Adam Blatner

Okay, this is a bit mythic, and speculative: The cosmos breathes, the rate of expansion and contraction operating along the course of what in mathematics is known as a sine wave—not a spike, not a square wave—but gradually then faster then slower then that sequence going in the opposite direction. It becomes more complex and then more simple, it builds and then dissolves. Stars, civilizations, ideas, fashions, all rise and fall in a sine wave, a kind of rhythm. So in much faster way does sound operate that way, at thousands of cycles per second—and this is the meaning of chanting the sacred syllable Ah-oh-oo-mmm (Om)—it’s a vibration!

In the sine wave of change, it takes a bit of time to get into the most rapid rate of change. It warms up gradually. On the surface in some ways, nothing much seems to be changing. Lots of little changes are accumulating in different sectors, but they’re not yet in sufficient communication to build on each other. Then gradually they do enter that phase and things speed up, change builds on other change. Then it overshoots a bit, clogs up a bit, gets tired, and it’s time to reap the benefits, digest them, let go of old forms. Looking down the middle of this it’s a circle— a cyclic process. From the side in three-dimensional space it’s a spiral. In two dimensions it’s a sine wave, like DNA.

Our age is especially fruitful—it represents the rapid upward slope of a cycle, harvesting and synthesizing more and more that which came before, reaching at times even over to the lessons that can be learned from previous cycles and declines. For the last few hundred years technology, politics, all sorts of aspects of humanity has been enjoying “progress,” and now it’s speeding up. We can almost intuit the side-effects of too-much-ness, the need to cool off, pull in, slow it down.

This is the dilemma of the postmodern world. For centuries more much will continue to speed up, but already no one person can keep up. Wisdom involves no longer just expanding, but also contracting—and doing it intentionally, not reactively.

Now, getting mythic: God at this point in this sector of the cosmos is enjoying the continuing process of differentiation and integration: There seem to be more elements giving rise to more elements in every field. We are seeing subtle variations and sub-variations and the problems that go with these. A must not be treated as A-prime, even though they seem almost the same. They’re not. Well, they are, in some ways, but not in others. That can be said of what’s happening in thousands of fields of exploration, discovery, adventure, invention. It’s happening in play and costume-dress as well as  in physics and astronomy. It’s happening all over the place in psychology.

And in your own life, as you begin to recognize the many roles you are asked to play, the many roles you do play—more or less competently—you can begin to feel stretched thin. It’s worse if you feel that you’re supposed to have a more limited and coherent identity. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to maintain such a way of being. Some folks, though, get spread to thin, and they know it, and they suffer from it. So there’s also some validity in pulling back, focusing, sacrificing some goals so that others can be more realistically and fully enjoyed. The game is doing this with more consciousness rather than simply reacting to the various pressures of life. Hm?