The Space Between

“Beyond the Human Species” by Patricia Albere

There is a “betweenness” to these consciousness-shifting times we’re living in, to borrow a phrase psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist used in his unique study of our divided brain and how each “hemisphere” shapes our perception. The author of The Master and the Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (2009) sees that the left and right hemispheres of the brain have competing visions of reality: the left hemisphere focuses on the details (good at organizing categories, not so good at seeing the whole, considered the male side of the brain); the right hemisphere focuses on the big picture (good at making connections between things, creating ideas, being empathetic, considered the female side.) Both hemispheres of the brain are essential, of course, and to be our most productive and compassionate selves we need a balance of both — the rational and the creative.

An example is McGilchrist’s scientific approach to explain music in which, simply put, the left hemisphere recognizes the notes, the right hemisphere recognizes the gaps, and it’s the gaps between the notes that make the music — the “betweenness.” It takes both sides, both hemispheres of the brain, working together to have harmony…in music and in life.

McGilchrist suggests we’re living in a world dominated by the left hemisphere — the part of us less likely to take the “humanistic view.” We see that occurring in our current angry, incendiary world. “Broadly speaking,” McGilchrist shared in an interview on Hidden Brain on National Public Radio (NPR), “the right hemisphere is more emotionally literate. It reads emotional expression, feels suffering…understanding another person’s point of view, what it feels like to be that person. However, there are some emotions that are more particularly associated with the left hemisphere. Perhaps the most striking one is anger, which happens to be the most lateralized of all emotions.” McGilchrist acknowledges this may be an over-simplification, but given the left hemisphere is always about accomplishing the immediate task in front of it, so “if it encounters any opposition, it’s dismissive, and it becomes enraged.”

We are a world out of harmony. And with no harmony, we have a compassion disconnect, empathy is lost. What will it take to bring our brains back into balance so the right hemisphere — the part more likely to take the “humanistic view” — can be a dynamic part of our world again? What will it take to create a world where we all live as though we truly believe, as Irish novelist Colum McCann once observed, that “an ounce of empathy is worth a boatload of judgment”; a world where we can live in the delicate, harmonic balance of “betweenness” — where being empathetic is as natural for human beings as breathing. How do we bring the feminine and masculine, the right brain and left brain, the entire human community back into balance? We’re all yearning for the inner peace that comes with a world in balance. Where do we find the opening?

“There are things known and things unknown and in between are the doors,” Jim Morrison, the charismatic singer and poet from the psychedelic 1960s, wrote. Perhaps we are closer than we have dared to hope to find the opening and take the leap. Perhaps the empathy and connection we seek resides in that “betweenness” — a space but not a separation. Lynne McTaggart writes about the essential nature of this “space between things” in The Bond: Connecting Through the Space Between Us (2011):

Between the smallest particles of our being, between our body and our environment, between ourselves and all of the people with whom we are in contact, between every member of every societal cluster, there is a Bond — a connection so integral and profound that there is no longer a clear demarcation between the end of one thing and the beginning of another. The world essentially operates not through the activity of individual things but in the connection between them — in a sense, in the space between things.

So how does that work? If we put our attention on the space between things, how does that bring us together in harmony with no separation? How can we honor our individual gifts yet focus on being in community together? How does that close the gap between “us” and “them” — leaving only a “we” connected through the heart?

Poet Jane Hirshfield said she’d been thinking of the phenomenon of “we” — of the “shared fate” of all living things — since she was seventeen, recalling a line of a poem she wrote at the time: “To define the meaning of we is to find a life of a kind, but who is to say?” Many years later, in her poem Cataclysm (2019), she warns what happens when we believe we are all separate and how the human language (opposite of Mother Nature’s “language” of everything is connected through everything) is indeed designed to keep us separate.

In her book, Evolutionary Relationships: Unleashing the Power of Mutual Awakening (2017), Patricia Albere called the space between us, “we-space”: “the space between us — where relatedness exists…where we overlap and our consciousness intermingles.” However, we now see it’s something else. Albere created a Mutual Awakening Practice for those in the Evolutionary Collective global community. However, as we gather on Zoom, connecting with another through the eyes, through love, having left our egos and identities at the door, we realize it’s beyond a “we space.” We become one with something so vast and evolving, a vastness we’re intimately inside of, new and fresh and not easily explainable. It feels as if we’re mapping out the relationships of the future, for the world of the future — the world as it was always meant to be. “What is new about this approach to relatedness is that we consciously focus on awakening to the space between us,” Albere writes. “Rather than communicating across the distance between two bodies and two subjective realities, we are placing our consciousness ‘inside’ the other and focus on the ‘we’ that arises when we are in a state of true communion.”

As a new consciousness is sweeping through the world — the “Ninth Wave of Consciousness,” in the words of Dr. Carl J. Calleman — and as human connection is evolving in our lifetime, we are being called by this “higher order of human relatedness,” as Albere sees it. In our wounded, fragmented world, the broken bits are seeking out each other — to reconnect, to become whole. “But it all starts with love…the most powerful force in existence”…the force in-between that draws us together.

“Love is expressed by humans at all levels of development,” Patricia Albere wrote. Her years of observation, research, coaching, and experience suggest that “when a person expresses love from a higher state of consciousness” — in other words, “beyond neediness and lack” — and “when individuals no longer bother to conform to ‘socialized’ norms” — i.e., feel free to express their authentic self — “that love manifests differently.” Albere continued: “The relationship they form no longer is about two separate people trying to meet each other across the ‘space between.’ Instead, they experience being intimately inside of a shared experience, inhabiting the same world.”

This is a new world being born. And today in this liminal space, on the verge of change, we approach a new future and can feel its promise of something deeply shared. The evolved humans of the “Ninth Wave,” perhaps with no divided brains and only connected hearts, will flourish together in unity, in something mutually shared. A “shared oneness,” as Patricia Albere clarifies, where there is no separation, no duality, only deeply connected unity with another. It’s the Divine calling to us as its own Beloved. This is the new frontier of human relatedness. ~

**CorneliaPowell.com**

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