Integrating the WE

I’ll begin with pointing to a blogpost from last year called I Love Therefore I Am. In it I say, “It certainly seems that I am the We of those I love and who love me, both the living and those who have passed on. I am sure that it extends beyond them but it certainly begins with those with whom I most naturally resonate. I am a fluid singular I that in some way is that We, as our resonances are always entwined.”

A few months ago, a secretary that I worked with in the late 70’s, named Sally, came to mind. I don’t recall what led up to that thought, but the image I pictured was one of her laughing. It was a quite infectious laugh. I experienced a rush of affinity, which surprised me. I don’t recall feeling anything like that during those days. She just was another coworker doing her job and I didn’t interact with her nearly as much as I did with many others in the company. My job had me outside of the office more than in, so I did have to walk by her desk when entering and exiting the building, thus at least saw her often. I found that affinity interesting so started recalling others with whom I had worked there. Nearly everyone brought back a sense of delight and affection. It did remind me of the earlier blogpost noted above, and I shared that with a few friends who are interested in such things and let my pattern-linking mechanism assign it a spot for future reference.

For a long while it has been my belief that I chose to be here in this body at this time. Whatever I was thinking when making that choice, I clearly was not operating in this physical environment. Learning how to operate within the physical parameters here required my full focused attention, which disconnected me, to a great degree, from that place of choosing. Now Plato had this notion that things which exist on Earth were a kind of shadow, or imperfect representation, of the perfect “forms” or “ideas” from which they are derived. Using my own two children as an example, they were completely different from each other the day they were born. As I see it, they were more “Form-like”, using Plato’s rough analogy, than they are now. I watched as it took many years for them to acclimate to the kind of focused attention required here. How do I, or they, get back to that essential self while keeping the skills, the talents and the ability to focus and choose here, that we’ve all developed along the way?

For me, it seems logical that I should start by cleaning out the debris field created as I passed through the relatively denser layers into this physical plane and learned to adapt and survive here. That detritus is composed of the beliefs, habits and ideas that I’ve created about “myself” that are, to some degree, obstructions masking the essential nature that I was swimming in when I made my choice to come here. And this process was necessary for operating in the like-kind frequency ranges of the physical world and human society, so I no longer disparage them, or the ego, as I have done in the past. Thus, I keep uncovering those habits and ideas, and letting go of those that aren’t of service to me where I happen to be focused in consciousness right now. Meister Eckhart said, “God is not found in the soul by any kind of addition, but by a process of subtraction.” I’m not at all worried about finding god, but his analogy fits. By subtracting out that which is not essentially me, I’ll at least get back to resonance range where I existed before I came here and be able to inhabit this body in a more Form-like fashion. I started doing that deliberately when I began my yoga practice in the 70’s, along with many other practices and inquiries that I’ve engaged in over the years and continue to this day.

Several weeks ago up popped another delightful soul from my past. I decided to start making a list of all of those who bring me the experience of affinity now, whether I saw it at the time that I knew them or not. It was like opening a floodgate. As I remembered people from different areas and times of my life, more people came to mind and events where they were present reminded me of similar events, thus more people. They were flowing in faster than I could type. It has slowed considerably, but not stopped. Given all of the groups that I have participated in, and the nature of the work that I did, I am just shy of 1,000.

I noticed that in all of the folks that I had listed, I’m remembering their essences, not their shadows, habits, etc. It’s like my essence only tunes to their essences and it seems that the more I am in touch with my own, the more sensitized I become to the essential self of others. Are there some with whom I did not feel this connection or still have dissonance with? Of course, but it is a tiny fraction of those who came to mind. But it mostly seems that as I extract myself from the kinds of resonance ranges where my own shadow elements tend to vibrate, and move towards longer quieter wavelengths, the less prone I am to meet others at those faster, denser ranges when they happen to be expressing themselves from there. The old saying that “like attracts like” applies in that how I am resonating within, may be tuning me to like-kind energy ranges in others.

Many decades of practice and inquiry seems to have stripped away a good deal of my nonessential notions and left me simply resonating with the basic natures of these past acquaintances, co-workers and friends. By remembering them as such, as I said in “I Love Therefore I Am,” I am acknowledging that who I am at this point in my life includes what they have contributed to the essential self that I have come to be. The I that I am is now a composite which includes them. This is not different from what I said in the earlier blogpost, it simply shows that the field of my loved ones is vaster than I knew.

John Vervaeke says agape is about for-giving love. Giving love before someone has earned it, before they deserve it. To “love them into existence” like parents do for their children, bringing them into the fullness of who they can be by loving them unconditionally first and fully. That sounds to me like loving their essence, which is impossible not to do at a child’s birth, and setting aside the more challenging of the self-generated idiosyncrasies that they created along the way in order to survive and thrive here. That is what most parents do. That is, I think, what I am doing with these mostly long bypassed souls with whom I spent time. I can’t say that I “loved them into existence” but what I am doing is tapping into their souls and not allowing myself to get distracted by the more frenetic frequency ranges that we so often get entangled in. It must also be so that I left some of myself in them as well. And to be clear, I am not at all saying that all of the frequency ranges we experience here are to be eschewed, just the ones we know to be impediments.

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 and I could then see them in me, and 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 right now. 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 obviously intertwined. The more Selves-aware I become, the more Self-aware I become and the more Selves-aware all of the WEcosystem becomes.

I did notice that as I continued listing names, the affinity was displaced by joy for the vast majority of them. It seemed that the joy-FULL-ness that was evoked by their memories was attracting their spirits at their most joyful, and that is how they are now coming to mind. There were, of course, some of these that I remembered who were more somber types and so a sense of affection was more present than their joy. But either way, I am filled with the shining aspects of them and they are now passing through me regularly during the day. I am accumulating joy simply by remembering them, their joy and my joy-ing in their re-presence. What is clear, is that I am becoming more WHOLE simply by becoming aware that I’ve already taken in these many enchanting multi-relational souls that I have come into contact with over a lifetime.

Perhaps this is the reason why I chose to come here. Not to do any particular thing in the physical world, but to bring those longer wavelengths into consciousness here so that I might participate in the joyful dance of integrating the We, and in turn the WEcosystem. It is possible that there is a particular way of focusing attention here in this place that enhances my capacity to re-collect the Many. Now that I can see it, there is nothing left to do but participate in the treasure hunt of collecting the multiple beloveds and seeing what evolves.

Now I’ll go way out on a limb.

I notice that we never seem to get mad at nature. We may be unhappy with it sometimes, but not actually mad. We do, however, get mad at each other or at a cat that is using the sofa as a scratching post. It’s like if a thing has observable agency, if it appears volitional, we treat it differently. What if that too is just another matter of what wavelengths we can sensitize ourselves to and then communicate with? What if the Earth has a kind of agency? There is vibrant life occurring everywhere. Is not the wellspring of that evolutionary thrust a form of agency, of the energy of Becoming? It may have no self-reflective awareness, but neither does a cat. Yet it is bursting with life. Perhaps it is just that the wavelengths of that agency are way too long for us to discern so we are unable to consciously assess its energetic direction.

I have said in the past that the longer wavelengths often “have something to say” and that there is some sort of translation zone where that occurs. When I touch the quietest ones at the edge of that zone, their words become accessible. Orland Bishop seems to express a sentiment much like this in a short video called “The Authentic Expression of My Voice” where he says “Nature and the cosmos are constituted with language. They are language-like. They are thought-like.”  I’m wondering if, through us, the Earth is using this translation zone to bring words into its life and is thereby evolving a kind of self-reflective awareness in the process. What if this integrating of the WEcosystem is a natural progression of that evolution and the more whole WE become, the closer We are to the essence-to-essence resonance that will make what it has to say accessible to our thoughts and voices. Orland calls it dialoging with nature. I think that we are doing that right now, and our capacity is evolving as the We is integrating.