The first post in this series described an alternative view of reality in which matter is not primary. In contrast to our conventional scientific perspective, it is in second place, its nature and behaviour arising from and shaped by a field of information. What does that make YOU? Who and what are you?
Science aside, it is natural for you to see yourself as a material entity. Any alternative is susceptible to a sharp challenge when your shin encounters a coffee table. The imperatives of your biological needs are the fabric of daily existence, eating and drinking, sleeping and keeping warm and dry. It can easily seem as if that is all you are, a grain of sand on the beach of human existence.
I want to avoid the path of some spiritual perspectives which regard the above as “maya”, an illusion that we need to somehow escape from. Material existence is a reality. Nor do I wish to lead you into the quantum soup of “everything is energy”, because even though that is true, it is not sufficient for daily existence. The task facing us is to be material while also being more than that. It is likewise to be energy beings while maintaining a material form. That is not an illusion. But even taken together, these are only part of the story.
The Shaping Field1 and the Layered Complexity
The Field of Information2 shapes the forms that energy takes when it becomes matter, and it shapes the ways that matter behaves. So, it shapes you, both in the physicality of your building blocks and in the dynamics of your function as a living being, including your behaviour. Our conventional descriptions of the material world are often limited because they see one interaction at a time, like balls on a pool table. That is a fragmented and partial reality. We are very complex beings, and who you BE arises from that complexity. Even the following description is simplified, but it should give you a sense of what I am saying.
Who you are physically is formed by many the building blocks that we know to be there but don’t think about; sub-atomic particles, atoms, molecules, amino-acids, proteins, genes, cells, organs, muscles and more.
Likewise, who you are as a living system is beneath daily awareness. Your blood circulates, your nervous system co-ordinates muscle movements, your neuroendocrine (hormonal) system regulates balances and influences emotions. You breathe and oxygenate your blood, your digestive system takes in nutrition and eliminates waste, your skin is an active component in managing the boundary between you and your environment. No thinking is involved.
Who you be as a person is yet more complex. It is not just what you think. It is affected by all the above systems. If you doubt that, recall having a hangover or being “in love”. More than that, it is an outcome of multiple influences before and throughout your life. Your ancestry, your genetics, your temperamental wiring form a base on which you have layered thoughts, belief systems, habits and ideas, many of which were given to you by parents, teachers, the culture you were raised in, and then shaped by your own experiences and conclusions.
In the last three paragraphs I have not even covered your relationship with any form of wider consciousness or spiritual context. I have not talked about the brain/mind itself or about “consciousness” – a term which I will not define, and I leave for you to choose your own meaning. Maybe you have eaten magic mushrooms or perhaps had some kind of oneness/bliss experience. And regardless, you have your own ideas of God/The Divine/The Force/Cosmic Consciousness etc., even when that includes rejecting them.
Framing a New Perspective
I am trying here to share a frame for your existence that would cover every part of you, from quanta via cells and organs to spirit. Based on that frame, I invite you into a reconsideration of how to operate most effectively. That is no small task, but I invite you to bear with me, because the way the world thinks just now doesn’t work for us or for the planet. Governments and political systems are equally adrift and overwhelmed because we are all in this together. Since we all breathe the same air, in the longer term the rich are as vulnerable as the poor to planetary collapse. What would enable us all to change that?
As with the above, the answer is multi-faceted, but what follows is a primary shift of perspective. I am going back to the earlier question of who and what you BE. We have already determined that you are not a thing, but that to view yourself as simply energy doesn’t cut it either. We have touched on the notion of you being a complex and multi-layered living system, and while that takes us further forward, you might feel as I do, that it doesn’t reach the core. It doesn’t cover what it is and how it feels to be distinctly you. Yet you know that you are not the same as anyone else. Even if you are an “identical” twin, you know that you are uniquely you. There is an “I” at the centre, distinct from all others.
So, Who and What is the “I” at the Centre?
There is a lot of philosophical analysis and psychology theory about this question. I leave that to the specialists and jump straight to my proposal. A polarising question is sometimes asked that seeks to put you on one side or the other of the matter/energy dichotomy. “Are you a human being having a spiritual experience, or are you a spiritual being having a human experience?” You might like to notice which way you lean with this polarisation, but I want to propose an answer that is neither or maybe both of them. My answer is “I am the experience”.
Let me offer a second prompt that I like to associate with my answer. I invite you to ponder that answers to both the “who” and the “what” aspects of your identity lead towards definitions framed either by nouns in which you are a thing (for example a human animal, a parent, or a care worker) or by an adjective, a qualifier such as Caucasian, female, German, bald, 25 years old, or heterosexual. I want to suggest that, instead, we should engage with ourselves as verbs. So, I extend my choice above to regarding myself as the experiencer, the experiencing and the experience.
Take a moment to imagine that way of seeing yourself. Pause reading, take your time and sense into it, so as to get behind the words. Does it open up your world? Who do you become when viewed in that frame?
What was the result for you? For me, it produces a different sense of Jon. Even my name is an optional feature, since I could also be Mr Freeman and, as it happens, neither Jon nor Freeman appeared on my birth certificate. Your name might have altered with marriage. Who I am is not tied to those labels. They don’t define my experiencing.
Notice, too, that the nouns and adjectives I used above are not yours. Nor are they mine. We did not create them for ourselves and any of them might fit thousands of other people. While a large number put together might narrow towards eventual uniqueness, they are still not coming from you. They are constructs in an external reality. In that realm, you don’t define who you are, much as you might like to imagine that you do. We are all defined by others too. The words constitute the ways in which others, individually or societally, relate to us.
The Relational Crux
Now we reach the crux of this article.
It is natural for us to think of ourselves with ourselves at the centre. Early in our lives, we establish an identity that separates us from the collective. For our very early years, we are barely distinct from our parents or close carers; who I am is who they are. Then, in what is known by many as “the terrible twos”, we begin to become self-aware. There is someone in the mirror who is “me”, and I experience making choices for myself, saying “no” and wanting things.
For the rest of our lives, we may oscillate between this self-oriented independence of choice and the need or desire to fit in with others. It is the dance of socialisation as we become citizens and colleagues. But I suggest that few of us see that dance as anything other than subjective.
Most people’s experience is still along the following lines:
I am the centre of my own universe.
Even if I have a philosophy or religion that acknowledges a higher power, my connection is personal; it is what I make it to be.
Even when life messes up my plans and doesn’t fit with what I want, I see that through my own lens.
It is MY experience.
That is the trap most of us live in. Yes, you are the experience, but you are not experiencing in isolation. You never have been. You have been shaped by your past; in many ways you already know this. It remains true in the present. The context for your thoughts and actions matters. The way that other people see you matters. More than either of those, the Information Field itself holds the definition of who you are, of who you have been and of the history that you have been embedded in.
Furthermore, the Information Field has an existence that is independent of you. The unfolding flow of events in the world has its own dynamics. These represent currents and tides that will make some choices easier for you and some more difficult. Other people are part of that – they too make choices, and those choices will become part of the framing for your future. Your own past decisions are also present in that frame, because they inhabit the Field. They shaped one tiny fragment of it. This is not only in the mundane sense that if you qualified as a lawyer, it affects your ability to practice medicine. It is true in the more subtle and esoteric sense that the Field is a kind of memory and it retains the history of your thinking as well. Think of it being like God remembering your prayers from last week. That is not such an unfamiliar notion when you consider that many belief systems expect that all your thoughts and actions will be judged when you die.
There was a time when people believed the Earth to be at the centre of the cosmos and that everything revolved around it. Copernicus and Galileo changed that conception and put the Sun at the centre. We have a similar tendency to see ourselves as the centre of existence. Even when we know that is not true because things happen to us, such events can seem disconnected and random. Few of us see ourselves as entwined in it, co-creating what comes next. But we are.
This is the starting point for relational existence. Both your identity and your life take place in a realm that sits in between the I and the cosmos. Who you BE is a function of your relationships with both the inner “I” and all that lies outside from the tangible to the informational. You are porous. Physically you exchange electrons with your surroundings as well as air, food and water. Your emotions are triggered by others. Mentally your consciousness is engaged with information that you are cognitively aware of and also much else that is subliminal and intuitive, often completely unnoticed.
In the next post we will take the relationship one step further. Since we are embedded in the Information Field and exchanging information with it, what does that mean for the unfolding flow of creation? Something for you to contemplate until then.
You might recognise a correspondence to Rupert Sheldrake’s “morphogenetic field”. This is no accident. The morphogenetic field is a particular and significant instance of this wider explanatory principle.
If you listen to some of the YouTube channels and podcasts that address aspects of these non-ordinary realities, you will hear a lot of references to “frequencies”. I have a strong suspicion that information in the Field is encoded as frequencies – possibly as multiple combinations of frequencies. There is some evidence to support this. I will address this in a future article in this series.
Resources:
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Information about my books can be found on www.spiralworld.net or as follows:
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