One key reason you might be feeling out of sorts

Life's joy begins with calibrating your focus filters

We all have filters. We are totally unaware of most of them. Some are the byproduct of natural evolution—Nature. Some we have developed, either consciously or unconsciously—Nurture.

A host of thinkers including philosophers, poets and scientists both ancient and modern have visited and explored this concept. Notably, Marcus Aurelius and Alan Watts built their philosophies around the concept of:

Ordinary everyday consciousness leaves out more than it takes in.

We do not see the shower of light rays cascading around us, nor do we hear the voluminous and cacophonous thunder of sounds caused by vibrating frequencies outside of our auditory range. That doesn’t mean they are not there.

(photo: instagram @alexd_vt The Milky Way rising over Sterling Pond, near Stowe, Vermont using a long exposure that illuminates what is hidden from the human eye, yet still there. See the reflection in the pond?)

More specifically, we filter out things our brains determine not necessary for processing. Junk.

It’s like an enjoyable friend we no longer talk to because of a hectic life, that with time becomes forgotten and ultimately, forever lost.

Over time, not only do our connections with this friend fray and then disintegrate, eventually so do the memories of joyful times spent together. They go to cold storage along with neural pathways which link us to the memories and emotions tied to that person and those shared experiences.

It’s like they never happened.

Until we are reminded that is. Perhaps a chance encounter with this friend at a coffee shop where you both find 15 minutes to slow down and catch up.

The encounter and the energetic link between you and this person trigger neural pathways, which light up. The pathways to what you’ve put into cold storage becoming bright and clear, no longer forgotten.

This in turn, triggers a rise in imprinted emotions which are re-animated and, which in turn triggers certain chemical reactions that lead to the creation of certain energetic frequencies that you quite literally emit like a radio tower. Deep storage memories triggered by a chance encounter that changes your energetic frequency—for a moment (this becomes important below).

These newly generated energies entangle with the same energy your friend is emitting, and who right now is experiencing pretty much the same thing as you.

Together you both become an amplifier sending out a stronger and broader signal which entangles with the signals of others.

Some boost yours further, like gas on a fire.

Others, yours boosts, like gas on a fire.

In the latter situation, you have done someone a kindness without even knowing it.

How. Bout. That.

You leave the coffee shop ebullient. Walking down 57th Street in your home of New York, you make eye contact with several people and they smile at you. Odd, but no matter. You smile back, your mood climbing incrementally higher. You notice your take away coffee’s smell and are surprised to find you are actually tasting the mix of flavors the coffee shop outlines on the board.

You hadn’t noticed before that you can actually taste hints of chocolate and cherry. This, in turn triggers a memory of your recent trip to the Costa Rican coffee farm. where you linger for a moment but then leads you to other memories of your most recent time there.

You recall the sunsets. Walking 57th Street you are transported back to your improbable retreat nestled high in the hills of the rainforest, each evening surrounded by an audio symphony of nature.

Rocco and his wife who owned the AirBnB house. It was newer than you thought. The story behind it more complicated. The guest house filled with your son and his college friends who showed up last minute, having ‘been’ in the area. Rocco having new friends to play with in the rainforest and the surf.

Memories flower. New emotions fire. Energy climbs.

Hmm.

(Sunset straddling the border of Puntareneas Province and San Jose Province in the foothills of the rainforest, Costa Rica)

(Surfing has concluded for the day. The beauty of ending is lost on many. Not here.)

(A Columbian horse wrangler who grew up in Arizona who indicated he had some ‘legal’ issues-but refused to elaborate but whose kind eyes and easy demeanor spoke volumes about who he truly was.)

The point of all of this example is that we have forgotten how to notice and appreciate things that are hidden in plain sight. And when we miss these things, we miss the joy they can bring.

Our filters deem certain things unimportant to register and process. They let through what we train them to recognize and register. This man on the beach, a poor working man leading some horses while we focus on lugging long boards up the beach, all wet and sandy. Not giving him or his horses two thoughts. But, oh what we would have missed had filters been in place.

You see, it’s the big things that are right in front of us we let through The loudest things. The most dramatic. The obvious. The sand chafing us. The 10’ surf boards. More commonly, rush hour traffic gets through. The guy behind you who won’t let you merge, closing a two car length open gap in heavy traffic, then when you start to change lanes (I still don’t get this complete bankruptcy of common courtesy. People like this deserve karma retribution, and I suggest raging hemorrhoids).

Sometimes family dinner gets through but often not the details. Your dog hovering, irritating you that he wants something from the table. The irritation gets through. What doesn’t is your pooch’s simple desire to be part of the family. Sadly, that doesn’t register.

Finally, it may be the passive-aggressive comment our hyper-sensitive ego is insulted by when an emotionally fragile co-worker who is struggling in the dark, totally asleep and largely unaware of their words or actions lashes out. Yes, his comment gets through too. Unfortunately.

See? Our filters are tuned to let in the wrong stuff.

Filters also block perception. For instance, with your passive-aggressive co-worker, your filter doesn’t allow you to register that you are nothing more to a shadow to that person. Your ego says its about you. But, the same holds true for your co-worker. The darkness of their own pain and fears are so severe they cannot register anything else.

They are not thinking about you. You, in your truest sense, doesn’t make it through their filters.

Think of yourself fumbling in the dark to find the doorway or a light switch. You don’t register anything in that room. You don’t stop to smell the faint fragrance of the flowers on the counter. After all, you just slammed your toe into the counter and it hurts, dammit. You are just trying to find the fucking aspirin in the kitchen cabinet.

Just know for many, that is how they live every day. Rinse and repeat.

Recognizing this reality is absolutely liberating. But it requires turning your filters off to sustain the freedom.

You feeling out of sorts? This might be why. Recognize you have filters. Find them. Turn the ones you need to up (like needlessly fretting over your colleague’s comments) and shut the others off.

The other night, while sitting outside meditating, I caught something. Something easily missed if a filter was in place.

At the exact same moment, the densely wooded and natural area in and surrounding our back yard went from the ebb and flow of crickets chirping, the sound of scattering of squirrels climbing the pines, feasting on pine cone nuts and blue jays shouting in between gorging themselves on Service and Hawthorn berries that something else happened.

In complete unison, tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of them began to chime all at once then began the ever present rise and fall of their call. Periodical cicadas emerge en-mass every 13 to 17 years. We hear them at first, then our filters kick in and from them on, maybe we register them, but that’s it.

The startling thing is these filters we have are doing this everywhere and all the time. We are missing more than we are experiencing.

You see, a long chain of millennia has evolved us to develop these filters. They are designed to keep our senses from being overloaded, in to help us recognize danger, to find food, to compete for control, find a mate, procreate and so on. But today, we have let our filters go largely unregulated, both externally and internally.

Many of these are within our control. We can turn them down, turn them up or turn them off. With some effort, we can see what we have been missing.

That is where life is, fully engaged filters allow only for existence.

(Winter hike, Mt. Tom, Woodstock Vermont. I’ve passed this tree dozens of in the over the years but never noticed or appreciated it’s beauty until I turned off certain filters)

After a while of meditation, it becomes possible to go deeper, to go exploring…in you and beyond you, if you like. Our filters lie there too.

Become mindful of your filters. Find and appreciate what they are tuning out. Lock those new signals in. Find the beauty. Set your radar on higher energy and natural things.

Do this repeatedly, and your world will open up. It will grow richer, more vibrant and more expansive, both outside and inside than you in ways you never dreamed possible.

And, if you are patient and do not assign urgency or importance to the task, but simply let it unfold with your gentle help and participation, what these awakened energetic connections will deliver to you will unfold to you in endless waves. You will see well beyond what you simply register. You will find majesty in the seemingly mundane.

(An aging barn in Boone County, Indiana I have ridden by on my gravel training rides a 1,000 times but actually never ‘seen’, nor appreciated.)

When this happens, you are back online and the universe will be able to find you again.

It is only then…that you will finally, and joyfully wake up.