|
|
or Concerning The World’s Fullness With ‘Numen”, i.e. divine/living presences.
with thanks to megli for the title
This is incomplete. I have struggled with the intricacies of this for many months now, to try and explain where I understand the source of the aliveness and consciousness of all things to come from. When I’m there it seems so simple, but bringing it back in words becomes a clumsy thing.
1. There is experience
1.1 This is the only a true priori (the only thing that can be known without presupposing other things)
1.2 Everything that follows results from the experience of the interpretation of experience
2. Experience is the perception of things
2.1 A thing is simultaneously a thing in itself, a collection of things and a component of other things
2.2 A thing is a collection of things that are recognised to act as a thing in itself
3. Experience is a thing. That is, there is the experience of perceiving experience
3.1 This is the first distinction
3.2 To experience experiencing requires the identification of the experiencer as distinct from the experienced
3.3 Those things which are distinguished as distinct stand in relationship to each other.
3.4 Relationship is understood as reciprocal agency (the mutual capacity to effect the other) and/or reflexive agency (where the act of agency itself has effect on the agent)
3.4.1 All things are described by relationship.
3.4.2 All things can be understood as existing only in context of the relationships they stand in relation to all other things
3.4.3 As relationship is agency, relationship is a dynamic property, never the same thing at different times.
4. There is the experience of things (things as the object of experience, things being experienced) and the experience of things (things as the subject of experience, things having experience).
4.1 Whereas a thing is “simultaneously a thing in itself, a collection of things and a component of other things”, the experience the thing as the subject of the experience is the experience of the thing itself, the sum of the experience of the collection of things, and the sum of the interpenetration of the experience of the things that the thing is a component of.
4.2 The experience of the thing as the subject of the experience is the experience of all these things as the subject of the experiences and as the object of the experiences
4.3 The reflexive nature of this multiple experience gives rise to the unique experience of the thing as the subject of the experience
4.4 The distinction between subject and object is an abstraction
4.5 The experience of things is understood to be identical to the relationship that the thing as subject stands in relation to the thing as object
5. The experience of being this human person is a relationship between self as subject and self as object of experience.
5.1 Self is no more and no less than simultaneously a thing in itself, a collection of things and a component of other things
5.2 The experience of being this human person is a unique subset of the experience of being of all things
5.2 The experience of being this human person is also simultaneously a thing in itself, a collection of things and a component of other things
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
Buckminster Fuller
When my daughter was very young, I used to take that malicious paternal delight in suggesting to her that what she was drinking contained what was very likely once dinosaur pee. Bless the resilience of young children, I haven’t disturbed her for life ;-p but it did lead on to the discussions about the hydrologic cycle.
I brought it up again yesterday… “Do you remember when you were little, and I would tell you that what you were drinking very probably contained dinosaur pee”. Quizzical look. “No”, she said, so I explained adding “You’ve covered the water cycle at school?”.
“Over and over again,” she groaned, with a roll of the eyes.
“But with a something new added each time?”
“Yes.”
“And you know the water molecules are not destroyed or newly created except in unusual circumstances… they likely stck around for a long time?”
“Yes.”
“So your probably drinking dinosaur pee!”
“OK, but it is clean isn’t it?”
“Of course it is… you only get the molecule of water, not actually the pee… and donkey sweat, and…”
“OK Dad, I get it… I get it.”
A human being is part of the whole, called by us “Universe”, a part limited in space and time. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself of this delusion is the one issue of true religion. Not to nourish the delusion but to try to overcome it is the way to reach the attainable measure of peace of mind.
I love this quote, a letter addressed by Albert Einstein to a Dr Marcus of the World Jewish Congress in 1950. I am grateful to this post, Einstein Sleuthing for drawing it to my attention and even more grateful for the sleuthing work she did in order to track down the original source. Because I think that is important.
I recently posted a quote out on Twitter that seems to have recently become attributed to Paulo Coelho or is simply quoted and misquoted as “Unknown”
A life without a cause is a life without effect
Now a simple piece of research showed the original to come from the 1968 film Barbarella, yet this seems to be wrongly attributed in many places.
Take the following
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond imagination. It is our light more than our darkness which scares us. We ask ourselves – who are we to be brilliant, beautiful, talented, and fabulous. But honestly, who are you to not be so?
so often attributed to Nelson Mandela and misquoted in the process, yet originally from Marianne Williamson in her book Return to Love.
It seems that quotations, particularly those seen as having religious or spiritual significance, are readily communicated via the internet without any sense of the need for verification of source or accuracy. While the sentiment may be “cool” and the poster may gain some kudos for saying “cool” things, I do think that this necessarily does the original source of the quotation a disservice. The Einstein quote I refer to above was used in one of those books so popular recently that attempts to link New Age philosophy with quantum speculation, but was misquoted as
A human being is part of a whole, called by us the ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty
Now, this is utterly different to the original as sourced through primary sources (see blow). The wording is significantly changed to support the idea behind the book and to create an emphasis on Buddhist thought that simply didn’t exist in Einstein’s statement.
There appears to be some sort of metaphor here for the distortion of our original involvement in reality. That by a process of wish fulfillment and carelessness we create a perception of the world that becomes increasingly other than it really is. Not because the original is unbearable or povertised in anyway, but simply because we try to make it in the experience of out own image. Einstein was right… the striving to free oneself of this delusion is the one issue of true religion.
 Einstein's letter
Grammatically very rough, this was written in about 20 minutes as a stream of consciousness metaphor… but when I came to work on it, every change destroyed something. So you are left with the poor grammar, paragraphs starting with conjunctions etc.
 I once knew a story about a boy called Hugh, who knew all sorts of things about how light bends in air, why the sky is blue, how mixing red and yellow makes orange. Hugh knew what it took to make a piece of carbon and a wire play radio music, to make a telephone from tin cans and a piece of string. Hugh knew how two pins touching the skin close together felt like one. But Hugh did not know where the sky ended and space began.
Hugh grew up, as we all do. He learned how a girl’s smile could melt his insides all the way from his throat down to his groin and how confusing that could be. He learned how songs that he heard when he broke up could make him feel as bad as he did when he broke up. He discovered communication in the widening of the eyes. And, with each passing year, his yearning to discover where the sky ends and space begins grew stronger and stronger.
Hugh became a man. He observed how he and his wife became we, rather than you and I. And that we became I and I became we and distinction blurred. He observed the emergence of consciousness as his daughter grew. He observed his daughter emerge into a beautiful being who knew all sorts of things about how light bends in air, why the sky is blue, how mixing red and yellow makes orange. Who knew what it took to make a piece of carbon and a wire play radio music, to make a telephone from tin cans and a piece of string. Who knew how two pins touching the skin close together felt like one.
But Hugh did not know where the sky ends and space begins.
Hugh grew older.
Hugh discovered meaning and communication in every sound, in every sight, in every sensation. He discovered how every year his awareness of his experience of being expanded, and he discovered how good that felt and how little it mattered, that his awareness of his experience of being was what it was, is what it is and will be what it will be. Hugh grew older with his children, with his grandchildren. He lived to see his great grandchildren emerge into consciousness, to see his great grandchildren emerge into beautiful beings who knew all sorts of things about how light bends in air, why the sky is blue, how mixing red and yellow makes orange.
And still he did not know where the sky ends and space begins.
Then he died.
In bed, surrounded by his children, his grandchildren and his great grandchildren… all of whom he had taught how light bends in air, why the sky is blue, how mixing red and yellow makes orange. Who he had taught what it took to make a piece of carbon and a wire play radio music, to make a telephone from tin cans and a piece of string. Who he had taught how two pins touching the skin close together felt like one.
And as the tears receded, he noticed how sight, sound and sensation receded too. And there came a point, as he breathed out once, that with his last breath he smiled and said silently to himself, “Ahh, so that is where the sky ends and space begins”.
 I’ve spent some time recently musing on what the nature of religion might be. There is a reactionary movement within paganism that challenges what is perceived to be the “cherry picking” “my truth” route that many pagan paths appear to have taken… a sort of post modern transcultural unorthodoxy… and this reactionary movement frequently raises the challenge that current pagan paths do not qualify as religion because of a lack of orthodoxy and orthopraxy.
While there is a validity to these challenges, there is also something profoundly unsatisfying in defining a religion in terms of a combination of orthodoxy and orthopraxy. It seems rather like defining a person as a physical body and their daily routine. It misses something about the essential experience and meaning, and ultimately the purpose, of religion.
I watched a wonderful programme last night, Wonders of the Solar System, in which Professor Brian Cox (who is rapidly become the successor to Carl Sagan in his enthusiasm for presenting the wonders of nature and science with a real sense of awe in my opinion) witnessed the Northern Lights from the snowy wastes of arctic Norway. He had illustrated and explained the causes in terms of the magnetosphere and it’s interaction with the solar wind, and as he witnessed the effect he said that he had expected to see it coming down like a curtain of light from the sky. And it didn’t. He described it as seeming to rise into the sky likes spirits rising, flying to heaven. The scientist moved to see beyond the physics and explain the wonder in the language of metaphor.
Apparently, back in around the 14th/15th centuries, people were prepared to live, kill and die over theological differences. Differences such as whether the bread used in the mass stood for the body of Christ or whether it was the body of Christ, for example. Now, what is going on here? In the first instance, the bread is understood as a metaphor. In the second, it is understood as a concrete truth. Neuroscientists seem to tell us that different parts of the brain process metaphorical imagery vs concrete representation, so the difference is one of perception and cognition. A hypothesis I hope to develop in another post is that differing states of consciousness result in different limitations as to what can be known and differing ways in which it can be known, but certainly my experience in learning disability and mental health care plus my own experiments in altered states of consciousness confirm to my satisfaction that these two different ways of understanding the nature of the bread are in fact state dependent and probably require differing neurological processes. So Brian Cox was witness to a powerful natural phenomenon and was moved to a spiritual metaphor in order to explain his full response to it.
One of the other things that I learned as a nurse is that pathology is so much easier to define than health. Pathology can be understood in terms of the parts. It is a process that lends itself to a reductionist analysis. Health does not. To understand health one has to look to ecology… the internal ecology of the individual in relationships to the ecologies of the external world. Maybe, just maybe, that is what a religion tries to do… to map the ever shifting ecology of the experience of the sacred. To understand that the bread is both a representation of the body and the body itself, that the Aurora Borealis is both a shower of photons caused by solar wind being channeled by magnetic fields and a living animated spirit. To map the liminal states that take us to these deeper interactions with the world without excluding the alternative experience but to understand our experience as a limitation of the sacred itself.
 The Mullah Nasrudin Nasrudin saw a man sitting at the side of a road looking utterly desolated.
“What’s bothering you?” he asked.
“My brother, there is nothing interesting in my life. I have enough money not to need to work, and I was traveling to see if there was anything curious in the world. But everyone I have met has nothing new to say to me, all they do is make me more bored.
“In a word, I can tell you without any fear of doubt that despite all that I have done, I haven’t managed to find the peace I sought. I have turned into my own worst enemy.”
At that very moment, Nasrudin grabbed the man’s bag and ran off down the road. Since he knew the region well, he quickly managed to set a considerable distance from the man by taking shortcuts through the fields and over the hills.
When he was far enough away, he put the bag down in the middle of the road where the traveler was bound to pass, and hid behind a rock. The man appeared half an hour later, feeling more miserable than ever because of the thief he had come across.
As soon as he caught sight of the bag, he ran to open it, breathless. Upon seeing that everything was intact, he looked up to the sky full of joy and thanked the Lord for life.
“Certain people only realize the taste of happiness when they manage to lose it,” thought Nasrudin, looking at the scene before his eyes.
 Adopt a comfortable, meditative position. Close your eyes and start a mantra sequence (For the purposes of this exercise I pick something pretty random, usually a sequence of consonanted sounds; ka da ma ta ha, for example)
Focus on the mantra until it you can self sustain it non vocally. Keep it going until it has a momentum all of it’s own, then dissociate… imagine that you step out of and away from your body so that you can see yourself and hear the mantra coming from the location you see yourself sat in.
Move further backwards and forwards until the volume and feel of the mantra is comfortable for you. In this spot, in imagination, sit down and start a new mantra (we are working simultaneously with a dissociated and associated self representation here). Be aware of the original mantra sequence cycling round as you initiate the new mantra layer. Again, keep it going until it and the original mantra are both self sustaining, then dissociate again…
Repeat
This is a meditation experiment aimed at developing a deep state of trance in which intentionality and volition remain enabled. The exercise is also part of personal research into multiple trance loops… it seems they can be mutiple and parallel, or multiple and embedded. The levels of recursion one is comfortable with grow with practice.
A man wanted to know about mind, not in nature, but in his private, large ‘computer’. He asked it: “Do you compute that you will ever think like a human being?” The machine then set to work to analyse its own computational habit. Finally, the machine printed its answer on a piece of paper, as such machines do. The man ran to get the answer and found, neatly typed, the words:
THAT REMINDS ME OF A STORY.
Gregory Bateson: Mind and Nature.
What is it to know another person’s soul? To know their true nature? To look into the heart of their being? It is to be able to enter the infinite universe of their stories and to recognise the utter interconnectedness of their stories with yours.
As Bateson points out, our language does not describe the world as it is… it describes the world as it is useful to describe it. Our language is primarily a language of things. Or as Pratchett put it
I think perhaps the most important problem is that we are trying to understand the fundamental workings of the universe via a language devised for telling one another when the best fruit is.
Again, as Bateson points out, the language of “reality” (whatever that may be) is the language of relationships, of connectedness; the language we use to describe the world simply does not describe the world. It only describes what is useful for us. Stories, though… stories are all about the relationships. All about the connectedness.
On a blog I read regularly, the author wrote about Lucretius’s “great didactic epic poem, which aims to teach us that the soul is mortal, death is not to be feared, religion is mere superstition, and the whole of creation is nothing but the random coming-together and shearing-apart of an infinity of atoms sleeting through the void.” He posed the question why would Lucretius do all this in the form of a massive complex poem? because the poem itself is a metaphor for order and structure, right down to the arrangement of letters in structured, grammatical and poetical order being a direct metaphor for reality and experience created from natural phenomena, atoms arranged and structured in patterns and relationship to each other…
Greg Hill made a really interesting post on his blog today in which he discusses the contention raised by the philosopher Galen Strawson that physicalism entails panpsychism, or the stance that all physical matter is conscious. Now I don’t propose to develop that specific argument, but in comments I have discussed the idea that it is not so much that matter is conscious but that consciousness resides in the experience of relationship (it turns out that Strawson defines consciousness in terms of the ability to experience, so that is quite handy).
Greg refers to the experience of Jung where he “reported an experience he had as a child: ‘Am I sitting on the stone or am I the stone on which he is sitting?’”. To me, it is not so much that I experience the rock and the rock experiences me, but that there is an experience of relationship between me and the rock. Consciousness manifests experience, which in turn requires distinction to acquire form. From the creation of distinction (what G Spencer-Brown would have defined as perfect continence) comes identity and the experience of an experiencer and that which is experienced; subject and object.
So I fall to wandering. If the process of manifesting consciousness as experience gives rise to duality (in order for experience to have form), then this process appears to be mirrored in language and music. Unformed sound becomes language, words, sound with form that creates distinction. Every word cleaves our perception of the world in two. The word sand divides the world of experience into sand and not sand. Music defines a structure of sound against the chaos. Language shapes our experience of the world and gives it form in ways that mirror that primary manifestation of universal consciousness as experience.
There is potentially a tie in with Professor Julian Jaynes’ hypothesis that includes the premise that consciousness is a learned process based on metaphorical language and gives rise to the ability (amongst other things) to introspect, to self-examine. While this is a different definition of consciousness, it does stress the importance of developed language in understanding the experience of experiencing. And if language mirrors the process of the emergence of form-as-experience from consciousness, while giving rise to the ability to understand how that process shapes our sense of self… then it seems fair to understand language itself, and every word, sentence, song, poem, story as sacred. As truly and fully participating in that process of emergence and co-creation.
|
|
