In my family, when we were kids, it was a running joke to announce “oh, watch out, she’s having a brain wave…” if one of us paused as though receiving a new idea or very suddenly changed what we were doing. Alterations in brain wave can be a bit like this – we stop in our tracks, we recalibrate our behaviour – and yet, in adulthood, most people don’t give their brain waves a second thought.

There are five brain waves associated with the human being, as shown above, and we have a mixture of them, though we spend most of our time in a dominant state, which will also depend a great deal on the time of day. Delta is associated with deep dreamless sleep, Theta with the dream-state, Alpha with lucid, creative thoughts that intermingle with more action-associated preoccupations (often experienced when we are just waking-up but actively encouraged by using meditation practices), Beta with the busy, active behaviours of our working day and Gamma…well, Gamma is something else (as I will get onto).

What follows is my best attempt at a description of how I consider these frequencies affect human experience in ways that are, perhaps, subtly altering and which relate to our evolution. I’m not trying to be desperately “scientific” here, you understand, since my topic, as ever, is human consciousness yet the abstraction I want to share feels like it has some value as a visualisation of where we are…perhaps where we are headed.

This range of human brain frequencies (though I’m really talking about something much broader than “brain”…) suggests to me, in my mind’s eye, as I will draw for you below, a journey into manifest creation and out the other side. I see a feminine frequency (Theta) and masculine frequency (Beta) joined by an interlinking bridge (Alpha) in the middle range, straddled by two quite distinct “neutral” states (Delta and Gamma) on either side of that necessarily dualistic experience. Most discussions of what these frequencies “are” succeed only in making them into something academic and hard to grasp as a human being (even though we are all subject to them) whereas what I am striving to do, here, is convey how they feel and play out as actual human experience; so that we can then consider how they are the very impulse of evolution at work, through us, and how we get to work with them.

So, let’s get down to talking about the human experience of life via these frequencies.

Whilst Delta feels to me like the primordial soup or “nothingness”, Theta feels like the feminine impulse rising up from that state to form pictures, ideas, flow-thoughts, nice ideas that mingle or separate at will, abstraction, playfulness, possibility…the seed starting to sprout…the very beginnings of the human “manifest” state, just as the feminine aspect signifies “birth”.

Alpha feels like a bridge between the feminine and the masculine; so, it’s where ideas start to take shape in a relaxed creative “environment” where all sides can be explored without anyone falling out over the small-print. Thus a tacit agreement is formed between masculine and feminine aspects –  “lets work together” – and the seed spouts (exactly like when a baby is conceived).

The masculine domain of Beta is where those shapes become our world; things happen, objects get made, we build, we collaborate, we direct with our will and our world rises up around us instead of being an experience inside of our consciousness; so the giant bean stalk begins to grow up up up. Actions have consequences there (how, and with what, do we feed our bean stalk; how far do we venture from nature because size and speed is all that matters to us now, having shrugged off the feminine perspective…) and so the bean stalk may no longer resemble a bean stalk, having been turned into a concrete duplex or whatever else we set our minds to.

Difficulties arise at the high-end of the Beta range (a loooong way from the feminine influence of Theta); so we get defensive of what we have “made”, jumpy or even paranoid. There, trigger-happy and knee-jerk are familiar ways of behaving since there is “no time” to ask questions, time now being a scarce commodity that is bought and sold. Tempers and fortunes frequently “get lost” and power games ensue. People feel as though they are teetering on the brink of ruin, their health becomes frayed, they wonder “what’s the point” or they hurl themselves off the very top of everything they have spent their whole lives creating, back to…what…all that nothingness they miss so desperately at the bottom. In other words, they long to cease to exist; or for the womb; for feminine nurturance and all the love they have been denying themselves (which they have alienated themselves from, having ventured so far from the Alpha bridge or, possibly, burnt it altogether).

Or, those in the enlightenment movement have worked towards a middle way; a way that makes Alpha our home since these “wakeful relaxation” waves, which are so great for achieving clarity and making prime decisions, are abundant during the meditative state…which is good, in fact its great. Meditation has become a real “thing” out there in the world of business and other “doing” people and this marks real progress being made, in consciousness terms. Frequenting this state, for whatever reason, is so helpful since it enables active and engaged people to pull back to where they still retain some perspective and balance so it has to be a positive that this is catching on.

Then there’s another movement where people actually long to make Theta their home somehow (and it’s not the most feasible idea since where there is no action or “masculine impulse” there is no innovation or progress…we all need to draw water, find food, put a roof over our heads, make things…). But its a nice idea and its idolised by a lot of people who are on the top end of the Beta range; living in high-stress, longing to get out of the rat-race, to go off-grid, back-into-nature, into some sort of permanent meditation-within-life state, or that’s how they see it. Whenever this gets proposed to me, I know I would get very bored…and that “life” would still follow me there anyway, since there is no escape from the compulsion of all things to live in a balanced state of both masculine and feminine aspects..

This is all getting very cerebral, trying to work out how to get into the right frequency to experience a better life; but what happens when the Universe takes over this evolutionary conundrum? That’s what the Schumann Resonance feels like to me. At times when it “spikes”, and that seems to be have been happening such a lot lately (though it’s a relatively new phenomenon), the SR’s frequency (also known as the “heartbeat of the planet” to which we all biologically entrain) has been shooting up from its typical 7.82 Hz into the high Betas and even into the Gamma frequencies. Last sunday (17th Feb, 2019) was a prime example; for about 12 hours, it reached very high levels, some say almost 70Hz (and if that sounds impressive, on one occasion last year it reached 90Hz). If you want some more on this phenomenon from an actual scientist, try Dr Joe Dispenza’s very-handy article on the topic here.

So what is Gamma (in the “consciousness” sense that I am talking about here)? Essentially unknown until we had EEG recorders to measure them with, they are associated with the “heightened experiences” reported by the most experienced meditators, with peak concentration and extremely high levels of cognitive functioning, self-control, compassion and bliss. Studies also suggest that gamma waves influence every single part of the brain at once. Yet there is something bizarrely similar about this state to being in the Delta zone. A clue lies in how it Gamma is revered by meditators; referred to as “being in the zone”, just as Delta is also revered, equated with the very deepest of deep states of “no-thought”; the dreamless sleep. To me, being similar but not the same as Delta, Gamma is a sort of neutral-zone. Only, this time, not neutral because it is “nothingness” but because it is “everything”. In my mind’s eye, if Delta is a sort of primordial sludge from which nothing has yet arisen, Gamma is a rainbow technicolor pool of iridescence in which “all things” have returned and reconciled; so, at a whole other end of the experience to where we began.

In a sense, this frequency-raising process (which we humans, being receptive of at the level of brian frequency, act upon all the days of our lives…) serves to move the invisibility of “nothingness” (a void space) into the full visibility of “everything” (an all-inclusive space), with us acting as its instruments.

For me, this brief description encapsulates why Source conducted the very experiment that Creation is and put us “out here” to play with it all. In other words, it was done so Source (being “everything”) could run itself through an experience filter “creation” (where duality is a crucial design feature, in order to provide contrasts in order for individuality to become manifest) and thus get to know itself better at the end of the process. Simply put, its like Source having shone a mega-torch upon itself in order to perceive all the different “colours” it is made up of which, otherwise, remained unknown to it, like all the stirred-together colours in a paint palette might resemble the colour of mud. Now, having been separated and then brought back together again (a process instigated by the transcendent Gamma range of frequencies), those “colours” can be perceived both for their individuality and their oneness, all at the same time, much like a prism reveals the colours of which white light is made up whilst also being able to see how it is white light; only this is on a much vaster scale since everything in creation is being run through that prism. What’s the point of all this, you might ask? Well, you’d better ask Source (God, if you prefer) though, without having the appropriate words to offer, I really feel like I get the point these days.

And that fundamental dichotomy, the very generator of our world of all-pervasive duality is, of course, the “split” between feminine and masculine…although, really, there is no split since they are both working together towards this universal objective.

So, when I imagine these frequencies rising up from the core of our planet and taking shape as us (the Schumann Resonance), it looks a bit like this (left). Those first impulses  of the Delta frequency in the earth feel like no more than a gentle thud thud of a very deep drum beat…the heartbeat of Gaia. From this primordial sludge, the feminine impulses of Theta arise softly, having no more substance than a mist rising from a meadow in the first light of dawn. This is the dreaming state; that brief moment of awareness, poised just before the creative act has made its very first mark. It’s somewhere we all long to re-experience for its simplicity combined with a wild, unreined quality that we equate with ultimate freedom yet we still go there when we sleep and can visit more often when we start to meditate as a daily practice, which can begin the process of recalibration at times when we most need it.

As these Theta waves start to collaborate with the structure-giving qualities… ideas, knowledge (stored data), innovation, ambition…of the masculine impulse that comes to meet them half-way in the Alpha frequencies, they take on more shape and start to get creative; not unlike the way a bean stalk takes heart to climb even higher with the help of a garden support. Pause for a moment and visualise those optimistic shoots of the Alpha in my drawing as a kind of organic bridge or a sacred marriage; a balancing place that enables us to take part in our own evolution…this is how it was “designed” to be.

However, once into the Beta range, that growth impulse starts to look more and more solid and masculine through and through…I imagine, like “towering skyscrapers” of human creation; held together by all the push and thrust of wanting more, a desire to conquer and possess, to be “better” than the next person, to “be right”, to assert individuality, ownership and sway (which everyone now wants their portion of and will guard to the death) and to be all-round king of the castle…etc. No wonder we start to feel vertiginous by the time we are living life at the top of that great big stress-pile!

Yet, just the other side of high Beta lies the Gamma range of frequencies. The first time you encounter these with enough oomph to really notice them, it can make you feel so dizzy, spacy, panicky, like you have lost that precious thing you grip onto called “control” and a little bit like you’re not only going to fall but that you’re being pushed from your perch (though, really, you’re being invited to fly). It can lead to crisis…in health, in resolve, in the very desire for your own corporate life…and suddenly you are changing things very fast because you feel you have to. This process is what I call “the shove” and it’s what happened to me, 13 years ago (whilst busy doing my corporate job) and I suddenly had no choice but to change my life overnight…I could bearly keep myself upright anymore!

This is continuing to happen to a lot of people, in a huge tidal wave, as I am hearing anecdotes about it all the time. However, once we start to experience Gamma on a semi-regular basis, in short sharp bursts, these evolutions become more…I won’t say comfortable but…organic seeming.

Just like the ninth wave impulse (which cycles in 36 day undulations, up and down, very rapidly compared to the previous wave which took two years) this rapid up-and-down quality of the SR, during these spikes I am referring to, is hastening our evolution (and for more on the “ninth wave”, look for that tag across all of my posts). For clarity’s sake, I feel I should add that the nine waves of creation (as identified by Dr Carl John Calleman) relate to a completely different part of the electromagnetic spectrum to that which is measurable by instruments used to detect brain waves or by the basic five sense. He suggests they are part of a morphogenetic (biological) as well as a mental range and they seem to have effected leaps in human “eras” similar to how brain waves effect leaps in human activity; yet the ninth wave somehow reminds me of the effect Gamma waves have on everything that has gone before, amalgamating and reconciling it all. I also suspect our reaction to, or partnership with, frequencies such as the SR has altered in line with the arrival of this latest creation wave (since 2011); perhaps even altering behaviour of the SR itself. And like the rapid undulations of the ninth wave, these sudden spikes in the SR also take us on a brain-wave journey across the whole range of accessible frequencies, so quickly, up down, up and down, revisiting them all over and over again in quick succession, that we have only one choice left…really….

…And that is to find our own personal match of frequency, picked out from the amalgamation of everything we have experienced before. We find our resonance with a certain “spot” and we identify this as our particular “happy place”. It might even be that the Gamma frequency is that “place” and yet we know we can access this, having identified it, in the very midst of an active life and don’t have to spend all our life in some-sort of constant transcendence state, like a super-experienced Budhist monk meditating day after day. It might be that we prefer the feeling of the Alpha bridge; or we might mix up aspects of different frequencies together into a busy and varied life. That “place” we identify as ours is the one we get to know on all the ups and downs, as we pass through it all so often now (like we are trapped on a manic elevator). Its the one that feels like where we most want to “get off” the ride, from within physical life (not escaping from it into some-sort of neutral zone), because the desire to still take part in life, not run and hide from it, is crucial for our evolutionary trajectory. It’s the level of the “skyscraper of human creation” that affords us the best view, the least aggravating neighbours, the best opportunities for how we really want to spending our days, easy access to just the right resources to support our chosen way of life plus an exploration of our gifts, and so on. I describe it like it’s a place but, primarily, its a state (though it will start to manifest as our outside reality when we continue to visualise it consistently enough)…and it’s an inside job.

Let’s pause to appreciate our chaotic world for a moment here…we didn’t used to get this much overview in our lives, before the world speeded up to such a breakneck speed and our accessible frequencies began to flip up and down on the chart. Imagine, just eighty or a hundred years ago, a man in the city, working all hours, feeling so stressed and out-of-sync with his life, everything he thinks he is “about” on the verge of crashing to the ground, would have had next to no facility to experience any different in his lifetime and would have just kept going until he dropped, never evolving his consciousness because to do so would have rocked his status quo too severely. What we get taken though now, on this out-of-control fairground ride of experience, is very much like the labyrinths that were played with so intensively by those learned in the esoteric traditions of old. The route to the top of Glastonbury Tor itself was designed to be a labyrinth; a wiggling route spinning round and around the hill. This route walked pilgrims, very rapidly and in such bewildering, dizzying fashion, crossing both the masculine and feminine telluric energy lines that are located there many times, thus baffling and muddling them up, breaking down all resistance to them, melding them as one, so that they could  have a heightened experience at the top…probably not unlike experiencing the Gamma frequency. How those individuals fared when they came back down the hill and went back to “real life” nobody knows but their world was very different to ours. These days, the very act of being alive will do that labyrinthine thing to you…in spadefulls!

Now, as happened this weekend, we can get to experience heightened experiences over the course of a “normal” sunday afternoon and hardly even register it (though I have really noticed its effects in people around me each time a spike has occured. I’ve observed feelings of sheer can’t-go-on exhaustion, of unexplained fear, of having to question everything, of needing to urgently re-examine life choices and many other existential panic feelings coming up in people, from nowhere, during these spikes; a classic sign that the top of end of the Beta range, with its burning tower-blocks, is being breached and yet, just the other side, moments of such transcendence.

Over the weekend, I noticed the high-frequency-ride myself and yet, for me this time, that first upward thrust of the SR on Friday had me on the crest of the wave, when I had the most extraordinarily uplifted day and felt quite unusually amazing, both physically and emotionally, lasting all weekend. I was still aware of a certain jitteriness towards bedtime each night, for no apparent reason other than the waxing super moon, yet I was able to stay really calm and centred, just observing it and remaining curious. In fact, it was this unexplained excitability in me, plus observations of other people, which led me to check the SR levels on Sunday, which was the first time I realised the huge spike we were in; though I wasn’t really surprised based on what I had been noticing. I was really in quite a profoundly energised and newly motivated love-of-everything state all weekend and just couldn’t get enough of being outside.  These variables are how the SR comes up in different people and there is no right or wrong. Some feel exhilarated, some feel floored or start to feel like they are having an existential crisis. If you let them, these diverse states also pass through with remarkable speed, especially if you pluck out from them what feels best.  It’s all good, it’s all what we each need to happen most. The more balanced we are, the easier it gets and I notice a profound difference in how I am handling it, now, compared to early last year.

Because what the Gamma state affords is an overview; and a tremendous one at that. In Gamma, we may be shocked to learn that we find ultimate peace, not because everything we disliked is suddenly gone away but because everything is all there, all at once…and yet there is no conflict, no disharmony, no rub. Its like popping your head through the clouds of the hyper-stressful, shadowy experience you were having a moment ago and seeing the other side of it, where the sun is always out and everything visible at once, even what we didn’t like; though seen in a new light. We remember what harmony feels like or, perhaps, experience it for the first conscious time.

What we learn, from that overview, is not that we “must do this” or “that thing” to get out of whatever feelings arise when we are back into the more active frequencies of Beta and Alpha. Rather, we learn to accept whatever is…which we can now do since we are operating from an inner state of harmony. The holding of the personal “happy place”, wherever we have pitched it, having come to recognise it on the way up or down of all these frequencies, becomes the place of harmony and we learn to reside there “within” our human lives. And once we do that, everything else starts to resolve, including that we will naturally make changes to our external circumstances to accommodate the harmonious state we now envision as our home. Even if we don’t seemingly change very much on the outside, at least not overnight, it’s not that we are avoiding “doing anything” but, rather, the holding of the state of harmony is the only “doing” that is necessary. To reiterate this important point, any panicky feeling that you “need” to run around making drastic changes or to tear-up your old life “immediately” because you realise it no longer suits you, as often follows a visit to Gamma land, is just part of the knee-jerk, trigger-happy response of the Beta frequency as you come back down the frequencies again; thus, is best over-ridden until you regain a clearer view. You would probably do better to focus on achieving inner harmony “with what is” than doing anything too radical, which only adds to the terrible feelings of panic, dissolution and stress that you are probably already experiencing at the top of the Beta range (where almost everyone seems to hang-out these days, especially in the work-place). Do that inner harmonising work first and the rest will usually follow.

People who achieve this state of presence, even as the frequency levels shoot up and down and the world feels ever-more chaotic, are doing major quantum work to evolve this planet, as I touched upon in my post last week. Because we all impact the field and the field’s harmonious state only becomes stronger and more resilient as more and more of the collective join in this state, regardless of what is happening “on the outside”. This is everything we hoped for and more since we are reaching a tipping point of individuals doing this very thing. When that happens, change will come because the manifest world always follows the idea of what we really want; just as the masculine impulse always follows the lead of the feminine’s first creative urge…from seed to breakthrough to shoot pushing through the soil. Remember, (re)birth is the feminine domain so, once we reclaim harmonious daydreams of the future for the feminine aspect to play with, the masculine aspect will start to do its bidding, creating the appropriate support structures for these to grow upon. Remember also, this has nothing whatsoever to do with gender and is as much of an inside job “per person” as it is a collective project for the whole world to become engaged in; so we can all start to do this work as we reharmonise our own lives. These frequencies that I have been talking about remind us that balance is the structure upon which harmony can be made manifest in our physical reality.

Mastering the harmonious state, whatever else is going on, means that (soon enough) all you have to do is pause long enough to notice your breath, to blink your eyes closed for a split moment and go to that inner state of harmony in your consciousness for just that fraction of a second and you are back there enough to feel something different, less convoluted, possibly even transcendent. This regular practice truly integrates the harmonious effect of Gamma’s transcendent state into our “real” human lives and is, therefore, so much more practical than several hours a day sat meditating or disappearing on long retreats, only to struggle more when the time comes to return to your life. In fact, I suspect, running away from your manic life for temporary time-frames will only tend to make things harder, going forwards, unless you have achievable projects lined-up to make your life more “like that” all of the time…with the cursory proviso to be careful what you wish for. A life of full-time meditation or quietly staring at an unpeopled view could be far less thrilling than you imagine; we are into a collective phase of “enlightened action” now and it is tugging at all our sleeves. Rather achieving these sound bites of harmony allows us to be fully present with people we are dealing with every day, and with their words when they are talking to us, to notice what is happening at the subtler levels of every interaction and to stay present with our own heart as we make decisions that impact countless others. These split-second moments, adding up, impact our world hugely, like individual snowflakes go to make up a giant snowball rolling down a hill…a ball that cannot be stopped and which is bringing such changes with it as it grows subtly yet in plain view.

I suspect that, at the deepest psychological level, as the SR continues to achieve these spikes and as we can’t help but to entrain to them, we will steadily come to equate “acceptance of all” as a flavour of the harmonious Gamma state we have now had experience of, albeit in brief flashes (growing stronger) and, so, acceptance of “others”, of diversity and of other’s points of view, including deeper awareness of how our actions have repercussions for those other people who, at the broadest level, are not so very dissimilar to us, will only increase where separation-mentality used to rule the roost. The interconnectedness of all things will become more apparent and this will become the basis of the state of oneness which underlies the still-so-important individuality of each person; only, now, we will have achieved awareness of it (as, before, only Source could).

And if what I share here seems like an audacious assumption, followed by a grossly simplified summary, of “what the Schumann Resonance does”,  then I would say there is nothing gross about helping the human mind to comprehend levels of heightened experience that it is only just starting to get to grips with. The visual that came to me so clearly, as scribbled down above, when I tried to help someone else navigate this territory (and which has helped me enormously as I have played with it),  felt well-worth sharing for that very reason.