We haven’t a clue. Like Humpty Dumpty, all the science and all the text books can’t begin to touch the billions of years of living intelligence Carly expresses each moment. We live in our cognitive bubble which is the very tip of our intelligence iceberg, the vast majority of which operates silently beneath our conscious awareness. We think we are so smart, so educated. We haven’t a clue!
Two moments, two events help reveal what Joseph Chilton Pearce calls cracks in our cosmic egg, cracks in our self-world-view, what we call reality. Viewing reality through the crack, we catch a glimpse of who we really are and what is possible. We are infinitely more sensitive, attuned and intelligent than what we ‘think.’ In many ways we are blinded by what we think.
A dear friend slipped in the shower. He fell straight down, crushing three vertebrae in his lower back. It was and is a terrible accident. Four or five days after major surgery Carly, a friend Joseph and I paid this poor chap a visit. Carly had never been to a hospital. Carly was being carried by Joseph; we entered the room and pulled back the curtain. The first thing Mark, the patient, said was, ‘Oh, dear Carly. She must be frightened by this old man.’ Carly rested her head on Joseph’s shoulder and there she stayed for our thirty minute visit, attentive, present and completely silent. Carly was not afraid. She understood immediately that this poor man was in pain and that his psychic resonance was muddled (by the medication he was forced to take).
Original play researcher Fred Donaldson, PhD, shared long ago how wild animals are sensitive to what I will call psychic resonance. Being so utterly domesticated and conditioned, human beings are anything but wild, anything but natural, whole and sane. To animals in the wild the ‘vibe’ we resonate is crazy, not to be trusted, and animals still having their innate intelligence intact act accordingly. They disappear or do their best to scare the crazy humans away. Carly, being preverbal, lives in this non-intellectual telepathic field of resonate intelligence. She was quiet, empathic and sad at our friend’s condition. I cannot imagine a more appropriate response. The moment we left the hospital room her head came off the shoulder. She began to move and express interest in her usual way. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we were as attuned, empathic, immediate and appropriate with our responses to life? Imagine the state of the world if this were the norm.
Another crack in what we consider to be reality happened today. I have a small office at home and print large format photographs in the garage. This afternoon I happened to be printing, guess what – an image of Carly for Joseph who was with us at the hospital. I have been planning on installing track lighting in my office. Out of the corner of my eye, while the printer was doing what it does, I saw a two foot strip of white track on the floor partially covered by stuff. There is no way Carly was physically attracted by the glance. I sat her on the floor and prepped a large paper cutter that would finish the print. Carly marched over to the pile, removed the strip of track and played with it on the carpet for just long enough. I was stunned.
Physicist David Bohm used the term ‘shared meaning.’ Carly was sharing meaning with Mark at the hospital, immediately, like a wild animal, with keen attention and appropriate behavior. Here she was eavesdropping on my fleeting glance, not the outward physical glance, the inner image we call conscious perception or something even more subtle. And this resonate shared meaning is going on all the time. But it is so quiet. This shared meaning flows beneath what we call thought and words. In fact, I am convinced that this subtle psychic eavesdropping gives meaning to the words we use. The word-name stands for the physical thing and for the mental meaning, this nonverbally resonance being shared. The pre verbal child is highly attuned to this shared meaning. I remember my second son sharing this resonate intelligence. And I remember how it seemed to dim or be pushed aside as language developed.
In the Academy, part of the Imagination and Play series Joseph Chilton Pearce describes the tremendous entrained energy and attention that is required to create inner images that correspond to the flow of words we use. It seems quite obvious, at least to me that this highly focused and very specific quality of attention is not attending to the subtle shared meaning Carly is experiencing and responding to today. One nail drives out or displaces the other, but not completely. This subtle shared meaning is still there, operating with its immediate and appropriate intelligence if we are present enough to notice. Being with Carly reawakens this connection with its kindness and appropriate compassion we share with all life.
Last night’s political debate is a good reminder of the pervasive insanity that sets in when we lose this. It is no wonder that animals in the wild run and hide. Environmentalist Bill McKibben posted a sobering editorial in the Boston Globe: “While the nation debated the relative size of Republican genitalia, something truly awful happened. Across the northern hemisphere, the temperature, if only for a few hours, apparently crossed a line: it was more than two degrees Celsius above “normal” for the first time in recorded history and likely for the first time in the course of human civilization.” We are really quite mad.
Like Humpty Dumpty, no one at the Mad Hatters Tea Party, what most of us consider normal, can even begin to grasp how far we have drifted. If Carly’s shared resonance were the norm we would not be in the terrifying social, moral, economic and environmental state we are in. In a conversation with a very sane Tibetan Buddhist scholar and humanitarian it was noted that ‘egos exploiting egos is the source of all our problems.’ The ego isn’t a thing. You can’t find the ego hiding no matter how hard you look. What we call ego is a very confused mental state when what is imagined pushes aside and blinds us to this subtle appropriate shared meaning that is very present and alive in Carly Elizabeth. Distracted by insane media and buzzing, beeping technology we are no better off than lemmings. Take a walk on the wild side with a nineteen month old and the world is full of hope.
Michael Mendizza