Power in Doubt

Even when there are no immediate answers, a critical mass of people may still be tremendous, just be admitting that it doesn't really know.  If it is willing to toss itself into that pause between collective inhale & exhale, it may swell the edges of the container and create a crack in an outdated framework.

We may not know where to go exactly, but if things are shaken up enough, a trance may be broken. Assuming we do not lose ourselves to fear, It seems natural to zoom out from that point to take in the surroundings, like any animal would some time after finally being freed from a small cage. It is a new moment when things are fresh and nothing is stuck in a frame. There is an expansion beyond that narrow point of focus and into a broader field.  

This seems an easier place for wonder and possibility... and perhaps, a new vision.  As an individual or group begins to embrace a new way of thinking, an invitation may be extended for new solutions outside of old frameworks... ideas may suddenly rise, in a similar way that the name of a person you are trying to think of can finally be accessed, once relaxing the grip, the hold on the one avenue the name was trying to be accessed from.

One image that comes to mind is of a person playing scrabble with X,Z,V & P and three U's. There are no apparent places to play and no more letters to draw from, so that person is at an impass. But instead of sitting there stuck on that, the person pauses, breaks from the game and backs up from the board till it becomes tiny, tiny, tiny... till new resources for new games flood into that newly created space. The animal is free.

On a side note, this also reminds me of an experience I had with a physical healing.  I was feeling quite bad at the time and, while out for groceries, had stumbled upon a healing circle at the local co-op.  There was one empty chair, and I was invited to join in and paired up with an experienced practitioner.  She asked to me to close my eyes and then led me though a meditative script of some sort.

The best I can describe is that there was a hard visualization of the discomfort.  It remained sort-of dense and physical, but the rest of the body became light and freed from form.  It operated outside of the issue somehow. 

The issue became smaller and my now broader self, which felt almost like static, engulfed it, untangled it or dissolved it... or something.  The hard issue, perhaps, had joined the rest of the body in it's intangibility. When I returned from that state of mind, I was alleviated of the suffering.

This reminds me of a reset to a system... but also of how a caterpillar breaks all the way down into a liquidy soup inside of a crysalis, and this loosening of form allows a new arrangement to come into reality.  

I'll say that I felt the exact moment in which I had broken off the connection, and I wanted immediately to return, but I did not find it easy to do so in the moments that followed. Perhaps at this point, I was essentially trying to force the recalling of a name.  "There is no try.  There is only do or do not" (Yoda)

Uncertainty may provide a transcendence also, a bypass, beyond the density of current form, a way to slip under relative distractions, such as personal patterns, habitual behaviors/additions, and the dramas of society... us vs. them, pressures to be of a certain status and definition... anything tight and confining... overly contractive... like a disease state, which can be also be contractive and a function of tightness or rigidness.

We may align with something intangible, something which hides right behind the curtains of everybody's mind... something that filters up through the ground to appear in multiple places, though it is unified across places and people. It may answer with an idea.

How many great ideas have sprung from dreams? How many indigenous hunter-gatherers have known what to do based on insight? Who knows what is possible when "tapping into the field"?... No doubt, it may take some gradual unfolding of things, a heavy dose of personal and collective adaptation, and a navigating of general discomforts. 

On a side note, it is easy to speak of ease, and how fluid motion may spring from ease, but I have to examine how tension may factor in.  I have to acknowledge the tension an artist may feel when acclimating to an idea or learning a musical pattern... to express creativity through.  So there is this too, an existence somewhere along the free-spirit, tortured artist continuum.  

There is the short fictional account of a writer who after typing a page of his story, had his work fly out the window of a skyrise apartment.  He stepped out on the ledge to recover the paper & ended up almost falling to his death.  Upon finally climbing back into the apartment after retrieving the paper, he had now reached pointlessness and immediately tossed the paper back out the window. 

Even typing this paper, I can experience an intensity.  I am also at a computer, and I do not like the way I feel at the computer, and so my body is sending me signals to get off of the computer.  The physical world is energetic also and it's messages can not be ignored forever.  For they can, of course, indicate disharmony.  In a context, an idea can destroy, provided the energetics and interrelationships of the physical world are ignored or tossed off too much as having no value.  The mystery is reflected in all of this too.

So maybe this has something to do with why artists abandon projects or why a certain indigenous people always purposely chipped their pottery... believing that perfection only belonged to the gods.  Maybe we can only get a hint of it or splash out the chaos and pick the fractal patterns out of it.

If we try to lock in on something too hard, there can be a tension... and a pushing back of reality. There can be an un-centering frenzy when attempting to push one aspect of life through another's language.  Perhaps this is why it is said "Those who know do not say. Those who say do not know". Also there is the story of Dean Radin in his search for experienced meditators to participate in his studies.  He mentions that a few did not want to participate, because they knew they would gain attention, and this would detract them from their state.  

Ultimately, it seems we exist across all of these levels and aspects, and it seems to be about bridges and integration.  As a constantly balancing system, adhering to messages from different aspects of self... we are like the hunter-gather who listens to dreams but listens also to the earth.  Maybe, when getting in touch with something broader, however, some aspects of self and of society will simply disappear like the illness at the healing circle. 

If the vision is broad enough.  Is this vision, deep down, compatible with the whole, and resonate across these different levels of our existence? Does it ease or lead to more suffering? Is it time again to embrace uncertainty and not know?

On a collective level, hopefully the vision is big enough, inspiring enough that it expands beyond the growing pains of personal and collective change.... so we may fold back in on ourselves, untangle, and move forward. 

“If the world is saved, it will not be saved by old minds with new programs but by new minds with no programs at all.” Daniel Quinn (taken with a practical grain of salt)

(Originally posted as a comment on social media March 2011.  Edited and needs editing)