Patterns of Energy

Still thinking about the influential resonance between similar shapes, I remember how gestalt psychology used the term isomorphism to refer to the similarity in the pattern of activation in the brain to the structure of the perception. A metaphor could be said to be isomorphism, a way of understanding one set of relationships through a similarly structured set of relationships. Fractals are the repeating shape at multiple scales. To be able to map many features together can enable a structure to emerge. In the realm of energy, the torus is a recurring pattern that when I looked into it in relation to nature made me catch my breath. As the shape of the human energy field, within the similarly shaped magnetic field of the earth, it is speculated by some that it is the organizational structure of the universe, aligning with the world tree of ancient shamans. It is the shape of growth, visible everywhere in the garden with flowers’ central tubes and fountain of petals as the most visible part. Recently I heard a talk that suggested we had a specific heart wave, shaped like a torus that expanded as we felt more loving feelings and in itself could affect others. I’m curious about these life energy waves and how they interact with other waves. The body has a system of tubes for digestion, blood, lymph, nerves. Flow along tubes is a primary organization for life, fields within fields. I’ve explored the human energy flow in drawings, as a torus-field, thinking of the physical body as the center tube. The energy flows in and out and beyond the tube. Just as a plant reacts when something comes close suggests its field of awareness extending beyond its physical space. Perhaps the ancient concept of chakras could be small torus nodes at other centers, not just the heart, areas that expand and contract with emotions associated with those areas. I can often see a relation between sickness in the urinary tract as alienation I wasn’t aware of. On the gut’s third chakra, issues of fear and control, congestion in my chest as clogs in my capacity to connect with others. When it’s the head my loss of ability to spill that energy back out into the world. These underlying themes can be drowned out by the areas of physical and intentional awareness, day to day concerns. With an image like the flow of clouds around the planet, I can sense ”the Tao that can’t be told”. With the essence of understanding in an image, these ideas about the torus have led me to see it as the path love takes as it weaves a whole that we share in with our personal torus.

Re-Centering

Same Shape Resonance

We’re in a time when, despite the resistance of mechanistic, materialistic science, new models of reality are cropping up in different fields that insist on the recognition of phenomenon that doesn’t fit the current machine model. Multiple instances of telepathy often occur between non-speaking autistic people and their mothers, the many Near Death Experiences where consciousness watches as a medical team works on the flat-lined body, the feeling of someone looking at you, or how your dog knows you’re on the way home are all phenomenon without explanation by current science. Biologist Rupert Sheldrake wrote a book about each of the last two and since his early work, I’ve been fascinated with his idea of memory not being stored in our head. The active neuronal circuit that accompanies a particular memory could also be the way the brain tunes in to a memory that exists in a larger field of mind. The circuit that tries to remember would take the same shape as the experience that encoded it so would resonate with the matching shape to tune it in, a possible explanation. Like the pulses that create frequency and amplitude in time, the ever present here contains information that resonates in shape. In her book, The Light Eaters, Zoe Schlanger gives many examples of how keenly some plants are attuned to shapes of leaves. Ultimately resonating with any frequency is resonating to the same shape wave. Sheldrake suggests every species has a field of their shape that contributes to the development of new members. Fields that are encoded by shape would open lines of influence that could be affecting us more than we know. We’re already aware of how we resonate with another’s posture and know something of how they feel thanks to our mirror neurons, our body’s understanding of what it feels like in that shape. Human psychological complexity is a constellation of relationships that requires a work of art to express it through form. Art is a composition of sensations that resonates with the internal dynamic in the human structure of feeling. As philosopher Susanne Langer wrote, “Art looks like feelings feel”. How a composition of visual form is organized is a language encoded during our non-verbal infancy as we come to understand gravity and what to expect of the surroundings we navigate. This is the practical meaning of what we see. The deep structure of balance and all the metaphors extending from it reach beyond surface information to a humanness that sustains art through history. Though more sophisticated than a tuning fork or the shape of leaves, the resonance with a work of art is a connection to the human drama even at its most subtle.

Mandala of Loss 6

The Environment of Companionship

Like the layers of an onion, working my way through the stages of grief started with surface things. I was able to soften the wounding effects of seeing shared things, by removing some, rearranging others. Always there’s a niggling sense of betrayal in these symbols of trying to move on when he’s not. That back and forth is a stage unto itself. But as the layers get deeper the body takes the brunt of suffering while day to day life is lived out buried in my work, walking with my neighbor and getting through the holidays, another layer of its own. The here and now is my refuge. I find pleasure in nature, satisfaction over seeing my feelings expressed on paper for giving me a glimpse of a stage I feel without words. I’ve appreciated my time with other people but coming home with so much to tell is hard. Six months in and this stage of loss is realizing that the more profound grief is the loss of that whole background of companionship. Surrounding me even when I wasn’t home, having someone to share whatever happens with creates a psychic environment that enfolded me wherever I was. The atmosphere of my inner world has suffered a cataclysm. The structures created by shared habits and routine are gone. The connective tissue between inner and outer environments are the patterns that characterize any couple. The antenna that pick up their interests has no one to transmit back the who, where or what they might have liked to know. The fact that it’s taken me so long to understand this is likely because its so unconscious and built in while living it. I offer it now so readers might think about and appreciate the inner environment created by people they care about, having their presence in the world. When there is a web of interlaced activity, it travels with us, an invisible personal nest of ongoing interaction. The living presence of someone behind the scenes in life is part of inner consciousness, something to be appreciated. Coming to terms with each stage as I peel them away is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. The challenge to find it in myself to face the many facets of this shift is a human aspect of the reaching that characterizes the life force in all forms. Most obvious in plants that stretch toward light, we extend our being in more metaphoric ways and borrow the metaphors of plants as we keep trying to find the cracks in the concrete .

Mandala of Loss 5

The Threat of Beauty

In Olga Grushin’s outstanding novel “The Dream Life of Sukanov”, a well-indoctrinated soviet youth says, “Beauty is for the bourgeois.” Art that didn’t support the soviet philosophy was rejected, not just because beauty was considered frivolous or subversive but because it had power. Authoritarian systems want to harness that power only to further the aims of the state or ruler. Dave Hickey in his book “The Invisible Dragon” was the first to bring to my attention how beauty is a threat to authority because it needs no authority but its own. Beauty has the power to command attention without anyone pointing to it. Beauty engages feelings. The intensity of the feeling is a gauge of how much it matters. As G.I. Gurdjieff wrote “Feeling is the foundation of common sense.” Art develops the range and depth of feeling leaving it to the conscious mind to find words for it. Nature offers endless opportunities to see a perfect collaboration of light, wind and clouds in the sky. The healing power of sunrise at the beach for the variety of people who gather to watch has a quality of ancient spiritual homage. When authority wants to decide what has value and what doesn’t, whatever stands out in itself is a problem. Theories and analysis that try to break down a formula for beauty can never work because the response to beauty is individual and dependent on the moment. “We suffer from the delusion that the entire universe is held in order by the categories of human thought”. Alan Watts Labels and categories have multiplied in the modern world, each one making a boundary. Every label separates. Categories and definitions cannot pin down the experience of beauty. Try as they might with theories about symmetry or preference, they can’t capture the magic that happens for the brief moment that light hits the damp leaves with a sparkle that makes the heart glad. As Elaine Scarry wrote, beauty is always in the particular. Experiencing beauty is a sensation that connects us to the beautiful, drawing us out of ourselves and into creation. We love the beautiful because in that experience we love. Attention is drawn away from ourselves and into the world. The only thing that can heal the pathologies that ravage today’s collective soul is the power of love. Rarely do the artificial sensations and flash of media exhilarate like perfect moments of amazement. But technology does gives us access to a wide range of art to meet each person’s particular sense of beauty. Art unifies. Even when exposing flaws, attracting attention still pulls attention into the world of feeling, it depends on the existing connection between us as human beings that resonates and communicates. Artists that strive for beauty are stimulating the viewers best qualities, unselfish appreciation and gratitude for those moments of connection.