When I first learned “sublime” was a verb, the idea fascinated me. Yes, it’s a term in chemistry, but just to hear the sound of the word, it felt like something a person could actually learn to do. It has such a sound to it – Let’s sublime!
In chemistry, when something sublimes it goes directly from solid to gas without passing through a liquid state in between. Under ordinary conditions, ice turns to water before it becomes steam. But if temperature and pressure are right, ice turns directly into vapor, and snow banks disappear without melting. Solid carbon dioxide – dry ice – also sublimes directly into gas, which is why you see what looks like steam coming off blocks of dry ice at room temperature. When conditions are right for something to sublime, its molecules suddenly have enough free energy to break loose from their bonds to the solid state, shoot right past the liquid state, and enter the gas phase directly.
How wonderful would it be if we could sublime and break free of our bondage to our states of mind or whatever holds us back! Can we jump to a new level, or even make a leap beyond the states we know, and go directly into unknown territory? This is a question of crossing the phase boundary – the point at which a substance changes state. To do that, either enough free energy needs to be generated to make the leap, or the phase boundary itself has to shift or become more porous.
So the question arises, how can we go beyond our phase boundary in the moment, how can we free up the energy needed to go beyond? Is it possible that envy can transform to love, anger to peace, pride to all-welcoming humility? Is it possible that there are levels we’ve never even considered? As we think about these questions, we start to see that if we stop and actually look at our current state of mind without predetermining an answer, the very looking is already a phase transition. It is a shift of energy, the energy of attention. And this shift frees up the energy so that instead of being invested in a particular experience or state of mind, the energy is now invested in observing a state of mind. In a way, it is like shifting into neutral. The freed-up energy becomes available, and immediately there is greater clarity and greater ability to move in another direction. So this is one way to make a shift. And from that viewpoint, all possibilities can open up. But it has to really, actually be neutral – not aiming toward a predetermined state. If we are holding on to the idea of a particular state we want, then we aren’t really neutral and open, we aren’t observing objectively, and we haven’t really freed up the energy we need to make the leap.
Taking the other question – How can we alter the phase boundary, and is it possible to shift it or make it more porous? – we have to consider what is actually within our power. In the quest for that which is higher than the states we know, in trying to go directly into unknown territory, we see that we cannot map out an exact way to get there because by definition it’s unknown to us. But what is within our power is to work to soften the limits and boundaries of perceptions, assumptions, and programmed tendencies that make us less available to the unknown. This is making the phase boundary more porous.
As we loosen the tightly held bondage to our preconceptions and assumptions – our solid states of mind – there is more room for the unknown to find its way through the open space that emerges. As we stop believing in the definitions that created the phase boundary in the first place, we are more and more free from bondage. We see that when we justify unloving attitudes, hurtful behaviors, and judgments that divide us from each other and close our minds, we increase our bondage to states we don’t want, and we make the phase boundary stronger. But when we soften and admit that we may be mistaken, that perhaps we can take a different attitude, we weaken the phase boundary. We can do what is within our power to loosen the boundary and become more loving. As we do that, the boundary becomes more porous.
The more porous the phase boundary becomes, the less energy is required to go beyond it. We can open ourselves and become more and more free from bondage to our set ways of looking at things. And when there is no more bondage, there is nothing to prevent us from subliming all the way.
© 2021 Shanti Natania Grace
Photo by Alexandre Caron on Unsplash
