Poignant synchronicities unfolded as I drafted a post about qualities of time, to celebrate the Equilux (March 16 in my latitude/longitude) and the Equinox (9:15 a.m. PDT on March 20 everywhere). Two days before the day of equal light and dark, my web connections filled with affectionate remembrances on the passing of Stephen Hawking, most famously the author of A Brief History of Time.
As glad as I’d been, during a recent editing project, to have known that Dr. Hawking had updated his theory of black holes, I was delighted to see a brand-new quote from the maestro on the topic, closely related to what I was planning to blog about: one article mentioned Hawking’s “radical new view, which he sums up cheerfully as ‘if you feel you are in a black hole, don’t give up, there’s a way out’.” (This, he said, is in the waves around the outer edges of black holes, made of zero-energy particles that store information previously thought lost forever. They persist and are not dragged down forever.)
I was writing about Quality Time as a way out of the emotional black hole into which so many in my web connections seem to have plummeted. Many are struggling heroically to find a way out of anxiety, resentment, despair. The way out feels like a retrieval of inner information about transcendent joys that have been cloaked in the sorrow of natural loss, or fear about the threat of loss, or anger about losses past, present, or future. The retrieval is called soul retrieval in some circles, disidentification in others, or deconstruction, neuroplastic rewiring, alchemy. The core idea is recognition – first intellectually, then emotionally and viscerally – that the dark reactions arise from a temporarily hidden awareness of the light side, an interior polarity of preferences that’s been constructed from life experience. My particular idea is to use the experience of the dark feelings as a flashlight: it can illuminate what we care about, prefer, value. Seeing the bright dimension of the polarity, noticing both of the extremes at each end of a phenomenon, sets the next step in motion.
Slow deep contemplation of the value being threatened (what is it that I treasure?) opens the psyche up to what that value feels like, inside, as part of one’s self (when did I first feel wonderful about such experiences?). The feelings that arise will likely emerge in multiple vibrational octaves, a sort of personal music that resonates with “preferences” for physical safety at the lower octaves, for positive self-regard in the lower middle, for love in the upper middle, and for panoramic insight and transcendence in the upper registers. The temptation to leap out of the pain and separate into a dissociated state is completely human and takes uncountable forms. Awareness of this temptation can be an ideal prompt to generate compassion for all us embodied folk – importantly, including the self. For me, the key is to develop new neural pathways between the experience of pain and the experience of the treasure (using the flashlight to discern the polarity – not sinking into the dark, or repressing/dissociating).
My first venture into explaining this was emergence from a mild disappointment – missing a chance to photograph blooming trees at their peak. Once the pattern is developed – sadness as a trigger to remember the joy – bigger and deeper pains can be transformed, though they may take a little more time. Thus, bigger and more powerful delight, once unlocked and activated, can pulse into the individual’s atmosphere and ripple out, magnetizing and activating joys from everywhere. There’s no need to pretend the pain was never there, no need to downgrade it as something unworthy, no need to keep feeling it in order to honor whatever/whoever was loved, admired, or appreciated. Sometimes the shift happens instantaneously, and sometimes it unfurls in cascades of revelation that last for hours or days.
The next step is allowing the remembered joy to suffuse one’s entire interior – to become it, to develop a self-sense of being made of this energy. This, to me, is Quality Time: the zero-energy rim around the black hole of existence, a bubbling circle that carries all the information and cannot be destroyed.
Photo Credit: Matthew Bowden via stockxchange