The Curious Paradox of What We Really Are

In this 10th episode of Root + Rise, we wander through some of my favorite terriain: the dance of opposites, the numinous space of both/and, and the wildly generative consciousness that lives at the Zero Point Field ~ the realm of The Fool, Beginner’s Mind, and radically creative evolution.

Join me as we explore:

The archetype of The Fool and the number 0 ~ the cosmic reset, the soul’s new cycle, and the curiosity that unfurls new worlds.

The Zero Point Field in physics and mysticism ~ the alive, luminous space of infinite potential that’s also the fabric of our own consciousness.

A personal story from my childhood encounters with the vast, transpersonal Self ~ and what they revealed about love, identity, and the larger context holding us.

Curiosity as an alchemical force ~ especially towards the “negative spaces” in our lives.

Beginner’s Mind  ~ the revolutionary humility that makes space for new possibilities, innovation, and the radically creative consciousness that the world is hungry for right now

The dangers of expertise-as-identity, and why openness is the fertile ground of evolution.

Everyday invitations to practice Beginner’s Mind in real time

This episode is a recalibration and a reminder that you're not separate from the infinite, shimmering potential of the Unified Field; that openness is a kind of magic. And that the seeds of a new evolutionary cycle are already alive within you.

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Intro & Outro Music: Coniferous Forest by orangery on Pixabay.

Transcript

Hi, friends, hello and welcome to root and rise the space where we slow down and attune to the deeper, faster nature aligned rhythms that guide and govern Our lives in the world. I'm Rohini Walker, and before we drop into today's episode, I wanted to share about a new zine from Luna Arcana, which is the print periodical that I co create with my collaborator, Martine muncher. And so yes, we've just released a new zine, and if you're familiar with Luna Arcana, it's completely different from our previous issues. This is more visual, more non linear, and well, more Zinni, like a memetic distillation of this mythic landscape of the Mohave high desert where we live. And the link to check it out and get your hands on a copy or two is in the show notes. It's a great holiday gift and a great way to support indie publishing. And now on with this episode, and somehow we are already at episode 10 of root and rise, and I'm celebrating myself for that. I know it's a small milestone, yes, but it's these tiny and crucial stepping stones that allow for the bigger milestones. So thank you for being here, for listening, for choosing to hang out in this space with me. I appreciate you, and actually, while we're at it, let me also encourage you to celebrate the small things in your own life. It doesn't need to be any sort of milestone. It could be something tiny and completely mundane and unremarkable, like cooking a delicious, nourishing meal for yourself, or cleaning the bathroom sink or taking out the trash, but celebrating ourselves in these small acts nourish us in ways that self negation and just prodding ourselves with what we haven't done simply can't those ways of negating ourselves and telling ourselves off and scolding ourselves and punishing ourselves, they just end up stagnating our growth. You know those plant experiments, how the ones that are spoken to lovingly, they flourish, and the ones that are spoken to with cruelty wilt. We're not so different. 

So yes, here we are at episode 10, and today I want to dive into something that takes up a decent amount of real estate in my body mind. I've written about it before, if you're part of my newsletter world and it's going to be about many things, the dance of thesis and antithesis being one of them, the play of opposites, and how they can bring us into that wild, spacious, psychedelic terrain of both, and which is the evolutionary revolutionary space of beginner's mind and the infinite potential of the zero point field, which is also this very intimate essence of who, or rather what we really are. And I come back to this again and again, because not only does it feel like an antidote for our hyper polarized times, it also opens up these unexpected dimensions of meaning and possibility and creativity. So let's start with the archetype of the fool and the number zero in the alchemical language of the Tarot, the fool is the number zero the beginning of a brand. New cycle, and one of the fool's most potent qualities is curiosity, that wide open, unjaded kind of curiosity that helps to re fertilize and enliven the soil of our inner garden as we enter any new chapter. And as we're moving towards Winter Solstice here in the Northern Hemisphere, the true nature aligned New Year, the time of year when the sun is born, or rather reborn, this full energy feels especially alive.

This is the true nature aligned New Year Winter Solstice before Pope Gregory decided to tidy things up with his Gregorian calendar and sweep away the indigenous pagan rhythms of time. So winter solstice was the actual start of the new year. It's a real cosmic turning, and calling in the fool's curiosity right now is a beautiful way to meet the potent, fertile energies of this season. So the fool card in the tarot and its corresponding number zero is also the beginning of a new cycle for the soul, whether that's being born into a new round of incarnation, or beginning a new phase in our lives, or gestating a new creative endeavor. In all cases, it's a new leap into the unknown, which is an essential aspect of all radically creative acts. And in this, the quality of curiosity that's clear and free from distortions and biases is hugely beneficial as we set off on our pivotal journey to the unknown. This sort of curiosity is also a really wonderful antidote to fear and dread, which, if they're not compassionately curiously tended to and composted, can end up driving our experience through the lens of rigid attachment and expectation. So let's talk about that much overlooked number zero. It's the capital S source that seemingly paradoxically contains nothing, no thing, and has the potential for everything. It's that luminous, numinous space from which life and new creation is born and dissolves back into in Unified Field Theory, or quantum physics, this is known as the zero point field and zero point energy, basically a state of near total stillness. It's like a vacuum state, except it's not completely empty. It still contains very subtle fluctuating waveforms, along with equally subtle particles, like virtual particles that become and unbecome, that flicker and pop in and out of being seemingly at random. The zero point field may appear completely empty, like a vacuum, like empty space, but it's filled with a humming potential, a fundamental aliveness and consciousness. It's like an ocean of quantum fluctuations, and it imbues everything in space and time, including our bodies and minds, the cosmos and the earth and plants and trees and animals and rocks, and you and I have our own zero point fields too, what's known as our bio electromagnetic fields, or our energy bodies or auras, which are always interfacing with each other. So the physical senses, it looks like there's nothing there. It appears and feels like there's nothing there, that our bodies just end where our skin ends. But we can learn to hone and refine our physical senses to access our non physical senses and begin to perceive our auras and interface intentionally with our energy fields. And here's another paradox, our zero point fields aren't just access. Exist through our energy bodies that extend several feet outside our physical bodies. We can also tap into our potential filled zero point fields in the landscape of our inner space. This is where we come to experience a much larger consciousness, a much larger self that's the background, the witnessing presence, the eternal witnessing presence, as well as the very fabric of our being, we can become aware of our own zero point field through practicing distraction free Silence and Awareness, and when we learn to consciously touch into it, free from fear and resistance, we can access the very ground of our being, tap into the root of our being and the discovery that awaits us there is that this space is our most intimate self with a capital S. It's the space between each inhale and exhale, that eternal unifying space of creation and dissolution, we discover that this most intimate part of who, or rather what we really are, isn't separate from the unified field And the zero point field, which is brimming with energetic potential. At our essence, we are regenerative fields of abundance and energy and information, and being able to access and harness this could be pivotal in this age of AI and its insatiable draining of energy, even so called clean energy, which destroys habitats and poisons the soil and water with aggressive mining practices, among a host of other things. Very, very early stage research is being done in learning how to harness genuinely clean, regenerative and free, zero point energy, but we can individually start learning how to tap into this ourselves. For me, this is a crucial invitation and choice point of this age, a profound collective leap in our human evolution that requires a tipping point of willing, curious humans, a tipping point that we're not so very far away from. It's just inconvenient because it requires slowing down and tuning inwards, turning inwards, it requires a sort of radically creative disobedience and refusal to outsource our power and our well being and our very

sense of self

to the screen and to the technocratic oligarchy who profit from our depletion, but back to our sub atomic quantum world, a wave or energy contains the potential of a particle, and a particle which is also energy, but in a denser form, what we call matter, a particle contains the potential of a wave, this innate potential of one containing its opposite, is an occult or hidden aspect of the nature of phenomena. And from this perspective, the fundamental nature of all phenomena is the paradox, the riddle of both and experience. It's one and the other

at the same time,

this essential paradoxical nature of all phenomena, all existence, can't be grasped by the linear logical constructs of the thinking mind, which can't go beyond the bounds of this or that. This is why art and music and poetry and silence and nature, most of all can take us to this deeper, truer experience of existence. And just to be clear, this or that is also valid and necessary to live and to make appropriate decisions and choices and to get from here to there, A to B, it's just not the whole picture, and getting rigidly attached. To and identified with one thing creates a fragmentation and alienation. Okay, I know I'm going off in multiple directions here. My notes are not really keeping me. Rained in today, and also, this is a bit of a magical mystery tour of a topic. So if you're still with me, let's continue with this weird ride. Everything I've talked about so far is just the tip of the iceberg of the mystery of the number zero and the zero point field, that field of brimming potential and energy, which is the essence of what we are. And I want to offer my own personal experience around this one that I used to have spontaneously as a child, probably until about the age of 12 or 13, I've only really been able to give language to it in adulthood, as my own meditation practice deepened, and as I learned more and more about these concepts that I've been talking about over the years, so often, sometimes after a particularly terrifying experience with my mum's own unresolved trauma, which would get projected onto me and in my direction, and sometimes also Just out of the blue, spontaneously, a strange sensation would take me over. I experienced myself as something vast and still and alive and conscious. And in that stillness was the I, the concept of the I, that I believed I was, that I still believe I am, with all of my bodily senses, senses and sensations and thoughts and emotions, with the pain of my distress and sadness. When that was going on, I was both this vast, silent, alive stillness and the helpless little girl filled with rage and fear and confusion or whatever else happened to be going on in my system. I was also the room that my physical body was located in, and the furniture in it, and the window and the sky that was visible from it, and everything, everything was vibrating with this aliveness. I could rest within the vantage point of this non dual, impersonal, or rather trans personal vastness, while also still perceiving and experiencing myself and my surroundings from the quote, unquote, normal human perspective, the experience of the human little girl I was happening inside of this faster experience of i and I'd stay in this experience until i The Little me, I would start to freak out a bit What I now know as my nervous system being overloaded from an experience that I couldn't properly integrate, and then I'd start spontaneously shaking my limbs to literally shake myself out of this state and back into myself, The personal me, with a body and emotions and sensations located here in time and space, my identity with drew back into the localized experience of me now as an adult, one of the big Things that I've come to integrate from those experiences, and also from being able to access this more regularly in my own practice as an actual embodied experience, one of the big things that I've come to integrate and stabilize in My system is that regardless of what's going on, there's a larger presence, a larger context in which things are unfolding. And actually that context and presence is also the very fabric of all the things that are unfolding. And. And that context and that presence, that unified field of consciousness, I experience it. I did experience it, even as a child, as an extremely loving and benevolent field and presence, not like sentimental love or lovely conditions attached to it, but like pure, unconditional love, we're literally swimming in it. It's all there is, and nothing is ever happening outside of it. It never rejects us or punishes us or damns us to some fictional notion of hell, which is just a state that's created in the mind by the contractions of the mind and then often projected out onto other beings that are considered different and unworthy. This larger context that I'm talking about, that I experience and have experienced, is so loving and so omnipresent that it doesn't place any conditions on us. It allows all of the bullshit of the world to happen and to organically resolve and unwind, maybe not always in our lifetimes, but in the larger cosmic time cycles, because life and nature are always evolving and truth is always revealing itself, if only we would get out of our own way, if only we could widen our contextual lens and see the bigger picture without bypassing the here and now of our human experience, the divine, curious paradox of both and which includes the paradox that the more we deepen into this larger locus of identity, the more this larger context makes us and our individuality makes us instruments and agents of evolutionary change. We don't disappear from the world, but become more established in it from a place of integrity, which is to say from a place of integration, from the Vedic perspective, this is the totality of the unified field of consciousness, having a human, individuated human experience, and that's really The essence of what I would experience as a child. And we don't have to seek out this larger capital S self. We don't have to go and live in a cave and renounce the world. It's right here all the time, closer than the breath in the space between each inhale and exhale, the space between each thought.

So let's pause here.

It's land in the body, land in the heart and the belly and take a slow, deep inhale and let the exhale be a sigh of release. And I want to invite you to call in one aspect of your life or yourself that feels like it's not enough, like it's a negative space, like it's a big fat zero. Maybe there are many, but for now, just call one into your awareness, and if you don't have any right now, remember this for the next time you feel this way, while allowing all of your human dislike and resentment for this situation to be present and felt, can you also sense and feel that this negative space is the very ground of potential in your living ecosystem. Can you allow yourself to relate to it differently, to become a little bit open and curious about it? Cultivating curiosity towards the negative spaces in our lives is a deceptively simple and powerful way to enter the fertile zero point field, an inherently creative and potent dimension of the fool. This sort of friendly, open curiosity is what enlivens creativity and creation. The observer effect in quantum mechanics describes this that it's the act of observation and the quality of attention that's offered that gives rise to creation, like the plant who's spoken to kindly and lovingly and the plant who is spoken to cruelly. And I found that playing with this, with the negative spaces in our lives, the spaces that feel like a big fat zero, the ones that our conditioned, unintegrated egos don't like with a passion. I've found that offering those spaces of friendly, curious, open attention can set the creative act in motion and can alchemize and transmute them another way to become intimate with the zero point field is to experiment and play with the discomfort of releasing expertise. A simple and powerful lens is through beginner's mind, or Shoshin from Japanese Zen Buddhism in the brilliant book, Zen Mind, beginner's mind, the Zen monk Shunryu Suzuki famously pointed to the simple truth in the beginner's mind, there are many possibilities, but in the experts, there are few Beginners. Mind is the wisdom of the fool. It's openness and curiosity. It's the courage to say I don't know when we don't know, or to ask uncomfortable or unpopular questions that could maybe point to something new and perhaps even heretical and dangerous to the status quo, like nature, beginner's mind is an open and evolving system, and meanwhile, our culture tells us that our innate worth, which is never in question, by the way, has to be measured by Our level of expertise, saying I don't know, or asking uncomfortable questions outside of the closed system of expert mind and accepted dogmas often leads to ridicule and shaming and a loss of external belonging. Beginner's mind is the world creating zero point field of the fool. It's the domain of the potentially heretical visionary, which is a necessary archetypal evolutionary energy for these times. It's the child in the Emperor's New Clothes who's pointing out inconvenient truths, and it's an archetype that I happen to be obsessed with and want to draw out from everyone I work with, because we all contain this seed and this potential of creating new realities in our lives and in the world, especially, especially Those of us who have felt for our whole lives that something is deeply off with these systems that we're taught to obey and that we all deserve way way better than this dominant cultural status quo, and especially those of us who have to various degrees, refused to comply with it. This is nature's evolutionary energy, the Unified Fields, evolutionary energy moving through you. And you're my people, and we can't walk towards beginner's mind, while clinging on to the false safety blanket of expertise, or, more importantly, the need to feel like an expert of receiving a sense of identity and completion and worth from whatever accolades of expertise We may have achieved in our lives, which may stop us from asking dangerous questions or pointing to inconvenient truths in case we're rejected from the special group of experts that we belong to. And this is a worthwhile distinction. Someone can have a lot of expertise in their field, and they can release the unintegrated egos addiction to being identified as an expert by cultivating this revolutionary humility of beginner's mind, which paradoxically allows in more wisdom. Them, knowledge, innovation and expertise. Experts mind is closed, system thinking, which rarely births radically new creations, while beginner's mind is open, system thinking, which is the fertile world building space of radical innovation and creation, or as Einstein famously put it, no problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it. And collectively, we're at a point now where we do well to pay attention to those words to truly release expertise and cultivate beginner's mind means becoming willing to risk ridicule and rejection, to no longer be part of the cultural, social or political group we may have previously identified with. It's this initial willingness that gently opens us up to cultivating the capacity in our nervous systems to do this, because it's not exactly easy, and it's best not to steamroll our way into it and becoming comfortable in the openness and uncertainty of beginner's mind actually begins to create more space in the nervous system and creates a friendly environment for neurogenesis, the growth of new neurons and neural pathways. This space is that felt sense flexibility of consciousness with a greater range of motion. So here are some simple and stretchy ways to start cultivating the openness of beginner's mind. And these aren't practices that require us to set time aside to do them instead. They're intended to be invited into life and holistically woven in as a new way of being as we enter into a pivotal new cycle of evolution, which 2025 has been, and 2026 will definitely continue to expand us into. So you can do these non practicey practices all the time to invite in a new level of embodied, open system beingness, and start to play an experiment with consciously cultivating beginner's mind. So the first is listening. How do you listen? And this is one that I'm always coming back to, because thankfully, I'm no expert at this, as Ollie, my husband, will enthusiastically testify to I still slip up and find that my mind wants to barrel forward with its opinion. So listening? How are you listening? Are you listening with half your mind on what you're going to say next, or judging what the other person is saying? Bring awareness to the quality of your listening, and slowly start releasing the mental compulsion of needing to know what you're going to say next and simply be in the space of listening. Slowly start leaning into the immediate uncertainty of not knowing exactly what you'll say next, and allowing for a pause, a breath before you answer. Another one is making friends with saying, I don't know, because we're living through a time when everything can be Googled or chat GPT at the drop of a hat, and while that's great and oh so convenient in so many ways, the trade off is the Mystery of, I don't know, the humility and vulnerability and openness of it, the humanness of it, start to make friends with I don't know, and when possible, be with not knowing for a while before asking The machine. And in that mystery, something wonderful could happen. Say, you're in a work or a social setting, and something comes up that you don't know, but you think that you should know, that you might be judged for not knowing. Say, I don't know. Again, be. With that vulnerability, it's a deceptively creative and powerful space. It also unconsciously gives other people permission to do the same. It's humanizing, which is a brave and radical act of disruption in this age of relentless, dehumanizing humanizing. And a third one, which is a really big one for so many of us, me included, for sure, is becoming aware of and challenging our confirmation biases, one of the ways that our minds try to create a distorted sense of safety is by seeking out information and knowledge that matches and confirms its tightly held views and beliefs. We exist in echo chambers, and these days they're all the more entrenched because of the ever present algorithm challenging our confirmation biases is an alchemical exploration of the polarity of thesis and antithesis, because essentially, anything that we have a rigid opinion about, anything that's based on Right or wrong, good or bad, is our particular thesis, and the inevitable immediate opposite of that thesis is its antithesis. I think it was Emerson who said something about the moment we have a rigid thesis about something, its antithesis is born equally as rigidly, one can't exist without the other, and in fact, one is defined by the other. Remember, waves contain the potential of their opposites, particles and vice versa, and so too with thesis and antithesis, any rigidly held mental position about ourselves, the world, other people that we're deeply attached to and identified with is not inseparable From its opposite. They are part of one continuum, just as left necessitates right and so on in this relational, dualistic world, they exist in an intimate relationship with each other. And the deeper truth here is that thesis and antithesis are the opposing poles of a unity, a unifying core or essence, neither one is inherently correct or incorrect in and of itself. So start becoming aware of your confirmation biases through your tightly held mental positions and opinions and the intensity of your emotional and energetic investment, start becoming aware of how you seek out information and connection In the world that validates this confirmation bias and rejects its opposite that it's not separate from. And notice how this might create a mental, emotional fragmentation and constriction in your experience of life, how it might constrict and close up your system, and slowly start becoming willing to change your mind. You don't have to change your mind, just become willing to that willingness creates openness and open system, beginner's mind. And then, if and when you feel ready, explore how the opposite could also be true or valid, challenge your pre existing mental fixations. So this is not about inauthentically changing our minds and then becoming attached to the antithesis, which would then make it the thesis and so on. It's also categorically, definitely not about subscribing to anything that is dissonant with our authentic values. In practice, it actually brings our values into clearer focus, giving us more creative energy to be in service to them in the world. Instead, this is about examining previously unexamined belief systems, to really look at why we believe. What we believe is it out of habit or familial and social and cultural and political conditioning and influence, or the myriad other reasons that uninvestigated reflexive thinking and believing exist. This is about noticing and inquiring into the energy dynamics of the mental plane, and then releasing that closed loop of our rigidly held opinions and biases and inviting in the open space of beginner's mind, where perhaps a third way, a synthesis might organically emerge, one that could be an evolutionary synthesis of the thesis and the antithesis, because neither thesis nor its antithesis contain the whole Truth, but the synthesis that can emerge when the two are reconciled contains a deeper truth in inner alchemy. This is the reconciliation of opposites. It's where deep healing and integration and transformation can happen. It's neither the wave or the particle, but what Alan Watts called the wavicle something new entirely. But how do we do this in practice when real, terrifying things are happening in the world? Genocide is genocide, and I have strong positionality around that. I have a strong emotional charge around that there's no part of me that can entertain it as anything else, because it isn't anything else, from my perspective, that is my values aligned thesis, and I'm unlikely to change my mind about that, and I don't have to change my mind about that. What I can do is become willing to accept that different antithetical perspectives also exist, must also exist because of this thesis, even if this thesis is factually and objectively and historically accurate, that willingness loosens the rigidity and makes space for curiosity, which eventually makes space for conversation and dialogue to happen, not debate, not proving my thesis right and the antithesis wrong, which perpetuates more of the same polarized fragmentation, not trying to change the other person's mind. No, I'm talking about conversation, dialogue, curiosity.

Why do you think what you think, and here's why I think what I think in that process, something completely new can emerge in that space. And of course, this is not easy. It requires us to be able to hold and feel and care for our triggers, instead of becoming identified with them or projecting them out onto the other person. It's not easy, and like I said, this is a big one, and continues to take me to new levels of challenge and growth and capacity, and it's so worth it, because this potential third way is made of a different, more flexible quality and state of consciousness, and it creates spacious capacity in our bodies and nervous systems, which is where emergent possibilities and radical solutions can be born. And I also want to mention here that if the person we're in conversation with becomes verbally abusive and starts making personal comments, as I recently experienced, it's our duty of care towards ourselves to step out of that conversation. Martyrdom is not required in this but this way of playing with thesis and antithesis is some power, inner outer alchemy. It's one way of initiating new timelines, and don't force this, because then you're mentally and emotionally contracting. Just play with it with ease and openness. And for those of you who are feeling yourselves as heretical, world building visionaries and want to deepen into the things I've. Explored today. My membership community, root and rise is open for winter enrolment until December 31 and we deepen into all this through the body, not simply conceptually. We see and feel how at any given moment the body contains polarities of experience and meaning, thesis and antithesis, and we become masterful and adept at somatically inhabiting the paradox of what we are and of integrating these so that new synthesized, evolutionary third ways can emerge in our lives. We stop making our bodies and our lives and our relationship with ourselves a battleground first and foremost, because this is where the true cultivation of peace begins, and ultimately, we start to experience and embody that curious divine paradox of who and what we really are, without bypassing either our humanness or our larger Self. From here, we write new stories and create new evolutionary timelines for ourselves and for the world. I'm talking about the things that we've been told are impossible for us. This space and community is here for the disobedient heretics, for the ones who have impossible dreams for the ones who have never complied or are done with complying to systems of harm and domination and control. Everything we do is trauma informed and values aligned, and I'm so excited to welcome Brave New souls into this space this season. The link to join is in the show notes and Registration closes on December 31 so let's close by breathing, landing and rooting back in the body, in the here and now. What have you received today that feels correct and resonant for you with an inhale? Let that settle in and what feels dissonant with an exhale. Let that be released. No need to overthink your nervous system and your body know before the thinking mind does. 

And until next time, stay curious, stay open. Remember you're held in love no matter what, and let the world creating Wisdom of the fool work its magic through you.