Listening to your own Deep Space

You, too, have Deep Space. You should be listening to it

Many years ago, Einstein predicted we should be able to hear gravitational waves: big events that happened in outer space. But, how could you possibly hear something like that? Some of you probably keep a stethoscope handy, right? You use it hear the pulsations in your body, like a heartbeat. Maybe, Einstein and later astrophysicists thought, we could do something like creating a stethoscope so big we could capture sounds from many light years away? What would it look like?

Well, after a long and rocky road, Einstein’s descendants created those galactic stethoscope-microphones. Two of them actually. They are called the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). They both look a little like this:

On the morning of September 14, 2015, a technician was on duty in each control room. Everything was humming away. Decades of hopes awaiting a response that looked like it would never arrive. Suddenly, there it was. The Chirp they had awaited all these years. You can listen to the chirp here. A “sighted telescope” later confirmed the telltale “chirp” sound: two black holes were colliding at precisely that time.  Last week, I talked about the ego. In fact, the ego functions a bit like an internal LIGO. The ego is humanity’s most powerful listening device. Go to any leadership seminar and you’ll probably hear the words emotional intelligence thrown around. But learning to listen to your ego is emotional intelligence - it’s building your own personal detection system for the gravitational waves of your inner life.

How to Build Your Own LIGO

LIGO is a stethoscope for the Universe. Your ego awareness is an Ego-LIGO for your life experiences. Maybe it’s the moment before we speak in a meeting, the split second when someone cuts us off in traffic, or that flash of comparison when scrolling through social media. Each event becomes a potential listening station for the subtle “chirps” of ego activity: they are your Ego-LIGO’s personal Chirp sound. Here’s some important tools to make sure you’re Ego-LIGO is fine-tuned to your experience:

1. Check in on your Ego-LIGO often - Just like there are two LIGO stations to confirm what each other hears, our Ego-LIGO benefits from listening at multiple points and multiple “feeds” during the day. What is our energy level right now? Did we sleep last night? For me, I need to be asking, Do I need to eat right now? Do I need to stop eating right now? Please don’t treat the ego like the bad step-child. The Ego is part of what it means to be like you. It’s an integral part of consciousness. Stop trying to shake off the ego. Instead, learn how to relate to it, to listen to it’s signals. It’s trying to tell you important information all the time. In a chat with Claude.ai, it described the relationship between ego and consciousness like this: Think of consciousness as the sky, and ego as weather patterns moving through it. The weather isn’t bad - it’s just what happens in skies. Some weather is stormy, some is calm, but you can’t have a sky without some kind of atmospheric activity. I’m sure some will say Claude is hallucinating on this point. The analogy works for me.
2. Double-check the data - LIGO was designed to have two stations, not just one. This way, each station’s data could be compared to the other’s. If only one station showed noise, it probably wasn’t a real chirp signal from deep space. Like the Space Ligo, we have multiple control rooms to provide information on how we’re functioning. Are we in pain? Where is the pain? Are we coping with an impending loss? Are we sensing changes? Sometimes our internal stations aren’t enough - we need an external detector to confirm what we’re sensing. Sometimes, like the two LIGO stations, we can consult with people we trust. Am I reading this situation right? Barb is my go-to advisor in this respect. She’s the other LIGO. A while back, she said, I sense that difficult things might be coming our way. We shared some ideas about what those might be. But, whenever both Stations are sensing something big, you can be sure there’s a disturbance in Deep Space. Sometimes, she’ll say, Be careful when you’re driving today. I’m worried. Trust me, it’s smart to pay attention to her Ego-LIGO 
3. Wait to Publish. We get an email and someone has said something that completely misunderstands what you said. I can’t believe he said that! You feverishly your email and prepare to shoot off an furious response. Wait! Not yet. Double check your understanding? Are there other perspectives? Like LIGO’s scientists, we need to review the data before we publish. When we notice defensiveness arising, instead of immediately responding, we might adopt healthy skepticism. Instead of immediately labeling our defensiveness, “bad ego,” we might ask: What else could this be? Am I protecting something valuable? Is this appropriate caution or unnecessary armor? Where are my fears lying in this conversation? This isn’t about dismissing our responses, but approaching them with the same rigorous curiosity those scientists showed. By waiting, you might save yourself email chain embarrassment and even your job. I remember sheepishly issuing more than a few apology emails because I didn’t wait to publish.
4. The Ego-LIGO needs quiet and downtime - LIGO requires two essential things to function: separation from environmental interference (cars, thunderstorms, random vibrations) and regular downtime for system updates and data syncing. Not a nice to have - mandatory. Your Ego-LIGO has the same requirements. Like those big science projects, you also need downtime (Put down phones, anyone? <- I’m a hypocrite on this.) This is why we meditate. You need time away from distraction to update your inner software. A dear friend likes to go into nature for this kind of downtime. The goal is simple: create space for your detection system to work clearly.

You probably want to meditate as badly as I hope you will. But, the goal constantly seems to slip away from you. Taking a page from Meditations for Mortals, I’m asking you to try, just try, his advice.

What you could have done instead was to forget about the whole project of ‘becoming a meditator,’ and focus solely on sitting down to meditate. Once. For five minutes. ¹

If five minutes isn’t realistic, then you can’t and shouldn’t try for five minutes. So, what can you do? Really. It doesn’t matter what that time frame is, what can you actually do? Now, you know what your personal meditation prescription is. If you can’t do that, refine again. Like any medicine, you keep titrating it until you get to the does that works.

There’s lots more about LIGO here

To watch the award-winning video that triggered this post, go here