What if “God” is pattern recognition? I’ve been chipping away at my own Unified Theory (just as physicists have been trying to crack a Unified Theory that explains everything) and while it will go to infinity as a mystery, there’s a convergence of science and spirituality that has been my obsession, and that is the zeitgeist as well.
Christianity makes “God” into an anthropomorphized Father Figure in the sky, and other religious traditions have gods and goddesses and so on, but each of these are archetypes with specific vibrational frequencies that, when we have calibrated our bodymind to pick up the frequency, FEELS like a fatherly love or a motherly love or whatever the mythical figure might be.
But those archetypes arise from the human need for meaning-making and stories that explain who we are and why we are. We come from long lineages of storytellers who used archetype to convey narratives that give language to the underlying vibrational frequencies and the way they interact in the Great Energy Soup that is the earthly plane. But the stories originally arose because SOMEONE FELT THE FREQUENCY AND TRIED TO PUT WORDS TO IT.
We’re in an age in which the stories have fallen away – our oral traditions lost in favor of emojis, our “sitting around the fire” time supplanted by staring at devices, our cosmologies disrupted by technological advances that make origin tales seem primitive and irrelevant.
Which is good – because language, by design, divides us. The moment we put something into words, we are misunderstood. Understanding happens only at a superficial level through language. True understanding comes from the felt-sense. The receiving of a transmission – which may be transmitted via language if the spoken or written word is communicated in a way that invokes resonance – happens when we experience something that moves us. It may be music, poetry, visual art, or theater. It may be awe, inspired by something that technology allows us to see. It may be nature. But regardless of the medium, real understanding happens in the body – not with words. We feel the thing that is being communicated. We feel what is here now, in the present moment. We sense the presence of something ineffable – and recognize it as ourselves.
All of this simply means that trying to unify people by getting everyone to agree on a single cosmology would be nonsense, and rigid adherence to historic traditions is a way of clinging to archaic structures that must, inevitably, crumble as we evolve as a species.
We are all one, indeed. But we aren’t going to talk our way through our differences. We can only find unity amidst division when we can feel it. And that means developing a new skillset – a new form of intelligence that allows us to provide and receive transmissions that we interpret through the instrument that is the body. We already do receive transmissions via the body, of course, but because most transmissions we receive are hostile, coming from a harsh cruel world, we quickly learn to disembody and walk around as talking heads on a somewhat useful but equally frustrating machine (called “body”) that we don’t know how to operate.
The skillset that is needed is to upgrade our vibrational interpretation centers so that we can receive hostility, toxicity, cruelty, neglect, injustice, and all forms of suffering and alchemize these waveforms into higher frequencies, which we then allow to inhabit our body and inform our own transmission of waveforms into the world.
This means, creating fields of coherence within the bodymind, so that others FEEL coherence in our presence, which then feels closer to what we might label as the presence of God. (You know when you’ve been in the presence of people who live from tremendous coherence. Your whole nervous system relaxes and knows you are in a space that you can trust. That whole spectrum of felt-sense – from trust, to peace, to Love, to wholeness, to connectedness, to inspiration and joy and beyond – is the spectrum of frequencies that allows us to PERCEIVE what we label as God.
So how do we create fields of coherence? This requires looking at one’s experience through the lens of pattern recognition – to observe patterns of discord beneath the complex texture of our evolving circumstances, so that we can correct the patterns, and to observe patterns of “miracles,” synchronicity, and alignment in the everyday goodness that surrounds us. Through the skill of pattern recognition, we begin to see through new eyes – with vision that can see from beneath the drama and noise, observing the underlying energetic patterns at work in the rich texture of our experiences.
This pattern recognition skill takes us beyond the cognitive understanding that “we are all interconnected” (which comes from the paradigm in which we are separate objects, even if linked in interconnected ways) and into the knowing of ourselves as active participants in a dynamically evolving hologram that is us, expresses us, mirrors us, and entertains us with its busy array of detailed circumstances and unpredicted events.
It’s this experiencing of ourselves as holographic artists, each of us shaping the hologram of our collective experience in creative ways (whether consciously or unconsciously) that places us in the paradigm in which we know ourselves to be one with the whole – with the same creative power we call “God” but not because we are clever about manipulating reality with God complexes that are sourced from an embodied experience of separation.
Pattern recognition allows us to see the underlying architecture of spacetime – not so that we can manipulate that, too, but so that we can learn to align ourselves with it and work with the forces that have created our solar system, that make our hearts beat, that inspires our desire to be a contribution to our fellow passengers on spaceship earth.
That which we have labeled as “God” is not an external force outside ourselves. We are the living, breathing embodiments of this magnificent mystery – even if we’ve trained ourselves to be unable to perceive this, and continue to reinforce societal and cultural norms that ensure our children can’t perceive it either.
The big work on the planet right now is the metabolization of trauma – individual, transgenerational, and collective – as our bodies attempt to evolve into vessels that are capable of feeling the vibrational frequencies that we call “God” more consistently. We’ve got to purge our nervous systems and DNA of the painbody that we’ve been storing for generations – which means going in and doing the unpleasant work of “feel it to heal it,” one by one grieving all of our hurts, our losses, our tragedies. It seems backwards – that we should feel so intensely awful as we evolve into a species capable of more lovingkindness. But as we learn to experience “awful” as “awe-full” and witness our pain through fresh eyes, the pain dissolves and in its wake is left the purity of experience, which simply is.
All of this is to say, all the healing work we are doing right now, the grieving, the catharsis, the forgiveness work, the buckets of tears pouring as we feel deeply the horrific pain of our own and our collective human condition, IS the way we are bailing out the water from our own sinking ships, so they may become seaworthy vessels again. Unmetabolized emotions are what we feel as the collective weight that seems to be “sinking” us – but we’d rather drink wine and indulge in ice cream than do the extremely uncomfortable work of feeling the feelings that didn’t get processed in our childhoods, in our parents’ childhoods, in our great-great-great-great-grandparents childhoods. We’ve been through atrocious shit, all of us, and all who have come before. But now as we learn to allow the feelings to move through our bodyminds as waves of sensation, letting the stories bubble up from the darkness of the unconscious and into the light of awareness, observing the pain of the past with equanimous witnessing presence, we are valves on the pressure cooker of the planet, releasing that which is needing to be released. It can only come out through us, which is why our collective conversation is increasingly inclusive of “emotional intelligence” and the importance of feeling our feelings and so on.
But “emotional intelligence” is simply a stepping stone to the deeper intelligence that awaits us as we befriend the emotional layer of our being. Emotions are like the windsock at the airport – the windsock doesn’t fuel the plane or program the GPS, it simply provides information about which direction the wind is blowing. We need skills to know what to do, based on which direction the emotional “wind” is blowing, but that skillset only creates the alignment necessary to access the creative intelligence that lies deeper within our core.
Once we know how to interpret and work with emotions and no longer fear feeling them (the things we wish to avoid are only because we wish to avoid the feeling that we have associated with the imagined experience) now we can operate from a field of coherence – a vibrational field that feels peaceful because it is sourced from peace. And then we can create stories, artistry, innovation, and advancements in society that carry the energetic signature of this coherence, so that other people’s nervous systems are stabilized simply by entering the energetic field and feeling the power of what we’ve created.
This is what it is to be a holographic artist, sculpting reality with our own unique transmission of coherence, merging the worldviews of “science” and “spirituality” by operating from the felt-sense of the feeling. We can talk all we want about what or whether we think “God” is, but when that felt-sense is present, nobody cares what it’s called.