Embracing the Mind

The idea of the mind infers that “it” is something separate from us. This terminology is used in all kinds of spiritual practices and psychological therapies, which mostly tend to refer to “it” as something to be dealt with rather than an integral aspect of ourselves or even as a tool to be used. As far as I can tell, there is no discernable demarcation line between what is referred to as “I” and that mind. Now there are certainly other “its” that we refer to, such as our bodies, but much like I recently pointed out how the word “belonging” can be limiting, here I want to pick the mind out for a similar kind of observation.

In the foundational essay of this Blog, Choice and Appreciation, I write:

I would like to provide here a few quotes from Steve McIntosh’s wonderful book “Evolution’s Purpose”. Not only because he so brilliantly conveys evolution’s nature and process, but also because it made sense of the mechanisms that I was seeing.

“…..I cannot see how the first cause could be anything less than personal, since we are personal. Indeed, how could the part be greater than the whole?”

“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….”

And I’ll add a quote here by Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue
“….the ultimate passion of the Cosmos is the creativity of divine beauty”.

To me, McIntosh is saying that manifesting experienceable perfection is at the center of Being’s choice to create the universe, and thus is Becoming’s active intent.

Distinguishing and choosing, in some energetic fashion, down the eons has manifested an uncountable number of pathways, spreading and diverging in all directions. Each component of awareness produces a myriad of points of physicality, along with the extended perceptual and experiential capacity, though muted, of its origin, Being.

Each point of awareness observes the environs of its locale and, in some way, selects new paths moment by moment, continuing that “downstream” current sourced by its headwaters, Being’s initial intent. Long forgotten in its focus on the immediate is any awareness of all of the upstream perspectives that it has traversed. The momentum of the energetic flow carries it along.

The choice of the next most perfect possible creation, in any particular place, for any particular aspect of the physical universe, must depend upon a particular perspective or set of perspectives from that locale.

What I was saying is that what some call our individual small “s” selves are the result of some 13.8 billion years of choices, in my view. Many of the more ancient ones, such as fight, flight or freeze, appear to be at least pre-mammalian in origin. Most of these tend to be called instincts. The ones that were influenced via familial or cultural conditioning are more likely to be referred to as habits. All were put in place by the steering mechanisms of earlier choices, often semi-consciously or from kinds of consciousness that came before what we understand as self-reflective consciousness. These usually will manifest unconsciously, or semi-consciously, as preferences. Our more deliberate choices will be made based upon the viable options presented by this same underlying stream. 

In talking about the mind in the Post, A Well Oiled Machine, I write:
One way to view this layering of commands is that at each given moment in time I am focused on something in particular. I make my choices based solely on what I’m present to. The jockeying of previous commands for dominance at that moment is dependent on my current energetic focal range too. But regardless of where it started and where it ends, it is always a matter of some choice being made. Even a letting go practice is initiated by a choice to do so. So it can be said that every moment of my life is exactly how I have chosen it to be in a given moment. 

There is nothing wrong with the mind. It works perfectly. The programmer must be conscious of what commands are given and though those commands are constrained to a great degree by earlier choices, there still appears to be a modicum of free will presenced in the act of choosing. There are people who’ve had near-death experiences who have said “my whole life passed before my eyes”. Extrapolate that out and imagine the time frame between the Big Bang and now. The original intent of the Singularity may appear minute, when looking from that vastness to the temporal rate in which we currently hang out, but I think that it is here infusing our every choice.

What I am pointing to is another kind of oscillation but will pause first to better describe what I mean when I use that word. The kinds of oscillations that I refer to are not like a clean sine wave. They are a back-and-forth movement between polarities that are in constant flux but still carry a certain flavor or frequency. You wake and you sleep. No waking period is like any other and no sleep period is like any other, yet it is a cycle, a rhythm.
Anytime attention, of any intensity, is focused on a frequency, it is changed and some traits of its flow are thereby altered in unpredictable ways but in a fashion commensurate with the input. In this way the natural back and forth flow of any waveform is impacted, along with all of the streams that may be in resonance with it. The electromagnetic spectrum is measured in frequencies, all traveling in the same space, so the nature of this back and forth flow seems universal. So oscillation is a fair and useful description even if it does not precisely match what I am pointing to.


On the one hand the mind can be seen as a part, often eschewed, and on the other, as I describe above, as a cohesive stream of choices flowing down the eons. If taken from a perspective “temporally” closer to the Big Bang, this stream can easily be seen as the choices of what people refer to as the big S Self. From that perspective, all of the downstream choices are re-cognized as deliberate, with the Self as the all-embracing author of each and every one. Thus, what we call the mind represents a flow of the affirmative choices of a Self, focusing attention, and intention, downstream. If we keep calling the mind an “it”, we ostracize it and put the deeper authorship of our choices at arm’s length. We thus slow down the re-integration of the big S Self’s awareness. Blaming any trait of the Self, wherever that Self happens to be in the stream of awareness, prevents the acknowledgement of the fullness of that Self and thus impedes the path upstream.


I have written before of the holon, an idea which I got from Ken Wilber and he borrowed from Arthur Koestler. That is that a holon is both a whole and a part. It has its own kind of integrated identity and yet is part of something larger. The example often used is the atom and a molecule. The atom stands alone yet is a pivotal component of a molecule, which is itself a whole. The dance between the Many (parts) and the Ones (wholes) are vast and delicious. As our attention shifts around, we experience ourselves as a whole, a whole amongst many, or as different collections of parts…in all manner of ways.

What I am suggesting is that the way for the mind, in its various expressions, to come into contact with another level of our wholeness, is to fully embrace “it” as the vital feature of the Self that it is. Given 13.8 billion years of choices, what is becoming visible as we move upstream will be an eternal kind of play. But this ongoing reintegration makes accessible the depths of the broader, more encompassing choices that we once made. The trajectory of those deep choices can then consciously be redirected, if so chosen, or can at least clarify the intent of downstream choices that heretofore were more habitual, thus likely less effective. We can deliberately bring to bear the kind of self-reflective consciousness that perhaps did not exist when we transited that terrain before. In this model, what exists in our choice-field in this lifetime was not in existence when those deeper choices were made. There is real value, for example, in taking into account how you would like the world to work before making choices that impact your own neighborhood. In this way, what we intend to manifest in the perceptual world we now inhabit will be in alignment with the intent of our Self, at whatever stage we happen to be aware.

I am suggesting that the oscillating dancing among the holons, experienced at any given moment as multitudes or a particular whole, will be more effective at manifesting beauty, and be more joyful in doing so, if the mind is not denigrated, but rather embraced.