Your Vibration…
Your vibration must be higher than what you create, otherwise you cannot manage it.
This past week, I posted a video on Instagram about the sentiment above, which I first heard from Carissa a few years ago—it was part of a transmission, from what I recall, but then Carissa and I discussed it at length, both in the context of my own life as well as the collective. (I think it came up in Podcast Episode #1 and Podcast Episode #2.) I wrote the phrase on a post-it note and put it on my computer, where it serves as a talisman and consistent reminder: Your vibration must be higher than what you create, otherwise you cannot manage it.
After posting the video last week, I was inundated with requests for concrete examples: What does this mean in action, and how can we all apply it to our lives? So let me try.
First, a word about vibration. Yes, it’s been co-opted by New Age culture and become an easy word to mock and dismiss, but as its root, it’s a stunning concept—and physical. It comes from vibrat (Latin), “moved to and fro,” and then evolved into vibrate, “to give out light or sound as if by vibration.” So what does it mean to have a high vibration? How do you emanate at a higher level? Well, I go to Cynthia Bourgeault and her discussion of the Armenian mystic G.I. Gurdjieff’s work: In Eye of the Heart, Bourgeault outlines Gurdjieff’s “Worlds,” or a theory of energetic realms. She explains that we’re all connected, like ornaments on a tree, passing energy up and down. These worlds proceed from lightest (highest vibration) to densest (lowest, or heaviest vibration). Bourgeault writes: “There is no ‘divide’ but rather a single continuum of energy manifesting in various degrees of subtlety or coarseness.”
World 1 is source, or God, or that core emanation of light, however you’d like to think of it; then we get to the Christic realm (World 12), and so forth. Humans, in our denseness, appear at World 24, the “imaginal realm,” or “kingdom of heaven,” the first world we can access or touch. Bourgeault writes that World 24 “Is the world of presence, where the outer forms of physical materiality are illuminated from within by the light that pours from World 12 and above, and where human consciousness—awake, three-centered, and having passed that first conscious shock point (which it supremely tends and mediates)—fully inhabits this physical world, takes instructions reliably from the higher realms, and participates fully in the required cosmic exchange. This is the world of conscious man or woman—‘man number four’ in Gurdjieffian terminology—who lives awake and willing right there at the junction point where the ‘two seas meet,’ infusing the staleness of the lower worlds with the vivifying energy of his or her authentic presence.” I interpret World 24 as the space we can occupy when we are co-creating with the divine, vibrating as high as we consciously can, lifting the world around us.
Next, there is World 48, where most of us live in our daily lives. Per Bourgeault, “It is the world of philosophy, ethics, and religion; the world of intellectual striving and cleverness and of industry, curiosity, science, technology, and the arts—in other words, the first fruits of civilization as best we know them. It is the world of high rationality. The world of high egoic functioning and self-reflective consciousness. The world that Teilhard mostly had in mind when he described the ‘noosphere.’ But for all its giftedness, it still falls just below the first conscious shock line; hence, it is still, in Gurdjieffian terms, preconscious and ‘asleep.’”
Then we get to World 96, which many of us would also recognize as the denser energies that threaten to pull us down and out of the continuum. Bourgeault again: “World 96 is the ‘formatory’ world, as Gurdjieff calls it, where everything operates on autopilot, in clichés and thought-bites: stale, conditioned, habitual. There’s not even any real thinking that goes on here, as there is in World 48; it’s all recycled opinions and stereotypes. In Gurdjieffian terms, this is the world of personality, the world of ‘not-I’; of all that is artificially acquired and that obscures our real essence. It is monochrome, repetitive, and boring—uncreative, stony, and inanimate; the lowest world in which human consciousness can even barely hold its shape.” This is not the final world, either. The next world is one of distortion and paranoid delusion, and it gets denser and darker from here.
In the view of Gurdjieff and Bourgeault, we pass energy up and down this continuum. And it is incumbent on all of us to reach up, up, and up. At least when it comes to our vibration, our energy, our intention, and our attention. This is how we keep those ornaments on the tree, how we prevent humanity from spinning out entirely.
So that’s my understanding of our vibration. In the context of “managing what we create,” we see how this plays out (or doesn’t) across society. Socially and culturally, we can look at undeniably genius inventions like YouTube or Facebook and recognize that we do not yet possess the emotional maturity or the vibrational lightness to manage these technologies correctly. And the people who created them certainly didn’t either. We are still trying to understand how to metaphorically get these horses back in the barn, to try to control or manage this technology, to limit its harms. They are proving, unfortunately, to be out-of-control, unmanaged, and potentially unmanageable—particularly when a move to do so conflicts with the price of the stock.
In business, there are untold companies that promised to do right by people and the planet but who are now polluting and profiting to serve shareholders. This is inevitable without a razor-sharp intention, guard-railed by clearly articulated values that are unyielding in the face of pressure. This is hard to do, and it’s clear as we survey the business landscape in America that it’s so very tempting to give a bit and yield for the sake of that margin, those bonuses, or the expectations of investors or shareholders. Not many founders and CEOs retain enough control or will to truly shepherd companies according to values articulated in their infancy. And then, of course, there’s greed. It’s infectious. So is the belief that you can do well for yourself while doing well for everyone else—or more commonly, do well for yourself and then do well for everyone else. We see this in the way that some billionaires now feel compelled to solve big, cultural problems in their second acts. That instinct might theoretically be good, but that much power should not be shepherded by a few. I much prefer Mackenzie Scott’s method: Quickly redistributing her billions to worthy organizations doing incredible work all over the world.
Maintaining a high vibration in business is possible. One stunning example is Yvon Chouinard of Patagonia: By making the planet the only stakeholder in his business, he is establishing a new paradigm for all other CEOs and founders who profess to hold similar values. He threw down a gauntlet by establishing a standard for what that really means: Quite simply, it means that the earth is the only stakeholder. This is not lip service, it’s a fully realized and canonized mission, and those who don’t follow his lead but maintain the same marketing points will likely be called to the mat. If you say you’re for the planet, then show us.
Managing what we create is necessary in our personal lives. For me, it’s required clearly articulating what I want, and what I don’t want, and then catching myself when I deviate—which I do! This wavering typically comes because I’m susceptible to getting sucked into a pit of anxiety about whether what I want will be enough. As my therapist likes to remind me, I’ve been quite clear about what I want for years: To write books, host Pulling the Thread, and be available for my kids. And, if I can gather enough energy behind it, to potentially grow Pulling the Thread into a more sizable offering. If and potentially being the operative words. I’ve watched too many of my friends “fall into” businesses that are now threatening to drown them, simply because they were chasing opportunities—sometimes frantically—rather than being intentional with their vision. As their businesses have grown, so has team size and complexity, creating a vicious cycle: They’ve had to chase more opportunities to maintain what they’ve made (i.e. pay people), and in the process, they lose the thread for why they started the whole thing in the first place. I get it, this is the tough part—being open to the universe and opportunities beyond your reasonable expectations, while also being clear about what you hope to do. It’s a careful dance between faith and planning, co-creation and personal will. Obviously, I haven’t mastered it.
Again and again, I find myself returning to Carissa’s words: Your vibration must be higher than what you create, otherwise you cannot manage it. The most simple definition of vibration is also energy—not just whether you feel alive in the morning, but whether something feels like a YES in your entire body, like something you cannot wait to do. This has also become an important test for me (thanks in no small part to Gabor Maté, episode here and transcript here): Is this a yes in my body or is it a no, or in other words, does this make me want to pull an all-nighter in excitement, or climb into bed and take a nap? As I’ve learned over time, don’t disobey the body. It often knows best, and is more than pleased to make decisions for you, including to shut you down. (In this same vein, several years ago Anne Emerson told me that I am no longer allowed to reflexively respond to any request for time or plans. I have to wait and then run it through my body first.)