I, a stranger and afraid in a world I never made.
A. E. Houseman
Two readers on my stats page today and I discover it is just me lol...checking to see how a highlighting came through on the readers page. Man, something has definitely cut this blog off from the rest of the world and I can honestly say I think it goes beyond what others may consider bad writing or an uninteresting topic lol. I have been disconnected somehow.
Still...here I am recording what I am learning from others and mostly from observing my own mind. So am I helping?
Frequency Holder?
Well interestingly enough, I stumbled across a video lecture from Eckhart Tolle today where he talked about something called a "frequency holder" and I wondered if that was what I could be here. Now a frequency holder is someone who holds the frequency of presence for others, affecting far more people than they actually come in contact with. In olden days they would have been referred to as the "forest dweller", cloistered monks and nuns...those who devoted their lives to holding this frequency and have been often segregated from the busy world so they could do this. Man...I feel segregated and isolated these days let me tell ya...but I don't see myself as someone who is doing much good for the world in my present state. Yet embodying presence is my goal and Tolle tells us healing happens when we embody presence. It isn't so much what we do that helps or heals others but how present we are when we are doing it. When we, as the ego, get out of the way and let the essence of who we are shine through then we heal. Hmm! If we can look out upon the world with the eyes of compassion and non-judgmental acceptance that originates from this place of spacious, ego-less awareness we can do much good. Carl Rogers would call this approach we take to the world and other beings as , "Unconditional positive regard". Hmm...maybe I am doing some good here? Maybe.
Who is "I"?
I guess that takes me to the next bit of learning I did today. In a video lecture from Alan Watts I was reminded to question who this "I" , I believe wants to help, is? Trying to understand who "I" is, is one of the greatest mysteries of mankind. It is like trying to touch the tip of one fingertip with that fingertip...to look at yourself in the eye without a mirror.
Watts went on to explain that in the West we tend to equate this "I" with a consciousness inside a body...the head more specifically. He said our version of "I" is a "skin encapsulated ego" that operates in the mind and with thinking. Whereas in the East...the "I" , if it is in the body, can be found in the heart or the solar plexus and operates with "feeling".
In the West we tend to see the self as a separate soul imprisoned in a body looking out upon a world that is strange....an island of consciousness locked up in a bag of skin facing a foreign world outside itself. Watts
Not a Skin-Encapsulated Ego
We grow up believing in the West , if we were raised in the Judeo-Christian way, that we came into this world, that we and all things of this world have been made. We grow up on the idea that some wise, loving but very watchful and corrective being created all this and "made" us, the humans, the only intelligent things in the universe. The universe, we are conditioned to believe, is basically stupid and was made for us to use and misuse as we see fit. If we grew up with science dominated thought rather than religious...we may have been taught that though there is no big benevolent being in charge, the universe, still very blind and stupid, through a series of very random and chaotic coincidences, comes to be. Man is at the top of the "survival of the fittest" food chain and therefore gets to dominate, control an dissect/kill to analyze, all beneath him/her/them.
In the east, in contrast, children are often taught to see how they, like all things in nature grew into being. Growth is expanding from the inside and extending outward. They are taught to see how intelligent nature is, how much a part of it they are.
Does not the eastern idea make more sense? Watts reminds us that we, as intelligent beings, must have come from something intelligent. We can not get an intelligent organism from an unintelligent environment.
We grow out of the world, just as an apple grows out of an apple tree.
We are simply extensions of our environment and the environment is an extension of some great invisible intelligence we will never be able to understand with our limited minds. Everything...absolutely everything comes out of this intelligence. Everything, absolutely everything is consciousness. The outsides or external forms or explicit nature may differ but what is inside everything is exactly the same. It is all this consciousness. We are the environment we think is outside us. Our behavior can not be separate from the world around us
You are something the whole world is doing.
We are not separate and isolated strangers in a foreign world. We are not, "a stranger to the earth- a momentary flash of consciousness between two eternal blackness's". We are a part of all of it. We are all of it. We as "I " are not limited to "me": a separate personality, body, mind. We are are players in a game the universe is playing to express itself.
Just as the sun shines its rays, so does the cosmos express itself in rays of "you and you and you..."
All is well.
Eckhart Tolle (September, 2022) Am I Ready To Help Others? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icheiaA4F1w
Alan Watts (n.d.) Understanding Life. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZArIBiRkGfk
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