Videos hosted by Michael Erlewine

It has been relatively quiet on the Sun for a while, but yesterday we had a large M5.9 Class solar flare at 6:49 PM EDT (Friday June 7, 2013). I tend to forget that we are at the peak of the Sunspot cycle this year until one of these eruptions breaks out. I have written a lot of material earlier about solar flares and their effects on our mind, so I won't repeat all of that here. For those who have not tuned in to what solar flares are all about, I have free e-books, articles, and videos on this topic here, so feel free to have a look around the site:

http://dharmagrooves.com/#&panel1-1

Not all solar flares are as strong as the M5.9 yesterday. What I would like to mention here is a common misunderstanding as to how solar flares work with our mind when we don't have really strong ones or are not at the peak of the eleven-year sunspot cycle. And this is important to understand.

I try to watch the government's real-time graphs of solar activity, which are here:

http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/today.html#xray

Of course a large solar flare has a correspondingly large effect on Earth physically and on our mind and psyche mentally. In my experience, it is not the size of the flare that we are sensitive to, but rather the variation in the steady sunlight we get from the quiet sun. In other words, we react internally to change or variation in the sun and not just to large change.

I used to believe that only large solar flares affected me, but when I looked closely at the times when I noticed a change within my psyche and then ran and looked at the solar graphs, it is not only the size that is import, but the fact that the sun has varied from quiet to active. It is the interrupt. The sun acts and we respond. It is almost like our mind is the meter or graph paper for all of this. Might as well be.

I know this is kind of subtle. I have had to learn to watch my mindstream closely to verify this, and my years of meditation certainly help in that regard. When the sun moves in intensity, we respond in kind. It is almost like a dance. As the sun varies, we are energized and move in response, like a reflection in a mirror.

Of course, what varies is the amount of change we have to absorb within ourselves, and that is where the really large flares do plunge us into greater reorganization of our self to one degree or another. The more change (larger the flare), the more we are moved around internally, and perhaps the longer it takes for us to stabilize and redirect. And of course, I have emphasized that the unstable self resulting from a largish flare is a perfect time to take stock and reorganize our priorities. I find it better to do so consciously than to be moved willy-nilly (without knowing it) by these solar variations.

And before I move off this subject, let's get more subtle yet, if you don't mind. We can go to the graph at the link given above and see if there is strong solar activity, and then look to see how we are inside our mindstream. This is looking outside for inner activity.

However, a better approach (and the one I use) involves shifting my attention from always looking outside to (instead) looking inside for signs of these flares. If we can allow the mind to rest (whether through meditation or some other means), we can observe even rather minor variations of solar intensity, if we will learn to look. You have to look.

Most of us are so used to looking outside for everything that we tend to ignore these inner changes which are (in my experience) a natural and perfect barometer of solar flux. I can usually feel inner change appearing, whether as a burst of relatively more creativity or just a fresh sense of things. And it gets quite subtle.

I notice this particular when I am writing. Thoughts and ideas emerge into the mind, some of them very insightful, but also very transitory. They are here and then gone almost before I can record them mentally. I have learned it is best to stop what I am writing when one of these delicate shafts of insight strikes me, write down in a few words the idea of the thought, and then resume writing.

If, instead, I finish my current sentence and then go to retrieve the thought, it is gone and I can't manage to bring it back to mind. And I find these passing thoughts are often very creative and, obviously, insightful.

And one last point. One of the main reasons I finally gave up coffee (which I dearly loved) was because for me coffee always gives me a buzz. Caffeine is like white-noise or static on the radio. It energizes me but also buzzes so loud that it easily drowns out my more subtle thoughts and they are lost in the fog of buzz coffee brings. And I checked this out very carefully because I was not about to give up my morning coffee.

But sadly, what I found out when I compared my thinking or writing on caffeine to writing without caffeine, that there was no comparison. Yes, on caffeine I wrote a lot (I write a lot anyway), but when I reviewed it later, it lacked a certain creativity that I have come to expect from myself. And when I wrote without caffeine, that creativity was present, so eventually I just stopped drinking coffee or anything with caffeine in it.

And it is not like I experimented once or twice and then dropped coffee. No chance. I loved coffee way more than that. I did this hundreds of times and in the end, I loved the creativity more that the caffeine. Just an observation.