In the fall of 1973 I was in the living room of a friend’s apartment with several friends doing LSD. I was sitting still, simply observing my experience, when I felt what I have since described as “invisible cotton balls” pummeling my mouth in rapid succession. As I turned my head just a bit, the direction from which this experience was emanating did not change. Fascinated, I moved my head side to side, up and down and, sure enough, this experience was coming from a fixed direction. When done with that little experiment, I just sat there observing, which was my preferred pastime when “tripping.” What occurred then sent my life on this examination of consciousness that I’m still on today. The impact of this “cotton ball machine gun” subtlety moved my lips, and while I simply observed, the mood that I was normally in when my mouth was shaped that way, quickly enveloped me. “WTF was that? Is there something that actually alters my mood without me knowing?”
Incredulous, I decided the phenomena needed to be examined (thanks dad) and so ended up tripping two or three times a week for the next couple of months, which was way out of the norm for me or anyone else I knew. Prior to this, LSD was typically something I’d do once or twice a month and was often well planned.
What I discovered was that awareness of this “energetic” experience was something that could be learned. With relative ease I was able to sensitize my focus to readily get to a place where these “waves,” as I initially called them, were experienceable. They came in a very wide variety of sensations. My next test was to see if I could achieve the same state just using marijuana, a significantly lesser “high.” I was successful in achieving that within just a few weeks. Now, the question was, could I get to this same state without the use of drugs?
Looking back, I would say that in some ways this next phase actually began in the summer of ’69 between my junior and senior years in high school. At the time, I had a job selling food to tourists in a little building that sits on the Washington Monument grounds in D.C. The bus I rode downtown took me past a “yoga center,” and many times, taking that ride, I thought that I wanted to try that some day. Remembering this thought, I decided that yoga would be the path I would try in order to sensitize my body to these “waves.” So I went out, picked up a yoga book, and just did it on my own for about a year and a half. During that time I did have some intermittent success in getting “sensitized” but nothing consistent, and while I continued my drug use during this time, it was at a dramatically reduced level. I was making some progress and very much liked what yoga did to me, so kept at it. Then my sister’s boyfriend gave me a “real” yoga book, The Complete Illustrated Book of Yoga by Swami Vishnudevananda. A few months later, I was in my local food coop and saw a flyer advertising a weekend retreat nearby with Swami Vishnu; of course, I went.
At the morning chanting that followed meditation my body went directly into high sensitivity mode. I had clearly found my home. I started regularly attending classes and Sunday “satsang” at the local “center,” which was, of course, the same one that I’d passed on the bus that summer in high school. The drugs had served their purpose and no longer needing them, I gave them up. To make it very short, I’m still doing yoga today.
The ingredients of frequency soup: ever-changing energetic fields
Here I’ll attempt to describe what I have called for many decades now, my “frequency soup”.
Though it’s not easy to relay, it is important because it provides the most fundamental access to how I experience this world, and thus it holds the general perspective which has generated the evolving worldview that I hold. Some of the terms I will use are simply the best description that I can come up with for an experience that cannot be converted into something easily referential. Therefore, I’m going to start with a simple, thus less accurate, version and perhaps blend in other attributes later.
I experience my “frequency soup” as ever-changing energetic fields. Imagine that you are floating in the ocean. You can experience currents in the water that vary both in direction, temperature and rate of flow. At the same time, you are also seeing differing amplitudes of waves on the water’s surface, some smaller ones riding larger ones. In addition, you are experiencing wind which is also varying in direction, velocity and, perhaps more subtly, temperature.
Try to imagine that your skin is a permeable membrane whose resistance is variable, and that the interior of your body is hollow. Imagine now, that this skin membrane allows the waves and air of your ocean experience to pass through to the interior, and then out the other side, in ways that vary due to the membrane’s resistance in any given moment. The wind and waves are never the same in any spot, at any time, and are moving at all manner of speeds and in all directions. In addition, imagine that the wind/waves have variable texture, density and other more subtle attributes. In a gross generality, one end of the spectrum is a warm, viscous, oily liquid, and at the other, it is static-y, like the “snow” on an old TV set when it was not tuned to a station. Everything has an impact on, and often creates, these frequencies; the amount of light, who is around, colors, temperature, the state of my body, my mood, what I’ve eaten and how long ago, which direction I’m facing, if I’m moving or stationary, sitting or standing…..literally EVERYTHING in my environment. Now include, that my thinking process can resist, intensify, divert, override or disperse these wind/waves, sometimes dramatically. Now add to this unfathomably complex mix, the fact that I am not alone in this world, and the energetic impact of everyone else’s energies are contributing to the energetic field that I’m immersed in. The intermixing flows can range from blissful to disorienting and many things “in between.” And it is all filtered by what “I” am paying attention to.
It is extremely rare that I am without these constant interweaving flows, though I am consciously paying little attention to them most of the time. Though constantly flowing in what appears to be infinite variety, there are nevertheless patterns of flow that are distinctive, and I’ve learned a great deal from those patterns, some of which I will attempt to convey.
Interpreting “Higher” and “Lower” Frequencies
Now, there is one more distinction that I would like to add here. I’m going to use the terms, “higher” and “lower” frequencies as they are referred to in science, with the short peak-to-peak distances of wave forms as the higher frequency and the longer peak-to-peak distances as lower. I don’t want to confuse what some call “higher” to mean more conscious because that is the opposite of how I use the terms. In this case then, the “lower” frequencies actually reflect “higher” levels of awareness.
My interpretation of these states is that those frequencies that are at the slow moving end of the spectrum (longer wavelengths) are typically infused by a sense of quiet calmness. At the extreme, those at the higher end (shorter wavelength) are so short that they appear to be a collection of minute and nearly identical separate particles. Experientially, note the difference in “feel” between looking down into the Grand Canyon and experiencing the rate of a bee’s wings moving next to your ear. Those will give you a general flavor of my perceptions at the distant ends of these fields. In between those ends they are mixed beyond imagining.