What is this awareness?

 

What is this awareness?

The action of awareness is the convergence of many different vibrations that arise at the quantum level and form increasingly complex yet lawfully constructed relationships as they move from atoms to molecules to organs. This statement is a scientific fact. 

Yet I live within awareness, not within the quantum, atomic, or molecular vibrations themselves.

Or do I?

The desires I have, the way I feel and think, represent the present rate of harmonic vibrations in me. They have a cumulative effect that results in feeling.

If I listen to myself carefully, as I am, and come into this relationship with harmonic vibration, it has a certain tone or quality that determines my attitude and my wish for the moment. I want to be alive; and I want to have what is called, in plain tongue, “satisfaction.” That is, to have enough of what is right and necessary to be content.

The harmonic rate of vibration in me is a joining of many different things — the word harmony itself means to join together. If I try to be more attentive and aware, if I try to sense the harmonic rate of vibration in me, it often gives me a direction, and inclination, as to what is necessary and the direction in which I can go to find it, to find contentment.

Sometimes, to be sure, the harmonic rate of vibration suggests that I should just be still and be where I am. This is a very good moment, because if I listen to it carefully, and I'm content with stillness alone, I can often come into an even better relationship with harmonic vibration and understand it more deeply. Moments like this are an education that helps me to carry that interest into outward life and be more sensitive to harmonic vibration in the midst of all the stuff that happens.

I can make an effort to create a more cooperative environment within myself through this kind of listening. More often than not, the harmonic vibration helps to bring to the threshold of awareness the various needs that the parts have: for example, the body needs some exercise, or a little bit of raspberry jam. 

If I listen carefully and attend responsibly to those needs, all of the parts work better together, because each of them needs a bit of attention and gets quite frustrated if it doesn’t get any. My feelings equally need attention, as do my emotions (the two are at different rates of vibration, feeling being at a finer rate than emotion) and if I pay attention to my feelings and my emotions, and help them come into a better relationship and overcome their frustrations, things will work out better inside me. 

Again, I need to listen to what is happening inside me.

Interestingly, the word “obey” comes from a root that means to listen in a direction: to attend to. So in a certain sense, attending to the harmonic rate of vibration in me is a form of obedience, of listening. To attend to conditions.

In turn, the word “conditions” comes from Latin roots that mean, essentially, “say with,” or, “agree.” 

This means that to obey conditions is to come into agreement with myself, to have my intelligence and my awareness correspond to the harmonic vibration that arises in me. 

The vibration encourages, in other words, an attention towards a certain kind of self awareness, which we might also, if we wanted to use Gurdjieff terms (do we?), call “self remembering.” But perhaps that term isn’t so important.

What is important is to recognize the need for care; the need to care about being alive. Attending to the harmonic rate of vibration within me is an essential part of that care. 

Here I am. 

My whole body is alive with a very fine, probably (except through organic sensation) imperceptible harmonic vibration of Being. 

That vibration creates what I am in this moment; and it begins in a deep stillness within that has, at least initially, no connection whatsoever with all the agitation in my parts or what is around me. Paradoxical, that this harmonic vibration which is in movement arises in stillness; yet that can also be sensed if I make a little bit of effort.

If I put attention into this moment of harmonic vibration, and I sense what is needed in order to encourage its relationship and support its movement, all of my parts will cooperate in return.

None of these ideas are new. They were known, in different forms and using different words, to all of the great masters of the past who studied the inward nature of the human condition. Today we can understand it in part through the lens of our sciences which know things about matters such as quantum states and atoms and so on; perhaps this will pique an interest in us if ancient masters and their perennial wisdom aren’t good enough. (I notice that almost everyone thinks they know so much more than ancient masters these days.) 

Perhaps, on the other hand, it won’t pique an interest; I don’t know.

What I do know is that when I pay attention to the vibration that arises within me, I see how sympathetic it is to the action of Being itself. It's much more than a simple physical phenomenon (if we can call the construction of what we call reality from atoms, molecules, and quanta simple, ha ha ha.) It contains Love in it; and that Love, which acts as an underpinning for the arising of reality, can be sensed as a presence that animates us all. 

Weirdly — I noticed this last night when sitting in the dining room — it even animates pots and pans hanging on the wall. Just in a different way than it animates me. They have Love in them too.

Wow.

My existence is more temporary and more intelligent than the cooking utensils. Yet they serve me, and not the other way around. What does this mean? I'm in the middle of an extraordinary and magnificent set of events that can include such things, and yet I sling the pots and pans around carelessly. 

Perhaps I should have a little more intention and pay a little more attention, eh?

Today is a new day. Maybe I will; maybe I won’t. How much I care about life and what it is, is up to me. The more invested I am in a relationship with the harmonic vibration within me, the more I care about life and what it is. And the more that I care about life and what it is, the more the door within me opens to the Kingdom of Heaven. 

I’m not a worthy visitor to that place; and far from an occupant. But I have a wish to move closer to the door, which forever emanates a wisdom and benevolence that would benefit me if I exposed myself to its radiance.

It’s time for morning prayer now, so I will wrap this little soliloquy up. But I hope to remember its observations within me today,, to take a little bit of it with me as a companion — maybe even to remember it the next time I encounter the pots and pans.

 Ponder that for a while.

May you be well within today.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.