I was thinking about the John Livingston essay again and his idea that we “downshift” into the egoic self. I had a different way of conceptualizing it flash in my mind. It kind of reverses the whole concept. I pictured the energy of Gaia as a ground beneath us, the energy of our immediate environment as another layer above that, then maybe our collective humanity as another layer, and at the top (and farthest removed from Gaia) would be our individual consciousness and ego. Expanding our consciousness is just merging back down into earth consciousness. I like this conceptualization better, because “upshifting” seems to imply effort and a striving for a new state of being. But my concept feels more natural--a surrender back to the ground of being from which we emerged.

Each individual and each living thing is an apex coming out of the ground of being, or Gaia. At the peak of the apex is that little dot of self and ego. We look all around us and it sure looks like we’re all little isolated dots. We just forget to look beneath our feet. If we did that we’d see we’re still firmly connected to something larger.