The Roots of Cynicism

For this piece I’m going to start back near the beginning of my frequencies journey. Very soon after LSD opened me up to this new way of experiencing, I dropped it because marijuana was sufficient for me to access the waves, as I initially called them, that my body was becoming sensitized to. I continued that for perhaps 2 years, tapering it down over time as I increased the yoga practice, which I had begun as a way to cultivate these experiences while straight. At that time, I had a large, foldable pyramid a friend had made that I would meditate in. Typically, I would take a single toke of marijuana and sit in it. What began to happen, on occasion, was the arrival of three very intense frequencies. All of them where most concentrated at the spine, but vibrating the entire body. The one that came from directly behind and out the front was always the first. I don’t remember the order of the next two, but one came from the left rear, exiting right front, and the last from above, straight down through the body. These were the first, and only, experiences of true terror in my life. Once I felt the first one, I knew that the others would follow. Each time I would attempt to sit with them for as long as I could to see if they would dissipate as they passed through, but my memory tells me that I never lasted more than two minutes or so. If I waited too long, I had to get out of the apartment and walk, or run, so that the physicality of that would draw my focus away from the tuning to those waves. The last time it happened I walked in the park across the street for perhaps fifteen minutes and when I stopped, my feet and lower legs seemed to vanish entirely from any form of experience. I toppled forward and was able to continue walking. That prompted me to permanently ended my drug use.

Shortly after I created this website, I wrote a Post called Preferences, which noted, in part, that when flowing as energy there are different ways of moving towards a particular resonant flow, or avoiding a dissonant or less attractive pathway. While some closures are very subtle, like centering your car in your lane as it drifts ever so slightly right or left, others are more like trying to avoid a car that is wandering into your lane and require a more conscious effort. Similarly, in the most subtle instances of energetic preferences, the velocity is such that a path is taken, or closed off, with the sense of the alteration of direction but without witnessing any act of choosing. In experiences where there is a bit less velocity,  there is often what seems like a micro second in which I feel that a gentle, but somehow deliberate, choice of direction is made.  

Over the years of opening to longer and more varied wavelengths, I have noticed some resistance to the “closing off” feeling, as if opening was given a stature that made closing a kind of negative impulse that should be avoided. I see a number of reasons this might be so, but there are a few that are most prominent for me. One has to do with our innate drive to seek pleasure (joy/resonance) and avoid pain (dissonance). There is a broader view that is in line with the pleasure/pain principle, which I have long been fond of and is expressed in Satprem’s quote from his book on Aurobindo, “For such is the goal of our evolution in the end: joy.” With this in mind, choosing resonance and avoiding dissonance seems like the natural pathway, unless choosing dissonance is for the express purpose of serving joy in the long term.

Another possibility is that it may have originated as multipurpose survival mechanism, one function of which is to block out dangerous or disruptive energies, under normal circumstances, like the three intensities mentioned above. Also, what is quite obvious to me is that closing off always takes more effort than flowing towards resonance. Effort takes calories, so from an evolutionary perspective most situations that require more calories would instinctively be avoided when possible.

In my particular case, a reason for resisting this closing off is the notion that opening up, often called “surrender,” was said to be the way to “higher” consciousness. It is prevalent in many communities whose adherents I have come to know over the decades, including some that I participated in and lived in. 

What has become clear to me is that the closing off mechanism is a natural function of life and is not to be eschewed. It is part of the unconscious steering mechanism by which I am guided, and in which I actively participate.

The history of previous experiences that are somehow written in these bodies (gross, subtle, and causal) all contribute to the range of preferences that are experientially accessible to us. This history would include everything from the survival mechanisms of single cell organisms through our hominid ancestry and the habits that they developed over time, as well as the habits that each of us have chosen or unconsciously adopted in this life. As I move into the range of longer and longer wavelengths, relative to my current experiential frequency range, the more subtle of those preferences become visible as I reach the wavelengths that they are energetically attuned to. I then become aware of them and the choice to move towards one path or another comes into the range where it can shift from unconscious and automated towards conscious and deliberate. This process seems like a kind of reverse engineering of my history. 


It was about 10 years ago that I realized the detrimental energetic affects that cynicism had on me. What came to me with this recent insight is that cynicism is a knee-jerk verbal expression used to justify that closure energy in a particular circumstance. I have said before that words tend to make the frequencies from which they arise hang around longer, and also that deliberately chosen words can create frequencies that their expression generates. So, words can act as fixative and generative, for both benefit and detriment. I will note that both of these cases take effort.

What is now visible to me is that the function of energetic closure is varied and should not be assigned negative connotations, as I appeared to be doing, simply because it takes effort, avoids “surrender” or activates a cynical justification system. Though many words add focus, thus energy, which attempt to solidify motion, words of cynicism add temporal weight with a particularly dissonant feel. If the words cease to be associated with a particular experience, any experience, the anchoring of that experience will ease and it will drift away into the background energetic ecosystem oriented around a particular focused point of conscious attention. 

This is a longwinded way of pointing out that though justifying thoughts are useful, and in some cases are required, it appears that cynical or negative justifying thoughts arise from a closing off energy and are impediments to moving in the direction of joy. 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *