Facing forwards

© The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

An exploration containing four threads, from the month that looks both ways.

January is named after the Roman god Janus, the god with two faces. He was also the god of gateways, portals, transitions.

What a strange image it is. Whoever thought of such a thing? The body we humans live in faces emphatically in one direction. Our eyes, nose, mouth, soft vulnerable parts (stomach, breasts, genitalia) all face the same way: the way in which we walk. Only the ears and arms are on the side.

Many mammals have their spine parallel to the ground, so that their soft parts are shielded by their backs. For us humans, our spine is perpendicular, so all that vulnerability and openness is carried in front of us. Behind us is the anus through which our body expels what it has no more use for. We leave the past behind, physically, emotionally and mentally.

So, our bodies are designed to face forwards, balanced by the ears and arms. That’s Thread One.

Thread Two is about being in a body at all. It really catches my attention that physical matter, including everything on the planet we inhabit, is so rare in the universe. Nearly everything else is plasma: immense clouds of charged particles, each particle smaller than an atom. Charged particles have a tendency to organise themselves, to arrange themselves. Some have proposed that with this and other characteristics, plasma fulfils the criteria for intelligence. Could we say, therefore, that it is alive? It is also suggested that matter itself, including what we are made of, is condensed plasma. If any of this is even partly correct, it is mind-blowing in its implications.

Linked to this is an obvious fact that my conscious faculty hardly ever goes near: the universe is mind-bogglingly big. Incomprehensibly so. Compared to the body I live in, my house is big, my town is enormous, let alone my country, the planet, the solar system, the galaxy … I can’t begin to imagine how big it all is. The question for me is — if the scientists are right about the plasma, what opportunities does this small human (and all other humans, but this is the one I’m responsible for) represent to these vast, living, unseen realms? Are we of any interest to them?

Thread Three is about choice. You may remember the experience of being a small child, feeling overwhelmed by all the impressions that come your way. It’s a similar experience if you move to live in another country. So much to assimilate, and the guidebooks aren’t much help. So, we have to filter what we perceive. We give things names, like “tree” or “house”, or “Monday”, but these are just convenient labels. Each tree or house is in fact a mass of complexity, and each Monday is a cornucopia of unique experiences, even though some of them may resemble what happened on other Mondays. So, in order to stay sane, we categorise and filter our impressions. We shut stuff out, tidy other things away in our minds and pay attention to the experiences we decide are relevant.

Thread Four is about resonance. Plasma is composed of energetic, charged particles. Physicists tell us that everything, including the multitude of charged particles that make up plasma, has its natural frequency at which it vibrates. Things of matching frequency will respond to each other. If one vibrates, another will resonate. A human voice emitting a clear note can cause the atoms in a wine glass to oscillate so strongly that the glass hums, like a tuning fork.

We can also see resonance in human interactions. Have you had the experience, in a conversation with someone you have never met before, that something just ‘clicks’? You might even say in response, that resonates! Or a friend expresses exactly what you have been feeling? It can be in actions, too. I see someone smiling and it makes me smile in turn.

So, we each respond to particular frequencies. Those frequencies must oscillate with each other. Do we pick up on this? Here is an example of what I mean, from the more difficult end of the spectrum.

When I am afraid, or anxious, the experience soon gets much bigger than my initial fear or anxiety. It’s as if I have tuned into the bank of it and am oscillating with it. I have inadvertently tuned into all the other fear and anxiety which is going on now and which has been emitted. In response, I start looking for all the other worries and fears that I can dredge up from my own memory banks. If I am to do anything about the initial problem that led to the fear or anxiety, I need to change frequency (which requires a particular set of skills that I won’t go into here). Once I am able to drag myself out of that difficult place in myself, then the effect fades. I can then look back from my new detached platform and wonder what all the fuss was about.

Which brings us back to choice.

Can I choose to resonate with the frequencies that inspire me, that sustain and encourage me, that I want to see in my world? Is there a bank of gratitude, or friendliness, or encouragement, within all of that plasma? Is that why, when I do a good thing then I feel good too? Can I have the discernment to notice what frequencies I am vibrating at, at any given moment, and fine-tune when necessary? I believe so.

How does this relate to the god of January? It’s about facing both ways. It’s about being a gateway, a transition, a portal.

Looking forwards, we decide what it is that we want to meet, process, experience. We humans have that power. Does that make us an interesting proposition to those living unseen realms? That they have the chance to see their frequencies embodied in expression? As I have said elsewhere, how can kindness exist if there is nobody to give it expression? I choose to live in a world that contains kindness.

Looking backwards, that is our platform. That is our bank of experience that we can call upon to give us the reference, the understanding, to refine and improve our choices as we go forward. Our repository of lived experience helps us to make decisions — do I want to do that again? Is that a frequency I want to mix with?

So maybe the portrayal of the god who has two faces is not so strange after all.