Twenty-five years ago, millions around the world huddled in the quiet dark on New Year’s Eve, afraid to leave anything plugged in:
The Y2K bug threatened to disrupt the world’s computers when they tried to switch from 19-something (1999) to 20-something (2000). Maybe electrical circuits would explode, maybe electronics would garble or fry. The world’s mechanical infrastructure had been built on 19-something.
The feeling was primal, with only firelight at midnight, hushed, listening beyond the crackle for noises from the wider world, for what might be approaching.
I still enjoy not personally knowing how much was raw paranoia, or how much disaster was averted by extreme preparations.
This year feels similar in tone, with so many unknowns on the horizon – prospects of unpredictable, abrupt changes in governance, society, economics, militarism, technology, trade, weather, our entire context. For me, it has the flavor of the best science fiction, which creates new worlds from the question “What if…” and stretches the imagination beyond the commonplace, beyond the event horizon.
I think that’s why I’ve temporarily lost my taste for long-form literary sci-fi: the actual world is stretching my imagination as far as it wants to go. (Flash fiction is an intriguing option, since that’s what life feels like at the moment.) Nonetheless, the miasmic mood, and the need for extra ways of knowing, reminded me of a long-ago favorite set on a planet inhabited by gigantic sentient spiders, complete with personalities and relationships, power struggles, dynasties. The spiders’ speech translated the vibrations they felt in their delicate legs touching intricate strands of webs, in the scents of everything in their environment.
This moment seems to call for an expanded human sensorium – to be re-invoked with each new moment. The only “resolution” for the new year would be the kind that comes with clarity, as in a picture, witnessed from a higher vantage point. I’m proposing a refined set of sensors for this resolution, so we can remain alert and awake while dramatic changes come toward us, without becoming exhausted, overreactive, nonplussed, or shut down – either as creative artists or just plain humans.
To optimize this moment-to-moment approach, in admiration for the sensors of the insect world’s multiple eyes, I designed a grid of nine lenses we can see through when something unexpected and unsettling arises. (This is also great for “layering” a work of fiction, adding depth and complexity to characters, if you’re reading this as an author.)
Along the horizontal axis (our horizon, rippling outward) are Self, Other, World. So many events now come through the World-window (vibrations of the web), designed to hook us with threats and promises, it can be useful and even relaxing to have these mental file folders to contain them. We’ll then have time to discern any potential real impact on our Self or the Others around us. If the Others near us are concerned, we have a file folder for them too, till we can choose how to respond, without being swept into contagion.
On the vertical axis (the ver root meaning turn, like verge and converse), from the ground up are Body, Cognition, and Subtlety (not the usual Body Mind Spirit). “Body” has the clearest consensus meaning. I’ve seen thousands of definitions of “Mind” (from heart-centered toroidal energies to superficial AI replications to universal consciousness), so I chose Cognition, to be clear it’s about mentality and intellect. I used “Subtlety” to include not only spiritual and intuitive insights but also emotions and subtle energies – all the unformed yet real motivators of our existence.
Although Body, Cognition, and Subtlety are interactive within us, signaling and resonating together, altering one another in feedback loops, there’s still value in considering them separately. I hope each reader here will fine-grind their own lenses to reflect their own deepest understandings.
Practicing with the nine lenses can lay down new neural pathways and modulate our way of perceiving the world, while also unearthing old reactivities buried in the nervous system. At first, processing and nine-lensing a previous disorienting event establishes the pattern, which gets faster and more instinctive with repetition because the results are so pleasurably eye-opening. The nine definitions derived from the horizontal and vertical axes ask different questions:
* Self-Body (where do I feel this physically, and what is the feeling telling or asking of me?)
* Other-Body (what was/am I sensing from this other person about how it affects them?)
* World-Body (what effect is this having on humanity as a whole?)
* Self-Cognition (what do I think about this, and what it might do to or for me, and is it my own thought or someone else’s?)
* Other-Cognition (do I need to work harder to understand what the other person is trying to say, or to know whether they understand or mean it?)
* World-Cognition (what is the state of access to real information about this, and what are the most apparent misconceptions?)
* Self-Subtle (what am I feeling about this, intuitively and energetically, and why?)
* Other-Subtle (what does the Other seem to be feeling about this, and why?)
* World-Subtle (what do I sense is the spirit of the times, and can I expand my impressions?).
Another beauty of activating the lenses, besides diffusing shock and heightening the capacity for wisdom, is flexibility through time: a change experienced through one lens doesn’t necessarily destroy an entire impression – though I’ve had orientations shift, in all nine perceptions, in a matter of minutes. Usually, “reality” shifts lens by lens, allowing a more gradual emergence as new insights commingle and influence one another.
All it takes is a pause, a sort of short-term fog, to give the lenses a chance to deploy.
Photo Credit: Pixabay