… for hitting its edge with your toe or elbow? Are dense objects sensitive to our emanations, be they kind or malicious? Call me quaint, but when I collide with a door frame I apologise, press the sore spot to the point 
of impact and send the pain back, assuming the wood tolerates it better than my soft tissue. It’s a long-honoured small-scale experiment with disentangling subtle vibrations. It works for me – pain and swelling ease miraculously. Try it, for fun.
We accept that people, animals and plants retain the pulse of our attitude to various degrees, from shock to nonchalance, yet how about the rest of nature, down to solid rocks and stones? I assume my relationship with what I see, touch or think about is reciprocal, for better or worse.
As in receiving and sending waves, I converse with my body, with trees, shrubs, flowers and creatures. I caution spiders not to come near my sleeping space. I have heart-to-heart chats with my house, laptop, car, and all manner of things. I say thank you to what I value and depend upon and even use little mantras conveying something like – all is well – I hear you gasp. I do this to disrupt mindless automatic response patterns. With people, I admit, it’s way more complicated.
I reckon all known and unknown life is moved by a force we poorly understand. Call it by any name, god, spirit, psychic energy, the ghost in the machine, it is a power that works throughout the cosmos, including the things we create, like tools, art, furniture, buildings, machines, weapons, ships, cars, trains, planes, phones, computers. As we project our pleasure or frustration into gadgets and the autonomous functions programmed into them, nature’s energy currents flow and oscillate through all, the whole universe.
I conclude that nothing is dead, lifeless, artificial and of no consequence.
Thomas Vaughan puts it poetically: ‘The real world is invisible. Thus in the physical or spiritual or light world – all forms or beings – stones, trees, stars, streams, men, flames and turds are really facts of invisible presences. Mineral, wood, fire, water, flesh are terms of dense soul-full sense.’
During recent centuries, western cultures developed multiple viewpoints. But what is happening to this wonderful diversity, given the hyper connectivity of the internet, where the masses turn for guidance, where people empowered by visibility offer opinions that swing back & forth in dramatic ways? Is this the dawn of a new tribalism that blanks out the unique contexts and realities of individual minds? One has to have one’s wits about these days.
In his time, Walter Benjamin wrote: ‘Technology, instead of liberating us from myth, confronts us with a force of a second nature just as overwhelming as the forces of an elementary nature in archaic times; our need for a practical philosophy of self-knowledge has never been greater.’
You see where this is going … autonomous technological devices will be no less interdependent than us, relying on social cohesion, the spin of politics, networks that harvest electricity –like, a solar flare could halt all digital utilities on this planet. So I wonder about it all, given there’s much we don’t understand about the forces that govern nature, and the input human consciousness has towards its geometry.
My Sufi friend, Fazal Inayat-Khan, said once in a lecture: , ‘Let us look at reality as a sort of operating faith, a sort of subjective, self-created assignment of realness … It is radiant intelligence which creates reality.’
Or, in another lecture: ‘The experience you have within yourself of your separate identity, to allow right and wrong to be re-defined by your singular contribution, is where evolution really happens. You, by becoming yourself, can open a new wavelength.’
C.G. Jung spent his life mapping the deeper structures of human experience, the collective unconscious, archetypes, and the shadow. Now that a collective mind is mirrored back to us, magnified on screens via the internet, it present an ideal opportunity to explore what is emerging for the collective psyche in the gap between recurring states of balance.
The flashing mirrors of the media blind me at times. Wary of the hive, I also like to belong. When fed up, in need of digestion, I retreat to a cave in my mind (once real) where I attend to what bubbles up from the unconscious in that zone between dreaming and waking, until I emerge from my cave into the light of a new reality, new beauty, new meaning and new questions.
This post is not about social, political or spiritual affiliations, but shares an attitude that aims at openness towards the unknown.
And I wonder what my readers think about conversing with dense objects 🙂
… “If we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly understand who we are and where we came from, we will have failed.” Carl Sagan
Course of Mirrors 
Yes, and thanks to emergence, we can talk not just to the door frame, but to the whole house! Not just to the dead battery, but to the whole car. How will we talk to the whole person?
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The bloody consistent challenge. Not many around.
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hmmm, i guess that’s an interesting point of view.
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Well, thank you.
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i bump on things a lot – i”m blind so that’s inevitable – and although i don’t curse the things i bump on, i don’t apologize either.
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You may have won a truce with things you bump into.
Sharp pain makes me impulsive, at first.
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Hey, I converse with them all the time. It’s all energy, it’s all alive, consequently it all responds, so why ever not? :–))
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Precisely 🙂 ☼
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I never talk to dense objects, but I so
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….sorry. I was going to say something about dense subjects. Always fun to read a bit of metaphysics in the morning, after the proudest of course.
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Sorry what? You may enjoy this story https://courseofmirrors.wordpress.com/2011/06/16/how-my-dad-was-attacked-by-a-tree/
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Lovely post Ashen thank you! I’ve sworn badly when stumping toe or knocking into the dishwasher with it’s door open but quickly forget about it – but this gives me cause for pause. I do talk with just about everything in my environment and also that which is invisible eg the wind and I’m glad to read your post which affirms this. Have a great upcoming week!
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Thanks Susan, glad I’m not the only odd one out 🙂
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Ashen, I just wrote a blog post somewhat related to your thoughts here (and which is reinforced by reading your thoughts!). Will finish and share tomorrow. As for your feelings about inanimate objects, I often impute feelings or a certain awareness to them as well. Especially if something is broken and/or needs to be discarded, or has suffered some injury or injustice! I like your idea of the transference of energy with them, something I had not articulated but also feel. As always, much to contemplate here and I’m grateful for that.
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Thank you, Mary. I like the way you put this … Especially if something is broken and/or needs to be discarded, or has suffered some injury or injustice! … Presently my lawn mower must have swallowed something unsavory after being faithful for many years. One bonds with things. I’ll be looking forward to your post.
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Now I know why I have an affinity with horses, and why I seldom see slimey snakes when I walk in the wilderness… I’ve also recently wondered at the art displayed by a burly woodworker, when he came to remove a heavy wardrobe and, little by little, all on his own, coaxed it through the door and into his van.
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I love horses too, not snakes, thought they are fascinating.
And yes, there’s an art with things. I used to manipulate ridiculously heavy things, cupboards etc, up and down the stairs, very slowly, resting edges on a cloth. Don’t do that anymore. But I admire people who have a kind way with things, and who can fix them.
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Thanks Ashen. A practical reminder that, at least according to much contemporary scientific thinking, what we conceive of as “objective reality” arises from consciousness….not the other way around. That being the case, perhaps we can conceive of being as a cacophony/ symphony of vibrations, a projection of the one eternal (timeless and spaceless) vibration….like an infinite orchestra where each instrument plays according to it’s score but is most of the time unaware of what the entirety sounds like. There is no vibration which doesn’t matter or doesn’t affect the whole.
How could the door post and I not be in relationship or be affected by each other? We are of the same essential being, projected from the same mystical center.
Love
Rob x
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We can’t help it, in the infinite orchestration of the cosmos we’re both, a cacophony and a symphony of vibrations ☼
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I loved your thought-provoking post. To be honest, I haven’t apologized or cursed anything that I have bumped into, but I DO talk to inanimate and animate aspects of nature that surround me. On my walks, the Universe daily receives my opinions. I wonder if it has plugged its’ ears tired of listening to me whine. On the other hand, maybe life and the world will work at changing… I hope! I have decided it is past time for me to finally be heard so I’m working at expressing myself to the world. Communication is useful no matter how we use it. Keep giving the world a piece of your mind!! 😉
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Thank you, Gwynn. No matter that it took you a while to let rip. I can only imagine the kind of things you aim your sharpened humour at. This made me laugh … Keep giving the world a piece of your mind!! 😉
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The Universe it’s sentient, therefore we can communicate, and small, and great miracles can happen. 🙂
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Yes, our thoughts and deeds may be random or causal, carry love or bad will towards life – nothing is lost, only transformed, and miracles do happen 🙂
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