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.

So what if some of us did only come to this planet to have experiences? If you look at young children, they are typically joyful, they wonder, explore, play, share, delight and are awed. They are more unfettered by enculturation so more exemplify our fundamental natures. What if all of these lovely experiences feel different within each of the uncountable frequency ranges that exist, and are unfolding, and we just want to experience every one of them? The kid in the candy store comes to mind, as well as the derided “monkey mind.” Being in this physical place not only opens up other ranges of experience, the contrast between here and the pre-physical ranges may very well magnify all experiences in all of the ranges and maybe our ability to easily move between ranges is also part of that exploration and amplification process. An analogy that came to mind was from the ashram in Canada where I lived years ago. It had previously been a resort so had a pool and jumping into the pool on a summer day was wonderful, of course. But there was a sauna just 10 feet from the edge of the pool and if you walked out of the sauna, then directly into the pool, that was a whole different experience. So that contrast, just like longer wavelengths to shorter or vice versa, can be a striking difference and all of it can be played with, explored, and enjoyed. Being embodied here makes the longest of wavelengths interact with the shorter ones of this realm and the variations and the intensities can come together in a joyous dance of splashing and playing. There is a sense of pure childlike play in flowing back and forth between long and short, high and low, particle and wave, particularly if one is cognizant of the game.

I have sometimes wondered why some people were so uninterested in how consciousness worked, how their own minds worked, where their idiosyncrasies and behaviors came from and what they were driven by. I remember thinking that “maybe some people are just here to play.” Perhaps all of us are just here to play, but to play in our own way with our preferences, delights and desires. Like children, almost all of us want to share our most joyful experiences. Maybe for some it is just vacation time, for others, perhaps creating and sharing experiences is what calls to them. The planning, and the deliberate execution, of the next most beautiful experience does seem to nudge out enjoyment for a time. Becoming and Being oscillating again, no doubt. I will not ignore the active energy of Becoming but that is not my focus here. One can either experience what is, or imagine and create something new to experience, then make it happen. Take your pick at any moment in time.

I will also note that it appears that most people will not experience playfulness or joy in the forceful acclimation of our longer wavelengths coming into this physical density. I suspect that this process results in much of the suffering in the world. The Hindus have described the experience of death as that of removing a tight shoe. Imagine trying to squeeze into that shoe in the first place, and without remembering the reason for putting it on. It does seem like acclimating to embodiment is a process that demands attention and concerted effort but having this broad view of the pursuit of experiences does make it all feel easier to me at this moment. The Hindus also say that god created the universe for Lila, their word for sport or play, so play with it.

What I have also noticed is that the experience of thinking of a loved one is also wonderful, as different as it is to actually being with them. Any of my 1,100+ folks (see Integrating the We) who brought me joy in my life, STILL bring me joy when they come to mind. The experience of anticipation is another unique experience, and though it is not at all like the presence of whatever is anticipated, it too can be enjoyed as the experience that it is. The memories of past joyful events too are very different than the events themselves, but they have a deliciousness of their very own to imbibe and appreciate. Here I will also note that being completely enveloped in one experience, or flitting from one to another, as the “monkey mind” describes, or anywhere in between are all just experiences, preferences allowed.

So perhaps it is true that life doesn’t mean anything. It’s all here to be experienced and our choices, and those of our companions, drive which ones we choose to focus on. Add meaning and stir, if you like.

I’ll end with two lines from the book, Sri Aurobindo or the Adventures of Consciousness, which I have quoted before but seem particularly pertinent here: “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.” And: “For such is the goal of our evolution in the end: joy.”

 And this quote from the Upanishads seems to fit in here too: “From Delight all these beings are born, by Delight they exist and grow, to Delight they return.”

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. 

In talking about the mind in the Post, A Well Oiled Machine, I write:
One way to view this layering of commands is that at each given moment in time I am focused on something in particular. I make my choices based solely on what I’m present to. The jockeying of previous commands for dominance at that moment is dependent on my current energetic focal range too. But regardless of where it started and where it ends, it is always a matter of some choice being made. Even a letting go practice is initiated by a choice to do so. So it can be said that every moment of my life is exactly how I have chosen it to be in a given moment. 

There is nothing wrong with the mind. It works perfectly. The programmer must be conscious of what commands are given and though those commands are constrained to a great degree by earlier choices, there still appears to be a modicum of free will presenced in the act of choosing. There are people who’ve had near-death experiences who have said “my whole life passed before my eyes”. Extrapolate that out and imagine the time frame between the Big Bang and now. The original intent of the Singularity may appear minute, when looking from that vastness to the temporal rate in which we currently hang out, but I think that it is here infusing our every choice.

What I am pointing to is another kind of oscillation but will pause first to better describe what I mean when I use that word. The kinds of oscillations that I refer to are not like a clean sine wave. They are a back-and-forth movement between polarities that are in constant flux but still carry a certain flavor or frequency. You wake and you sleep. No waking period is like any other and no sleep period is like any other, yet it is a cycle, a rhythm.
Anytime attention, of any intensity, is focused on a frequency, it is changed and some traits of its flow are thereby altered in unpredictable ways but in a fashion commensurate with the input. In this way the natural back and forth flow of any waveform is impacted, along with all of the streams that may be in resonance with it. The electromagnetic spectrum is measured in frequencies, all traveling in the same space, so the nature of this back and forth flow seems universal. So oscillation is a fair and useful description even if it does not precisely match what I am pointing to.


On the one hand the mind can be seen as a part, often eschewed, and on the other, as I describe above, as a cohesive stream of choices flowing down the eons. If taken from a perspective “temporally” closer to the Big Bang, this stream can easily be seen as the choices of what people refer to as the big S Self. From that perspective, all of the downstream choices are re-cognized as deliberate, with the Self as the all-embracing author of each and every one. Thus, what we call the mind represents a flow of the affirmative choices of a Self, focusing attention, and intention, downstream. If we keep calling the mind an “it”, we ostracize it and put the deeper authorship of our choices at arm’s length. We thus slow down the re-integration of the big S Self’s awareness. Blaming any trait of the Self, wherever that Self happens to be in the stream of awareness, prevents the acknowledgement of the fullness of that Self and thus impedes the path upstream.


I have written before of the holon, an idea which I got from Ken Wilber and he borrowed from Arthur Koestler. That is that a holon is both a whole and a part. It has its own kind of integrated identity and yet is part of something larger. The example often used is the atom and a molecule. The atom stands alone yet is a pivotal component of a molecule, which is itself a whole. The dance between the Many (parts) and the Ones (wholes) are vast and delicious. As our attention shifts around, we experience ourselves as a whole, a whole amongst many, or as different collections of parts…in all manner of ways.

What I am suggesting is that the way for the mind, in its various expressions, to come into contact with another level of our wholeness, is to fully embrace “it” as the vital feature of the Self that it is. Given 13.8 billion years of choices, what is becoming visible as we move upstream will be an eternal kind of play. But this ongoing reintegration makes accessible the depths of the broader, more encompassing choices that we once made. The trajectory of those deep choices can then consciously be redirected, if so chosen, or can at least clarify the intent of downstream choices that heretofore were more habitual, thus likely less effective. We can deliberately bring to bear the kind of self-reflective consciousness that perhaps did not exist when we transited that terrain before. In this model, what exists in our choice-field in this lifetime was not in existence when those deeper choices were made. There is real value, for example, in taking into account how you would like the world to work before making choices that impact your own neighborhood. In this way, what we intend to manifest in the perceptual world we now inhabit will be in alignment with the intent of our Self, at whatever stage we happen to be aware.

I am suggesting that the oscillating dancing among the holons, experienced at any given moment as multitudes or a particular whole, will be more effective at manifesting beauty, and be more joyful in doing so, if the mind is not denigrated, but rather embraced.

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.

It seemed to me, in that moment several days ago, that the word belonging itself was a kind of thought-barrier to stepping into a merged We, which I think must precede the weaving in and out of pure experience/loss of self-reflective awareness that I had experienced. At least initially, and I will get to that, I thought that the “emotional need” described by Wikipedia was not ultimately for belonging but for the pure delight of this weaving. I think that integration or integrating would be a good way to describe the entry into this stage beyond belonging.

Some blending happens in any close relationship and marriage is a commitment into a more intimate kind of We blending. But I see integration as a step beyond that. I then wondered if  a group can reach a kind of integrated state. Yes, I think so, perhaps not to the weaving stage, but at least to the integrated We stage. I once had an experience like that. Granted that it was drug induced, but it was very powerful and no one who was there will ever forget it. In my college years seven of us were gathered together to try “peyote buttons” for the first time. We had all done many hallucinogens before, including mescaline, which comes from the peyote. For some unremembered period of time that evening, anything that came out of anyone’s mouth was either added to or simply agreed with. I clearly remember hearing “Yes, that’s how it is” or “That’s right” over and over. I have often since described it like one brain with seven mouths. This is clearly beyond both belonging and the simple blending that occurs in most of the marriages that I’ve seen.

I recently read a book by Jeff Carreira called “American Awakening.” Referring to William James he says: “James had an intriguing vision for how the process of consciousness, including the process of thinking, can go on in a line that looks intelligently directed, but does not require the existence of any independent entity that could be called a ‘thinker’…As human beings, we mistakenly see ourselves as the guiding force of our thought process, when in fact it is a completely automated process led by the desire to experience satisfaction.”

Perhaps this “experience of satisfaction” is, again, that dancing of a We in and out of “being an experience”, as I described in the excerpt above. Either way, it is within the realm of possibility that our thoughts are not solely our own, ever. And though in my peyote experience the arising thoughts all seemed to be in alignment, even in our own personal internal “dialogue” there are clearly debates from different perspectives going on with some frequency. Any group in the dynamic flow of being integrated would certainly experience both as well.

In my more recent post Integrating the We, I described how I have been infused by the essence of now over 1,100 delightful souls that I have had the privilege to get to know over my lifetime and that all of their essences are now inseparably “me”. Thus the notion that “my” thoughts arise from that kind of blended me/us, is not out of alignment with James’ idea that thoughts are simply a “process of consciousness” that  “does not require the existence of any independent entity that could be called a thinker”. It is also clear that for me what “comes to mind” is very often evoked by the presence of who I am with, so I am inclined to think that we are already, in vary degrees, blended with most people that we come into contact with. But integrating feels like a further step that seems to require acknowledging and choosing to be integrated. I think that it requires knowing that you will have to give up the notion of “your” thoughts, which is tantamount to letting go of your “self”. Though it is often said that the ego is a problem, no one really wants to give up the self, as that may infer giving up the beloved belief in your soul or “who I really am.” But perhaps “who I really am” is a merged state of a higher order that re-incorporates a Self that existed prior to the evolutionary differentiation that led to the more narrowly experienced “self” that you now consider yourself to be. This expanded self, experienced as a re-integrated “I”,  will recollect all of the experiences and wisdom that “it” gathered when differentiated. The I that you then experience yourself to be will still be the I that you experience now, just with more experiences under its belt, so to speak. Each formerly individuated “I” will still just be experienced as the expanded I. There is no loss, only gain. It is this state, I think, which we actually are gravitating towards and which the word belonging may blind us to.

I see a progression of deliberately choosing to be integrating with others, then weaving in and out of the integrated We/pure experience, and then regularly oscillating from there to an expanded I, in an ongoing process. It is all just a practice for individuals and groups that exists, in this moment, only in my imagination. Though the process will surely be messy at times, hopefully it will also be joyful at times. Re-unions generally are. 

“From Delight all these beings are born, by Delight they exist and grow, to Delight they return.” – Taittiriya Upanishad: 

The essay below was written for my book and, like many others, was not put on this site. Some of the notions from it have been coming up with some frequency this past year so it seems like the time to bring it back. I am leaving it unchanged. Though my views on mindfulness have changed just a bit, what I am pointing to remains the same.

Here I’m going to create a distinction between some types of attention. They are very different but have some interestingly similar traits.

The Witness state is a state of mindlessness, in fact a state solely of witnessing. There is no thinking there, no frequencies, no mind, nothing of any kind. Distinctions are available just outside the threshold of this place, but not within. One thing that is very clear is that there is no Justin there, nor anything or anyone else. It is assumed, upon exiting, that time has passed, but there is no knowing how much.

Then there is the immersion in pleasure or grace – appreciating or being appreciated, which I’ve described as the downward flow of particles. Immersion in this experience also tends to be mindless. The more one lets go into the flow, the more pleasure/bliss there is but the less self-awareness there is. Any “Oh my god this is good” seems to be expressed after being completely “lost” in the experience. Identity tends to disappear in that flow of pleasure, though it may be very brief. When lying down on the grass to enjoy a sunny spring day, sleep often lies on the distant side of that pleasure. Sleep is an energetic outreach in the same direction as grace – tapping up and allowing in – and though it is somewhat different in feel, I think they are related.

I see Mindfulness as clearly different than the two outlined above. How many things can you be attentive to at one time? Let’s say you are in a restaurant eating a hot egg roll. If you intend to be “mindful” you could pay attention to every way in which your tongue moves the food around to dissipate the heat, what the teeth are coming into contact with, the sounds of chewing something crunchy, the consistency of the filling or the shell, or the flavors that most jump out at you or the more subtle ones. You could just pay attention to one portion of the shell at the fold, which is particularly hard. What does it mean to be mindful? As with frequencies, the possibilities are immense. Every moment of life can be experienced in an infinite number of ways, and it is all a matter of where your focus of attention is. So being mindful appears to be a choice of where to put one’s full attention. If you are fully engaged on any one thing, like perhaps the sound of chewing in this case, being deliberately mindful can silence the mind to a great degree. It is full attention on one particular thing. Keeping it focused there, however, will typically require continuous intent.

I once had an experience where I was so lost in a project that over 5 hours had gone by in what seemed more like 2. I actually assumed that the clock in the room had gotten screwed up somehow, so I went downstairs to find out the “real” time. The moment I realized the actual time, it occurred to me that being fully involved in a creative act – the purview of Becoming – there was a loss of identity and a time dilation. It was different from the time dilation of Witnessing, in that it was full engagement rather than full detachment. I will note here that it also appears different from the full attention to the eggroll above. In that case, though initially consciously attentive, the act is pleasure seeking (appreciating), rather than creative. In my experience, creativity has a higher flow velocity than pleasure seeking. It also requires a greater degree of effort, of intent – ongoing choosing at some level transmitted through to this present moment.

On two occasions I have awoken in the night in a state very different from any other. I experience my “self” as a tight ball of intensity, a mind over-full. It felt as if all frequencies were so compacted that their condensed state allowed for no movement at all. It was pure potential waiting for a choice. There was no “outside” of me. My normal experience of frequencies is that they are distinct from my perceptions of them and they are just passing by. I can, in a way, experience them on the outside, like wind, as they are transiting through. In this particular experience, there was “nothing” out there, as I could sense no “out there”. I was enclosed but not by anything. Though my thought process did exist, it was very slow. I remember wondering if this is what it was like at the beginning, before the Big Bang. It was empty, nearly silent but not completely so. There was no impetus to act in any way – which later made me wonder where the impulse to choose comes from. There was nothing to choose from because the compaction of energy was such that there was no movement from which to discern any boundary. There was nothing distinct to choose. Yet, I do recall choosing to fall asleep again and I remembered all of it extremely clearly when I awoke in the morning. The rate and feel of thought in this space was similar to the flow rate that I remembered – after the fact – in the creative endeavor noted above. There was active, deliberative thinking and assessing going on, but just no creative action in these two nighttime cases.

What I’m pointing out in these experiences is that it seems that when full immersion occurs – full Becoming, full appreciating or full observation – they have attributes of mind quieting and time dilation. In each case, it can only be described afterwards and there is no experience of identity for some period of time.

 

“There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.” – Jack London

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?

For me, it seems logical that I should start by cleaning out the debris field created as I passed through the relatively denser layers into this physical plane and learned to adapt and survive here. That detritus is composed of the beliefs, habits and ideas that I’ve created about “myself” that are, to some degree, obstructions masking the essential nature that I was swimming in when I made my choice to come here. And this process was necessary for operating in the like-kind frequency ranges of the physical world and human society, so I no longer disparage them, or the ego, as I have done in the past. Thus, I keep uncovering those habits and ideas, and letting go of those that aren’t of service to me where I happen to be focused in consciousness right now. Meister Eckhart said, “God is not found in the soul by any kind of addition, but by a process of subtraction.” I’m not at all worried about finding god, but his analogy fits. By subtracting out that which is not essentially me, I’ll at least get back to resonance range where I existed before I came here and be able to inhabit this body in a more Form-like fashion. I started doing that deliberately when I began my yoga practice in the 70’s, along with many other practices and inquiries that I’ve engaged in over the years and continue to this day.

 

Several weeks ago up popped another delightful soul from my past. I decided to start making a list of all of those who bring me the experience of affinity now, whether I saw it at the time that I knew them or not. It was like opening a floodgate. As I remembered people from different areas and times of my life, more people came to mind and events where they were present reminded me of similar events, thus more people. They were flowing in faster than I could type. It has slowed considerably, but not stopped. Given all of the groups that I have participated in, and the nature of the work that I did, I am just shy of 1,000.

I noticed that in all of the folks that I had listed, I’m remembering their essences, not their shadows, habits, etc. It’s like my essence only tunes to their essences and it seems that the more I am in touch with my own, the more sensitized I become to the essential self of others. Are there some with whom I did not feel this connection or still have dissonance with? Of course, but it is a tiny fraction of those who came to mind. But it mostly seems that as I extract myself from the kinds of resonance ranges where my own shadow elements tend to vibrate, and move towards longer quieter wavelengths, the less prone I am to meet others at those faster, denser ranges when they happen to be expressing themselves from there. The old saying that “like attracts like” applies in that how I am resonating within, may be tuning me to like-kind energy ranges in others.

Many decades of practice and inquiry seems to have stripped away a good deal of my nonessential notions and left me simply resonating with the basic natures of these past acquaintances, co-workers and friends. By remembering them as such, as I said in “I Love Therefore I Am,” I am acknowledging that who I am at this point in my life includes what they have contributed to the essential self that I have come to be. The I that I am is now a composite which includes them. This is not different from what I said in the earlier blogpost, it simply shows that the field of my loved ones is vaster than I knew.

 

John Vervaeke says agape is about for-giving love. Giving love before someone has earned it, before they deserve it. To “love them into existence” like parents do for their children, bringing them into the fullness of who they can be by loving them unconditionally first and fully. That sounds to me like loving their essence, which is impossible not to do at a child’s birth, and setting aside the more challenging of the self-generated idiosyncrasies that they created along the way in order to survive and thrive here. That is what most parents do. That is, I think, what I am doing with these mostly long bypassed souls with whom I spent time. I can’t say that I “loved them into existence” but what I am doing is tapping into their souls and not allowing myself to get distracted by the more frenetic frequency ranges that we so often get entangled in. It must also be so that I left some of myself in them as well. And to be clear, I am not at all saying that all of the frequency ranges we experience here are to be eschewed, just the ones we know to be impediments.

So, I’m now seeing that before I could consciously recognize that I had always been “Integrating the We” of them, I had to have integrated myself to some degree. I had to do the work of extracting what was not essentially me in order to get close to the range where essence-to-essence resonance would be the norm and I could then see them in me, and as me. Time has also clearly played a part in that. But now, as I bring them all in, I am enhancing this I to be more whole, in the acknowledgement of their contribution to this I. How many will I be able to include as sustenance to the WE that I continue to become? It seems like the more of the essence of this emerging WEcosystem that I bring in, the more folks I include into the I/WE-ness of which I am aware, the more accessible my affinity is, that agape, to reach out and sense the joyful selves of others in my environment right now. I can then actively invite their energies into this evolving I/We and gift back to them the vibrations of this enhanced Self to which they have contributed. And note that they too are composites of relationships accrued in their life’s journey and thus the vastness of the ever-interacting WEcosystem becomes more obviously intertwined. The more Selves-aware I become, the more Self-aware I become and the more Selves-aware all of the WEcosystem becomes.

I did notice that as I continued listing names, the affinity was displaced by joy for the vast majority of them. It seemed that the joy-FULL-ness that was evoked by their memories was attracting their spirits at their most joyful, and that is how they are now coming to mind. There were, of course, some of these that I remembered who were more somber types and so a sense of affection was more present than their joy. But either way, I am filled with the shining aspects of them and they are now passing through me regularly during the day. I am accumulating joy simply by remembering them, their joy and my joy-ing in their re-presence. What is clear, is that I am becoming more WHOLE simply by becoming aware that I’ve already taken in these many enchanting multi-relational souls that I have come into contact with over a lifetime.

Perhaps this is the reason why I chose to come here. Not to do any particular thing in the physical world, but to bring those longer wavelengths into consciousness here so that I might participate in the joyful dance of integrating the We, and in turn the WEcosystem. It is possible that there is a particular way of focusing attention here in this place that enhances my capacity to re-collect the Many. Now that I can see it, there is nothing left to do but participate in the treasure hunt of collecting the multiple beloveds and seeing what evolves.

Now I’ll go way out on a limb.

I notice that we never seem to get mad at nature. We may be unhappy with it sometimes, but not actually mad. We do, however, get mad at each other or at a cat that is using the sofa as a scratching post. It’s like if a thing has observable agency, if it appears volitional, we treat it differently. What if that too is just another matter of what wavelengths we can sensitize ourselves to and then communicate with? What if the Earth has a kind of agency? There is vibrant life occurring everywhere. Is not the wellspring of that evolutionary thrust a form of agency, of the energy of Becoming? It may have no self-reflective awareness, but neither does a cat. Yet it is bursting with life. Perhaps it is just that the wavelengths of that agency are way too long for us to discern so we are unable to consciously assess its energetic direction.

I have said in the past that the longer wavelengths often “have something to say” and that there is some sort of translation zone where that occurs. When I touch the quietest ones at the edge of that zone, their words become accessible. Orland Bishop seems to express a sentiment much like this in a short video called “The Authentic Expression of My Voice” where he says “Nature and the cosmos are constituted with language. They are language-like. They are thought-like.”  I’m wondering if, through us, the Earth is using this translation zone to bring words into its life and is thereby evolving a kind of self-reflective awareness in the process. What if this integrating of the WEcosystem is a natural progression of that evolution and the more whole WE become, the closer We are to the essence-to-essence resonance that will make what it has to say accessible to our thoughts and voices. Orland calls it dialoging with nature. I think that we are doing that right now, and our capacity is evolving as the We is integrating.

 

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.

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Flow, Attention and IntentionRead More »

In a recent spontaneous writing circle, in one moment of time, an expression arose from this fluid form of attention while in the presence of a few other lovely souls, who evoked it. I don’t recall what poem was read that prompted it, doesn’t really matter.


What is wisdom? What is love? Love seems to come in many forms. Is not delight a form of love, its radiant form? Is not joy the same? We delight IN, we are joyful FOR. How about gratitude? Does it not arise from experiences like joy and delight? Do we not appreciate those we love, what we delight in, what we are joyful for and what we are grateful for?

Perhaps one form of wisdom is to see the manifestation of love in the myriad forms it takes. To enjoy each form for what it brings us. To share the delight and love for every form with others, in the way that most suits their ears, their hearts so that WE may be joy’d in unison.

Shared delight is magnified love. As we share the forms of love it radiates out of us calling forth that resonance in others. Love invites, love beckons. Its presence melts the concerns of others and they are opened to share into that radiant space. They are welcomed home into the collective heart, where they can rest and play in the loving arms from which they once wandered out to discover the delights of every form of love that graces the world.

The wise ones know. They allow each to find their own path, taste their own delights and gently nudge each soul when it fails to see love and joy in the many forms in which it manifests.
Go out and play, find love, taste delight, share what you find with others and then come home and tell us of your joy.

I found a number of fascinating ideas in Michael Pollan’s book, How to Change Your Mind. I am going to simply list a number of quotes from the chapter on “The Neuroscience” then add some thoughts around them.

“[Marcus] Raichle had noticed that several areas in the brain exhibited heightened activity precisely when his subjects were doing nothing mentally. This was the brain’s “default mode,” the network of brain structures that light up with activity when there are no demands on our attention and we have no mental task to perform. Put another way, Raichle had discovered the place where our minds go to wander – to daydream, ruminate, travel in time, reflect on ourselves, and worry. It may be through these very structures that the stream of our consciousness flows.

The default network stands in a kind of seesaw relationship with the attentional networks that wake up whenever the outside world demands our attention; when one is active, the other goes quiet, and vice versa.”

“…working at a remove from our sensory processing of the outside world, the default mode is most active when we are engaged in higher-level “metacognitive” processes, such as self-reflection, mental time travel, mental constructions (such as the self or ego), moral reasoning, and “theory of mind” – the ability to attribute mental states to others, as when we try to imagine “what it is like” to be someone else.”

 “ ‘The brain is a hierarchical system’ [Robin] Carhart-Harris explained in one of our interviews. ‘The highest-level parts’ – those developed late in our evolution, typically located in the cortex – ‘exert an inhibitory influence on the lower-level [and older] parts, like emotion and memory.’ ”

 “…the default mode network appears to play a role in the creation of mental constructs or projections, the most important of which is the construct we call the self, or ego….Nodes in the default network are thought to be responsible for autobiographical memory, the material from which we compose the story of who we are, by linking our past experiences with what happens to us and with projections of our future goals.”

 “Taken as a whole, the default mode network exerts in inhibitory influence on other parts of the brain, notably including the limbic regions involved in emotion and memory, in much the same way Freud conceived of the ego keeping the anarchic forces of the unconscious id in check.”

It appears to me that what is being offered in these quotes is that the inhibitory nature of the default mode network (DMN) both suppresses the immediate appetites of the Id, and allows us to distinguish a “self” out of all the incoming data streaming from our immediate sensings. When the outside world does not demand our attention, our attention goes to “…composing the story of who we are…”

In talking about the DMN, Pollan also adds “If not for the brain’s filtering mechanisms, the torrent of information the senses make available to our brains at any given moment might prove difficult to process – as indeed is sometimes the case during the psychedelic experience.” I can attest to this torrent from my own experiences with hallucinogens when I was young. The rate at which that torrent flowed was often much too fast for any assessment, descriptions or meaning-making to occur, which would, on occasion, be unsettling.  The suppression of that torrent is apparently how the ego arose and so it seems to be fundamental to self-reflective awareness.  Remember that this suppression comes from ‘The highest-level parts’ [of the brain] – those developed late in our evolution, typically located in the cortex”, which makes sense.

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The Oscillation of AttentionRead More »