Frequency Soup

I’ll start with a quote from “Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness” by Satprem: “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…”

I will not attempt to explicate his planes of consciousness, and don’t think that I could, but will list them here.

The Absolute (Sat-Chit-Ananda*)
Supermind
Overmind
Intuitive Mind
Illumined Mind
Higher Mind
Mind
Life
Matter
Subconscient
Inconscient
Nescient

My take on this is that everything is Joy and that matter is bound up, deliberately concealed Joy.

Two thoughts about this came to mind recently.

The first is that the Joy that is to be released from bondage appears to be layered in some way, given his description of planes. That would seem to indicate that each plane is mining Joy from the ones below for their own processing and en-Joy-ment, and then release it into the next higher plane. Thus, every individuated consciousness is, in some fashion, dependent on the ones below to provide the fodder for releasing Joy at their plane. This thought came about when thinking of the practice that many people have of generating gratitude. If what I just said is accurate, then at each plane those above are grateful for those of us working on the front lines below, like here where we are dealing with Life, Matter, and using the basic “Mind.” So, it strikes me that gratitude is not unidirectional, as I perceive gratitude practice to be, but bidirectional. The Joy and gratitude that they have for us is the fuel that allows us to do the often difficult Joy-mining that we have chosen, and they are grateful for that nutrient stream from which they further release Joy at a different frequency range. It’s like the Joy and gratitude flowing downstream tickles the Joy that is buried in matter and due to its resonance with itself, it is called forth to meet its match. As we can attest, it sometimes takes concerted efforts to extract Joy from the stickiness of density and unconsciousness, but the resulting Joy is apparently worth it. The entirety of the stream appears to have been created for that purpose.

“The soul attracted leaned to the Abyss: It longed for the adventure of Ignorance.” – Aurobindo 

Continue reading Joy Conversion

This will meander a bit, but I will attempt to point to the relatedness of all of the pieces by the end, though they will not be tidily wrapped up.

I’m going to start this first piece with a notion that I have expressed on many occasions, that we, as focused points of attention, are the result of 13.8 billion years of choices, or something energetically akin to choices. It is common knowledge that the physical Universe began when a Singularity burst forth in a Big Bang. [This may or may not be true but it is widely accepted in cosmology so I have used it as a framework] I have posited that something like “let there be light” was the first choice and that everything else has formed, evolved, differentiated from similar subsequent emanations.

And it is fairly common knowledge that without mass there is no gravity and without gravity there is no time. A photon, for example, has no mass so does not “experience” time. I saw a short video with Neil DeGrasse Tyson where he says that it takes about 30K years for a photon to get from the center of our galaxy to a telescope here on Earth, and from the perspective of the photon, the instant that it is created in a star and the instant that it reaches our telescope is the same instant. So, they seem to exist in an eternal “present” of some kind.

But our telescopes are also capturing photons that were emitted billions of years in the past, which is also the same instant for them. So, I’m wondering if we, like photons, could move towards an eternal present experientially if we became more photon-like…en-light-ened perhaps? I do experience time passing at different rates. This was most dramatically experienced in the LSD days of my youth but I notice it often in a variety of ways and settings. The experience of personal time slowing, as the world around me appears to speed up, has become much more obvious as I have aged and have been “lightened” by many decades of spiritual practices. If this is so generally, we should be able to swim back “upstream” in time by becoming less dense and, in the process, retrace all of our individual and collective choices. Each layer that I transit in this fashion will lighten me, bring a vaster view of the universe as I move back towards a less differentiated time, and accelerate my awareness towards the direction of light speed. In effect, it has the possibility of re-presencing moments of experience that a less differentiated “I” had “then.” Continue reading Time and Attention

I will begin this piece with my current view on what I will call the fundamentals of consciousness. It is, in part, the blending of perspectives from Steve McIntosh and Aurobindo, along with my own, which has its origins in a multitude of collected, and personally generated, insights over time.

I originally founded this Blog based on a single moment’s revelation when reading Steve McIntosh’s book Evolution’s Purpose. Some untold number of parts came into a coherent sensed perspective in that moment, in which I felt the wholeness of a pattern. Many of the parts were fleshed out in more detail in the days that followed and have continued to this day.

From the Blog Page Choice and Appreciation, some of McIntosh and O’Donohue:

“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 one here one by the Irish poet John O’Donohue.

“…the ultimate passion of the Cosmos is the creativity of divine beauty”.

I will now blend in some things that I’ve envisioned since returning to some of Aurobindo’s work that I had read when I was younger. I will note here that Aurobindo talks of joy, McIntosh uses perfection, and O’Donohue says beauty. I will use all three, as I think that they are pointing towards the same energy.

The purpose of Becoming is to create the next most perfect thing so that it might bring joy to Being, the beloved. So, an inherent part of what Becoming does is sharing. It creates something perfect, something amazing or beautiful, in order to share it, thereby to bring joy. In previous posts when I have listed what I saw as some of the fundamental traits of children, I included not only things like playfulness and curiosity, but also a child’s natural impulse to share. And in doing so, they want you to be as excited as they are about their discoveries, or their creations. They seek to delight their mothers, as they have been delighted by whatever they have discovered or created. And the appreciation shown by the mother delights the child due to the experience of shared joy. At least for a moment, they are “Oned” in joy, to use a term from Julian of Norwich. This brings about a circle of joying between an aspect of Becoming – that which is creating/sharing – and an aspect of Being – that which is appreciating/loving. Some form of perfection is discovered or created anew and then shared. The mother loves both what was shared and the one who shared it, which brings her joy. The one presenting the gift is, in turn, joyed by the delight of the mother and the cycle begins again. Each brings joy to the other, with a form of perceived perfection or beauty as the medium. Continue reading A Cycle of Joy-to-Joy

When we show up here as infants, we are raw and open. We have no mental cognition, but what I will call our essential, or core selves are energetically attuning to the natural frequency ranges of physicality and the basic hominid instincts that our consciousness cannot avoid. Over time, societal and personal enculturation comes into play and those manifestations are formed downstream from the essential self and those built-in hominid features. Our narrowing of attention continues to create many streams of focused attention in order to handle the wide variety of circumstances that we encounter in individual and societal situations. That narrowing of attention towards these focal points constricts the full flow of the essential self. All of the thinking and planning that goes into creating, firming up and justifying these habits will further dilute the deep essential energy of the core self that reaches our localized experience. All aspects of our lives are still fed from the fields of that essential self. It’s just expressed in a less purified form.

As we explore farther into our essential natures, the more “truth” we find. The clarity in those spaces can be experienced as profound, as we inherently know that we are closer to that essential self. But the resonances of the frequency ranges that we have developed over our lifetimes call us back to the habits that were formed in various kinds of situations. Family gatherings are a perfect example. I tend to engage with my family in the well-known historical grooves of those energetic spaces. It is mostly enjoyable, but I do sometimes get caught up in debates that bring out some of our older disagreements and resistances. In those cases, I find myself saying things that match those energies rather than from the fields that I tend to inhabit now. I will sometimes get a bit upset with myself for doing that. But the gravitation of practiced and repetitive attention is strong and unrelenting. That is its nature. And the fact that we formed those patterns, in that environment, grounds us all the more in their gravitational fields. And we all instinctively train ourselves to act automatically for two reasons that I heard John Vervaeke articulate. One, automatic behaviors reduce reaction time and two, thinking uses more calories than automated behavior, both of which are beneficial for survival. As an example, your instinctive reaction to a car careening towards yours will be much faster and more efficient after years of driving than it was when you were first behind the wheel.

Continue reading The Gravity of Habitual Attention

I have written before about the aspects of human nature that I see as fundamental, primarily because they are so visible in the behavior of young children. I have mentioned curiosity, play and joy, to name a few. But one that came up recently that I never thought of is vulnerability. At birth we are entirely vulnerable, so it is clearly elemental.

What brought this to mind was noticing how we react to different types of experiences that people have, and a curiosity about whether there is some kind of internal hierarchy in our responses to them. If there is some kind of accident or tragedy in the life of people that we know well, there is an innate reaction to come to their side and lend any kind of support that we can. There is some deep resonance with people when they are in pain. Some would say “my heart goes out to them.” When someone is being curious, playful, or overjoyed, there are a wide variety of ways that we might respond, but all are very different than our response to pain. When someone is pondering a life change, like changing jobs or moving, we react one way. If they are contemplating a divorce, we react quite differently.

What I am wondering is, is there some hidden criteria by which we naturally determine what is “more real?” Is our “authentic” self any more reflected in our vulnerability than it is in our curious self, our playful self, or our joyful self? When someone is being playful we will respond one way, but if there is a misunderstanding, and the mood suddenly shifts to vulnerability, pain or grief, everything changes in an instant. What is it about pain or grief that makes them any more “real” than the playfulness? Why do we react as if they are “more important” or “more authentic?” How do we navigate abrupt changes like this and what are those actions based on? Spontaneity is generally considered authentic. But do we curtail spontaneity in order to avoid the possibility of causing pain when around someone that we know is prone to depression? Is that a form of hierarchy that is built in to an enculturated human being? Could something akin to that even exist in other animals? What comes to mind are the many cats that my wife and I have had over the years. When they were roughhousing, a single “yip” of pain from one would stop the other.

It does seem evident that there is something about vulnerability, pain and grief that, for nearly everyone, immediately alters how they are being. I remember just days after the World Trade Center towers came down, I heard on the radio that there was a minute of silence, somewhere in Europe, where cars pulled off to the side of the road to acknowledge the moment. That brought me to tears. A natural reaction, I think, but is that really any more essential to my nature than joy?

I have often cited Aurobindo’s belief that everything is Joy. If he is correct, perhaps what touches us in the experience of grief is that we inherently know that the absence of joy requires the re-infusion of joy to be made whole again. If so, there is an argument to be made that our joyful self is most in resonance with the nature of the universe, thus our natural response to re-joy someone is too, as it arises from that same alignment with the cosmos. Thus, this pattern could be reflected in some hierarchical fashion in most, perhaps all, of our ways of relating to each other.

 

 

Over this past year I have more and more frequently found myself starting things and then my attention quickly slides off, much like the trying to catch a greased pig metaphor. One moment I’m reading, and the next I’m just staring blankly at text on a page. One of those things is writing a blogpost. I started many and though the ideas made sense to me, I’d slip off before I really got anywhere near a finished product. This sliding off experience has been so common of late that I have been trying to simply sense the experience of the energy that was tugging me away. What came to me was “This isn’t it.” Whatever I was doing was not taking me where I wanted to go. But where did I want to go? In that moment it seemed like the year and a half of Zoom calls, both attentively listening and doing practices, had been taking me to different, deeper frequency ranges. And whatever experiences that had once called to me were no longer sufficient to satisfy whatever it was that I was being drawn towards. It seems that what had been a suitable pathway had done its job to get me to a certain station on the road, but the terrain now went beyond the vibrational lure that led me to this point. And then, a flash of understanding.

For nearly all of my life I’ve been wondering what the hell I’m doing on this planet, and the answer that arose was: just to have experiences. That insight flowed into me and I could feel myself being washed clean of any notion that I had ever had about how things are. It is so simple that it’s hard to fathom that I did not see it before. I’m still just sitting with the inflow, as it “news” me. Though some patterns and thoughts I have seen in the past may still hold true, they must all be reassessed from what a friend called this new “un-framing.” I suspect that many will be discarded and that many will remain true, but all will have a different take. And now that I’ve arrived at this space to which I was drawn, will I be led elsewhere when the acclimation to this space is farther along? Perhaps, but that can unfold when it does.

Continue reading In Pursuit of Experience

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. 

Continue reading Embracing the Mind

Just days ago I had a thought that was a subtle alteration of my view of the word belonging but it had a very dynamic impact on me. In an instant, it was like popping the cork on a well shaken bottle of champagne. What follows is what came forth from that fountain, but was not the cause of it. I really don’t know what happened.

One definition of belonging is: Acceptance as a natural member or part.

Wikipedia’s description of belongingness also popped up when I did the search:
Belongingness is the human emotional need to be an accepted member of a group. Whether it is family, friends, co-workers, a religion, or something else, people tend to have an ‘inherent’ desire to belong and be an important part of something greater than themselves.


I “belong” to a number of groups. One of them is Ria Baeck’s Collective Presencing, and in this particular instance it was a Deep Dive, which is a short term closed group of 15. We were engaging with a question that included the word “we.” Strangely, I paused at that word when pondering it shortly before getting on Zoom for our call. On this Blog I have often written about the I, the We, the I/We, and the oscillation between the two, so that way of blending came to mind. It occurred to me that the word belonging itself was an impediment to that oscillation. Note in the definition above the use of the word “member”. A member is a distinct thus separate part.

I have previously described an experience in which there was a loss of identity, where there was simply experience occurring without, at moments, even the awareness that it was occurring. This is how I described it in the Post Experiences of Being :

It is reminiscent of “time flies when you’re having fun” except that it has been much more frequent and there has been a rapid oscillation between experience and then noticing that I was just lost in “it”. There appears to be no “I” in the experience. Rather, the experience is noticed after the fact and there is then a re-cognition of the lack of identity during the experience, which is really no surprise given the immediate nature of experiencing. But what is new is the sense that whatever it is that holds identity in place lets go and simply allows experience to occur. It feels like what life or consciousness desires is access to experience, here in this place, through portals such as us, and that it uses every available avenue to do just that. But in one case, it was not just me. I was doing a “What is present?” practice with someone and there was a mutual experience of free-flowing dancing in the expanse of imagination, one leading and one following. We experienced exchanging the roles of leader and follower, which began to accelerate back and forth so fast that, in an instant, leader and follower were merged. Both of us were gone. There was no I and no We. After the fact, it seemed that dance was simply occurring, as if consciousness had been set free to enjoy itself.

Continue reading Beyond Belonging

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?

Continue reading Integrating the WE

Oscillation has been a repeating theme this past year. I have noticed some additional relationships that I will point to here. As with my last post, this may appear to meander a bit but it is going somewhere and there are ideas that I want to include as I go.

I’ll begin with an experience where I noticed how sensitized I was becoming to shifts in perceived exclusion. I was on a Zoom call with a teacher that I have long followed and noticed that there were 142 participants. Some time later I noticed that the number had gone down to 136 and I felt what I would describe as a mild sense of loss. Somehow, at a rate too fast for me to notice, I concluded that people leaving was some kind of rejection of the teacher and my instinctive reaction was to generate the experience of empathy. The inclusion/exclusion component of this action matches up with Maslow’s notion of the need to belong so at one level my reaction should be no surprise. But when looking at the actual experience itself, there was just an energy flowing out of me, nothing more or less than that, just the “motion away” of a particular energy that I noticed only in retrospect. So in micro moments I had made an assessment and evoked the related “motional” experience that I associated with that notion of his loss and sent something out towards him. Both the assessment and the corresponding motion of energy had to be habitual for it to occur that fast, and automatically.

As another example, one motion towards that clearly a young child can feel is that of a reprimand, which would feel like being pushed away, a moderate form of exclusion, depending on the volume and the child. It is a common childhood experience that flows out of a parent’s mouth as an outgoing force. I remember being reprimanded as a child and did the same to my own children. When an experience is repeated often enough, it appears that a fixed cognitive association is made which can then elicit the experience which has been linked to it. In a similar vein, but deeper and more universal, is the experience of grief. We just had to put down our 17 year old cat and waves of grief came and went. Grief is a label too, but it seems like one that I adopted rather than applied myself. Not only is it universal in humans, some animals seem to act as if they are having an experience like loss or grief so it is much more deeply embedded in the planet’s evolutionary history. Now in the case of the cat, sometimes that grief came right after I thought of her, but sometimes it seemingly came out of nowhere.  Maybe it doesn’t matter whether the motional experience or association comes first. There is a linkage and, perhaps, one always elicits the other. Given the speed at which it is occurring, I am not able to tell. My suspicion now is, “it depends”…on circumstances and moments in time. The point is that we do use labels or associations, they are linked to frequencies, or “motions”, and that linkage is automated and predominantly invisible. The more ancient the association, the more likely the trait is to have an additional label, natural.

In a class that I took several months back on “Sensemaking” with Rebel Wisdom, Diane Musho Hamilton used the terms “sameness” and “difference” which points to something similar, but less emotionally activating. Some flow, which I might automatically interpret as exclusionary, could simply be re-interpreted as a flow of difference. Sameness and difference, as terms, feel much different than included or excluded. So is it really just a matter of assigning different associations to energy, like tabs on a file folder, to alter the “e”motional reaction? It certainly seems plausible. But better yet, could I skip the re-assigning phase and go straight to the root and just allow the experience of that energy flowing in with no labels or associations at all? (Hamilton did also talk about how the body feels.) Each incident will have its distinct feel, intensity and velocity, but maybe all I have to do is slow down enough to catch the experience/labelling synchronizing mechanism as it is occurring – more easily said than done, no doubt – and decouple the associations. Can I become aware enough of this mechanism that I can revert to my pre-verbal days, when I choose to, where there are simply experiences of moving energy that exist without rigid associations or linguistic labels? It seems like it would be more difficult with the ancient ones, as their wavelengths lie deeper in the background so I would have to slow down my temporal flow rate more than I am currently able for them to be visible. But if it’s possible with the short ones, it should also be with the longer ones. Energy is just energy so should have similar traits up and down the spectrums.

Along a different stream, I recently noticed something in the in-and-out flow which is perceived as that of We and I. What I expressed in “I Love, Therefore I Am” was that some essence of those I have loved, and even those that I just spent a lot of time around in my work environments, became, and still is, part of my own essence. But the “in-and-out flow” that I have recently distinguished feels more like bringing in resonant traits of anyone within my energetic perceptual range. The inward flow is sensed as a drawing in of “Other” or most often “Many”, which is then concentrated into the experience of this singular identity, Justin. Like the example of those I’ve pointed to in my past, “who I am” is permanently imbued by the resonances that some aspect of me chooses to “allow in”. It now seems to me that there is some natural mechanism that allows for this blending of energies to occur that “I” have some intentional control over, though I have not been aware of the permanence of the impact until now. But in all of this processing what is left in the end is always “just me” so the experience of that Many doesn’t  ever come to mind, even though that Many, that sensed We, seems to be constantly flowing in to nourish and reconstitute the I. Like any nourishment, I take in what I choose to and leave the rest, which then makes up my body, or in this case, my Self. What remains, and anything that  flows out, is then flavored by those nutrients.

All of this led me to wonder: How else might the experience of flowing in and flowing out of my perceptive sphere be experienced and be automatically interpreted and perhaps acted on? I certainly feel flowing in or flowing out of a myriad of waves and particles and in all sorts of different directions and have for over 45 years.

Continue reading Flow, Attention and Intention