Patterns

When scientists, from what I have understood, break down life to the lowest level, what they find is patterns, sometimes even fractal patterns. Everything, it would seem, is a pattern at the end of the day and even when we look at our daily lives, our routine, what do we find, patterns. Not only do we find individual patterns, but we find collective patterns also, for example, 9-5 working is a collective pattern. Once a pattern is formed, like an eddy in a river, it tries to maintain itself for as long as it can. In effect, this 'rule' is the true engine of what we call evolution, really evolution is just patterns seeking to maintain their existence for as long as they can. Ultimately, human beings are repeated patterns or arrangements of cells, a hurricane is a pattern of air, a galaxy is a pattern of stars and so we find that when we look under the hood, we find it's all patterns, patterns, patterns.

Understanding this and the idea that each pattern, including patterns of thought, that 'once they exist seek to maintain themselves' for as long as they possibly can, is an important thing to be aware of. In a person's life, then, a pattern of thinking might form quite early on in their life and, once it is formed, that pattern will seek to maintain itself whatever the cost. The pattern has precisely no interest in whether it is true, false, good, bad or any of that stuff, it is just a pattern seeking to survive.

So, once we understand that thoughts are patterns, we understand that the pattern 'making sense' doesn't really have anything to do with it. The pattern has a beauty, whether it 'makes sense' or not. The fact is, then, each mind has a pattern to it and its aim in life is to stay as it is, that is it. So, psychological 'arguments' or 'debates' don't really have much to do with 'ultimate truth' because all it really is about is patterns of thought trying to persist, come what may. You might say of someone's thought pattern 'that is blatantly untrue, it is false, you may even say it is a lie' but to the pattern that makes no difference. It is just a pattern trying to survive for as long as it can.

So, when we see out entire world as a matrix or system of patterns which form and disband, then we lose a lot of our personal hurt and so on related to when our personal pattern is modified or repatterned. Of course, when we are born, we are a brand new pattern coming into the world and that pattern is growing and it takes its imprinting from what is around it. Most adults, not all by any means, follow the pattern or religion of their parents because it is the pattern that they took on as children when their patterning was forming.

Why do I mention this. Well, I am one of those people who had a certain patterning in my life and I completely altered it. It's not something I consciously 'chose' to do, well, I did, but I didn't know what I was doing, which was to take my existing psychological patterns and rearrange them entirely. What I did is I took Ayahuasca in 5 ceremonies in the Amazon jungle with shamen and so on. This is an interesting and challenging thing to do. What these 'medicines' do, essentially, is to repattern your thought processes. Let's be clear here. If you are an Amazonian shaman who has rarely been outside the jungle taking plant medicines since you were a child, Ayahuasca will not not re-pattern you, it will simply re-enforce the pattern you already hold because it is your normal pattern. To a westerner, however, it is a completely different pattern of behaviour and perception and so it powerfully rearranges the patterns of perception and even possibility which are in your psyche.

So, because we identify with our psychological pattern in fact, for nearly all of us, our pattern becomes what we identify as, we think of ourselves as our behaviour really and our habits are just another pattern we have formed. For an Amazonian Shamen, living in a big city for a few years might re-pattern his perceptions and so on. So, a lot of people champion Ayahuasca as a method for treating addiction. An addiction is really just a strongly enforced behavioural pattern. It's a pattern to smoke weed every morning or have a bottle of wine at night and so on. So, when something powerfully comes in and rearranges your patterning that can be constructive in terms of addictions and so on. If it breaks the pattern that was causing your addictive behaviour then, you would be addiction free. Let's be clear, if you were addicted to Ayahuasca and never drank alcohol, then a bottle of scotch might break your Ayahuasca addiction for you, so it works both ways. The net effect, then, I think in terms of addiction is to use re-patterning to break down a pattern which has become too persistent in our lives and in that process, find more of a middle ground. We all tend to fall into patterns and if they are collective patterns also, they can be very very powerful. There might be massive fear in someone about stepping our of 9-5 working because the collective pattern is so strong, for example.

So, as a society, I think this apparent chaos we are in is not truly chaos, it's more of an operation. We are working to break down old rigid patterns and replace them with newer, which doesn't mean better necessarily, patterns. So, if you take marijuana - I smoked, literally, a few joints at college because everybody else was and on a much higher intake than I - then, the pattern that had formed around that is that it was or is illegal. That was the strongest pattern. The way to change and that it has been changed, is to create a new stronger pattern where it isn't illegal and that would be a repatterning. Patterns of government, patterns of law and so on. We all get stuck in patterns and it seems like our world is 'going mad' but we confuse our patterning with sanity. It is not sanity, it is just a pattern and as far as a pattern is concerned, one pattern is as sane as another because a pattern doesn't even has a concept of sanity, it is just a pattern after all. If someone did a doily you wouldn't say, that's a sane doily and that's an insane doily, no, you would understand that it's just a pattern. So it is with life patterns. Our patterns in life are merely doilies etched onto the fabric of consciousness and where patterns conflict, that is where there is pain. In WW2, the nations had individuated patterns and those patterns conflicted and were broken down in order to create bigger more all encompassing patterns - the Euro instead of national currencies, for example. It's not really any different than that, and the simple rule is any pattern wants to survive for as long as it can, be it a pattern of thought, a pattern of behaviour or a pattern of addiction. When we identify with our patterns strongly, we confuse ourselves with actually being our pattern. So when our patterns are changed and altered, we can mistake it with something attacking us or trying to kill us. Really it's just our pattern being changed and when a pattern dies and another one forms, that is what the mystics call ego death. The ego they talk about is basically our personal re-enforced patterns of behaviour. For many of us, when our patterning dies, it feels like we ourselves are dying. Really, we are just being re-programmed or re-patterned. Even our planet, it is just in a pattern of 'going around the Sun'. One day that pattern will end as all patterns do.
Note, everything that exists is a pattern and every pattern is valid, whilst it lasts.