent.