Our Brain, Our Life, Awakening, Our Lives Together
Everything we ever experience, express and learn is a function of our nervous system. To open that statement up a little, our nervous system is the substrate that pervades our every moment of perceiving the world, including all others, through our senses; every moment moving, sensing and feeling our bodies; as well as the appearance of every image, distinction, label, thought, description, story, concept, insight and intuition we have ever lived through and, are living through, now. Our nervous system manages all the interconnected functions and of all the interrelated subsystems of our organism as human beings, relating in dynamic exchange with our environment and other human beings in this world.
In short, our individual nervous systems underlie our subjective experiences of being alive here. From the beginning, our nervous system subsumes all the processes we each go through adapting to and living on this Earth. Here, in this world where our subjective lives are inseparable from the inter-subjective field of others’ lives here, around us. Our nervous system is the substrate of the experience of our lives; our lives, which are inextricable from the enveloping ecosystem and its myriad subsystems. We can recognize these as the external side of our living organism’s metabolism.
Our experience and perception of ourselves, others, this world and all of us being together in this world as our human species of consciousness is determined by the conditioned patterns within the neurological substrate of our organism – our underlying beliefs determine our understanding of our interpretations and our consequent perception. These conditioned, neural patterns of thinking in our minds, of experiencing in our bodies and ways of being with others in the world are habits in our nervous system; they show up as repeating sequences of firings in our neural networks, as particular cycles among our neuro-chemical shifts; as well as limited, repetitive sets of oscillations within the wide-spectrum of our brainwaves which can be said to be playing familiar pieces of music throughout our lives. Sometimes runaway feedback cycles within our neural systems spins us through energetic vortices into further reaches of discomfort, dissatisfaction and discouragement; or into frantic activity.
Whether we were raised in what is now called, “a dysfunctional family” or just anywhere within our rather dysfunctional species of consciousness, by the age of three or four, we were virtually all conditioned to adopt the fundamental premise of separation, which had been assumed by everyone around us and everybody around them, and back generations for millennia. As we adapted to what we found here, we each divided Reality into “us” as separate from “not-us.” We adopted reified constructs of “self-in-world,” “self-with-other,” and “me & us-vs-them.” These became the basis for our identifications as a separate one in this world.
Of course, all this is mistaken. With a little reflection it becomes obvious that every so-called “thing” is both a whole in itself as well as a part/participant in a larger system; nothing is ever really separate from everything else. Nevertheless, even once we’ve conceptually understood this, we all tend to see and experience ourselves as separate and disconnected from our context, each other, this Earth and the Divine Source and Substance of all being – in both its transcendent and its immanent infinities. Perhaps, it cannot be stated too often that this fundamental misunderstanding is the essential root of all our problems – both personal and shared – as this human species of consciousness.
This mis-apprehension of separation is the unstable foundation of our representation of life to ourselves. For the most part we live our lives from within this mind-made field of representation, which informs us of who and what we are in relation to things, others and the world. Unfortunately, this is true, even if we know of and have had experiential glimpses of our shared oneness and our interconnectedness with All-That-Is because our nervous system keeps reverting back to the latest version of our earliest adaptation to the inter-subjective world of separation, within which we were raised.
Whether we have a vague intuitive sense or a burning heart’s desire to come to ongoing-ly live as the experiencing expression of our shared oneness consciously engaging with our neuro-plasticity with our vision in mind with all nuances of its self-organized complexity and depth of experience, an open-minded experiential exploration of the felt-sensing of our instinctive vision of our whole species living together, sustainably in peace is the direction we’re wanting to go toward. This vision involves us living together in creative collaboration for the benefit of all of us.
Gradually, we are moving past the separate identities which create all these polarizing categories and descriptions we have all habitually been living because we have been taking our mistaken representational field to be an accurate map or model for who and what we are as individual beings. We are beginning to notice, we beginning to experience the dynamic and multilayered patterning of our nervous system; we are beginning to notice ourselves recreating and experiencing of duality letting go of who and what we think and have believed we are, in relation to the same mind’s version of what constitutes “you” or “them,” or “this world.” These are merely our conditioned minds’ interpretations of what this or that is and means.
We turn our attention away from the familiar, conditioned “known” and, noticing the knower that is always here; we deliberately stop the stream of thoughts and, for a moment, just notice what is always, already and naturally, here. This awake, cognizance is always here, just beneath and behind our story of ourself in the throes of duality and separation. When we finally say to ourselves, in our own way of speaking, “WhiskyTangoFoxtrot, this is my life passing through the filters of my mind; I can take a moment out of my mind-made, self-world, my experienced interpretation, and begin noticing the experiential actuality of my being. I have an innate right to focus my attention where I prefer. It is simple to stop thinking and simply notice, to the best of my current ability, the beneath behind and beyond any and all conceived and assumed interpretations and interpreted meanings.”
It is important to realize that repatterning the energetic field of our mistaken representation of reality as polarized, reified dualities involves what can be broadly described as two simultaneous and mutually synergistic processes. Both involve developing the muscle of our conscious attention but in different ways. The heart-essence of the path of awakening is to drop all thought, including all assumptions, to the best of our current ability. We attune to the actuality of our being here, noticing what is already here. As we begin to take such experiential short moments, we are attuning our minds, our bodies and our perception of the field of life around us; to the actuality of being the one we have always been regardless of who or what we thought, believed and perceived ourselves to have been.
Which brings us to the second process of becoming conscious of the ways our mind had been creating and re-creating the representational field of our inevitable discomfort and dissatisfaction with ourselves, others & life. As we practice taking short moments, we begin to come to rest as the actuality of our awareness/being, the one we actually and always are beneath, behind and beyond any story of duality we may have been telling ourselves, others and the world. We notice the inherently open presence of being which subtends all mind-filtered experiences which pull us out of our living rest, is the compelling stories of polarized dualities and separation that we tell ourselves. We become re-engaged with one of our mind’s habitual versions of ourselves either by life happening around us and turning attention to it or by another integration of neural networks that correlates with one of our identities in relation with the perceived/conceived context of self/other/world.
The way I see it, as we awaken together, we are taking back our intrinsic connectedness and our primordial identity as awareness/field-beings experiencing and expressing through these organisms both with and within the interconnected field of all being. In truth it is utterly simple; we merely remember to turn our attention from whichever of our separate-identity-creating self-other, self-world dualities happens to have been running on automatic; we simply re-turn our attention and we re-tune our resonance to the underlying presence of our natural state.
Inevitably this will throw our habitual positive and/or negative points of view of me & you, or him or her or them into the foreground of our awareness. So what do we do? First we recognize this is one of the conditioned self-in-context identities we have been living through. It involves a set of feelings, descriptions, interpretations and meanings, which constitute the experiential fabric of our identity as a separate one in relation to the experiential fabric of however it happens we have been regarding our world. We come to take responsibility for the ways we have been interpreting and being in relation to life including ourselves, others and all the interconnected holons of All-That-Is. We begin to recognize ourselves as the author, director and star of our own movie. We begin seeing that we have been continuously living within and believing in the interpretations generated by our mistaken mind’s premise of separation and duality.
In brief, we simply stop thinking for a moment and just notice whatever we can notice about the felt-sensing of just being here. We recognize that the binary pattern of our identification exists within the all-inclusive space of our awareness. We sustain the experiential recognition of awareness while allowing the habitual “me-you,” “me-them,” or “me-world” field of representation, with all its charged emotional nuances, to be here within it, for the time being. If we can take off the labels and allow the polarized energies to be as they are, then, as it is regarded within the open space of awareness, the polarized duality of “me-you,” “me-them,” or “me-world,” naturally morphs and resolves back into the unified field of the awareness of now. This may occur with a recognition/revelation of an early, seminal moment of being imprinted, disconnecting and creating one of our original identifications within samsara. Sometimes, I have found, as these current versions of “me” separate from “whatever” resolve, some quality of essence is revealed within me – some peace, or presence, or quality of integrity or wholeness.
Using words as primers and pointers toward the immediate and direct non-verbal experience of being can be very helpful if we remember release our focus from the word(s) toward the immediacy of the already present, non-verbal felt-sensing of our being. Language can point our attention toward the living experiential domain of our shared oneness. Or we can get caught up in a seemingly endless sequence of verbal and nominal associations.
As a contemplation, you might find it useful to feel into the possibilities of meaning in words and phrases like interconnectedness; wide-open; each-and-all-included; empty, open cognizance; nothing preferenced; opening into a non-verbal knowing of the vast unknown beneath, behind and beyond whatever confusing and painful ways we have been conceiving, perceiving and living. In these ways we can begin noticing the felt-sensing of the openness of our being and we will gradually become more and more able to rest as the awareness of being. After some time of this, (for most of us, so far), we come to rely on this silent, open presence to express through us throughout our life.
Like I said, our awakening is not usually a one time turning of attention from the discursive, thinking mind and toward the awareness which underlies every moment of our being.
As we look at our world and recognize what is at stake for our species if we all continue to live through the mistaken lens of separation; when we start to see how deeply we care about how we humans on this Earth are being with each other; as we find ourselves feeling the overwhelming amount of trauma and pain and destructiveness we create for ourselves and other sentient species; when we begin to recognize how we humans have semiconsciously degraded the living environment of space, light, air, fire, water and earth in natural synergy with our mistaken, human-mind made contaminants to the extent that we are now distorting the natural electromagnetic field of the earth-sun-galaxy-universe-etc. system; we find a compelling reason to refocus our attention and re-attune our consciousness. I mean, we have been tinkering with the electromagnetic field that subtends our every living moment in these bodies and the enveloping sphere of our lived moment. What could possibly go wrong?
When we see the dualistic world around us and how much so many of us are suffering by the hands of our own species of consciousness, we begin chose to consciously relax our hold on our current interpretations, identifications and world-views. We become willing to stop thinking and attend, noticing everything we can about the experience of our open cognizance.
Again, this will inevitably stimulate the accretion of interpretive neural networks until they take center stage, capturing our attention and we label and describe what we’ve been noticing. Eventually this happens within the conscious awareness of the whole field of being; but often it seems that, as soon as the mind train chugs out of the station, we are already on board and down the tracks. We may find ourselves riding the mind’s steaming and streaming along for a long time before we remember to remember. Then, we, once again, chose to turn attention away from believed thinking and notice what being here, just now feels like. Thereby, we re-tune our nervous system/ psyche to our shared, natural state.