The Secret of Life is Enjoying the Passage of Time

 

 

More than forty years ago, James Taylor recorded a song with this refrain: "The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time."  This musical lyric has been playing in my head all month, and I believe it to be true.  As the words have been percolating deeply into my psyche, I find myself relaxing into greater and greater levels of contentment and an underlying sense of joy.  

Allow me to digress for a moment into the physiological anatomy behind all of this.  The autonomic nervous system of our bodies is comprised of two basic parts, the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous systems.  

The sympathetic nervous system is our 'fight or flight' mode and it is our common response to stress.  This is where we are all charged up, our heart rate increases and our kidneys release adrenaline.   When our sympathetic nervous system is engaged, we are on our guard and ready to go, full speed ahead.

The parasympathetic nervous system is our 'rest and digest' mode. Here our bodies can tend to housekeeping and maintenance.  We are relaxed, our heart rate slows and we are at ease and can undergo repair.  Too often in modern life, this aspect of our beingness is over-ridden by stress and the cares and concerns of the day, leaving us in an unbalanced state.

For a healthy nervous system it is best if we allow both these modes of being to occur, perhaps giving a little more time to our parasympathetic mode, in order to even out the balance.  When we take the time to pet the dog, cuddle the cat, smell the roses or gaze up into the blue sky, even if just for a few moments, we are tipping the scales more toward that balance. 

It is worth our while to note that our internal mental climate is so often controlled by habit.  We do have choices.  And sadly, we sometimes choose to develop habits of being self-critical, or routinely pessimistic, or even being easily offended.  These types of thought habits put us in that 'fight or flight' mode.  Should we choose instead, (using our will and consciously directing our attention,) to notice what is beautiful, right and good around us, we shift our energy into a calmer more relaxed way of being.  And this is not only a healthier way to be, but is also a much more enjoyable way to spend time.  All it takes is a little self-observation and a tiny bit of conscious effort.

Now, I'm not saying that we should ignore the world's suffering.  Our advocacy on behalf of what we believe is right and good in the world can be a passionate and very positive use of our sympathetic nervous system.  There is a time and a place to vehemently defend what we believe in.  But I feel that it is best if we don't allow it to habitually completely consume our light.  We can also have gratitude and give ourselves time to remember and enjoy the beauty that we may have been fighting for.

A great healer and a friend of mine recently told me some profound wisdom and I typed out on a piece of paper.  

He called it "The A,B,C's."  

"A" is for Awareness.  (Be) Aware that I have choices.  

"B" is for Breathe, Better.  When we Breathe Better, we pause, we take a moment that allows us to relax or rethink our stance just a little.  

"C" is for Choose, Better.  I can think about how to Choose Better.

My friend is a healer of the physical body, and this was intended as a first response for injury or trauma, but right away I noticed how in my life his same wisdom could also be used for my mental, emotional and spiritual health as well.  Why not find ease and grace in my mind as well as in my body?  So, I leave you with these beautiful A,B,C's of his and the secret of life, which is enjoying the passing of time.

 

P.S.  Vote.

The ABC's of Intuition

Intuition is the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning. This is a natural human trait, but for some of us, it is not so easy to access. Outside influences can be mistaken for our own inner perceptions. Memories and old patterns can masquerade as guidance. Please enjoy this hour long talk on how to learn how to listen to, cultivate and trust your own intuition.

© Josephine Laing 2018

The Quantum Mechanical World and the Nature of Consciousness

My friend and favorite scientist, Rupert Sheldrake recently gave a talk at the Royal Geological Society in London called, "Is the Sun Conscious?"  This is a wonderful topic and I hope you get a chance to listen to it.  In it he speaks about the work of Alfred North Whitehead, an English mathematician and philosopher from the last century.  Rupert explained that Whitehead proposed a "philosophy of organisms," seeing the whole universe as an organism and stars and planets as organisms, including Gaia, our own planet, as an organism.  This is of course an idea that has gained considerable popularity in our time, following the work of James Lovelock, during the 1960's. 

Rupert explained that Alfred Whitehead also saw crystals, atoms and molecules along with, of course, plants and animals as organisms.  This holistic philosophy of nature treated organisms as self organizing systems with their own goals or purposes.  This is one of the properties of consciousness, having a goal or a purpose.  Rupert went on to say that living organisms or any organism has goals and purposes.  Then he showed how Whitehead used quantum theory to point out how this might work.  I've transcribed this part of Rupert's talk and would like to share it with you now, as my blog this week, because it is such a lovely and simple primer in some of the basics of quantum theory and also of consciousness.  So, here we go.

"Whitehead then went on to point out how this might work using quantum theory, where matter is no longer just stuff, matter is a process.  An electron is a wave, everything in quantum theory is made of waves and waves take time to wave.  You can't have waves in an instant.  Think of a wave in the sea, if you take an infinitesimally thin slice of a wave, it is no longer a wave, it's impossible in terms of a wave.  This is the ultimate reason for the Uncertainty Principle in Quantum physics, because you can't localize waves in space or time.  They are spread out in both. 

Because they are spread out in time, it means that every material thing is a process, and that a material process has a past and a future, because it is spread out in time, and it has a direction in time.  And whitehead used this as a way of approaching the mind body problem.  Normally people think of the mind as the inside and the body as the outside, in the external world.  People talk of the inner life, the mind is within, using spacial metaphors. 

But Whitehead thought that the best way of thinking of mind and body was in time.  The mind is the future pole of the organism, the body is the past pole.  The future pole is concerned with possible actions.  And this is true even with electrons, the spread of the wave equation tells us all the possible things an electron could do.  And when it interacts with something is what people call "the collapse of the wave function."  Of all these possibilities, only one is actually realized.  That's a measurable observable fact, but it is immediately in the past.  It's now a physical fact, and immediately a whole new set of possibilities opens up, in the new wave equation, which are in the future, or the virtual future.  And when the electron decides, or the wave function collapses to one of these things, again, you get something in the past, a material body, like a measurable fact. 

Now, he (Whitehead) thought our minds worked the same way, our minds are principally concerned with possibilities.  Consciousness is an arena of possibility.  And the function of our consciousness is to choose among possibilities.  We all had many possibilities for this afternoon.  And we chose to come here and to be here out of all of the possible things we could have done.  We made that decision.  We brought it into actuality by coming here.  It's now a measurable fact that we are all in this room.  We can be photographed, weighed, measured etc.  And our minds are now opening to new possibilities.  

Now, our habits are generally unconscious and don't require the consideration of possibilities.  Consciousness is about consideration of possibilities in this model.  It gives us a way of thinking about consciousness and what it does."

Isn't that a lovely description?  To me, with this, Rupert harmonizes the quantum mechanical world with the material world.  And he does it through a brief peek into the world of consciousness. 


© Josephine Laing, 2016