We can all hum, while some also sing
People resonate with others at an inner heart level when they hum as an act of kindness, simply to be present in the action. Different pitches and volumes, tuneful or not, from lower belly or mid-chest or voice box, it matters not. Your hum will convey something of value into the group – which is your willingness to hear and be heard. But withholding your ‘presence’ may turn the enduring love of ‘life shared with others’ into a curious grief-like atmosphere, as others search the silence instead for the presence of loss or hurt. The atmosphere will change out there, because they want you to resonate.
I don’t mean ‘out there’ as if in some separated spiritual realm ‘beyond this world’, although of course that might be equally true; I mean ‘out there’ in the sense of physically connected, by sound waves through material air through our sense organs receiving remote inputs. By this we intuit embodied life unfolding from our shared ecology, a bit like flowers opening their fragrance in a garden, or a choir filling a resonating hall with joy.
For ten years I sang only moderately well in a four-part choir while exploring how the Eastern Orthodox Church made sense of life. It was fascinatingly different to the rather harsh way that the Western Church makes sense of life, and the music was different too. But singing is the same anywhere, in secular settings, kitchens, out in the cosmos on a clear night. If I hum or sing the same note as another person, I can feel the resonance vibrating physically in my chest, connecting me into the wider movements of life. It is an experience very close to intuiting a spiritual realm.
The Power of Choice to hum my personal values
For me, that exploration was an uplifting experience that many in community choirs have also discovered is true. Humming can happen in homes, even respectfully in some workplaces. The solution is simple. It is valuing the power of choice to radiate our inner resonance out into our local ecology. That is ‘being the presence of loving kindness in all that I do’. Making that choice to hum my values puts resonance into the simple solution to complex problems. I am not isolated. Come outside and breathe the cool evening air of connection! It’s a choice to resonate with nature and her people that anyone CAN make. A resonance is there, waiting for you to connect and synergise.
Local troubles can swamp this movement of your inner heart. The immediacy of fear, or the escape to sensuality, demand attention that needs must be met now. But the personal values in your inner heart that resonate and synergise with others are not needs! If not, what are they?
Personal values are… a different type of resonance, an inner resonance, a type of inner movement that NEEDS to be understood and valued. Then personal values can be fully lived and anticipated.
Personal values are an inner resonance that radiates subtly outward
A personal value is not just a vague notion or idea that something or some behaviour is important. A personal value is much, much more than that.
Also it is not just a heroic aspiration that others have told you is important for society. Your personal values are truly the substance of you. They are you, a focal point of mindful movement connecting your inner heart’s values and thoughts with… other people’s focal points of value. The Science of Values explores how a radiance of change spreads subtly from your personal values, relationally, at a deeper level of physics than your head space, to influence life’s wider movements. We’ll look at that more closely in a minute, and why that can resonate with others.
For now, your personal values are continuously and actively writing your signature into life, responsively, emotively, affectively, with passion – like making an analogue sweep of the pen into people’s inner hearts around and beyond you; not like a digital tap tap tap into the merely restricting economy of an Information Technology network. Your personal set of values is this analogue movement of your whole embodied person dynamically shaping events.
Moment by moment this is your life, your embodied soul, moving those fingertips and all the rest of you. But your values are lost from insight when attention focuses on those ideas flashing across a screen.
Resonant feedback loops + filters = values
Life is a complex web of movements in feedback loops. Feedback activity occurs at every level, from the biochemistry of your living cells, to the brain’s regulation of body movement and communications, on to thinking-feeling people mixing their lives conversationally in families and groups.
Imagine this. New Science is showing how the chemistry of every cell of your body and brain is kept in unity by your… biophysics. Every chemical molecule is now known to be a ‘field’ of vibration that interacts with other nearby ‘molecular fields’, and possibly with some wider fields of the ecology. Your biophysics is your electromagnetic and gravitational pull-push modulated by the warmth of your responsiveness, which others may notice as you enter or leave a room. Overall, this is your ‘field of presence’. Chemical atoms and molecules are no longer thought of as solid lumps. All particles have ‘fuzzy boundaries’ that merge and transform and spin endlessly. In just such a similar way, so do people’s values. A ‘scientist of values’ would ask, “How?”
People’s unique values merge and transform and spin endlessly because they are patterns of activity in neural feedback loops within the brain’s core, and equally between the brain and every cell of the body via hormones. These patterns change as we focus on what we consider to be important – our values. These affect our behaviour, which loops via the resulting environmental changes back into the sensory feedback of its impact. This sensory feedback is then filtered in the core brain. The filtering nerve synapses are themselves being primed continuously with ‘anticipation patterns’ of what might happen with the movements being activated. The result is that people tend to notice what they previously thought is important to notice.
What passes through those continuously resetting sensory filters is… what you think is important. So, your personal values are physically ‘the selection settings’ that repattern the activity of those filters. They filter the ‘probability field’ of your presence in the local ecology, and beyond in the cosmic scale of life. These value patterns are set in place synchronously with the outgoing priming of body movement and posture, and therefore prior to the feedback from ‘outside’. “What did you expect?”
This is the level at which the New Science of Values works. It is the same level at which people can intuit a resonance with other people’s values, which is a vital sensitivity needed if trust groups are going to form. And trust groups that have a depth resonance are going to be vitally important in the coming years of environmental and economic change. The resonance is foundational, sustaining the adaptive relational systems based on values that promote life.
So, may we all choose a resonant LIFE! Resonance increasingly will feature as part of the simple solution, when problems get more complex and outcomes become even more unpredictable.
[Pre-orders can now be taken via Amazon for Clearing a Way: Unveiling the Mental Tricks that Hide Reality, which explains ideas like these more fully.]
