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.
So, as I picture it, Joy is everything and everyone that has been created by Becoming. In my take on Aurobindo, as I have written about before, we are creating and enjoying the infinite delights of our explorations of consciousness, as well as deliberately releasing the Joy that is bound up in matter. It too is released to be enJoyed. We exhibit both the outflowing and the inflowing energies as they oscillate, both within our sphere of attention and as the aperture of our attention. So, we are a fractal, a microcosm, of the dance of Becoming and Being, of that which creates and that which appreciates. We create in Joy, experience Joy, and Joy is the “material” that our creations are made from. “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…”
In my current view, the Observer’s presence is liberally strewn between the two at every frequency range that we may inhabit. Thus, like the other two, it is also frequency range (context) dependent. But it provides a stepping back and a distancing from the dynamic interactions that we are immersed in at a given moment in time, and are therefore mostly blind to. It appears to “step back” a bit from the our current focal range, and to me this is a separation from both the lively Becoming energy and the softer, quieter Being energy. Though Being’s inflow is always relatively still in comparison to outflow, there always seems to be some motion there, some flow. In the most pure form that I have experienced it, the Observer has no motion. It simply witnesses what it beholds and does nothing at all. That source-like essence provides an essential shift in perspective to step outside of motion and, in its less pure forms, provides a momentary respite in which to reassess.
So, I now come to Love and Joy.
In my experience, Love and Joy are experiences of motion and are reflected in Being and Becoming. Love is the motion that I experience moving, metaphorically, towards the depths of Unity, Oneness, Singularity. In me it is most often evoked by a sense of deep resonance with a particular person within whom I sense a shared energetic home that brings me back in the direction of my origin as a separate self, or is at least at a similarly very long wavelength. Along the differentiation path that brought “me” into some measure of distinctness, there are innumerable frequency ranges or way-stations that I have passed through. The depth of resonance with a particular person, or sometimes a group, varies the strength of the gravitational energy that pulls me towards their locale. The farther back in my particular evolutionary journey that resonance lies, the greater the gravitation, thus the greater velocity of that motion, the greater Love, that the person evokes in me. Love is not, as I see it now, the destination frequency range itself, but it is the motion toward it.
For decades a phrase that has arisen in me from time to time is “Joy is in the Many.” There is delight in our explorations and discoveries along our journeys, which seem exponentially multiplied by sharing experiences and in the mutual creations of Becoming’s expressions through us. In my Post Integrating the WE I wrote of the many people in my life whose very essence, when remembering them, brought me Joy. Love showed up just a bit in the afterglow of the Joy, but, from today’s vantage point, their essence has flavored my essence so there is no distance to travel, thus no velocity to elicit the experience of love. There is simply relatedness, a soft equanimity, a relative unity.
If love is the motion of an individual towards Unity, or its resonance within another, to me Joy is the motion of the individual towards that same Unity, that same One, but with and through the Many, with others. I imagine it much like the many stars that are returning, joyfully, to the Singularity at the center of our galaxy, with “…the childlike laughter and ecstasy of the Infinite…” – heading to that deeply common home where the currently known laws of physics cease to exist, and so is ineffable. Since this is simply one galaxy among many billions, it may too just be a way-station. But as in an article I recently quoted here says, some physicists believe that the heart of all singularities is the same (except the Big Bang Singularity) so perhaps it’s not a way-station at all.
“I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day” – E.B. White
The Observe cleanses the palate so that one might more freely choose.
So poetic!