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Monday, July 8, 2019

breaking news

All is vibration she told me six years ago. I didn't understand. I had been searching for answers and I came across the Goddess in my study of ancient Egypt and thus I soon longed to connect with her, to which she did not disappoint. She led me by the hand into the Amazon rainforest for an ethereal meet and greet. My first encounter with her after drinking that initial cup of Ayahuasca was incredible. I didn’t think something like this was possible in the world I was brought up in but here I was in the presence of this eternal beauty who radiated love and forgiveness while hinting at the discovery of a sublime mystery. She instructed me on life and my path with her deep wisdom and left me in a state of awe and wonder for this whole evening I journeyed with her. As she left me for the night, my right index figure started tapping on the floor of the ceremonial maloca in a rhythmic and frenzied manner. As her presence faded, she kept repeating to me “all is vibration.” When I returned home I wrote a poem about this encounter.


I was honest with myself in that I really didn’t understand but she knew I was a tireless seeker of knowledge and on my path I’d unlock all these secrets.

Vibrations are waves of energy. All waves have a crest and a trough. There does not exist a wave that is only crest and no trough and vice versa. Think of your human life. It's a wave that takes seventy plus years or so to complete the cycle. You as an energetic wave come forth and then back to latency. Where do you think you are going? You are eternal; there is nothing to worry about. You don't need salvation nor do you need to believe the logicians who tell you this is it and you face eternal darkness. All trough and no more crest? I don't think so.

I have come across a few people in my life recently who has made such a profound impact on me. After the Goddess showed me all is about Love this unassuming man I met in the Amazon jungle, don Howard, opened up my heart and showed me how to live with that love in my heart for self and all others. On my road to knowledge I also came across another giant of a man, someone who called himself "a philosophical entertainer.” I would expect nothing more than Alan Watts to be supremely self effacing and not make any claims of being a guru or an enlightened being; all this in the spirit of the Zen that he loved and taught. He was much much more than that and could wax eloquently upon any subject presented to him. He had an other worldly ability to bring understanding to just about everything. So in this spirit of vibration I want to just highlight below how he explained that all is vibration:

So if I may start by insulting your intelligence with what is called the most elementary lesson: the thing that we should have learned before we learned one, two, three and A, B, C, but somehow was overlooked. Now, this lesson is quite simply this: that any experience that we have through our senses—whether of sound, or of light, or of touch—is a vibration. And a vibration has two aspects: one called on, and the other called off. Vibrations seem to be propagated in waves, and every wave system has crests and it has troughs. And so life is a system of now you see it, now you don’t. And these two aspects always go together. For example, sound is not pure sound, it is a rapid alternation of sound and silence. And that’s simply the way things are. Only you must remember that the crest and the trough of a wave are inseparable. Nobody ever saw crests without troughs or troughs without crests, just as you don’t encounter in life people with fronts but no backs. Just as you don’t encounter a coin that has a heads but no tails. And although the heads and the tails, the fronts and the backs, the positives and the negatives are different, they’re at the same time one. And one has to get used, fundamentally, to the notion that different things can be inseparable; that what is explicitly two can at the same time be implicitly one. If you forget that, very funny things happen.

If, therefore, we forget, you see, that black and white are inseparable and that existence is constituted equivalently by being and non-being, then we get scared. And we have to play a game called, Uh-oh, black might win! And once we get into the fear that black—the negative side—might win, we are compelled to play the game, But white must win! And from that start all our troubles. Because, you see, the human awareness is a very odd mechanism. (I don’t think mechanism is quite the right word, but it’ll do for the moment.) That is to say, we have—as a species—specialized in a certain kind of awareness, which we call conscious attention. And by this we have the faculty of examining the details of life very closely. We can restrict our gaze, and it corresponds somewhat to the central field, the vision, in the eyes. We have central vision, we have peripheral vision. Central vision is that which we use for reading, for all sorts of close work, and it’s like using a spotlight. Whereas peripheral vision is more like using a floodlight.

Now, civilization and civilized human beings—for maybe 5,000 years, maybe much longer—have learned to specialize in concentrated attention. Even if a person’s attention span is short he is, as it were, wavering his spotlight over many fields. The price which we pay for specialization in conscious attention is ignorance of everything outside its field. I would rather say ignore-ance than ignorance, because if you concentrate on a figure you tend to ignore the background. You tend, therefore, to see the world in a disintegrated aspect. You take separate things and events seriously, imagining that these really do exist when actually they have the same kind of existence as an individual’s interpretation of a Rorschach blot: they’re what you make out of it. In fact, our physical world is a system of inseparable differences. Everything exists with everything else, but we contrive not to notice that because what we notice is what is noteworthy. And we notice it in terms of notations: numbers, words, images. What is notable, noteworthy, notated, noticed is what appears to us to be significant and the rest is ignored as insignificant, and as a result of that we select from the total input that goes to our senses only a very small fraction. And this causes us to believe that we are separate beings, isolated by the boundary of the epidermis from the rest of the world.

You see, this is also the mechanism involved in not noticing that black and white go together. Not noticing that every inside has an outside, and that what goes on inside your skin is inseparable from what goes on outside your skin. You see that, for example, in the science of ecology. One learns that a human being is not an organism in an environment, but is an organism-environment—that is to say, a unified field of behavior. If you describe, carefully, the behavior of any organism, you cannot do so without at the same time describing the behavior of the environment. And by that you know that you’ve got a new entity of study. You’re describing the behavior of a unified field. You must be very careful indeed not to fall into old Newtonian assumptions about the billiard-ball nature of the universe. The organism is not the puppet of the environment, being pushed around by it. Nor, on the other hand, is the environment the puppet of the organism, being pushed around by the organism. The relationship between them is, to use John Dewey’s word, transactional. The transaction being a situation, like buying and selling, in which there is no buying unless somebody sells and no selling unless somebody buys.

So that fundamental relationship between ourselves and the world, which is in an old-fashioned way—by people such as Skinner (American Professor of Psychology at Harvard B.F. Skinner), who has not updated his philosophy—interpreted in terms of Newtonian mechanics. He interprets the organism as something determined by the total environment, he doesn’t see that in a more modern way of talking about it, they’re simply describing a unified field of behavior—which is nothing more than what any mystic ever said. That’s a dirty word in the modern academic scientific environment. But if a mystic is one who is sensibly—or even sensuously—aware of his inseparability, as an individual, from the total existing universe, he’s simply a person who has become sensible—aware through his senses—of the way ecologists see the world. So when I’m in academic circles I don’t talk about mystical experience, I talk about ecological awareness. Same thing.

Excerpt from the lecture by Alan Watts "The Tao of Philosophy 3: Coincidence of Opposites"

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