I’m toying with the idea of drawing. Charcoal to paper and sketching nothing. My daughter is an artist. When I inquired how to start, she suggested take an object and look past it, around it, at the space within it. Draw the space.
What a perplexing thought to draw the space. There is nothing in the space at first thought. Nothingness becomes something when juxtaposed with something.
I haven’t done anything yet. I’m feeling into the possibility.
Is there light in space? Is there something in the perceived nothingness? I’ve heard said we see what we perceive. Does that mean what I don’t perceive is there but I can’t see it?
Matt Kahn put out a statement yesterday that contained these words: “By giving your attention to the space between things, instead of fixating on things in space, the more light you cultivate.”
I’m confused. I’ve worked with healers who can see energy. I’ve worked with seers who describe my ancestors standing around me. I have witnessed structures in another dimension in space that weren’t physically there. I use my inner eyes all the time seeing visions and people who have left their bodies and move on. I know for a fact there is more present than I can perceive.
So many times after our meditation time, I perceive things I can’t define. Yesterday was another of those times. Pictures, thoughts, feelings, messages, all coming to me at once and I hit overload. It reminds me of an innocent toddler comfortable with what it knows and then brought into a party with people and sounds and feelings. Before long the child is screaming. Too much is going on and they get scared.
Like a turtle, I retreat into myself to hide and find the familiar. My familiar used to be comfort food. That door is closed. The familiar is getting back in bed. Sometimes that’s not an option. The familiar is music, calming music that soothes the overstimulated, overwhelmed, fractured-like landscape of my insides.
What doesn’t work is using my mind to figure out what is happening. My limited perceptions are being thumbed through at break-neck speed trying to find an answer, a label, an understanding, a right fit to a new perception.
I watched a documentary yesterday on Gaia TV that introduced me to the Global Consciousness Project, a parapsychology experiment that started in 1998 at Princeton. “The project monitors a geographically distributed network of hardware random number generators in a bid to identify anomalous outputs that correlate with widespread emotional responses to sets of world events, or periods of focused attention by large numbers of people. The GCP is privately funded through the Institute of Noetic Sciences and describes itself as an international collaboration of about 100 research scientists and engineers.”
Two key memories stand out from the documentary, and bear with me because I am not a scientist and this is from memory.
The project monitors emotional responses worldwide from world events such as 9/11, an event that focused peoples’ attention on a large scale. In particular, the scientists focused on the 24 hours before the first terrorist attack on 9/11 and the data showed an increase in response before attack. Perplexing.
Our eyes perceive before our brains get information. That is a proven fact by solid data research and testing. We have the ability to see more than our brains are naming. In fact, our senses pick up more than we attribute they can.
Take, for instance, domesticated animals who wait at the door in anticipation of their owner arriving sometimes a half hour or more because they are picking up something that indicates the impending loved one’s arrival. Scientists tested this theory in many ways. One way in particular was changing up the mode of transportation that an owner comes home in, such as a familiar to a taxi or bike, transportation that was not familiar to the pet, and 100% of the time the animal knew.
So much is still a mystery.
“If you don’t become speechless when looking out into space on a clear night, you are not really looking, not aware of the totality of what is there. You are probably only looking at the objects and perhaps seeking to name them.” – Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth
To move through the world transparently—
Wouldn’t that just be nice?
To not pin things down
And tie them up,
Wouldn’t it be a relief—
To not have to identify
With everything,
And sometimes even anything?
I’d like to just live in the world,
Just for a glimpse,
Without needing to be
Of the world,
Without a label or a word
For everything.
Are the dead
More alive
Than the living?
I wonder if we should
Stop wondering about everything.
If I think a little less,
Or a little more,
Does it change who I am,
Really, at the core?
What’s underneath
Is underneath,
No matter what I throw
On top of it.
Maybe if I stop describing it,
I can start living it.
Maybe life will start living me.
When I stop trying to close in on
My self,
Trying to nail down the truth,
And open up to the
Incomprehensible mystery,
I can join the truth.
Am I so hypnotized
By what happens
That I’ve forgotten
A vital half, missing?
No.
Not aligned with a greater reality,
Simply needing to look
Through my eyes
Instead of with them.
I feel the guidance to
Hold the truth
That I’m living and dying
All at the same time.
It’s a paradox,
Complexity,
Whole and wondrous
In its own right.
If we look out
Into the vast night,
There’s more than what is seen:
There’s the unseen,
The unheard,
The unfathomable half,
Without which
There would be no path
For the stars to align
Into portraits painted
Across the sky—
Nothing for us to
Place words upon,
And nothing for the eye.
To think that I am only
What I think
Would be a lie.
Even space
Would like to look at itself
Without being called a sky.
“Just look,”
It might whisper,
“Without needing to know,
You will know.”
Perhaps if I looked through my eyes
And not with them,
I’d be looking at myself,
Wherever it is I go.
That’s the paradox,
The complexity,
Of understanding that the soul
Doesn’t need to know,
In order to know.
Only in stillness
Am I present inside
This great mystery.
Participants’ Reflections:
Thank you. I was blown away by the idea of the global consciousness project. I’m glad to learn about this project. The idea that the data changes at global events, like New Year’s Eve, 9/11. And to hear that the data shows being aware before it is going to happen. As a scientist, I have to explore that. And as a person living in my spiritual beliefs, I accept it. It’s a paradox for me—life and everything. I’m glad you used that word. There is much to think about today.
I don’t believe in a God but I do believe in a Divine Spirit. If I had heard you talk about this 15 years ago, I would have shaken my head. But I see more and more evidence of a Divine Consciousness that links all beings. Those of us who remember JFK’s assassination yesterday links us together. I’m sure it applies globally.
Thank you for the reading. I’ve been trying to be more conscious about the energy in my space. I appreciate your bringing that forward. During the meditation, I started with my eyes open, soft looking. At one point, I put my hands up and I touched my plant. I felt like it was starting to hug my arm and was saying ‘oh, you are here, hi.’ My energy went out to say hello and then came back. It was a nice surprise.
It is raining outside here and I can hear it. During the meditation, I started imagining the sound was a crackling fire. And then I imagined a fireplace and I could feel the warmth of the fire and I knew where it was in the room and I could see the glow. It all became different based on where I let myself go beyond the definition of what I knew it was. It was fun and mind-stretching.
Jean Houston’s workshops are like that. She takes you beyond what you think is normal into the unknown and asks you to trust the process and go with it. It’s an incredible experience. (Houston has an online class tomorrow)
Thank you for the reading. I’ve just had a series of intense things happen in the last 24 hours. I’ve never seen an owl before. Last night, just before sunset, an owl swooped down so low, I could have jumped up and touched it. It went right over my head, down and around. I wasn’t home when that happened. In the middle of the night, I heard an owl in a tree right near my house. I also found out that the plans for outside family event won’t happen. And I let go of my client due to risk. It’s been physically painful for me. I just wanted to share the difficult time I am going through. The reading helped me expand beyond my own drama. There is a whole history of owls, hearing owls before family members die. And my cat is sick. It’s been an extraordinary 24 hours for me. I’m so glad to be here and to be able to share this.
I hear transition through all that, one way or another. Owls are powerful totems.
What you were saying about the imagination and how to use it, I’m just starting to cultivate that ability in myself. I’m remembering how Ram Dass used to keep dropping acid in order to continue be in a mindset instead of coming down. That led him to meditation because he wanted a way to maintain that insight and openness without having to come down. Your image reminded me of that, the mind-bending and how meditation can do that.
I will pray for your cat. I’ve been through so many elderly kitties passing. I have a memory of owls. We had a long driveway. Sometimes, during the night, I could hear owls way back in the woods. My family member told me he had walked along our driveway one night and he realized that the owls were calling back and forth to each other. It was a nice memory.
This idea about global consciousness, I saw a film about Intelligent Trees, how the trees communicate and the fungus helps them communicate. This idea of consciousness across the globe is so way beyond what we understand. People are beginning to go beyond what their minds know. It is fascinating.
Thank you for sharing this time, for listening to my words, and for donating 15 minutes to yourself in the idea that silence helps us grow. I truly believe it.
Picture credit: Artist Farokh Jamalyaria, MD. Unfinished pencil drawing (4B graphite on Bristol board) of a Jeffrey pine seen near Glacier Point, Yosemite National Park. Circa April, 2012