Off to Europe

Foreground: Thoughts on multidimensionality. Background: "How much will my carry-on hold?"

A Langley sunrise

“So are you excited?” Not yet. It’s t-minus 1 day until I hop Virgin Atlantic from Seattle to London, change at Heathrow, and fly Croatia Airlines to Split. (I’ve scheduled this to be published May 1—the day I fly.) Stretching nearly three months, this trip will be a long one. After a 12-day Road Scholar tour of Croatia’s southern coast, I’ll go solo and pretend to live however briefly in a series of cities and towns instead of jamming my schedule with sight seeing. First time to Croatia, a return to England, then France for the first time since 2000, Portugal for the fourth time, and home.

If the past is a guide, when the plane takes of I'll feel like a kid at a county fair with a cherry snow cone in one hand and a fistful of ride tickets in the other. Today I need to persuade everything into my modest carry-on and nail a diverse list of pre-trip tasks. However, this comes first, because what's been on my mind since We had a bet is multi-ness.

I sometimes come out of meditations thinking, “Wow! I have feet!” That surprise usually fades quickly, however, as I reorient to the 3-D. The states of multi-ness I’ll attempt to put into words here is different.

For one thing, it’s more subtle. It’s the sensory experience of existing in multiple dimensions, being in multiple octaves. Of simultaneously occupying multiple altitudes and aspects of self.

Calling the experience “simultaneous awareness of multiple levels of awareness” isn’t quite right. “Levels” conjures floors, ceilings, and separated spaces stacked within a vertical structure. What I’m speaking of is more continuous—an uninterrupted flow where distinctions among dimensions are like points of interest in a tidal estuary whose water flows upstream and down.

This can get pretty meta so I’ll try to convey this in a few ways.

The most memorable “multi” moments are like music, movement, color, and knowing all woven together. Their subtlety sometimes overwhelms me—that’s a deliberate contradiction. Almost color, almost sound, almost limitlessness, almost unity, almost infinitely varied distinction, everything on a verge, together adding up to something so lovely that I want to stay in/as/with them forever. As if Awareness is quietly using me to inventory itself and delighted by what it finds.

These experiences are multi-sensory and multi-dimensional. Here’s an example of what I think I mean:

A few days ago, just past sunrise, I opened the sliding door for some cool morning air. I was about to launch into quotidian busyness when my Self plunked me down on a meditation bench by door instead. I sat, closed my eyes, and listened.

The water in the harbor was nearly still and silent. Land and water birds began to move over, in, and on the water. I heard them cry, call, and sing. Mating calls, territorial disputes, the falsetto trill of bald Eagles on the bluff, goldeneyes, gulls, murres, and cormorants on the water below, morning doves on the roof, pigeons and crows by the boats in the marina.

Image, sound, texture—breeze on skin, patterns in hearing, rippling or stillness in the image, light on face, temperature differential between shadowed feet and sun-kissed forehead, sound of birds, ripeness of silence.

I stopped being Holly and became quiet astonishment. Stillness before and after each bird song connected all of it into something quiet and symphonic. All of that is the multisensory dimension of multidimensionality.

As for the multidimensional aspect of multidimensionality….

I can find myself laughing aloud at the sensation of my feet on the floor, my self in my body, with my senses cascading through perceptions while my inner world feels like a family of attunements in cahoots—an orchestra warming up with intention behind the cacophony and plenty of respect between the first and second chairs. Notes across multiple octaves. A conductor watching from the podium, baton ready.

Judi Sion and Tom Kenyon’s book The Arcturian Anthology describes Arcturian thinking as holographic and, if I recall correctly, eight-dimensional. These multi experiences are a bit like that. I believe they’re extending and deepening my ability to be and softening my attachment to familiar identity.

Back to the birds and the morning. When my attention turned inward from the symphony of sounds and silences to appreciatie the octaves of Presence I was feeling, an image arrived in my mind’s eye. I saw an absorbent surface suspended vertically within the fluid space of everything I was feeling. Like a fabric dipped in dye, the lower half was soaking in the frequencies of the sensory dimensions—sounds, sights, sensations. and silences—and depicting them as shifting gestures and patterns across layers and lines. It was a painting painting itself. The changes were slow and gentle, the colors as soft as the quiet water outside.

I was given the understanding that the lower part of the image depicted the physical and emotional aspects of this multi-sensory moment. The 3-D. And that the upper part represented whatever higher dimensions/frequencies the moment was touching into, in many, many layers. My attention was influencing the image like an apprentice’s brush. I heard the words “vast,” “tender,” “ever-changing.” And I heard an invitation: “Paint this.”

I’ve sketched it—a simple abstract, really, just a hint of a hint of what I saw and felt. I’ll keep sketching it as I travel, knowing it’ll never be the same twice. The way it felt matters more, but that’s where words fall short. If you watch this video, though, you’ll get a sense of it. Musician and future human Jacob Collier calls us forth.

While you watch and listen to it, try to notice every response you have, physical and non-physical. You might sway, sing, get goosebumps, shed tears, wrestle with your thoughts or scratch an itch somewhere. Do you feel any hunger and longing? Joy, sorrow, and hope? Homesickness? Certainty? Befuddlement? Awe?

Collier has a genius for reminding us what we are and can be. The image I saw was a glimpse of our innate vastness and wonder—the multidimensionality of our whole being—exactly what Collier helps us feel in this collaboration of willing voices. A sense of what already is, what we already are, and what is already possible.