Encroachment

Sharing Consciousness

Earth Day is a day to recognize how interconnected with our planet we are, how long the chain of events that brought our food and other physical needs, as well as all the influence of people in our lives and what goes on in our heads. Beyond the support for our physical body are the minds that shaped ours, the person we saw yesterday and the line of thinking that grew from that and any interaction. The idea of being separate is a trick of words. We are the ongoing expression of everything that has been shared with us. Think of the eye of Jupiter, or a place in a stream where the current circles, both holding thei shape as the current flows in taking a shape supported by what’s below. If we think of ourselves as complex patterns of energy, the rocks are placed by genes and caregivers, some burrowing into the mud, others nudged around until a strong current moves them downstream. What flows from upstream can’t be predicted but some of it will lodge in the swirl and some won’t. This image reflects how I think of various groups I’m part of as well as myself as a particular organization of energy that will break down when my body does. Called solitons, the specialized character for each energy swirl last until the supporting structure ends. For the tapestry of human energy fields, groups form and disperse directed by confluence of individual purposes. With every soliton we inhabit we make linkages that persist in the overall field of vibrations from all that has emerged. There is resonance with similar patterns, behaviors and thoughts, finetuning our perception of experience. The interplay of multiple qualities in the flowing overall consciousness is ongoing with everyone affecting everyone else in varying degree as part of a unified field These images free our ideas of consciousness as trapped in our heads, an assumption with no basis and far more evidence to suggest otherwise. Even in the most detached head-centered lifestyle, influence flows in from all sides. We’ve been ensnared by words for too long and they aren’t adequate to describe consciousness. Images are more effective at stimulating new ways of looking at a subject. Images can show the contradictory as complementary, the difference that completes and allows the whole to work. The soliton is just one image for the interweave of consciousness. It provides a set of relationships that stir the viewer’s mind to their own speculations. Artists are best suited to showing alternatives to old mindsets that keep people from feeling part of the universe. Efforts to shift the mechanical view of the universe to an organic growth model are already happening. Artists Alex Grey and Amanda Sage use organic patterns intuiting the webs and pattern of energy that grow in complexity. Even with the sky overhead and the earth beneath our feet holding us secure in its gravity, modern people often lose their sense of connection to nature even as many in medicine are seeing the concrete benefits of nature for relieving stress and prescribing daily doses. Reconnecting to nature personally may be a necessary first step to caring for the planet. The resonance with what grows reminds us we are growing too, are part of the growth of the planet with responsibility toward it.