Bends of Light

Calling All Alarm Clocks

I just realized something about intellectual space. I need more of it. So do you, very likely. Taking on the task of being an alarm clock in a world of sleepers is no small thing, but it can lead to a feeling of confinement on diverse levels, like being stuck in a waiting game. We’ve been awake and holding space for a very long time, disseminating the message of “time to wake up” in various creative ways for long enough, persistently enough to ensure it’s been acknowledged. We work in tandem with universal wake-up calls and those have been dished out in loud plenitude. Especially lately.

Perhaps it’s safe to say that the message has been heard. All the Whos down in Who-ville are shifting into the big “Aha!”. If not all, then a big chunk. Especially lately. There’s a general hum that indicates beds being made, newspapers snapping open, coffee brewing. Sleepy eyes are adjusting to the light. Now we can stop acting like crazed alarm clocks and sit down for a minute. Maybe there’s a slumber we can wake up from, too.

Have a cup of coffee with me.

I’m taking a look at what I’ve done and what’s ahead, just beyond the edge of the full plate. Through the window, just past the edge of the curtains. Many creative ventures I’ve spun off, one after another, live out there in the field of what’s real. The discipline that goes with that, I’ve come to love. Even if I am admittedly doing it “wrong”, I’m doing it my way, ensuring that I’m contributing something unique, perhaps of some value and, I hope, of some merit. Keeping my inner eye trained on the beyond, I chop wood, carry water, and work toward the betterment of this world. That fits just fine with the rhythm of dancing with the things life throws at me. Discipline underlies everything.

Many alarm clocks are doing the same yet on separate paths. You, reading this, likely are, learning by doing how to redefine reality rather than conform mindlessly to a spurious construct thereof. Sometimes I feel like our paths are parallel, which contributes to a sense of being one in the wilderness, or in a rut; however, lately I’m sensing a convergence. This is a good thing, an exciting thing.

Do You Want to Play a Game?

In between building websites for what I’ve written, writing contemplations for clients and new public material (online location TBD), keeping up with twice-weekly posts, and doing the social media thing (not to mention necessary life and family things), I need to find quiet space to let my mind go on autopilot for a while. Vegetate. Work itself is meditation. Sleep is often too busy to count as rest, with the dreams I’ve been having. Especially lately. When the labor of holding up shields to silence the chaos gets to be too much, I occasionally fall into what my son calls “zombification”: basically, sitting on the sofa and letting my head empty for a few minutes. Just until the numbness of mental overstimulation dissipates.

It was during one of these zombie-moments when I chanced to answer a Facebook friend’s request to play a casual game. Normally, I’m averse to video games. I have a 15-year-old son. I see what it does to productivity, and I just don’t have time to lose time. But this time, I thought, maybe I’ll see what it’s about. Reality research. Yeah. Harmless, right?

Well. It was all well and good for the first day or two. A couple of rounds of hunting down words in a grid, seeing how many letters I could meaningfully string together in a minute and a half… perfect for those in-between times when I needed a brain break from the discipline of transdimensional writing in erratic conditions. But I soon saw the folly in my thinking. Before long, the game took on a life of its own. Ten minutes of benign phone-tapping translated into direct neural patterning. How naïve I had been! The game continued seething in my head long after the screen went black, long after my eyes were shut, dragging my brain in the wee hours of night around and around a 4×4 grid of light, one letter after another in a mad dash to make sense of random phonemes and consonant blends. There was no escape. There was no sleep. There was only one choice, and that was obliteration. I pulled the plug. Blessed relief.

Recognizing the Rut

At about the same period of time, also on Facebook, I had come across some bracingly unfamiliar terms in a post by a brilliant friend from my California days. As the elements from his podcast transcript filled my eyes and streamed into my brain, I felt enlivened with phrases and sentence structures refreshingly exotic. A new paradigm emerged, yet not new, but a fractalline emergence of awareness in remembrance. My brain started popping with the fervor of a spring meadow after a rain, the sunshine of intellect stimulating the bursting forth of new neural activity. I felt a sort of homecoming to myself. In my own communications, I had been for too long relying on the same vocabulary, feeling my parlance becoming dulled by what… repetition? expediency? that I was moving in a circuit of mental exercise without challenge. I knew I’d been in a rut, and reasoned that busy-ness had, to some extent, delimited my reach. Something that was by nature anathema to me had been stealthily settling in.

Let’s be honest here: when breaking new ground, the shovel can sometimes dig too long in one place. The road out of Rome is full of ruts thus fashioned. So, casting everything aside, recognizing a response to my universal call for a new flavor sensation to otherwise still-meaningful discourse, I found myself looking over a very appealing landscape of mind. Isn’t it like that, though? You send out a request, and a signaling beacon falls somewhere just beyond. The adventure in finding it is met with the joy of (self-)discovery. New space becomes instantly familiar, and remembrance morphs into deeper integrational awareness.

We help each other out of these ruts in a joint quest for higher ground. I have no doubt that help comes from outside the visible, tangible world of our senses. I’m also pretty sure that game-playing is intrinsic in the structure of reality, and that It has a very keen sense of irony. Case in point: Said podcast that got me out of a rut is, ironically, hosted by Jim Rutt. I kid you not. Dig it.

No Exit?

That silly (though admittedly charming) video game I had been playing, which had burned into my neurons alarmingly fast, was telling me something. There’s only so much you can do with 16 random letters in 90 seconds. Soon you start making the same words over and over and over, the same patterns in a pointless race to meaning within limitation, ad absurdum. Translating that to the real world, my work wasn’t lacking meaning—far from it—but I had grown accustomed to certain boundaries, certain patterns, and needed to break them down if I was to find a greater, more satisfying, more liberating meaning within it.

As more of my self comes together in the ceaseless quest for wholeness, I needed new food. Found it. Not only was this happy incident refreshingly stimulating, it was also a means to open what I do to new life. It is already effortlessly infusing itself into what issues from my mystic-mind-to-physical-keyboard circuit. It seems this way; we’ll see what happens next. At this moment, it seems a function of recent integrational resolution.

Isn’t it funny how easily the high ground of doing something new and groundbreaking can morph into territory so familiar it becomes unfamiliar? Without even noticing it happening, one day you look around and you see walls of earth where before you had clear views to the horizon, if not beyond. Ruts are dug without even noticing it. It happens all the time. It’s sort of a graveyard of creative pursuit. The only way out is to rethink what you’re doing, and pay attention to where you next put your feet. In fact, very little thinking is required, beyond deciding to extend your visual field. Engage with it. Letting go takes but an instant, and in that instant, your perspective rises and a new reality becomes home. Comfortably, invigoratingly, affirmatively so. Personal resurrection from the graveyard of intent is possible, if only you believe. After that, flight is inevitable.

Reconfiguring Reality for the Win

Having fine-tuned and expanded the Nine’s Path family of websites, I’m gradually shifting into preparation for the upcoming release of the feature film Lightships, based on my book Remembrance. That’s another story. Meanwhile, a new idea is brewing, challenging me in ways I’m finding intellectually and spiritually delicious. As with all things, I’m taking cues from higher dimensions of thought, from those threads of communication that filter through my awareness from temporal connections anchored in other coordinates of reality. Both the game nonsense and the podcast were necessary realignments. Job done. And with that, another fractalline emanation of creative manifestation begins to unfurl itself within.

Yearning for more and different space often signals having reached the edge of what you can currently be. The game—read into that whatever endeavor you’ve been “playing”—may have been fun but in truth, when you reach the limit there’s really no point in going around again. At that point, there’s no more of you that you can stuff inside your being under current conditions of mind and still make sense. Expansion is the natural next phase shift.

Message to Alarm Clocks Everywhere (That’s You)

As the world wakes up, there’s a lot of shuffling in the background. People are becoming aware of how tight the framework has become, tangled in the sheets, stifled in stale air. Dreams are shattering, and well nigh about time. Rising from the arms of Morpheus, the awakening ones naturally gravitate toward free expression of the energies of their truth; those truths in turn graduate into higher levels of understanding just how big the story we share really might be. A grand adventure awaits for them! And for us. We move as one opalescent organism of human beingness.

While the coffee’s brewing and the sleepers stretch awake, are you who’ve been ringing the alarm for so long ready to move to more comfortable quarters, as well? Are you ready to take on the challenge of ushering your mission to the next level? Have you got the signal that the time has come for an across-the-board upgrade? Relax, it’s happening. Keep doing what you’re doing with an awareness of how it’s shifting. Maybe instead of alerting people to the nightmare they’re waking up to, you can gently and effectively wipe grains of trauma from their eyes so they can see without fear. Rustle up a breakfast to fill them with something nourishing, concepts they’d been missing in the hypnotic dreamland of sleep. Challenge yourself to a good morning stretch; reach past the limits of what you think you can handle as far as mental flexibility. Beyond the edge, meet the energy that’s there. It’s invigorating, and will equip you to do what you’re being called to do.

As the growing light accentuates the shadows of things caught lurking in the dark, there’s no time to waste pattering around in what passes for a comfort zone. Soon, such things will become unbearable. Pay attention now, because your next step both redefines your limits and obliterates them. We move as a harmonic unit in this morning exercise. Every barrier that falls allows more light to flood the scene, all the better to see with.

Pathways we’ve trod in solitude march toward convergence. The singularity of transformation is calling matins. Soon, a new reality will be unmistakably upon us. May we usher it in with grace and loving respect for each other, that we all might witness something completely knowledge-shifting, and greet each other as new humans in a new world.

Message received.

The podcast mentioned this article is found here: The Jim Rutt Show with Daniel Schmachtenberger.

Find my books here and up your game to the next level.

© 2019 Maryann Rada, sharing permitted with link to original article