🌬 Heightening

Beautiful States of Being

Dülmen, Heilig-Kreuz-Kirche,Rosette By Dietmar Rabich (2022)

There is a certain quality of being that I would like to infuse throughout all of these writings. An embodied sense that exists, before, within and beyond these words. But to be entirely honest, I feel I haven't even come close to communicating this feeling. Especially online. I don’t really want to online, it feels paradoxical. I’ll explain why below.

When I think of what I would love to heighten, I picture those scenes in a movie where the sounds fades and you feel transfixed on a person in a club or a surrounding space. Heightening could also be thought of as amplifying, like the way a microphone amplifies a voice. However what I’m actually more interested in is the silence that gives way to a deeper perception rather than an amplification of noise. This is a subtle distinction that I am curious to explore deeper.

This distinction I speak of is between screaming louder to get attention in a loud room or speaking more intently in a quiet space to communicate something of importance. On the surface in both situations you are being heard right? Well intuitively we all know that sometimes the more potent way to heighten something is change the context & tune in deeper, rather than trying to compete with the noise. This really fascinates me because I sometimes have this uneasy feeling that we are screaming into the void when we share online, rather than intently connecting.

I don’t think this is a reflection of people as a whole but rather the rooms we are in. Lets briefly take tik tok as an example of a room. On the surface people currently get more views on that platform with the same content as they post on other platforms, that sounds like an amplification of sorts right? Maybe more people are moving to that platform and hence more views. But in fact I recently discovered (From Tristan Harris) that one of the reasons you get more views on that platform is because people are scrolling more quickly so they see more videos in total, but with less engagement of each video. This pattern is also replicated with the new platform threads, which people have rushed to with the promise of getting more followers & engagement etc Despite the fact that this platform, like many others, promises to replicate the same extractive, data harvesting business model that surveillance capitalism is soo good at. Another way to summarise my point could be to say, these rooms and systems as a whole are prioritising more quantity over quality.

With this in mind I have continuously tried to be aware and discern over the last few years whether I am engaging in a meaningless numbers game of more-ness or whether I am deepening into a richer quality of being. As an example on my way to this show earlier today, I found myself slightly rushing down the street, then all of a sudden I paused as the rain was pouring down and simply sensed the sound of the water and leaves blowing in the breeze. In that moment I spotted an opportunity to heighten a seemingly mundane 4 seconds into a deeply therapeutic moment that almost surpassed the actual music show I was rushing to. In that moment I was struck by the thought that maybe heightening an experience, a moment, a state of being is not about amplifying it to get more numbers or recognition, but rather its about moving from noise to signal.

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