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Layers of Oscillation

It appears that everything is energy and though physicists may differentiate between particles and waves, the famous double slit experiment appears to indicate that there is at least a wave component to everything. So here I will ignore the particulate for the moment and note some of the basic characteristics of a wave or frequency. By definition a frequency oscillates, so it is always in motion. At a minimum, it also has bandwidth, amplitude, directional shifts and polarities. By these features it can be distinguished, so it could be said that, in part, we make distinctions via our perceptions of frequencies and, since we ourselves are distinguishable, we too should have these same traits. So, in a way, we are collections of frequencies, observing and interacting with other frequencies.

In my own energetic experiences, frequencies of shorter bandwidths ride along on those of longer bandwidths. It may be similar to the multiple sizes of waves on the ocean, though it doesn’t exactly feel like that. It might be that they are on, or in, or blended with them. I can’t really tell but I will use some analogies that I have used before. Though we experience some of the same frequency ranges, a mouse or a hummingbird is most naturally tuned to a different set of ranges than we are. Their heartbeats, for example, are much faster than ours, just as those of whales are slower than ours. Some animals see in the infrared and some in the ultraviolet. We see neither. Bacteria or cells in our bodies clearly resonate at very different frequency rates than we do, yet we all ride along in the cycle of our planet’s daily spin, its annual trip around the sun and the solar system’s trip spiraling around the center of our galaxy. We are in those longer wavelengths, which will last much longer than we will, and we’re not getting out of them. Their wavelengths are so long that we do not consciously sense them, much like our cells do not experience our whole body. Their vastness, thus relative stillness, makes us blind to them. All frequencies exist together in a cosmological ecosystem that we are immersed in and inseparable from, and at least some of the more subtle are distinguishable in our experience should we seek them out via yoga, meditation or other “letting go” practices.

Here I will quote Alan Watts again, “the ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention.” It appears to me that the focused attention of consciousness is precisely how we are expressed as a particular identity in this universe. What frequencies I happen to be attending to determine what I am distinguishing, thus experiencing, at any given moment. Our daily lives tend to keep us focused on those frequencies that are habitual, resulting from being in a physical body and by being immersed since infancy into a family, a culture and the relationships that we have chosen, or fallen into, throughout our lives. Thus there is a “frequency neighborhood” that I am most attuned to and what is familiar tends to mask the expanse of the unknown that lies beyond. I am not minimizing the importance of the familiar, for without the focal ranges that I am aligned in and the integration of my self-selected habits, I could not adequately function, much less survive, in this world. I am pointing out that part of that vast unknown is made up of an endless parade of meta-waves, each of a longer, thus more subtle, wavelength than the one before – in this example in the direction of vastness. Each is a deeper aspect of the foundation from which this particular point of attention somehow became differentiated. Those deep foundational layers have useful meta-perspectives to impart. They, like their waveforms, tend to be broad and naturally “transcend and include” the perspectives that I am currently conscious of. And they come slowly to the forefront as I dip my awareness back into their long undulations via my chosen practices.

Within the vastness of experience, there are experiences that I am totally unaware of (the spinning of our galaxy), ones that I am semi-conscious of (the light of the sun on a cloudy day), ones that I am conscious of (a casual conversation), ones that I am hyper-conscious of (immersion in a particular task) and, lastly, the apex of focused attention, a deliberate choice. It seems clear that the more our attention is brought to bear, the more energy is added. To me this added energy feels like it is drawn from some of those longer wavelengths on which we travel and is funneled into the ranges of our everyday lives via focused attention and choice. Choice seems to bring the essence of creativity itself from our deepest spaces, penetrating all intervening experiential terrain, and inserting the power of that declaration into our current space-time neighborhood. This additional energy generates an increasing mass, along with the gravitation that comes naturally with a larger mass. Along with that added gravity comes the commensurate difficulty to extract oneself from it. In his book The Four Agreements, Don Miguel Ruiz says “Breaking agreements is very difficult because we put the power of the word (which is the power of our will) into every agreement we have made. We need the same amount of power to change an agreement.” Our deliberate choices, our “agreements”, can bring the power of our will up from the deepest and longest of wavelengths, as I experience it, and imbue a relatively solid groundedness, a kind of particle-ness, into our here-and-now experience. Thus, without  “…the same amount of power…” they will be difficult to extract ourselves from.

Evolution-Development, The WE

I Love, Therefore I Am

I noticed of late the pull to be reclusive, again. I have lived with that in the background, and often enough in the foreground, for my entire life. What was also occurring during this time was that people that I love were coming to mind and, at moments, they left my mind and I instead felt them present in my experience. It was as if some essence of them was right here in me. As I contemplated this, I deliberately stopped “thinking” of them and simply invited them in. Over a period of days, dear friends and family seemed to be transiting through me. At times it felt like I was a mixture of myself and them, which I found quite easy to do. I felt their nudging energies blending into me, sometimes collectively. It is perhaps best imagined as being in pre-boiling water, considerable movement but warm and gently caressing.

What came to me was that the call towards reclusiveness might actually be the pull of the essential consciousness of each of these loved ones, acting collectively as a kind of magnified gravitational field. I might not be seeking to be solitary, but to be immersed within the many beloveds of my life.

At one point in that field, I let go and felt the rushing motion of moving into them, into that Many, and being joyously welcomed home. Moments later, I felt the Many rushing back into me and this core, this solid “I” was welcoming them back to the home that they were seeking. Back and forth We went.

In this moment it seems to me that all of the frequencies that I’ve been immersed in these many decades might just be the caresses of love in an infinite dance, leading and following, as the oscillations of I and We. This I/We is joy’d. Joy’d in the inhalation of love from the many and sharing that accumulated joy back into the ecosystem of the Many as the exhalation of this particular collective I/We. A natural breathing in and breathing out is taking over. It knows the way.

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. And yet often the collective energies that are present at a given moment are compacted and become experientially focused as a solid, individuated “I”. It is a matter of where and how attention is focused and it seems likely that this has always been so. I have newly conscious ways of perceiving. I can experience myself as a porous, loosely focused aspect of a blended We; as a compacted collective I – focused, lucid and distinct; or as an infinitely modulating dance between the two. It is clear that, whether in focused or unfocused form, without them I would not be. It appears, at least at the moment, that I exist only as some vortex of interrelationship, which oscillates between an expanded unfocused We and a compacted collective momentary I. I give back my gratitude, my appreciation and my love into the ecosystem of the Many when I experience myself on the leading, more uni-focused, side of the dance and I accept theirs in kind when invited to be the follower, to let go and be led. Bidirectional joy radiates at all times. This I/We is blended into the collective love that they are, in their web of loves, and we co-create ourselves in our joint oscillating resonances.

As we are joy’d by this inter-webbing, Being is joy’d in our recognition of, and active participation in, the ongoing joyful interplay of welcoming in and gifting out.

When I texted a friend with my thought of “Without those I love, I would not be,” his response was “So…..I love therefore I am?”. YES, that’s perfect.

I love, therefore I am

Creation-Appreciation

Experiences of Being

What is emerging of late is that I have been getting “lost” in experience. 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.

 

On the active side of this inter-play, my partner and I did set up the parameters in which this experience could happen by choosing to get on a call and do the practice. In our lives we do choose how to modify our environment and how to put ourselves into situations where we are most likely to enjoy ourselves. Thus, from this perspective, it appears that enjoyment is one of the activities by which Being accesses earthly experience, through us, and that we are actively engaged in creating that opening. Other avenues might include curiosity, gratitude and love. We, as particular aspects of identity, can set up the circumstances, initiate a flow, then stand aside and be overtaken by life experiencing itself through us.

In a way, we are the experiences of Being, individually and collectively.

Creation-Appreciation, The WE

Appreciation and Gratitude

For all of my adult life, I’ve had an antipathy toward God, or “The Divine”, as people now tend to call it.

It started some time in elementary school, a Catholic institution, with what I considered the irrational notion that an “all loving” god would send someone to burn eternally in “hell” for a single transgression.

We were told that this was the end result of committing a “mortal sin” that we did not repent before death.

I’ll not go into the whole “divine rant” as to how this antipathy developed over the years, but eventually I ended up with the idea that in the grand scheme of things we are points of consciousness in a particular type of manifestation “downstream”, and within, eons of somehow intentional creative choices. We are a collection of those choices and the perspectives that they have transformed into. Those collections of perspectives can be experienced both as a collective – a WE – and also as a unified singular consciousness – an I – anywhere in that stream where some particular collection of perspectives coheres in a particular instant and then looks out upon “its” current chosen terrain.

The notion of “The Divine” infers that we are not part of that eternal continuum of consciousness, that we are distinct from it, and thus somehow not divine. From that perspective only our distinctness is acknowledged and not our unity with the entire stream – the ecosystem of consciousness, if you will.  Energetically, I see no evidence that there is a demarcation line between this entity, currently named Justin, and anything. Thus the notion of some “higher” and separate god is, in a way, an impediment to the experience of Unity that is sought by so many. A belief that we are not divine will inhibit us from crossing that imaginary line into a Unity state since we have declared “it” as separate from “us”. It is all one flow so either everything is divine or nothing is. At some point, I’m saying, that declared barrier must be discarded. This will allow for the continuing flow of a particular “I” to commune with some vaster collective, a new WE, and then a transition will occur into its broader collective unity, our next momentary I.  Each experience of WE or I is an aspect of divinity, if one wants to use that term for consciousness. It’s all arising in the same inescapable ecosystem. Now I do recognize that a star-sized WE would certainly feel like it was divine due to its size, but it’s really just a more inclusive I/WE. The entirety of all possible perspectives could be considered The Divine, but if that ultimate Unity were fully experienced, there would be no remaining distinct perspective to call it that.

Creation-Appreciation

Concentration and Meditation

In the Sivananda method of teaching yoga, which was taken from the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, we were taught the “Eight Limbs of Raja Yoga”.

These are, in order:
Yamas
Niyamas
Asanas
Pranayama
Pratyahara
Dharana
Dhyana
Samadhi

 

I’ll not go into them all, as you can find their meanings yourself and I want to focus on Dharana at the moment. I’m using my former teacher Swami Vishnudevananda’s description of the word’s meaning as “Progression in mental control or concentration” from his book “The Complete Illustrated Book of Yoga”.

What came to mind recently was that this step of concentration seems to get all too little attention compared to Dhyana [Meditation] though it is in the sequence as a vital step in the path towards enlightenment [Samadhi].

I do want to make a distinction between what I consider meditation and “mindfulness”, which is sometimes referred to as “mindfulness meditation” though in my view is not meditation at all. The first time I was told about mindfulness, a couple of decades or more ago, it was described to me as “Doing what you are doing while you are doing it.” That infers active concentration and thus, in my view, points towards dharana not meditation. But I also think that “Doing what you’re doing while you are doing it” though intentional, is not the same as a creative act. Both require concentration but one is generative and the other is not.

It seems to me that the forward focusing nature of concentration is an aspect of Becoming, the creative aspect of the universe. It is what we are endowed with by consciousness both to explore and then to manifest, through choice, the next most perfect or beautiful experiences that we would like to enjoy. It does make sense that meditation is a very useful way to extricate ourselves from this ancient concentrated, creative flow that we have become wrapped up in by trying to perfect our lives. But what meditation’s extrication also provides is the possibility of then re-engaging in Becoming’s flow by consciously making choices from the quieter, more expansive perspectives that a quiet mind evokes. In my view this is not solely for the purpose of assisting others in extracting themselves from this world of “suffering”. I do not think that we were meant to use Concentration and Meditation to permanently extricate ourselves and others from Becoming, as the yogis have taught. Though there is suffering in the world, creating and experiencing beauty seems to me our primary purpose here, not avoiding suffering. …

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Take Your Pick

In the beginning, there was consciousness. I will grant that we seem to be confined to the particular orientation that we refer to as evolution, and that it may be possible that some method outside of that framework could exist. But since that is unimaginable to me at the moment, I will use the standard evolutionary model and assert that everything in our experience now is logically derived from that original consciousness.

Using that consciousness as Source, everything else in the universe is composed of, sustained by and nourished by that very Source. In the fractions of a second after the Big Bang, quarks, electrons and other subatomic particles came “into being”. Our bodies are still made up of those particles, though we do not see or experience them directly. 

And every bit of that is energetic. Though the eons of evolutionary development have generated a vast array of different types of energy, they are all derived from the same Source. What we tend to call our “dense” form of physicality is just a different gradation of energy. As Einstein said, in one of my favorite quotes:

“Everything is energy and that is all there is to it. Match the frequency of the reality you want and you cannot help but get that reality. This is not philosophy. It is physics.” *

Given Einstein’s quote, and for lack of a better analogy at the moment, I will just generalize and say that Divine Energy, in whatever form, is diffused throughout the universe at all frequency ranges, know or unknown to us.

The nourishment provided by that energy is used by any given frequency range in a way that suits that range. As an example, unicellular organisms operate at different scales than plants or mammals, thus at the most gross levels they each resonate in different frequency ranges. Our individual cells may be at similar scales as the unicellular, but that is not where we are primarily experiencing our world. We operate and experience where our primary focus of attention is.  We do not sense nutrients in the way an amoeba does, we smell with a nose and taste with a tongue at a vaster scale. We see the lightening and hear the thunder. …

Choice, Evolution-Development

Free Will

As I have expressed before, there is nothing more powerful than choice. It originates as what one might call divine intent, the initial expression of which called forth our physical universe.

It could be argued that curiosity and imagination would have been necessary for the notion of creation, and of what to create, to arise in the first place, but in terms of raw power it seems to me that choice reigns supreme. Love, which many people point to as primary, might well have come into existence in the moments after the Big Bang and perhaps existed as a possibility before the Big Bang, but without duality there would have been nothing in existence that might have evoked the experience of love.  

Since we are aspects of consciousness, it seems logical to me that we tap that same power of choice in order to do things in our everyday lives, used with particular potency in our declarative choices. And all the while we are also being impacted by every single one of the choices upstream in “our” historical past. We would be, after all, the product of a long lineage of choices starting with some “let there be light” type of choice from which they all began, as I have articulated in previous writings. Thus it makes sense to me that all of those ancestral choices are still sourcing us and therefore should be “sense-able” at more and more subtle levels as we take our awareness back upstream towards that Source. I have noted before that the most discernable way that these choices appear comes in the form of preferences. Some of them we would call instincts and some we might actually recall choosing ourselves in this lifetime. The power to impact us at any given moment will depend on the power of that declarative choice when originally made, and how and where our attention is focused in our immediate circumstances. …

Creation-Appreciation

Back to Basics

I recently noticed that I was delighted in the experience of discovery itself. This delight occurred in the instant after the recognition that I had discovered something that was new to me. What came to mind was that maybe it does not matter at all what I was exploring, or had discovered, but that perhaps what I was seeking was simply delight. This took me right back to the premise I made in Choice and Appreciation that appreciation (described as delight in this current experience) was part of the fundamental process of creating beauty so that it might be appreciated. It also brought to mind that Freud’s “pleasure principle” – that entities seek pleasure and avoid pain – is visible in this pattern.

I wondered if it was possible that the Family Traits that I had pointed to in an earlier essay also had the same feature, that of evoking delight, pleasure, enjoyment, appreciation, or whatever other adjectives point to that range of experiences. 

Here is an excerpt from that essay:

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. They investigate and try things out long before they have the use of language.

Evolution-Development

All and………

There is a saying that has become common of late, “both and”, which is intended to replace “either or”. It is intended to be inclusive.

I think that it is all a matter of how many perspectives you can hold at once. From a Spiral Dynamics perspective, one transcends and includes all components of the spiral from which one has arisen over time. All are “included” from the broader perspective from which one peers out at a given “moment”. Thus, none are excluded and the more developed a consciousness is, the more particles and parts are included. They are its components; its cells, if you will.

Now, how do we describe our experiences? We enjoy, we observe, we examine etc. As with the levels of the Spiral, we ARE the experience that we are having AND we are observing it, examining it, assessing it etc. and can access any of these at any “time” or, perhaps, all at the same time. In my view, the rate of experiential time that we choose to dwell in determines if we are multi-tasking – holding many views – or allowing a single one, or a few, to dominate. …

Creation-Appreciation

It’s Just Your Imagination

Imagination is something that children appear to have in great abundance, but what we “imagine” that they are doing is, in my view, only one form of imagination. I think that we are all using forms of it most of the time. What a child seems to be doing, which adults also do, is to “bring possibilities to mind”. That opening into possibility is clearly innate in children. They seem to swim in a sea of it. Adults reach into that same expanse, using a familiar and long practiced way, to allow a particular type of imaginative flow to arise from it. It is still innate in us too. Artists do this type of accessing with more apparent ease than most of the rest of us. “What’s possible here?” does not always need to be asked. They simply open up, I imagine, to the space of possibility, just like children do.

But that is not the only flavor of imagination. Think about when you are listening to someone describing just about anything. You cannot have their experience so you are using your imagination in order to access some semblance of what they are describing. It’s an opening up of possibility too, but it is being directed by your sensings of the expressions of another. Listening, to any degree, will guide one towards the space from which those words and expressions are arising. …

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