The Mind, The WE

Integrating the We*

/

Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.” – Walt Whitman

I recently noticed, when observing my internal monologue, that sometimes the pronoun “We” is used rather than “I”. Once noticed, I attempted to be aware of the frequency of this usage. My guess at the moment is that it is approximately twenty percent. Now, I have previously written about my observation that “my” identity seems to operate as an I/We, as it appears to be a collection of ever-shifting perspectives (We) but expresses itself as fixed and singular (I). It had not, however, come to my attention that “We” had snuck into my automated self-talk.

This new observation about the naturally arising plural pronoun became much more apparent in a recent seven-day meditation retreat with Jeff Carreira that I attended. The subtly nuanced undertones that lie beneath my monologues became easily distinguishable in that vast and quiet space, and certain centers of gravity became visible.

I have also said before that thoughts have a kind of gravity, which continues to exist in the surrounding energetic environs after their creation. Habitual thinking, like concentrated matter, has gravity commensurate with its mass, thus more focused thinking results in more gravity and that gravitational force will thereby more firmly hold our attention. It’s a bit of a trap, as our attention generates gravity and the gravity draws our attention. Our identity, whatever that is, will primarily dwell around these most frequented “centers of gravity”. …

Integrating the We*Read More »

Beauty, Evolution-Development

Motion and Stillness

/

Following up on the last Post, here I’ll look at a feature of consciousness that is also fundamental, motion.

I’ll begin with one of my favorite Einstein quotes: “Everything is energy and that is all there is to it. Match the frequency of the reality that you want and you cannot help but get that reality. This is not philosophy. It is physics.” (turns out this is not an Einstein quote)

The foundation of this Blog is that we live in constantly moving energetic fields.  At the most fundamental physical levels, the Earth is rotating and also orbiting the Sun, which in turn is rotating in our spiral galaxy, which exists in a universe that is expanding. Add to that the fairly recent measurement of gravitational waves from two black holes that merged 1.3 billion years ago and rippled space/time here on Earth in Sept. of 2015. Apparently there are innumerable large-scale interactions occurring in space that have this type of impact. Given that they are now measureable, it means that they are, and have always been, sense-able as energetic motion. This kind of motion, of course, does not include all of the smaller flows of weather, wildlife, people, our respiration, our moods and the like, with which we are more familiar. Though the scales are obviously quite different, our bodies (gross, subtle or causal) can tune to any of it, in my view, even though our attention tends to habitually remain focused in particular energetic ranges. The bottom line here is that everything is moving and what moves is experienceable by the very fact that it is moving, in relation to some given point of perception. …

Motion and StillnessRead More »

Choice, Creation-Appreciation, Evolution-Development

Family Traits

/

This essay is taken from my book (pictures added). These primary traits have been a recurring presence in my mind of late so I began a new Post, which became unnecessary when looking back at this piece.

In the essay above on Looking Good, I stated that I think that all of the most basic traits of consciousness flow through every level of awareness. Thus, my curiosity wonders which of these were present before the Big Bang and which might have developed later. So it is again time for more “creations of imagination”. [I’m going to ignore the idea of a multiverse, since if that possibility is mentioned in mystical writings, it’s not discernible to me in any that I am familiar with.] In that vein I’ll repeat what I suggested in Creation and Appreciation: “For any choice to occur there must have been, at a very minimum, the options of creating or not creating. Options require distinctions between one “thing” and another, so the possibility of making distinctions must have existed before that initial choice.” For distinctions to be possible, observation must also have been an aspect of consciousness.

If, to borrow a phrase, we were “made in the image and likeness of God,” then it makes sense that we still reflect the “likeness” of our parent energy, which some call god. It also makes sense, from a purely evolutionary point of view, that the essence of what we evolved from would still be embedded in us, much like the DNA in our bodies. And where those likenesses are most visible in a relatively undiluted form is in young children. Initially it takes time to bring their attention into our perceptual ranges, but as they do they are insatiably curious. They observe, then explore and enjoy. …

Family TraitsRead More »

Choice

Another View of Habits and Letting Go

/

I recently read the book “Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain” by David Eagleman. It provided a new way, and perhaps a clearer one, for me to point to features of both habits and the inherent difficulty in mastering “letting go” practices, both of which I have addressed before.

I have postulated that we each are “a focused point of attention” of Being resulting from 13.8 billion years of choices, beginning at the Big Bang with a choice whose intent was something akin to “Let there be light”. This nearly infinite number of choices is represented as instinctual preferences written in our DNA and by the directional nudging we have accepted from family, friends and environments through infancy, childhood and beyond. These all provide a vast multitude of subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, preferences which direct our behavior. Add on to this all of our own current and former conscious choices during this lifetime.

Here are some quotes from the book to initiate another look at habits and “letting go”. (The quotes listed here are not always in the same sequence as in the book; the underlines and bolding are mine).

 “Consciousness is the long term planner…” “…it sets the goals, and the rest of the system learns how to meet them.” “When the brain [has] a task that it needs to solve, it rewrites its own circuitry until it can accomplish the task with maximum efficiency.” …

Another View of Habits and Letting GoRead More »

Evolution-Development, Polarities

Movement and Evolving Consciousness

/

I’ve been participating in the Evolutionary Collective for several years but in January I went to my first “public” event, of which there have been relatively few. In that event we did some practices that are typical of what we normally do, either online or by phone weekly, or in person at our periodic weekends together. But the energy in the room seemed to have a different dynamic than what I had normally experienced in the EC work.

What came to mind is something that I mentioned in Some Thoughts on Love, Sadness and We-Space, and that is about energetic distances. In that essay I wrote about the experience of “falling in love” with my wife and that after many years the sensation of “falling” was no longer experienced. We’d fallen into orbit around each other so there was little distance between our energetic home bases.

Similarly, in this EC event the energetic distance, which those new to the territory needed to traverse towards this collective We-Space, would have been greater than that which occurs for those of us who are already in some energetic proximity to each other.
The EC members present had all practiced regularly together for at least a year, and for some of us much longer. …

Movement and Evolving ConsciousnessRead More »

Creation-Appreciation, Language

Language, a Tool of Consciousness

/

I’m going to start this piece off with a story:

Some time in early 2015 I saw an interview on TV with Lin Manuel Miranda talking about his play “Hamilton”. He said that the show was moving to Broadway in the summer. Now I have no interest in that kind of entertainment but I do follow politics and it sounded like it was a part of the story of our political history. It was also mentioned that both Bill Clinton and Rupert Murdoch had given it excellent reviews. I found that second part most intriguing. I was going to be in New York for a weekend in July so got online and purchased two of the remaining 23 seats available for the only evening that both my wife and I had free. That was the entirety of what I knew before entering the theater. I had no idea what I was about to experience that night. It was breathtaking.

Since then I’ve seen many stories, interviews and video clips of the show. What came to me was that some aspect of this identity was, through these gateways, trying to recreate the experience that I had that evening. That simply wasn’t going to happen. I had become attached to the forms of articulation pointing to the experience in an apparent attempt to recreate that experience. No experience hangs around. It occurs and is gone in the very next moment and yet I seemed to be trying to retrieve one.

With that example, I’ll go back to something that I have addressed before, both in the book and this Blog, and that is the relationships between language and experience. Here are two passages that I’ll begin with. The first points to the primacy of experience and the second to the way language seems to act like a link to experience. …

Language, a Tool of ConsciousnessRead More »

The WE

Who Are WE?

/

There is a practice in the Evolutionary Collective that is called a Mutual Awakening Practice (MAP). This is done weekly for about 8 weeks with a partner, randomly assigned, after which partners are changed. I typically do one or two additional practices each week with partners that I’ve had before or friends that I’ve introduced to it. It is a thirty minute exercise with each person answering the question “What is present?” followed by “What are we experiencing?”

In this practice my words often seem to arise of their own accord, without any intervening mental assessing occurring. The experience is very immediate. These resonances are often very deep and intimate. The energy of one space had “me” say “I can’t imagine anything more intimate than this”. It was exquisite.

It feels to me that the space we are transiting through/creating has something to say and we have chosen, by our commitment to each other and the practice, to allow it to have its say. As a listener, I feel the space from which the other’s words arise and deliberately allow my fluid self to become entwined in the energetic flow that is being offered. The words act as an invitation to find where our common path is leading us. We follow each other’s lead, in this back-and-forth, in a kind of playful dance. The dance that we “are” seems to delight in the space that is being generated and also in the pleasure of having a partner with which to enjoy it.

…

Who Are WE?Read More »

Evolution-Development

Do You Love Me?

/

I noticed recently that “Do you love me?” – or some form of it such as “Do you like me?” – is a question that may underlie much of my behavior with other people. I appear to “come from” it as I engage with them.

My day-to-day interactions with other people seem to begin with a subtle sense of whether or not someone’s energy feels preferred, or not, by some layer of my own energetic fields. This may, and I suspect does, occur before I am consciously aware of their presence but certainly happens as I become aware of them. This “feeling out” occurs before any thoughts about the matter arise. There are always energetic interactions going on. We all exist in the same energetic ecosystem and will feel the back-and-forth interplay, particularly when in some kind of physical or visual proximity, whether we are conscious of it or not.

If I become consciously aware of someone’s presence, then thinking will usually follow. Whether I attend to those thoughts will depend on where and how my attention is currently focused and how much time I have. Walking down the street or in a grocery store, I may have the impulse to simply say hello to someone. That process occurs extremely rapidly, but there is still energetic sensing and choosing going on, which I rarely observe. Although it is not common for me, these may lead to some brief pleasant banter, if circumstances make that possible and my sensings pull me in that direction. In a way, it is mostly automated, energetic machinery and I am reacting to subtle preferences.

With those whom I have any prolonged interaction, some aspect of me will assess whether this person’s energy, as deep as I can feel it at the moment, is such that I want to interact with them or not. In short, do I want them to like me or not? If not, I keep exchanges brief or ignore them altogether, if civility allows for that. If so, I play it by ear. But there is some level of back and forth exchange where I tune to the deepest space in them that is visible to me and I speak from the space in me that sees it into that place in them, which might be listening – available for tuning. I think that it is both to transmit to where some deep receptivity dwells and to listen to what arises from that space, as it flows back to where my own speaking arose. It is both curiosity and, I think, a natural desire to experience resonance. It might be called the desire to be seen and accepted, but reaching a common resonance feels like a better description, given my energetic way of experiencing the world.

…

Do You Love Me?Read More »

Choice

The Experience of Time

/

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” – Soren Kierkegaard

Lately I’ve been noticing the layers of preferences and how they appear to reflect rates at which I experience the flow of time. If a preference – the result of an earlier choice – is immediate, like what on your dinner plate you will eat first, the distance between the choice, the completion and the enjoyment are minimal and there is very little, if any, deliberate thinking going on. If the choice is that you’d like to change careers, it will take a while before you can enjoy the results.

T

The time between the initiation of the choice and its fruition is much longer. It will take planning, and a multitude of choices along the way. The result of each choice will have its own brief experience of fulfillment, if one takes the moment to enjoy them, but the end result will be enjoyed after transiting a vast number of choice/appreciation cycles (frequencies).

Now one of the results of long-term planning is that some choices will become automated along the way. That is, they will no longer require conscious thought since they are a single component that is in line with the long-term intent. If you are training for a new line of work, taking your books to class is not something you think about, you just do it. It is a choice that has become a habit and is just part of the process towards your goal. Your long-term pursuit is to have that new career and the fruit of that intent. Its enjoyment will be experienced when you land a job doing what you want to do. You may or may not take the time to experience the satisfaction of individual results along the way. That will depend on what you are focused on in the moment. The long-term goal’s satisfaction will be commensurate with the effort you’ve put into it, but you’ll have to wait until that goal is achieved. …

The Experience of TimeRead More »

Beauty

The Quest for Beauty

/

I’m going to return to the point I was making in my original essay on Creation and Appreciation, as it keeps coming back to me as a point of focus.

What if every moment of your life could be narrowed down to creating the next most perfect experience to have, and then to enjoy it, as well as the creations that already exist in the world?

I suspect that it is. We are pleasure seekers at heart. Every choice that we make is some form of perfecting life – making it more beautiful – so that it can be appreciated.  It could be making the perfect breakfast out of ingredients that are available, within the time constraints that you have and sitting down to enjoy it. It may be that reading the paper while you eat, though it distracts you from the pure enjoyment of the food, is what you prefer to do. Each of these perfection choices tends to be so fast as to appear automated, if they are even noticed. But they are each choices and collectively the end result IS the sum of what you chose. It may also be true that your intent to get to work on time minimizes your full enjoyment of the pleasure of that reading/eating experience, but that intent to be on time is also a choice that is aligned with a larger perspective of what is perfect. Any choices that become repetitive and ordinary, like eating breakfast, tying your shoes or going to work, may drift into habits and eventually, perhaps, into instinct. You will then lose both the recognition that it is a choice, and perhaps the appreciation of that which you manifested as a result of your choice. …

The Quest for BeautyRead More »

Scroll to Top