Andy of Mayberry and the Rise of Polarity

Andy of Mayberry and the Rise of Polarity

"All policemen in training should be required to watch the entire series of 'Andy of Mayberry'," declared my younger brother out of the blue today during one of our marathon talking sessions. I've come to appreciate these talks because he's, first of all, a kook like me, and second of all we both increasingly have come to see human life as a spectator sport.

"Andy always handled things. He was the last word, and people loved him for it. His good nature and down-home philosophy fit in with a type socio-emotional small town Utopia," he said.

I joined in, "Yeah, he always was kind of pre-crime--always right there when potential trouble could have started, so nothing ever got out of hand that couldn't be fixed with good ol' common sense and a handshake."

"Uh huh... I love that style of TV way back in the day, when the Beaver had to apologize to his dad, and Fred McMurry was the wisest dad in the world," my brother waxed nostalgic.

I then pointed out that those TV shows were more about feeling snug and cozy in a predictably small world with predictably smaller world views. And as the 60s "family show" began to go out of fashion, it seemed like it was more because script writers wanted to be more dramatic and show how things "really are"--maybe a product of pressure from TV execs to increase ratings: we all know what suckers we are for drrraaammmaaa. Or, there were darker agendas at work.

The rise of the police procedural drama really illustrates this point. Shows like "The FBI", "Hawaii 5-0", "The Untouchables", "Police Story", and "Kojak" all snagged the lion's share of ratings back then--and shows like these continue to do so today. But at a deeper level, the police procedural is all about separating the good from the bad, and bringing "justice" to crime victims by discovering the "truth" behind a particular crime. Audiences love that stuff, because it's a no-brainer. There are the bad guys doing bad things over there, and here come our good guys to make them pay--the dramatization of polarity.

It proves to us that the world is basically black and white, good vs. evil, a place where crime doesn't pay, and if it does, it's only for a little while--and the longer it does pay, the harder the fall. This is comforting psychology to take refuge in, as life became more and more complex and the grey areas continued to expand into the 21st Century.

Mass entertainment media like this has, in my view, too much power and influence over casual consumers. TV is already one of the greatest of hypnotic medias, with its rhythmic scanning of electrons across a framed screen with the viewers' attention focussed on a small area. It's actually outright hypnotism. And now these days, with tiny digital dots in dense arrays, it's the very essence of high definition mind control.

And if you were wanting power over a society, well, TV is THE way to go. Throw in subliminal messages and images, and you've got a recipe for creating a hoard of unthinking, unreflecting zombies with emotional "on" switches and little self-control. You've created a polarized society, which is exactly what any power monger wants to see, because a divided, polarized world is easy to control, and easy to profit from.

The point I'm laboring to make is that the more we become aware of the darkness, the more important it is to embrace the light. Embracing the light is not the arduous task the perpetrators of the dark side would have you believe, because we ARE ALREADY LIGHT. Consciousness IS light. So it's just a matter of being what you ARE, as you face what you are not. Yes, we all have that popular "dark side", and we've stored a lot of power in there in the form of unconscious energies we've purposely created or agreed to. But that doesn't mean we have to automatically be victimized by our own dark choices.

Just observe it all--get into spectator mode about your own mind and attention and where you control it, and where you allow it to be controlled. Get into the non-duality of mindful awareness. There is no "good" or "bad"--just different states of energy. For all his simplicity and good intentions, I believe Andy of Mayberry really knew this to be true. And, yes, all police training should definitely require a nice, long visit to Mayberry.

What Healing Really Means

I woke up suddenly the other night--it might have been the thunder of a Kansas spring, or a nearby train whistle in this railroad town--with a distinct voice in my head. Actually, a loud voice in my head: "There is no 'out there'!", it seemed to rant, then a short pause, and, "External, internal--it's all eternal."

I turned over in bed onto my back, staring at the ceiling slowly being illuminated by the early morning light, with a faint patter of raindrops, and comforting far-off thunder. I found myself reflecting back on a conversation I had with my younger brother, where we had both concluded that we had "not signed up for this"--meaning human physical life. He was bemoaning making certain choices that he felt powerless to change, and I was offering up what seemed like lame platitudes about the perfection of the moment and the "master class" of three-dimensional living. We both realized we were referring to opposite ends of the same spectrum.

The loud voice continued: "You are the eternal. You are life." At this point, I really wanted to fully wake up and track where this commentary was coming from. So as I looked around, I realized I had said these things to someone, and now they were echoing back to me.

I've been going through some uncomfortable shifting physically. I wouldn't go so far to say it was a healing "crisis", but it is a healing, and it has been painful. I was on a "Zoom" conference call last night with three shamans, and had related this bit to them, and one of them said, "You are releasing your unconscious into the eternal, and your body is resisting it." They all nodded, and I remembered that loud voice. What if what we call "healing" is more a matter of bringing what is internal and external into the Eternal?

The most basic of bottom lines is that we are all eternal consciousness that has simply agreed to muck about in this thick earthbound density for a period of time, and after we're done "mucking around", we release whatever grasp we have on physicality, and retreat once again into the Universal Field of Consciousness.

I think that because I have been characterizing my stint here on Planet Rock as "mucking about", that is probably what I'm here to heal. All the resistances I have about it, and the resistances I have to what happens as a result of it, is really what I have been called upon (by myself) to re-contextualize.

When you're a rebellious renegade like me, after 60-some years of pain, suffering, and observing the transitory nature of it all, it ends up seeming like a joke. But I'm coming around to the Truth of it: I'm here to make the internal and external eternal. I'm here to live my life to reflect back to me the eternal, infinite nature of what and who I am. And if I can do it HERE--of all places--then I've really DONE something for the Universe at large. I've contributed to a morphogenetic field that bridges the duality of life and death. A field that says I am love, and that I am always here, and I have never been anything other than that, and never will be anything other than that.

So what "healing" really means is to heal the lie of death that would have us believe we are not eternal, victimized by the false construct of "in here" vs. "out there"--the death we create by not believing that love is all there is, and not understanding that creation and destruction are the same thing.

Hence, by claiming that "I didn't sign up for this," it is a direct denial of the eternal love that could potentially transform the Universe. Rather jaded of me, don't you think?

Let's transform all the little, petty complaints--deaths, really--into grand commitments to and expressions of the infinite and eternal love we all truly, and most basically, are.

That Mystic Broadcast of Oneness

It was around 1986 when one night I woke up with an "announcement" in my mind: "The mystic broadcast of oneness emanating from every point in the universe." I remember gazing at the ceiling of my room with that message reverberating through my being for a long time, as the faint light of early morning grew to illuminate the entire room.

From that experience was born the concept for the Mystic Broadcast Network, which at the pre-Internet time, I envisioned as a broadcast network of radio and TV stations with programming that enhanced higher consciousness and human evolution. I could not in a million years have conceived of what the Internet would bring a few short years later, with literally millions of video and radio channels, where anyone could have a voice.

As the Net rolled out, it seemed perhaps that early broadcast I heard was getting picked up by the general population, so maybe there just wasn't anything for me to do, personally. But, as time wore on, and the Internet turned into millions of idea bubbles, rigorously defended and attacked by other idea bubbles, I realized I needed to revive the original idea of the "broadcast of oneness", so I put up my own internet radio station that I felt was true to my original vision.

I tell this story as a result of a couple of things that happened to me this past week that showed me deeper context about that broadcast of oneness.

One of my favorite consciousness raconteurs is the late Terence McKenna. In one of his talks posted on YouTube, he makes the point that Nature is continually ramifying into more and more complexity and uniqueness. He took that idea much further with the development of his Time Wave Zero Theory, where he posited a Transcendental Object at the end of time that was driving all creation toward it with infinite novelty. He even graphed a "Novelty Curve" across human history. He derived the Novelty Curve by running millions of random samplings of the I Ching hexagrams through a computer algorithm, and found that the longer the algorithm ran, it represented increasing novelty, much like computing "Pi" out to billions of decimals. He then placed a graph of this up against human history, and found that the peaks and valleys of novelty corresponded to the ups and downs of human technological and political development. These correlations were so exact and profound, he concluded that there had to be some sort of overall "oneness" algorithm that was driving the whole thing.

I spent a long time studying and mulling this over, and have come to the awareness that only within oneness can there be uniqueness. New possibilities can only occur when the oneness of the infinite is factored in. What we call "infinite" is most likely all the possibilities of life we are not aware of. And were we to step outside the dimensions of existence, we would probably see that what is newly created requires the sum total of what exists, otherwise, how could it be unique?

The other thing that happened this week, was that my shaman friend and mentor, Janet Barrett, had me on her podcast to discuss "curiosity" and its role in consciousness. As the conversation sauntered along, we both started saying stuff like, "Most of what is created is simply picked up by the mind as a broadcast of a previously existing idea." And, as I mentioned from a George Carlin quote, "If it's true that we are all from the center of a star--every atom--then we are all the same thing. Even a Coke machine or a cigarette butt in the street in Buffalo, are made from atoms that came from a star. They've all been recycled thousands of times, as you and I. And therefore, it's only me out there. so what is there to be afraid of? There's nothing to be afraid of because it's all us."

A Facebook friend was doing some market research for her new book today, and was asking everyone if we even read email messages from subscriptions we'd signed up for. I snarkily replied that I wouldn't have subscribed if I wasn't going to read the messages. But then she followed up with me, asking what specifically would cause me to open a particular message. I came back with, "Well, whatever I was resonating with at the moment--whatever broadcast I was tuned into at the time."

After I had commented, I sat for some moments reflecting on what I am tuned into, and I realized that question is an excellent one to ask as a mindfulness exercise. What broadcasts are you listening to, or watching in life? How do those broadcasts make you feel? What content do you want to put into your own broadcast? Because, whether it's incoming or outgoing, those broadcasts are what is being reflected back to you as your life right now.

By tuning in to that cosmic and mystical broadcast of oneness, you allow infinite possibilities to become available, and from there it begs the question: Which broadcast of possibility do you prefer? It very quickly starts to become real that every particle, every wave, every point, everywhere is broadcasting its own program, as it entangles with and resonates with other points of broadcast that combine and manifest as unique creations--always in motion, always changing, always responding to your attention and intent. So, BE that mystic broadcast of oneness from your own life, and fling open the doors of infinite possibility for humanity, for Earth, and for the Universe.

Living in Possibility

Have you had this experience? You wake up in the middle of your sleep cycle, and suddenly everything about existence makes sense, and meaning washes over you in a timeless wave of knowing. You are caught up in a cosmic moment of understanding and feel suspended in time and space with your whole life laid out in front of you like a three-dimensional mandala. Well, this happened the other night, and, of course, upon officially waking up later, I had trouble remembering the dream and the experience. But it returned slowly over the last couple of days.

As I contextualized the experience, it became about living in the unknown, but completely without fear, knowing everything was in its right place and correct time. The tendency, when confronted with uncertainty and larger unknowns is to start doing what's been called "predictive processing" with the mind. This takes the form of worry, or obsessively computing and conjuring outcomes based on known data. It's actually a bad habit, because when actual outcomes start showing up, nine times out of ten, they are nothing like what was computed. Yet, for some reason, we keep doing it--probably from a sense of disempowerment and a feeling of being out of control, where at least you can control your imagination by creating scenarios.

Deep down in the behaviorial DNA there's a gaping fear of not being, and I think what we may think of as a terror of the abyss or void, is actually excitement about infinite possibility. Excitement and fear have been shown to fire up the same neurons in the brain, and most of what goes for fear of the future is learned. This lies outside the purview of a perceived existential physical threat, but we tend to lump anything "unknown" into a threat, hence the fear of the future.

The irony is that, as non-physical entities, we cannot NOT BE, but the over-identification with our personas, body, and other identity markers we use to interact with others sets us up for "losing it all" or just plain "losing it". Now, I've been there a few times in my life, and it really seemed real at the time, and for some time after that, but as events sauntered on and perspective was gained, I can look back on these "losses" as necessary wisdom teachers.

As I have begun to embrace this "living in the unknown", I have started to re-frame it as "living in infinite possibility." The habitual tendency of the mind and emotions to worry has now become a signal to observe how past perceived traumas have left their mark and sculpted a terrain of avoidance--much like keeping your hand away from a flame, or not moving when in pain. These areas of avoidance get activated when circumstances appear threatening due to perceived lack of information. I have started to simply let all that go, and instead embrace the excitement of not knowing what wonderful infinite possibilities are precipitating all around me to become gloriously visible at some point.

Along these lines, I've been experimenting with spending money--a big area of past trauma for me--and have started to notice that everytime I would spend, say, 50 bucks for groceries, 50 bucks of income would shortly show up--within a few hours or days. In two cases, the amounts were nearly exact, which made me start looking at this in the first place. I had no idea beforehand where these monies would be coming from, and in most cases, when I am scanning for sales or income sources, I'm completely surprised about what shows up instead.

By letting the unknown be unknown, it takes the limitations off of what is possible. Just declare it: "Show me something amazing", or "I don't know or care how, just show up!" and then remain mindful in the moment, observing the coalescence of events and circumstances as they unfold to answer your intent.

I've also noticed that worrying doesn't seem to have any affect one way or another on the manifestations. The problem with worry is that it is a way of stressing the body and is debilitating. It's better to re-frame worry into excitement or curiousity, spot the past trauma, observe it, and then remain mindful in the present. The sage and I Ching master, Wei Po Yang, when asked about what he had learned from a lifetime of studying the I Ching, said, "To worry is preposterous." Why would he say this? Because all of life is in support of being, and only when we cut ourselves off from that support by low self-esteem or self-destructive programming, do we repel that support.

Life makes life, and even death makes life, so either way, you're gonna be alive one way or another. Why not accept the excitement, the support, and the love we all have inherent in being?

Healing You

I've commented before in previous writings that I have a semantic aversion to the concept of "healing". From a non-dualistic point of view, "healing" becomes a matter of judgement about how we feel about our bodies and lives, and has little to do with the reality that how we express in our given incarnation is perfectly who we are being. No harm, no foul.

That said, from a day-to-day experience of life in linear time, we most certainly become aware of dysfunction and pain leading us to look for a way to "heal". At the core of these dysfunctions, pains, and unwanted conditions, are inevitably unconscious patterns we've created in response to experiences--usually traumatic or extreme in some way, either physically, mentally or emotionally.

The deep-down reality of the situation with disease and dysfunction is that we created or adopted--many times unwittingly--negative experiences that, because they were negative, we decided to block them, or denied them, or shoved them down into a dark hole of forgetfulness. The problem with doing this, is that the energies of the experience are still active and reactive in the present moment, even though we've quite thoroughly forgotten their origin or intensity.

Complicating matters is that every time these reactive experiences are activated, it affects the entire field of consciousness, and this is what I am addressing in this essay.

The harsh or ecstatic quantum truth is that we are all connected as conscious and unconscious energy vortexes. All of our perceptions and experiences, whether conscious or unconscious, affect the entire quantum field of life. On the day to day, we don't really observe this directly due to social mores, cultural memes and contrivances, yet we are all affecting each other with every thought we experience, every intent we create, and every action we take. And, this includes all that previously created and sequestered reactive energy we've placed in the denial box of the "unconscious", waiting to be triggered at any moment.

The important thing to realize here is that for every unwanted condition, denied energy, and latent trigger, lies the opposite, that when addressed and brought to present attention, causes a discharge, and so is no longer unconsciously reactive. What initiates this process of mindful attention can exist anywhere in the quantum field of life. Meaning that your "healing" is inevitable due to the increasing and expanding conscious present awareness of all sentient life in the universe. This is why it is possible to "be healed" by another person, animal, or entity.

Often it is just a matter of asking for the healing, and in the asking, the "field of sentience" sends back the resolving energies causing the disease or dysfunction in the first place. Of course, if we believe this can't happen, or "know" this "isn't the way it works", that serves as a barrier and further isolates the unwanted energy within the dark cauldron of our Unconscious. On the other hand, to become aware and in allowance of the reality that our unconsciousness is waiting to discharge upon our request or demand, then healing occurs.

Nothing happens without our permission. My favorite book on this subject is Alice Bailey's Esoteric Healing, wherein she makes this exact point. As a healer, without the full consent and trust of the client or patient, no amount of moving energy or discharging it is going to have an effect.

Therefore, the seeking of healing requires that the seeker be fundamentally willing to re-perceive what energies lurk in the dark cave of unconsciousness, and to reach out to the Sentient Whole to find and remind how, why and where we blocked or denied the energies of an unwanted experience. And in so doing, let go of these blocked or previously unseen energies, so they may contribute once again to our life and to the expansion of general universal sentience.

Healing has always been an inside job, and in acknowledging that reality we not only open the flood gates of our own healing potential, we also open the possibilities for others to be healed, ultimately serving the entire conscious collective. And by reaching out with intent and purpose, we call in the keys to unlocking the prison of unconscious energies, and free ourselves as well as our beloved fellow beings into infinite possibilities.

The Transcendental Object at the Center of Creation

Looking back on 60-odd years, I notice I've made it my business to follow some of the latest discoveries and trends in consciousness. It's more of a spiritual practice, actually, and allows a "quantum of solace" outside the normal noisy racket of my life. And every once in a while, I get a flash of insight about what this universe actually is, my place in it, and what life really means. Not to say I personally had any original thoughts in this field--just that every once in a while, I'm able to poke my head behind the curtain and see what's going on--or at least take a stab at describing what's going on.

My first real glimpse into cosmic discovery came about in a cliché way back in 1971 during a psychedelic experience. The gateway was "Orange Sunshine", and the experience was: "I saw what god was". I couldn't talk about the experience for years, but I've thought about it for over 40 years, and boiled it down to levels of consciousness, and among those, God Consciousness. This is something we all have access to (without taking psychedelics), it's just that our mundane aculturation, social training and--dare I say--American-style dismay with spiritual pursuits, puts us at a disadvantage when it comes to experiencing altered states of consciousness.

The thing about this first touch of god was, it terrified me. I mean it really scared the bejesus (pardon the pun) out of me. To the point where I was sort of stunned spiritually, where I couldn't even read a spiritual book or talk metaphysics for a few years after that.

But, as life paths go, I was returned to consciousness research from none other than my paternal granddad, a Baptist Minister by training, and a proud Irishman by birth. He gave me Teilhard de Chardin's The Phenomenon of Man, a pretty heavy read for a 20-year old--for anyone, any age, actually--and it pulled me out of my terror of my god encounter into an intellectual pursuit of proofs of god. This is a revered practice among Christian mystics, and I realized that under my granddad's jolly jokester Irishman act lay a true philosopher of magnitude. At any rate, I plowed through this dense tome a couple of times, and came away with a more rational view of what had happened to me that fateful night at the hippy dance.

De Chardin puts forth a series of thought experiments that bring you to unavoidable conclusions about the existence of god. He summarized that we are all "gods" in our own right (near blasphemy for his day), and that by merging into this universal consciousness, we all can have this divine experience.

Fast forward a few decades, and I was at a local ski resort on a two-night weekend gig with a band, and Sunday afternoon I was minding my own business eating a sandwich at the club where we were performing, and suddenly found myself looking at something in my mind that took me aback. It was a single sphere sitting there in my mind, much like the monolith in "2001: A Space Odyssey". I was like the apes jumping around trying to figure out why it was even there. And then came a thought: The entire universe emanates from this particle. Hummmm... OK. It just seemed to make sense, without any explanation--a self-evident display.

Fast forward another few years to Terence McKenna's "Time Wave Zero" theory, and we hear that there's a sort of transcendental object at the end of time, and that everything happening back from this "object" is a reflection and expression of that object. Time flows into this Transcendence like a vortex of water flowing down a drain, and it is entirely made of thought. This theory was enhanced by Kurzweil's Singularity--where all consciousness is moving toward a single point of universal thought.

THEN, a couple of scientists recently took the leap and mathematically proved that there is, indeed, one object from which the entire hologram of the universe emanates, and that it is a double tetrahedron (such as representations of the Star of David and the Sri Yantra). This accounts for all geometries, from spiraling galaxies to the double helix of DNA.

THEN, last night... I was watching the final episode of "Grimm", where our hero, Nick Burhardt, battles the ultimate evil only to watch in horror as all of those he loved are murdered by it. And just when poor Nick is about to give up and hand over the key to universal destruction to the evil guy, he is visited by his deceased mother and aunt--both powerful Grimm shamans--and together they defeat the evil, sending our hero back in time to when everyone he loves is back together again. His mother said, "The power of blood--the blood of you and all your ancestors--are more powerful than any evil."

The take away for me was that we all have within our own Being access to all the power, knowledge and love in the Universe, and it is ONLY a matter of Being Who We Truly Are. We are all not only Children of God, but also the Father of those children, having our Being in cosmic love and trust that everything there is, is who we are: The Transcendental Object at the center of Creation.

The Only Necessary Thing

Back when I was a much younger man, my shaman guide at the time told me, "About ninety-percent of what you're doing is unnecessary." And like most of what he said back then, it went sailing straight over my furry little head. I remember chuckling ironically at the statement, but it stuck with me, although it wasn't until recently I actually understood what he meant.

Necessity is really an anathema to quantum living. Why? Because necessity, by definition, requires there be just one solution. This or that necessity is required in order to function. Or, we can't solve such and such a problem without this particular necessity. The thing is, once something becomes "necessary", it reduces infinite possibilities down to zero--not a way we want to go with limitless quantum living.

This is not to say that there aren't such things as "logical steps" or "system requirements". In the quantum sense, such things are really more like chosen possibilities, rather than "necessities". You decide to go down a certain path of action, and, yes, there are predictable things that happen, and they may even seem like they are required. But from a quantum perspective, when things start becoming necessary is when we need to step back.

Socio-politically, "necessities" are really code for getting others to give up personal power. We hear about these necessities from people in power attempting to use "necessity" as an excuse not to explain or be open to creative input from other people. "We must do this because it's necessary." No it isn't. There is always another way besides what is necessary.

If we cancel this Code of Necessity, we reclaim what it is to create a greater, grander life. Living by the Necessary Code will put you in slave mode, and can be an extremely compelling way to limit yourself and those around you. Instead, how about checking the melodrama of necessity at the spiritual quantum door, and re-evaluate situations from the view of possibility?

Possibilities trump necessities in this game of quantum living, and by throwing off the shackles of what is necessary, a new and expanded version of things comes into view. Things that are necessary obscure a more efficient, better way of doing something. And we're back to what my teacher was talking about with the ninety percent.

And yet, beyond all the analyzing, planning and doing, there is one ultimate necessity, and I think this is what my teacher would have said next--had I really gotten what he had said at the time. THE ONLY THING NECESSARY IS TO BE. We cannot not be. It is a necessity of creating life. It is the cause behind everything. By focussing on what it is to BE, we create a giant shortcut to the realization of our dreams and desires.

This gets down to a basic tenant of quantum living: The universe you are experiencing is the reflection of who you are being. Want to change your life? Be something else. In this equation there are no requirements, no necessities, other than BEING. Sure, there are always things to do, but those things are reflections of who you are, and they don't have to be the "necessary requirements", limitations, shoulds and shouldn'ts of a slave's life. Those are all ego constructs that complicate and tangle up the infinite simplicity and infinite possibilities of you just being you.

If you can take a moment, and take a look at what percentage of your life is a necessity of doing compared with simply being, you may find some new ways of approaching life's situations.

Just be. Breathe. Step back. Ask for infinite possibilities, and then watch the complications, worries and necessities fall away to a panorama of ease and joy.

Just be. It's the only necessary thing.