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The Space Between Space: The Wisdom of Silence

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This inspired film by Jeff Scher is an example of silence. It’s funny how even in silence we find noise, but many a time the only way we can find silence is to have noise. So why silence? And why noise? Lets start with silence. But first please click on the image and explore this short and powerful piece.

Silence is the space in between all our thoughts. Like the space between the rain drops and the sound between the notes of a piano. Silence is where our wisdom and intuition reside. This wisdom is the collective power of our whole body system, and thus is the accumulated efforts of our subconscious. The subconscious is infinitely more powerful than the conscious mind, because it is not restricted to form but instead understands the universe in a logical, but non-linear fashion. It doesn’t require lines, labels and definitions of the forms that it is working with. Anything and everything exists in all time and space and so it is in silence that our complete biological system realizes its full potential of the computing power of its entire energy structure which enables it to fully understand this world.

We recognize this world through our feelings and subtle images, not through the incessant self-talk that churns through our thought space, distracting us from a greater thought. This incessant talk is noise. But it is a chaotic noise; it is a reaction to our experiences. A noise without structure it bubbles up haphazardly from the stories we have of ourselves from our multiple identities of who we believe ourselves to be. These stories constantly reaffirm our reality, ensuring that we keep to the illusion of who we are. We have these identities so we can feel safe, so we can be in control, so we can know what is and what isn’t. But this noise does not serve us. We need noise to give shape to the world and help us know what is from what isn’t through the use of words and thoughts but often this is merely a distraction and for the most part a farce. Noise forms us but doesn’t necessarily serve us. However noise has another role if we condition it through our breathing, through a mantra, a repetitive motion or any other meditative form you desire. By using this structured noise we can quiet the chaos and create a space in which we can connect to the silence. We remove the typical overbearing chatter that drowns out the subtler feelings that contains so much wisdom.

Silence exists in the present moment. Whenever you are thinking of the past or the future you are in a space of thought. Thoughts of who you were and who you should and could be. In the present moment you can create a white place; a clean slate. It is from this place free of the untangled world of the past and the future that there are no preconceptions, existing forms and ideas that you have to adhere to in order to create. Instead your canvas is free to create afresh and anew any world that your deepest self dreams to be true.

This space, induced by structured noise, is often associated with slower frequencies in our brain. When considering sleep, the slower our frequencies get the deeper we are into sleep and the less our conscious faculties are in play. Early on in sleep we often reach a stage in which our waves slow to what is called Alpha frequency. This stage is a powerful stage as it has been to show that we can operate powerfully without the use of our conscious mind getting in the way. We often use our conscious mind to understand things, which are great for when we are first learning something so we can build the necessary neural connections, but then we continue to rely on this conscious mind rather than trust the wisdom that exists beneath this conscious process. A much more powerful processor. There is research which shows how mind when wandering or day dreaming we often reach our greatest moments of inspiration, so too in that period just before we wake, where we look at the world in the borderland of our sleep and waking worlds. It is in this space that we are in the Alpha wave state and it is in this period where we have shut down enough of our conscious faculties to open ourselves to the power of silence.

Find a moment to yourself when you are ready to discover yourself or something in your life. Take a breath and then take another and listen and feel what happens in your breath and between the breath. Listen to the rain and see the rhythm of it in motion or stop for a moment and play this piece and find the peace you need to move to a powerful place. So don’t think you need to think your way through life all the time, but instead take a moment and access the space of silence. And remember, “Silence is Golden”.

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Flow is for everyone in everything

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Here is a video that is not only inspiring to the point of tears but teaches us something about how connecting to our passion allows us to realise the highest sense of our selves.  This is currently being explored in modern science under the term “Flow States”, however it is more commonly known as being “in the zone”.  In this state people are able to perform at their optimum level along with experiencing a series of other impressive phenomenon. The amazing thing about Flow is that it is accessible in any and all activities that people undertake. Its simply about finding a way to truly connect to the moment, where you are completely immersed in the activity and all your resources are being focussed on that task in only the moment of now. Watch this video and see how the power of Flow can help us overcome any limitation.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ek1iIOTsiRo&feature=search]

After watching this and other films on Autism as well as my own personal experience interacting with autistic kids, it makes me think that while we can all have limitations in expressing our true selves, there is always an avenue that can overcome them and truly tap our connection to life. It’s just about finding what makes that connection flow.

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HUMANS ARE AN INFINITE SYSTEM

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The human organism is made up of a system of cells working together to make a grander system. This system develops from two primary elements: Cultural and Hereditary. Hereditary elements are when the system’s ancestors have donated a part of themselves to help discern the type of system that will develop. This gift will lead to the development of its traits, dispositions and strengths, creating how the system functions as well as its inevitable purpose in life. However there is the cultural element that is also needed to be taken into consideration. This Culture relates to the external world and its influence on the individual cells. The cells are required to adapt and evolve to their changing world. Culture has shown to have a major impact not only on the content but also the structure of the new system. This is evidenced by a group of American researchers who have recently shown how the brain develops differently due to different cultural upbringings. But it is quite intuitive to understand that, by this larger system (or human) living its life, it learns and develops, as it goes to different places and experiences different emotions, understandings, germs, foods and all matter of experience. This experience is what the body needs to learn from and adjust to, in creating new combinations and understandings (or thought technologies) to deal with its evolving world.

The Evolving System

To gain an understanding of a larger system I like to first understand the constituent parts which help make up that system. The benefit in understanding these preceding systems is that they are quite similar to the ultimate functioning of the greater system at hand. For example, we are for the most part an evolved system from our parents. They contained certain physiological and intellectual matrices which they had developed and advanced from their forebears and passed them onto us. We (who are reading this) are now evolving our physiological and intellectual systems to surpass where our parents have developed. While we can look at the ontological story, or the evolution of the individual system, we as humans also develop as a species and share a grander story of a collective advancing system. We started off having evolved from a system of single cell life forms into multi-cell life forms and from there the system has kept on evolving all the way to humans as we know it and inevitably beyond. All systems evolve from systems preceding it and therefore you can gain many understandings of the current system by delving back into the past and looking at where you have come from. You can’t see where you are going without knowing where you came from.

Where it began

So let us look at what we can learn from the single cell – where it all began. The way I best find to understand this is through analogy. What I found interesting is the likeness of the human cell to bee colonies. These share very similar operating systems in that they both have a central nucleus, which in the case of the bee is the queen, as well as many other constituent parts to keep the system running such as membranes, receptors, messengers and so on. Contrary to popular belief the nuclei in the cell and the queen, are not the central processor but instead more similar to the sexual organ. They contain and retain the genetic history of the colony and feed the updated information collected from the male messenger counterparts to understand the true needs of the system or colony. This central unit then proceeds to direct the creation of the necessary elements of the cell that will best serve the system. I would like to reiterate that the reason why I use the term ‘system’ for the cell here is because as the cell is part of the human system, so too is the human part of a larger system like a community or country, and thus the individual parts make up the system of the cell itself. We are therefore an outward expansion of complexity based on ever-increasing layers of symbiotic simplicity. Each advancing level corresponding to its previous simpler counterpart as well as many counterparts before. The human, as part of the global system, feeds back into a national system, a cultural system, a communal system and so on. These parts still feed out into many other systems well past the next advancing stage of the system. Thus again we see the importance of understanding the system from the simplest levels.

So if the queen and the nucleus are not the brain of the system then what is, and how are these systems aware of the changing external world. Bruce Lipton talks of the cell membrane as the main processing unit. (My next blog will be on Lipton’s ideas expanded). He says the membrane (or outermost shell of the system) is that which experiences the external changing world and perceives it, deciding and sending back the relevant information to the entirety of the system which best realizes the reaction, not just a central nucleus but the entire system. Therefore he purports that the membrane, that which is connected to and assesses the outside world, may be the central processing unit. However as the central processor, it is not necessarily that which experiences as the Mind. The Mind is separate from the brain. It is all-pervasive and the culmination of the system which is able to experience itself.

Sum of the Parts

The Mind is a collective of all the parts in the system. A system can be a system in itself (a cell), but it can also be a part of a system (a neuronal cell). Each system connects into other relevant systems to feed and share information and understandings. As a collective sum of all these systems, a level of consciousness arises. With each advancing level of systems connecting into each other, comes greater functionality, and thus greater tools to interact with and understand the world. The tool, or functionality, that we most recently developed as humans is metacognition ,which is the awareness and understanding of one’s own thought processes. This has taken up much of our philosophical understanding and religious explorations with names such as the soul, the ego and as many other forms. It is important to remember that each system has its own level of mind. The mind or consciousness of the cell is much less conscious than the Mind of a human as there is a smaller complexity and functionality to the system due to a limited sum of the parts to make such an advanced whole. But the wisdom and functionality of mother earth and the human collective is much greater than the individual human.

One amazing idea that we can draw from this is that as an individual we may be great, but as part of a larger system we are amazing. Many of the world’s great leaders, such as Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., have created revolutionary change not because they were great men but because they were acting for a system much greater than themselves.  It is why when people work together to make change they will be so much more effective than if they tried to do it on their own. When we look at our lives as an individual many people become overwhelmed with feelings of inadequacy but when we look at ourselves as part of the greater system and a contributor untoward that we find a sense of peace and satisfaction in what we have given. The same way a multi-cellular life form has much greater capacity, and therefore potential to make greater change, so too are humans as collectives in comparison to individuals. That is where our greatest power comes from by working together.

Through the Mind’s Eye

So the Mind exists as the sum of the system and we can therefore make use of this by looking at the ways in which the mind perceives the world. It does it physically through direct contact as in an external element that is touching up against the sense membrane and the system then responds to it accordingly. Whether it be air waves, light waves or a more tangible element, the system registers through the sense organ and responds appropriately. However we are beginning to understand that there is another form of communication in these systems known as indirect communication. We see this in bees that communicate through a special dance to denote what is happening at far distances away from the system and we see this in cells that communicate electromagnetically. It has also been recorded by researchers that our heart has an electromagnetic field that stretches out and can be recorded several feet outside of our body. Over the last few years scientists have been considering the role of quantum mechanisms, in which it has been shown that it is possible for the mind to exist, communicate and perceive from distances outside of itself, through processes such as entanglement, that allow it to still perceive its external world. In its simplest sense it is most probably a combination of the quantum and electromagnetic processes of the system which help to explain some of those intuitive feelings people have like sensing someone’s presence in a room, danger to a loved one and other intuitive understandings that the human system is able to determine outside of the sole control of direct communication.

Intuitive wisdom can ultimately be considered a product of whole body functioning and therefore cannot be understood solely through the brain but by feeling how your body reacts to situations. It depends on the subtle messages and signals that the individual systems in your body are attuned to and how they translate that for your brain to understand. This can occur through gut feelings, dreams, reoccurring themes in your life, etc. there are many different ways that the greater wisdom of your whole body system will be able to communicate with you. Therefore it is important take time, to find stillness in which to feel the movements in your body. Notice the way that the subtle feelings in your body move with the ebb and flow of life. Synchronicities are thus multiple whole body systems operating on a harmonious frequency, communicating and interacting to create greater understandings. A space of stillness is crucial in best creating for your life as it not helps you to better act but also stops you to react. Finding space in your actions and not being so quick to react will mean that your decisions are based on your own consciousness rather than feeding into another persons. Often we also act from a place of the subconscious, when you react; you are simply perpetuating the inherent cycles of your life and not allowing for a space in which to grow. It is by taking a breath and connecting with how you feel in stillness of the moment that you may be able to break non-serving trends in your life and instead sense actions that may create actions that serve you as you create anew.

Mind is the Master-power that molds and makes, And Man is Mind, and evermore he takes the tool of thought, and, shaping what he wills brings forth a thousand joys, a thousand ills: — He thinks in secret, and it comes to pass: Environment is but his looking glass. – James Allen “As a man thinketh”.

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Knowing your potential of tomorrow, today

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I am often led to the question “are you a person that knows everything or nothing?” If I were to be asked that question my answer would be “nothing”. I would say nothing because the information I think I know is only on loan until I trade it for newer upgrades on the information. While this information is always building on itself to further create greater understanding of what I think I know, sometimes there are complete overhauls to the system that completely shatter the foundations of the old idea. Therefore by understanding that my ideas of the world are transient and only temporary, then I am a lot freer to move with the changes. By knowing that we know nothing except  what we choose to know actually allows us to know everything, if everything to know is already known. We just haven’t chosen to know it yet. It all exists but there’s only so much we can hold as a conscious knowing. So don’t own your ideas just rent them, so that its easier to trade them in for a better model.

Knowing is subjective

The basis for our thoughts are only on rent because we take them on as our own only for a short period until we are ready to move on to a thinking space that better serves us. Think back to how often your opinions of the different aspects on life have changed. How love is supposed to be, what is beautiful, what our dreams are, what is the best way to have your sandwich? Our way that we look at the world is always changing. While we are settled into a particular thought space, we are completely appreciative of it as we are provided with a sanctuary in which to build our lives from. But some people forget that our thoughts are temporary and choose to identify with them as the Truth rather than a guide.

Subjectivity is infinite

Are our thoughts pre-existing or conjured and created?  In my opinion, I believe both. The thoughts that we experience, in our conscious world, are synthesized from our experience. But the place where they reside outside of our consciousness is a volatile world of unlimited thought and possibility, dormant in our experience until we move towards its creation. Therefore the place where our thoughts come from exists already, because infinity possibility exists.

The quantum world of infinite possibility

I base my idea of the pre-existence of infinite possibility on the double slit quantum experiment which showed how a photon (a massless quantum particle of light) had the possibility of existing in every part of space-time all at the one moment. It moved in a wave-like manner as it was projected outward and in turn took every known path through the universe before it made it through the slit. What was interesting is that the instance the photon was observed, it collapsed into a finite particle moving out of the wave-like state. This is true for us. You have the possibility of moving your body in any way you choose right now and create unlimited possibility of events that you wouldn’t even consider like kissing your screen. Just think about how many ways you can move your arm in the space around you. But the second you do it you observe the experience of that move and it collapses into a finite experience. Our minds are created to only experience one moment at a time and that is in part why time is experienced in a progressive linear fashion.

A world of potential past the point of now

Ultimately it depends on how you subscribe to the mechanics of the Universe and what you determine the universe actually to be. For instance is the universe only this moment of reality that we are conscious of? If we peer past this moment does anything exist or is it just a void? I personally believe it is a void of reality, a world of formless potential. A foamy sea of quantum fluctuations awaiting the light of our consciousness to collapse infinity into a finite moment of experience which we have chosen for ourselves. When i look at it that way, I see that what lies in that void is one thing and one thing only… possibility. The eternal possibility of anything and everything happening at that one moment and the brilliant harmony of the universe forming to enable that moment is realized as your truth, your knowing, because you chose so. But when you choose otherwise, then no longer will that reality be, but now a completely different one in its place for you. Tired of the old and embraced the new.

The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.

Sir James Jeans (1877-1946) English physicist and mathematician

When we are young we may think that all we want to be is an astronaut but then we experience and grow. We learn that there are more possibilities for us that better serve our future selves and we now know that we want to be a musician, completely discarding the old idea of becoming an astronaut, to have a new knowing of who we are. We have been given the opportunity to discard ideas. We live our ideas as true but then we are free to let them go. Therefore we have them as only the most probable possibility at that point in time. We loan our ideas from the sea of possibility as the knowing that best serves us at that time. The more we understand this, the more we are able to create a fluid world, free from the pain of resistance and rigidity.

Resistance can break

It is when we are rigid with our thinking, holding our thoughts as a universal truth, that we create a pain of rejecting new and improved thinking into our lives. This rigidity and resistance is brought about from our attachment to dogma, to comfort and familiarity, to the ruts that we have carved in our thinking and living, so that we can coast along without considering new terrain. A train can only stay on the track. Another way of thinking about attachments to old beliefs is that it is only the brittle reed that breaks. The supple leaf bends and folds with the movements of the violent and erratic forces of the external world because this branch is flexible in its movements and thinking. It believes it can take on many shapes and form, whereas the brittle reed only has one form and if you try to ask it to take on another knowing of its shape it will resist and break itself rather than allow for a change.

I’m not frustrated by not knowing everything i am inspired by it. I don’t need to know everything, where would be the fun in that, and for that matter i know that i have the potential of knowing everything that i need to know. “know more, know less” hehehehe.

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Gratitude gets you Zen

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When I was taking some time from my past relationship, I noticed I would feel bad when I tried to not think about her. I felt that this was not an effective method to help me deal with the changing shape of our relationship, for as we know what you resist persists. So I sat there and tried something different. I sent her gratitude for the amazing person that she is, for all the good times that we had and the lessons that she taught me. I immediately felt better and I wasn’t sure why until this moment and this is the lesson that I learnt about part of what gratitude’s power is.

Gratitude keeps us in the present.

Being present is the most important thing. The power in the Now.  In the present moment, the problems and patterns of the past have no avenue to creep in, and they have no way of imposing themselves on the future. When we are in gratitude it is impossible to be in any other moment but the present. Gratitude is an active state of being. It must be consciously acknowledged for it to be gratitude. If we don’t do it consciously it is being “taken for granted”.

We can feel joy unconsciously, like when we are eating something and it makes us feel good. However we can go through the meal without truly appreciating it, without truly being conscious and aware of the meal. That is why we suddenly finish and think, I can’t even remember eating that meal. That poor meal was taken for granted.  Once we acknowledge something and give it thanks, we are living in the present moment of now, and then we are truly living.

Gratitude is the most powerful mediation.

Gratitude is the quickest and easiest way to reach a truly meditative state. The true meditative state is when you can be completely present in the moment. The best way to be present is through appreciation, because you are not limiting anything. You are being completely accepting. Through this unadulterated acceptance, it opens you up to an even greater experience and expression of life. Gratitude is the in-breath of love. When we breathe in, during meditation, and give thanks as well, we are doubling the focus and meditative power of being present. It is for this reason that we can immediately find ourselves in a place of harmony. Harmony occurs not only in our bodies but also with the world around us. The Institute of HeartMath, a research group in California, has conducted studies on the power of using gratitude with breathing meditation.  Their results have been astounding. Through the use of gratitude, it has been shown that many of our biological systems have harmonized finding a physiological resonance that creates a form of visceral symphony. Our heart, lungs, hormones and even our brain all our working to the driving beat of the gratitude playing in our hearts.

Gratitude transforms fear

Unconscious joy is an opportunity lost but not as much as when we are in fear, which is true unconsciousness. Fear results in a true lack of appreciation and a true lack of consciousness. In fear we have no way of being present, instead we are truly locked in the patterns of the past and future and not “being in the present”. Our fear is similar to a fog that we are lost in. When you think of an experience that you are saying no to, that you are resisting, that you say is wrong, you feel it in your body and get lost in a spiral of thoughts.

Thinking those fear thought spirals, perpetuate cycles and reoccurring themes in your life. This is because you fall into the patterns of the past that you experienced when you were younger and your mind takes you down that road trying to protect you. It is inbuilt to humans to have this inclination towards the negative. It evolved for our protection and is referred to as the ‘negativity bias’. The negativity bias means that it is easier to think about the bad things and process them more quickly than the good things. This is so that if the bad things happen we will know what to do quicker to protect ourselves. That is all good and proper when we were cave men but the problem is that now we live in a World where dinosaurs and monsters don’t exist. But our bodies still think they exist so it is constantly trying and create them.

I’ll use horror films to explain this. Isn’t it interesting how in horror films the monster is so much scarier when we don’t see it, but finally when we the monster is revealed, we think, “Is that all?! That’s so fake!” It’s because our minds are programmed naturally to think the worst of the scene and the more we resist it and say “No” to the monster the scarier it gets. But the second we look at it, it immediately loses most of its scariness. The reality of the monster has taken form and thus collapses the infinite possibilities of scariness into only one possibility. It is because of this reason that we also recreate the patterns of our past, because “better the devil we know”. We know how story is going to end when we continually replay the same story and we know that while the monster is scary because we know what form it takes we are more inclined to deal with that monster than the other millions of monsters that can exist out in the world. But if we take a plunge and step into the darkness and unknown we may find that we slay the dragon and find an ending that better suits us.  So a powerful way of navigating through the unfamiliar territory of this new story is send the scary scene “Thanks”. Find all that you can be grateful for in the scene. Be grateful for all the amazing outcomes that can and will happen as you work through the darkness and you will give yourself a light to guide your way to a scene of something that you can love. You can even invite your fears to come along with you and work at your goals together. By doing this you know longer are denying the existence of your fears, which is the best way to let them go because what we resist persists and what we look at goes away.

Use your attitude of gratitude and you will find your way through any dark spot.