by Heather June
I hear water music in my sleep: foghorns, and the scratchy voice of a Great Blue Heron, frogs in the marsh. There is the tide as it slides out, then rushes back-the ocean breathing in and out. I dream all the voices in a room filled with people but I can make out only snatches of dialogue, a little blond girl saying, “Change is a fast-moving current,” and a tall, thin professor who explains, “the explicate lies enfolded in the implicate.” Their hands flutter as they talk. A deep laugh sounds from the big bald man, a sweet little birdsong from the petite woman in a turquoise dress.
I dream my great grandmother is waking me up, a purple lotus in her open palm, her bright eyes boring into mine. She asks me, “Do you hear it?”
Let’s listen. Something powerful is happening. I heard a Hopi prophecy, something about the river of change and how those who try to hold onto the shore will suffer greatly.
I go to a synagogue in Seattle to hear Thomas Friedman, the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist for the New York Times. He says that the rich and powerful industrialized nations are losing their economic advantage by the nanosecond. Tools like the internet and Google have flattened the playing field of the world economy. He says NAFTA is not worth rehashing, technology has moved us light years beyond such antiquities. Our international relationships shrink to the screen on your desk, to the technician in India who reads the x-rays from Seattle. Friedman points out that in less than twenty years we’ve gone from hardly using e-mail to paying bills on line, earning a living on line, paying taxes on line, banking offshore on line. Corporations are not outsourcing purely to save money on labor, but also to cull the minds of the third world, the engineers, the physicists, and the computer technicians. We don’t even know what’s hit us yet, he says. And our politicians are not even talking about it. What sticks in my ears is how certain Thomas Friedman is that the acceleration is just beginning. The major effects of our technological quantum leap have only just begun.
A tugboat passes through the channel and its wake ripples to shore, wave upon wave.
Ever watch the wind move across the water? Ever see a boy throw a stone into the pond and watch the ripples circle outward forever and ever? Ever see an eagle catching thermal air currents, spiraling up and up, until it is impossibly high?
An eight year old girl named Gita asks her mother, “Why are we here?” Her mother thinks for a moment, and then she answers, “Maybe this is like some spiritual Kindergarten, a place where we learn what works and what doesn’t, how to get along.” Gita laughs. “Kindergarten? More like preschool.”
In March I flew from Seattle to Colorado. Whenever I leave the island, I realize how 20th century I am. I don’t have a remote control car lock and I’m not used to hurtling down I-5 at 70 mph in a steel box with other, larger steel boxes less than three feet from mine. I still hesitate when sliding my credit card through the magnetic strip at the United Counter to retrieve my e-ticket that I ordered on-line from home. I’m still amazed and relieved when the receipt actually comes out with my name on it. Also, I’m just about the only person boarding the plane who is not carrying on with someone on a cell phone.
As we taxi down the runway, the flight attendant comes on the loudspeaker, “At this time, all personal electronic devices must be turned off. This includes laptops, CD players, DVD players, cell phones, gameboys, iPods, BlackBerries, and I’m sure I must be forgetting something, but if it has an on/off switch it has to be dismantled before take-off.” When we reach a cruising altitude of something like 30,000 feet, she tells us we can turn on again.
Even at our cruising altitude, there is turbulence. I don’t particularly like turbulence. I like roller coasters all right, but those rides are only ten minutes long, not three and a half hours, and they aren’t 30,000 feet above sea level. It seems logically impossible. If we were outside the plane, we couldn’t even breathe. Louise Hay once wrote that she is old enough to remember when commercial airlines first became affordable to your average American, and back then those barf bags in the seat pocket in front of you were used quite often. Now, she notes, hardly anyone needs one. Back then the idea of flying was so foreign that lots of folks got nauseous and sick. Now we’re used to it. And truthfully, no one on that three and a half hour flight was sick from the nearly constant turbulence. Even me.
Snow falls at night in Colorado. I wake up near midnight and white covers everything, sticking heavily to the pine needles and the wood railings of my mother’s deck. A bright moon lights up the snow. The trees have shadows. I hear no cars driving by. The snow muffles the sound, except for an owl down by the creek. Who-who? Who-who?
The day after the snow, I read about the Hubble spacecraft in an old copy of Smithsonian Magazine (July, 2004). The Hubble is a space telescope that orbits 375 miles above Earth’s atmosphere, and, according to the article, “. . . peers through the mists of time.” The universe has been expanding since the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago. The farther away in space Hubble focuses, the farther back in history it gazes. “Perhaps the biggest surprise to come out of Hubble (backed by other instruments) is that the universe in not just expanding, but expanding faster and faster, . . . ”
People everywhere, even on Lopez, talk about how they don’t have enough time, there’s too much to do. Everything moves so fast. A fast paced life. Amy tells me about how yogis can still their minds through meditation. The stillness balances acceleration. This state is what many athletes call being in the zone, a sort of relaxed awareness that creates optimum efficiency and movement. We can all meditate.
Scientists who study time say that if we were to travel back in time several thousand years we would be invisible, because our vibrational field is faster now, too fast to be seen by the eyes of those living in the past. Is it true? We know if we could move faster than the speed of light we could travel into the future.
Our eight year old son, Jed, learned about Runescape from his friend Chris. Runescape is a free, on-line internet game. It is a quest style game, you create your character, in Jed’s case a knight, and you earn points by fighting battles or by trading jewels and gold and weaponry with the other players. Being alert against graphic violence, I check out the game, but what I see on the screen are animated characters hashing it out with swords, which I’m somehow more okay with than submachine guns and hand held missile launchers, so I deem the game acceptable. But I’m so 20th century, I’m not even looking for danger in the right direction. Two days later I’m driving Jed and Chris home from school and they’re talking about their adventures on the game the night before, and how another friend of theirs (who shall remain unidentified) was text messaging and including a cuss word or two. Chris threatens to turn said friend in, which would mean he’d lose all his life points and possibly get kicked off the site. I stop the car, “Wait a minute. You were e-mailing him through the game?” Chris and Jed look at me as though I’m crazy. Old and crazy. “Yes,” they say, in unison. “Why did you stop the car?”
“You mean, you can all play on-line at the same time, AND you can talk to each other THROUGH the game?” I feel like I did when I first watched the film, The Matrix. The kids look at me again like I’m old and crazy. “You’re not supposed to cuss,” Chris says, slowly, as if I don’t speak English. All I can think of is how I was comparing guns to swords and meanwhile, Jed is playing online with up to 50,000 people at the same time, all over the world, and any one of them can talk to him. I decide we need to talk about the information we give to strangers online. I talk with my husband about it and Billy gives me a run down on all the positive and amazing aspects of this technology, but he agrees we need an internet safety talk. The last time Billy watched Jed play, some girl from Australia traded him 5 gold coins for an iron mace. We talk to Jed about how the girl from Australia might not be who she says she is. Or she might be. But you don’t give your address or phone number to anyone playing Runescape.
I can hear Thomas Friedman’s voice in my mind. He’s talking about the founder of the independent airline Jet Blue, who used the same computer technology that Al Quaeda did. Jet Blue employs Mormon housewives in Salt Lake City to do bookings on line from their living rooms, while the terrorists put their tools to more tragic use. The results are a matter of intention.
Have you ever planted broccoli by seed? Each seed is less than half the length of a grain of rice, and perfectly round. Literally thousands of these seeds are produced from one broccoli plant gone to flower. And each tiny seed can grow into a two by three foot broccoli plant with large blue-green leaves and a gorgeous, heavy head of broccoli. You know how you can break up a head of broccoli into little florets? And each little floret is like a miniature copy of the whole head? The science of quantum physics tells us that this is how the entire universe works.
Holographic images. There’s probably one on your credit card, a rainbow colored design on a metallic square. Mine is the image of a bird in flight. If we shattered this image into little tiny pieces, each little piece would contain the bird in flight. Perhaps not as sharply outlined, but the form is there.
DNA works similarly. Every cell in our body contains the map of our DNA. Quantum physicists say that the brain contains the map of the entire universe. Our brains are holograms of the holograph called the universe. What this is saying is that every part of the universe contains the information of all the parts of the universe. Let’s say that inside every one of us, inside every single cell, exists all the information in the universe.
Two months ago, Carmen told me that there’s evidence that human DNA is changing. Geneticists have discovered a third strand of DNA appearing with the traditional double helix in some children.
While in the Queen Anne district of Seattle, Billy and I go to see the film, What The Bleep Do We Know? It reminds me of the philosophy I studied in Boulder, about paradigms and consciousness. In the film many scientists discuss what is known about time. All of time is one continuum, which is to say that the past, the present, and the future all exist at the same time, right now, they are a continuous whole series; a thing whose parts cannot be separated or separately discerned. Those of us who aren’t scientists only get about half of this concept. We all understand that through our actions today we can affect the future. If I buy beef at the store we will have steak for dinner, but if I buy Halibut, we will have fish. The part we don’t get is that, because time is a continuum, then we can also affect the past. In fact, it is impossible not to affect the past by what we do in this moment, because the past is just as connected to the present moment as the future is. It all exists right now.
At sunset, I watch orange light playing on the water. Sparkling. When the tide changes you can see the currents running opposite each other in the channel, one going north, one going south. A flock of buffleheads comes in for a landing then disappears one by one below the surface, staying down a long while. They pop up to the surface randomly, one after the other. To watch is to laugh in delight.
I hear the quantum physicists are coming to the same conclusions as the ancient mystics. Consciousness informs matter. You know how for years we couldn’t figure out if light was a wave or a particle? Energy or matter? Then scientists determined that it depends on how you look at it. Light is both a wave and a particle. Light is matter. And light is energy. It all depends on the subjective focus of the observer. From this follows that there is no objectivity, ever, and that our minds affect everything. Our thoughts affect concrete matter, even rocks, even buildings, even stars.
One night I was driving home from work to the south end and I saw the Northern Lights like I’d never seen them before. Not only were there greenish blue streaks glowing in the sky, there were waves of light rippling across the surface. As far as I could see the dome of the sky was a fine net with light pulsing through it in waves. I stopped the car and got out. To look up made me dizzy. It was so enormous, so amazing, so luminous, so beautiful.
Traditional magic fascinates me. It always has. Good magic, like the mother I read about in the paper who wakes in the middle of the night in Denver and knows that her daughter in New York City is in trouble. She calls her daughter in the middle of the night and lo and behold, the daughter is so weak and fevered from a sudden lung infection that she can barely pick up the phone.
Somewhere around third grade, after my own incident with fire, I heard about people who can start fires with their minds. It’s a psychic ability present only in a very small percentage of the population. After reading Stephen King’s novel, Firestarter, I learned how important getting a handle on our power is. The little girl didn’t want to use her psychic ability for bad reasons, but when she got hurt, fires spontaneously started in her presence. Let’s just say she wasn’t completely in control.
As a child I read about monks who spontaneously combusted and yogis who could levitate. The fact that people exist who can defy the supposed laws of physics thrilled me. I loved books and movies where witches moved objects with magic wands and wizards started thunderstorms with a staff. I believed it all. My great grandmother could tell when you were talking bad or doing wrong. I swear she felt it with her mind.
In the film, What The Bleep Do We Know?, they tell a story about the first Europeans arriving on the shores of South America by ship. This is recorded, apparently, in historical texts. Nothing like these boats had ever been seen before and the natives on the beach did not see the vast ships on the horizon. It’s not just that they didn’t notice them, they did not even see them. There was no reference point in their consciousness for the existence of such things and so their minds (and eyes) simply could not see them. Only the Shaman of these natives in the story noticed anything. What he saw was a change in the pattern of the waves on the sea, and he could find no explanation for the change. So he simply looked, for hours, for days, gazing out at the horizon, until he slowly began to see, visually, the outlines of the tall ships coming toward shore. Then he told the rest of the people on the beach, and eventually, with much effort and description on his part, they too could see the ships, because they now had a context for them, the story told to them by their Shaman.
If people can learn to walk on red hot coals and not burn their feet to crisps, then surely someone as evolved as Jesus could walk on water.
Another scene shows a physicist from India sitting at an oblique angle to the camera. He says that nothing is solid, not in essence, not at the subatomic level, where things are particles and waves. His eyes twinkle. “Does this mean the chair is not solid?” he asks. “Yes. If we could believe that the chair is in fact energy, then the chair would not be solid.” If I remember right, he giggles as he says this. He knows what the Shaman did, that there has to be context for this new reality, or we cannot believe it. But the more we describe it, the more likely it is that others will see.
I dream I am at home on the land and my friend Irene brings me a large bunch of red beets. The next day, I look it up in a book on dream symbolism and it says to dream of beets indicates that the dreamer needs to appreciate the love relationship in her life.
Waiting for the ferry in Anacortes, I go to a bookstore. A blue book with a snowflake on the front catches my eyes. It’s so pretty. The title is The Hidden Messages in Water by the Japanese scientist, Masaru Emoto. Emoto uses high-speed photography to capture ice crystals as they form in freezing water. His photographs reveal that crystals change form when specific, concentrated thoughts are directed toward them. Water from springs and water exposed to loving words shows brilliant, complex, and colorful snowflake patterns. Polluted water, however, or water exposed to negative thoughts, forms incomplete, asymmetrical patterns with dull colors. (Book jacket cover, The Hidden Messages of Water, Beyond Words Publishing, Inc., 2004)
Water spoken to with love and gratitude forms the most brilliant and complex ice crystals. Water spoken to negatively forms ugly, deformed crystals, if it forms them at all. Amazingly, Emoto’s water responds to these messages whether they are spoken or written. Water that was shown the typed words “You are beautiful” formed the same brilliant crystals as it did when the words were spoken. When shown the typed words, “You fool!” no crystals formed. Emoto believes this is due to the spirit of words, and by that he means that words have a vibration which is communicated to water, whether written or spoken.
I heard a group of monks in Boulder singing the Om thing, and the feeling in the room was all vibration. Om. My fingers tingled. My chest was vibrating. The hair on my arms raised up. The glass windowpanes vibrated the way they do just before an earthquake, the glass warped a little, as if it were liquid. I thought about those commercials on tv where an opera singer hits a high note and breaks a crystal wine glass. That isn’t just theater, it happens.
Emoto echoes other physicists when he says that existence is vibration. He says, “All things vibrate, and they vibrate at their own frequencies. When you understand this, you will significantly broaden your understanding of the universe. The fact that everything is in a state of vibration also means that everything is creating a sound.” When something creates a sound frequency and another responds with the same sound, they resonate.
I hear neurobiologists think that our minds are morphic fields, and repeated thought patterns cut grooves into our brains, creating neural pathways in much the same way that rivers are formed. Negative thoughts create certain patterns, tributaries of electric energy. Positive thoughts do the same thing. What’s been verified by brain studies is that once a pattern has been established, it is easier for the mind’s energy to go down the same pathway again and again. You know, like a rut. In fact, it takes about three months to form new neural pathways in the brain. However, once positive thoughts and new patterns begin resonating, they gain momentum and ripple out into the morphic field, expanding into all morphic fields, ultimately affecting everything.
I dreamed I had to climb a high mountain in order to see my great grandmother. It was in Colorado at high altitude and I was hot and sunburned. I had forgotten water and sunscreen so by the time I reached her I was so thirsty I thought I would faint. She handed me a tin cup. “Drink,” she said. “Drink for all the people who have no water.” I laughed at her. She shook her knobby little finger at me. “Who are you to think you don’t affect this world?” she asked me. She kissed my hair and sang me a song in Gaelic.
Just prior to an earthquake, Emoto could not get ice crystals to form in any type of water. Not tap water, distilled water, polluted water, blessed water, water he played music for, nothing. He checked and rechecked his instrumentation, wondering what had broken down. Later, he heard about the earthquake halfway across the world and realized what had happened. All the water on the planet had the information concerning the earthquake. Water is a supreme conductor.
You know that saying, things happen in threes? Or the one that goes, “If something happens twice it will happen again?” According to Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, when the same thing repeats itself, a morphic field is formed, and resonance with this morphic field increases the chances of it occurring again. Events are capable of resonating in the same way sound resonates. The repetition of similar events is called morphic resonance. This is similar to the hundredth monkey phenomenon. Or the way the natives couldn’t see the European ships at first, until the Shaman did, and then they could.
Humans are water. The average human body is 70% water. A fetus is 99% water, and a body dying of old age is 50% water. Humans are mostly water and as such are privy to the same information that water is. Emoto’s message is that all water responds best to the vibrations of love and gratitude. We can heal ourselves and the polluted water around us by focusing our thoughts on gratitude. “Whenever you sit in front of water and send out messages of love and gratitude, somewhere in the world, someone is being filled with love and gratitude. You don’t need to go anywhere. The water right in front of you is linked to all the water in the world. The water you’re looking at will resonate with water everywhere.”
There are choices.
Let’s choose our thoughts-let’s change the morphic resonance of our energy. Consciousness is vibration. Gratitude and love resonate at a higher frequency. What the world needs now? More love is what we need.
Oh yeah, remember that Hopi prophecy about the fast moving river? There is another part to it. They say, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” Maybe the Hopi will redeem our polluted world, perhaps they are the chosen people. I want to believe it applies to every one of us.
My water thanks your water for listening.
©2005 Heather June