Evening Reflection

Listening to 1970s Yes

Fields of Awakening: From the Edge of Coherence to the Alchemy of the False Self

I stand at the counter at Daily Provisions most days now, the noise and the rhythm of it a kind of practice. Orders called, coffee pulled, the small exchanges with people who are mostly just passing through. Sometimes, in the middle of it, I feel the pattern of the place—the way bodies move together, the way attention holds or frays. It reminds me of something larger I have been tracking for years: the way form holds, or fails to hold, across scales. The way memory and habit seem to live not only inside individual bodies but in the fields between them.

This thread of inquiry began, as so many of mine do, with a question about fields. The Higgs field, that invisible substrate said to give mass to particles. Then the move to Michael Levin’s work on bioelectric patterns—voltage gradients that act as a kind of cognitive glue for tissues and organisms, guiding form and regeneration even when the genome is disrupted. Xenobots and Anthrobots, those strange living machines assembled from frog or human cells, that repair themselves and even show epigenetic shifts toward younger states when they form new collectives. Aging, Levin and others suggest, may be in part a loss of morphostatic information—the coherent patterns that tell a body how to maintain itself. The question that followed was practical: what does it mean, then, to restore or rewrite those patterns? What does it mean for longevity, for regeneration, for the kind of presence I am trying to cultivate in my own life?

From there the inquiry widened. Stuart Kauffman’s adjacent possible—the space of what can become actual next—felt like a natural companion. So did the sense that self-organization is not merely mechanical but creative, that habits of form and behavior accumulate and strengthen over time. Robert Anton Wilson’s playful skepticism kept the models from hardening into dogma. And then the older voices returned with new force: Hermann Hesse’s river in Siddhartha, the place where time and unity are known directly; the Magic Theater in Steppenwolf, where the multiplicity of the self is staged and the false identifications are loosened. Jung’s individuation, the work of integrating what has been split off. The formulas in Mitch Horowitz’s recent Esoterika—concise operations against the false self—arrived as contemporary tools in the same lineage.

What began to clarify for me is that these are not separate domains. The bioelectric patterns Levin tracks, the morphic fields Sheldrake proposes, the archetypal patterns Jung described, the resonant habits Kauffman’s work implies—all point toward a layered reality in which memory and form are not confined to individual brains or genomes. Sheldrake’s morphic resonance suggests that similar systems influence one another across space and time through fields that carry collective memory. His telepathy experiments—dogs anticipating returns, people guessing callers on the phone with above-chance accuracy when the bond is strong—remain contested. Richard Wiseman’s replications of the dog studies, using the same animal and stricter operational definitions of “waiting,” found no effect under those criteria. Sheldrake re-analyzed the data and argued the patterns persisted when measured differently. The debate continues, as these things do. What interests me is not the final verdict but the opening it creates: the possibility that connection and influence operate through fields we have only begun to name.

In my own practice this lands as more than theory. The Alchemy of Awakening I have been living and writing about for years is, among other things, an attempt to work directly with these layers. Recovery gave me the base matter—the recognition that the false self is not merely a psychological construct but a patterned way of being that can be reinforced or dissolved. Jung gave language for the integration of what has been split off, the anima work that continues with Eris as companion. Hesse gave images: the river that teaches unity without erasing multiplicity; the theater where one can try on other selves and laugh at the rigidity of the one left behind. The Yes songs we have been turning over—“Close to the Edge” with its river and seasons, “And You and I” with its cord of life and shared ascent—have functioned as something like mantras for this process. And now the formulas from Esoterika offer concise operations: the Sovereignty Assertion I have been carrying—“I withdraw all consent from external definitions of my worth, identity, and direction. My center is internal and sovereign”—functions as a solvent. It loosens the adhesions of the false self so that something more coherent can emerge.

I have been testing this in the ordinary places. At the counter when the false self wants to perform competence or likability. In writing, when the voice that wants to be received threatens to crowd out the one that simply needs to speak what is true. In family presence, where old patterns of duty or withdrawal still tug. Each time the formula is applied, energy that was leaking outward returns. The field of attention clarifies. It feels, sometimes, like restoring a youthful voltage pattern in tissue—less noise, more coherent signaling. The Anthrobot data, where adult cells reorganize into novel collectives and register younger on epigenetic clocks, sits in the background as an image of what is possible when context changes and new resonant patterns become available.

Kauffman’s adjacent possible and Levin’s pattern memory together suggest that the space of what can be repaired or transformed expands when we stop treating the current configuration as fixed. Morphic resonance adds the possibility that these new configurations, once stabilized in one system, become more available to others. The formulas become not only personal hygiene but contributions to a larger field—small acts of coherence that may strengthen similar patterns elsewhere. That is the good-ancestor dimension: the recognition that every withdrawal of consent from the false self, every return to internal sovereignty in service, is also a vote cast in the morphic field of what human beings can be.

I do not claim to have proven any of this. The evidence for morphic resonance and the telepathy it is said to enable remains contested; mainstream biology has other, sufficient mechanisms for most of the phenomena Sheldrake cites, and independent replications have not always held. What I do claim is that treating these ideas as live hypotheses—rather than as settled science or dismissed pseudoscience—opens a richer space for practice. It lets the Alchemy of Awakening include not only inner work and service but a conscious relationship to the fields in which that work occurs. It lets the question “How May I Serve?” extend beyond immediate relationships into the subtle architecture of memory and habit that shapes what becomes possible next.

The river still flows. The theater still opens. The formulas are still being tested in the laboratory of one life. And the edge—whatever it is that separates the known configuration from what can emerge—remains close enough to touch, if one is willing to withdraw consent from what no longer serves and return, again and again, to the sovereign center that is already awake.

I am still learning how to do this cleanly. The work continues.