The Free Radical

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(Author Narration with musical accompaniment: Garden of Paradise excerpt by Steve Hillage)

I know that it must seem that I’m hopelessly self-obsessed. I almost always write about my own experience, and I’m constantly sharing whatever new creations I come up with. It would be easy to label me a narcissist; I joke about that all the time! But ironically, it’s not at all about me; I’m inconsequential… to you. Why should you care in the least what self-aggrandizing thing Niels has come up with now? Indeed, you shouldn’t.

You see, it’s because I’m really only an expert on one thing: me. That’s where my responsibility lies. If I were to obsess about others and their information, that would be irresponsible and undoubtedly misleading… So I stick to what I know. And we teach best by example anyway.

I’ve always been different. From a very young age, ‘they’ always told me I was smart, but truthfully, I still to this day don’t know what that means. When I was still young, that meant that I was assured good grades and every advantage which would inevitably ensue therefrom. The problem was that I discovered, while still a teenager, that any such ‘advantage’ was no guarantee for fulfillment or happiness. In fact, the path ahead looked bland, drab and rather bleak.

I don’t think ‘smart’ is a real thing; it doesn’t mean anything. But there’s this other thing in consciousness; it’s called awareness. That’s real. And what’s more, I believe that our level of awareness is the ‘thing’ we carry from one life to the next through the incarnation cycle… through the veil of forgetting. Awareness is that aspect of consciousness which has the greatest affinity with Spirit.

In a nutshell, awareness is the ability to witness (notice)– especially oneself. Awareness can only function properly in Zero Point or Neutrality. Awareness is not time-bound. Basic linear time, with its propensity for looping in reoccurring fractals– according to acquired programming (beliefs) and associated trauma, belongs to the Reactionary Being. The Reactionary Being is mired in polarity (duality), ‘choosing’ from among paired opposites in a polarized existence– as a consequence of past experience (also polarized). In any real sense, the Reactionary Being lacks Free Will; the only real choice available to one stuck in reaction mode is the choice for developing awareness (or not)– in order to eventually move out of polarity (extremely limited choice) and into Neutrality (infinite choice: creativity).

When awareness is firmly established within consciousness, it has a natural affinity with the internal Spirit, as the Spirit is the absolute Master Witness, being privy to one’s every thought, word, deed and action as well as knowing one’s ancestral (biological) lineage and all the memories of the soul. Spirit is the infallible witness… as well as the source of Life. So when awareness becomes adequately developed within an individual consciousness, it naturally acts as the internal bridge to the Spirit. It is awareness which invites the Spirit fully into the body, preparing the way for Its creative Life expression as an Earth embodiment.

Spirit is infinitely creative; It can do anything! Awareness, functioning in Zero Point, is the same creativity, but limited, conditioned and shaped by its own Life Experience. Awareness deals with new information creatively, utilizing it as the basis for new experience… whereas the Reactionary Being, stuck in duality, forces all new information into already well-established patterns, characterized by polarity– or else it outright rejects the new information altogether.

Sometimes– no matter how aware we are– we don’t know exactly what to do with new information; we don’t know how to craft an experience in the real world that adequately incorporates the new information… to test it out. Fortunately, it makes no difference to Spirit– and indeed our bodies– whether an experience occurs in the real world, in a dream, or merely in our imaginations; it’s all the same to Spirit… hence my unabashed proclivity for unfettered creativity!

I hunger for new information… and the more radical it is– the less it fits with what I think I already know– the more excited I am about it, provided that it has some internal coherence of its own and internal resonance with my Spirit. I typically take that new information and I craft a story or a poem, or maybe a song; or maybe I’ll write a lengthy, in-depth article exploring its veracity (wink). Nevertheless, the bottom line is that I make it my own by thoroughly experiencing it– whether internally or externally, or both. By making new information the very building blocks of our own coherent creations, we take that information into a very deep layer of the psyche… in the direction of Spirit. That is the action of awareness when it’s not merely witnessing. From the infinite space of awareness we create new possibilities where before the Reactionary Being could only choose among variables that are already established as a given.

Awareness creates a new relationship with Time. Awareness– with its close affinity to Spirit– regards Time as a Living thing. When Time is alive, the past is always changing, in accordance with my evolving understanding of it. When past events are fixed (adhered) in consciousness, we are stuck in linear time, conditioned by the programs stemming from those events. To the Reactionary Being, the past is fixed; it’s set in stone and cannot be altered. To awareness however, the past is fluid and alive. Although the physical (external) events of the past cannot necessarily be changed, the interpretation, the meaning, the significance of those events can– and should be, according to new information acquired. Remember, awareness is not time-bound; it can revisit any situation and create new meaning for the Being having had that experience. The internal experience of all ‘past’ events is infinitely and eternally Alive, changing, evolving! In the realm of Spirit, nothing is ever finished; it’s never a done deal… and therein lies the Spirit’s freedom to fully inhabit the body in this lifetime.

Awareness can be difficult to measure or gauge; it is most conspicuously noticed when it is absent. Someone utterly lacking in awareness– a Reactionary Being– is a pitiable creature, seemingly bound by fate. But once the seed of awareness germinates, it can be coaxed and nurtured to grow. When I first began to meditate regularly, like most people, I thought that eventually I would start to have some far-out experiences occur during my meditations. Nah, that never really happened; my meditation is extremely uneventful. When I’m sitting in meditation– usually with my Holosync entrainment headphones on– when I’m just sitting there, I’m just sitting. Some varied thoughts– rather ordinary ones usually– float through my head, and I watch myself think… and sit. And that’s it. That’s as exciting as my meditation gets. I get deeply relaxed; and I also noticed over time that my level of awareness went up, as I continued to meditate regularly.

There are two things which actively support growth in awareness. The first is one’s genuine intent to do so– to allow space for the mere possibility of becoming more aware. And the second one is practicing being the witness to oneself. Once I realized that, for me, meditation was just me practicing being the observer– especially of myself– once I realized that, it was easy to commit my time.

Awareness replaces the Reactionary Being. Reactions are locked in time; awareness spans Time. Awareness is free to create a new response to old tiresome stimuli. Awareness is free to create the inner experience with less and less regard for external circumstances. Awareness chooses the internal expression of Being as an act of liberated Will: “I choose to be such-and-such a type of person, for that is who I perceive myself to Be in this moment anyway… when I’m not triggered, when I’m not reacting…” And eventually, the outer reality will make room, accommodate, and finally support that Being who is, in awareness, crafting Its own experience from the inside out… intentionally.

The enemies of awareness are too numerous to even categorize. Any lapse in consciousness is an invitation for incursion. In the realms of consciousness, it’s like entropy is paradoxically a rabid beast ready to spring into and inhabit the least crack in one’s awareness. And this brings us to the topic of substance abuse. Sadly, it is undoubtedly alcohol which consistently kicks the ass of awareness. I see it so pervasively and consistently that alcohol brings out the Reactionary Being– if not outright allowing for demonic possession! I see it a lot. Folks literally become different people when they’ve had a few drinks. Those other personas and devil-spawn express in total unawareness… and seek only to continue existing throughout time. (And they will often tell the same story three or four times in a night to the same person!)

Smoking pot can be a huge problem too. The vast majority of cannabis consumed in the West is grown artificially indoors, often without soil… and often by unsavory characters, who are only in it for the money. Pot is a highly impressionable plant. Its natural Spirit is creative and expressive– but not when it’s grown in isolation from all other life on the planet, except the thug who tends (exploits) it. I never liked the so-called ‘wheelchair’ weed. That commercial stuff always made me instantly feel disconnected and mostly dysfunctional, sometimes paranoid. When someone wants to trade some buds with me, I usually end up giving those buds to someone else and stick to my own, which is always grown in soil, and in actual contact with the Earth. In my experience, it makes a huge difference!

As for the harder drugs, I’ve pretty much tried them all. (I never mainlined heroin though.) During the six years I toured with Missing Peace, opportunities arose, and if I was reasonably sure that I’d survive the experience, I wanted to try it. (Equally true for trying foods too.) My life is a grand experiment… and I want to Know.

Through all of the varied experiences had on these many substances, I always maintained a continuity of self-awareness. Even while blasting into orbit on smoked DMT, I was still unequivocally Niels among those stars; I never lost my awareness of myself… except on alcohol. When I was still a teenager, during the first times I got drunk, I sometimes blacked out; I lost myself. I instinctively knew that this was unacceptable, and despite what others might expect, I have managed to maintain my continuity of self-awareness ever since; I Will not abandon myself!

(Admittedly, I do lose my continuity of self-awareness in the dreamtime; I never used to as a child. My dreamwork needs work!)

It’s very difficult to demonstrate awareness to others in benign circumstances. Challenging situations will bring awareness to the fore. I can’t prove to you that I’m not just some drug-addled hippie spewing nonsense. All I can point to is what I create. It is my claim that it comes through me internally, through my awareness, at the behest of Spirit… expressing. The only other thing I can point to is the impeccability of my written word. I do all of my own proof-reading– which breaks the first rule of proof-reading: get someone else to do it. There was a time in my youth when I couldn’t properly proof my own work; like anyone of average awareness, I was apt to perceive what my mind knew the text was supposed to say, rather than actually perceiving the typos on the page. In unawareness we gloss over our own errors automatically. I’m not saying that all of my work is error-free (especially keeping in mind that I use British spellings as opposed to American spellings… mostly), but in the thousands and thousands of pages I’ve published and proofed in the last twenty-odd years, one will find very few oversights.

Now I proof-read my whole Life, as I’m ‘writing’ it… in awareness.

Because of the language and structure I use, it may appear once again that I’ve written this article for you, Dear Reader, but no; this is, in truth, just me selfishly integrating some of the new things that I’ve recently learned. No, it’s for me… so that I’ll eventually Know exactly how to properly deal with you whackos!