In article 2 of this series we looked at the nature of identity, and how you are both who you see yourself to be and who other parts of the universe hold you to be. Family and friends, colleagues and pets have their perception, you have a place in societal systems, an economic existence, are a customer to shops and a patient in the health system. Even your ecological footprint on the Earth is part of who you are to the system as a whole. For now, I will avoid any form of spiritual context. However, if you have one, you may see how it also applies in your language, meaning-making and framework.
None of those facets of existence is static. You are not static either. As also explored previously, we need to think of ourselves as verbs and not nouns; we need to develop the habit of seeing ourselves as experiencers and as the experiences we are having. I am my experiencing. I am my experiences. Try playing with that for the next month whenever you are thinking about your life and who you are. You might feel the need for us to modify the way language is used. At this moment I am a writer, writing, a thinker thinking, a breather breathing. But that is not quite enough. Even the word “am” seems to attempt to pin something. I writing, I thinking, I breathing.
Also, I digressing. This article’s subject is “Engaging with the Field”. In part 1 we learned of the way in which everything that is, has its reality framed by an Information Field. All matter is energy that has been shaped into form by this Information Field. Anything in the non-material reality also exists as information in the Field. I am referring to thoughts, cultures, habits, sensations, ideas, songs, myths and the rules of tennis. I am also referring to the laws of mathematics as well as to elves, fairies and gods. There’s a lot of non-material reality, much more than we generally give our attention to and maybe you can see how much of that list affects you. Try engaging with each word in turn and seeing where it shows up in your world.
This article brings together the “you” of Part 2 and the Field of part 1. I have been arguing that the “you” is a dynamic collection of actions, a constantly changing set of relationships with your world. Similarly, the Field is ever-changing all around us. Everything, from the weather to the activity of ants in your backyard, to bacteria, to the political context, is dynamic too. What is the relationship between the Field and you? More than that, what happens when we move from a passive to an active relating?
In one direction, the answer is relatively easy to see. You change clothes according to the weather, but your mood is liable to change, too. The ants in your backyard may undermine the path you walk on, sting you when you disturb them or annoy you when they come into the house. Bacteria may make you feel unwell or add to the health of your digestion. Politics and laws affect whether your sexual preferences are criminalised, how much of your wealth is taxed and how free you are to express your opinions. Thus, we are affected biologically, physically and emotionally in ways not just too many to list, but too numerous to notice or comprehend.
What about the other direction? How do you affect the world and does that extend to the Field?
Framing a New Perspective
I repeat here from the previous article that I am trying to share a frame for your existence that would cover every part of you, from quanta via bones and brain cells to spirit. We are doing so because the way the world thinks just now doesn’t work for us or for the planet.
I invited us to make a primary shift of perspective. I am going back to the earlier question of who and what you BE. We are going beyond the dichotomy of matter and energy because neither of those feel like an answer and that doesn’t change when you take them together. Even accepting that you are a complex and multi-layered living system didn’t cover what it is and how it feels to be distinctly you. So we explored the sense we have of an “I” at the centre, distinct from all others.
As above, that took us into a new space where I proposed that somewhere alongside the mix of matter and energy, “I am the experience”. We then explored what that means for our use of language. If I am not only matter, I am not a thing and can’t be a noun. Since I am alive and in constant change, I am a verb, but “I am” is too fixed-sounding. There is a more dynamic continuity in which “I am the experiencing”. But I can also step back from that and view myself as the experiencer. I can slice up time into experiences. I suggest that all of these perspectives are real, or at least as real as anything is, and none of them on its own is sufficient. On top of that, you are more even than an experiencer because you have agency, you make choices and you act. Who you BE is an action.
I also repeat my encouragement for you to take a minute or two to imagine that way of seeing yourself. Pause reading, take your time and sense into it. Does it expand your world? I admit to not finding it easy to stay in that frame. Sometimes I feel as if I needed to have been raised with a different language. Maybe there is a culture somewhere that already has that.
Even if it is tricky though, bear with me. Can you get a sense that it shifts your worldview, beyond identity? It makes you part of a flow. Instead of being an observer on the riverbank you are in the river, swimming or floating, and the currents are eddying around you. Your movements alter those flows. You become a component of the river. There is a relationship between you and it.
Now I would like you to take a leap with me.
I have been leading you towards acceptance of a reality in which a) the Information Field holds all of the relationships and descriptions from which the world has been created and b) that Field is in an active and ongoing relationship with you which constitutes the flow of the reality that you are swimming in. That Field, that database, that universal memory governs all of creation and all the ongoing creating that is taking place.
Breathe.
That is a big concept; they don’t come much bigger, and it calls for us to be shifting our view of creation from any that there have been before. We must shift our experiencing, our awareness and our choosing.
Breathe.
Embodied Engagement
You can’t do this from your mind alone. It requires a whole-system, embodied engagement. It calls for us to sense into it, to feel the difference. This is probably unfamiliar. It might take time. You may need to sit with it for a while. And even when you get a little sense of it, this is likely to the beginning of a long process of absorbing the implications and making them part of your existence. It certainly has been so for me, and I wouldn’t say that it is complete either.
Let’s unpack it a little more and look at some of those implications. You can forget the Bible, except perhaps as a wonderful metaphor or mythological expression. Michelangelo’s is wonderful art, but you can forget a creator God in quasi-human form. The old patriarch with a white beard and a pointy finger just isn’t in the frame here. It’s far too small a notion to encompass a billion galaxies.
You can jettison the idea of randomness that is conventionally presented with the Big Bang and replace it with a continuous process of creating. The Field learned what works and forgot what doesn’t. There are thousands of energy configurations which were too unstable to create matter, so the ones we see are the ones which could sustain form. It is an unfolding, an autopoiesis, an action from within, from the beginning of time until now, in which all that has happened and been retained has its being in universal memory. Think of it like evolution, but as more than biology. Like an ant that cannot see the colony on the other side of the garden, we can only see our tiny piece of this from where we are. We don’t know how many aspects of consciousness have arisen, in what forms (or lack of form) or where. We never can. It was never about us, so we have to practice getting over ourselves and into a cosmic perspective. And at the same time, we are part of it, conscious and active, individuals with agency. What else is made possible by that?
Myriad species have come and gone since the beginning of time, and also stars have been born and died. What remains in the Field is what continues to be. That is to say – the matter and the “rules” which shape energy to be as it is, together with the information about how all of the elements remaining within the whole relate to each other. This is vast. It is at the farthest possible extreme beyond the span of a human mind. That is nothing new; so are a billion galaxies. We already know how creation can boggle our minds. So please allow that this is even bigger, accept it for that and engage with as much as is possible. It’s all that we can do. And as if that was not enough, now for the real leap.
Several paragraphs ago I indicated that you have an effect on the flow of the river. The way that I said that had a passive tone. Any effect would appear to be haphazard, and maybe not even significant. But the river metaphor has limitations and it is not enough for your engagement with the Information Field. It presents you and the river as too separate, as if you are a log. That isn’t how the Field is. In terms of the information content and flow, you are as much a part of it all as any other element of creation.
Please bear with me. For the moment I ask you to set to one side any questions about your identity. What I am saying doesn’t deprive you of that and we will have a conversation about the boundaries at some point. Nothing I am saying requires you to stop being who you are. At the same time, the Information Field includes you. You are in it, and it is in you. There is a continual exchange of information with every breath that brings oxygen molecules in. Every skin cell that dies and flakes away also has its informational component. Electrons detach from atoms inside and are exchanged with others from the outside. That is simply how it is. Nothing for you to do about that. There is no change, except to your awareness of it.
At the same time, humans seem to be special and rare creatures on planet Earth. We are conscious of our existence and are making choices at a level that seems not to be the case for any other species. We can vision the future and we take steps in the material world to create it. That is familiar. But we can also make choices in the non-material realm, altering the content and the quality. That places us in a different relationship with the Field, one which is active rather than passive. We are not at all like logs. From our embedded and connected position we can choose how to influence the flow intentionally.
This has some huge implications for how we live, and I invite you to consider what might be possible in that sphere of operation. Individually we are a tiny influence on a large stream. We cannot divert it. But we can create new ripples in the areas of the river which are right around us. We can have small effects on the parts of the system that we have a relationship with. Over time those small effects may accumulate.
You may also be aware of the concept of fractals, of the oft-used example of how a butterfly’s wing beats in Hawaii might trigger a tornado in Tokyo. That is another concept that boggles our linear and mechanical mindsets. We can’t visualise the conditions that would make such a thing possible. But then, we can’t easily grasp the amount of energy stored in an atom such that a kilogram of uranium undergoing fission would cause Hiroshima. It is probable that from that kilogram, only half a gram, the weight of a butterfly, was converted into energy. Our daily reality and a theoretical physicist’s reality are different, but equally valid.
And maybe there is more. We don’t know what potency is available when there are many influences from our collective choices. Also, the slightly mechanistic image that I am using doesn’t allow as much as it should for qualitative influences. That would be more like injecting a coloured dye into the stream. What is the difference to the system of choosing kindness rather than anger in our responses? I believe that might matter a lot and maybe you can sense that, too. In a future article I will try to explain why that might be so. Nor does the image treat the flow as if it has some form of consciousness in its own right, so we don’t know what capacity the flow may have to respond to us. What can the river do?
For now, I will pause these speculations and leave you to play with them if you wish. What might be possible? The thread of this post is to acknowledge this interaction as one among many aspects of Relational Being and to recognise our existence in a place that is always a mix of what the world is to us and what we are to the world. This is a scenario and we are always in it. It is an experience and we are always experiencing it. It is a generative space and we have the possibility to engage creatively with it.
Plus, the wider Field has awareness in its own way, of the part that is you and the part that is me. It may be hard for us to even detect that, let alone know just how that awareness works, or to what degree. That would be like asking to know the mind of creation, of the universe or even of God. But maybe we can learn, or discover how to learn, about that. It won’t be the first time that humans have done so, and maybe we can do it better from an improved perspective on the relational space.
Resources:
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Find my books at:
The Science of Possibility: Patterns of Connected Consciousness
Your Access to Possibility: 7 Amazingly Simple Success Keys to Creating Your Life Consciously
7-Stage Parenting: How to Meet your Child's Changing Needs
Reinventing Capitalism: How We Broke Money and How We Fix it, From Inside and Out
Flow- lovely! Conscious evolution of our unique evolutionary selves set in the unfolding of the world where every thought, impulse and action ripples across the universe