Approaching cosmic oneness

The opposite of oneness is categories. The human mind sorts the chaotic flux of reality into categories to render it intelligible. But pull out the dividers that sort the categories and what you have is oneness, or rather one continuous cosmic gradient. (In my experience, psychedelics like LSD and mushrooms are one way of pulling out the dividers but not the only way.)

Some cognates:

Before Freud, there was faculty psychology. The human psyche was composed of faculties: passion, reason, appetite, etc. – like separate boxes on a shelf. Freud (not alone but he’s the one that pulled it together) switched out this category-based model for something more fluid and dynamic – a gradient moving from the conscious mind down deeper and deeper into unconscious drives and mechanisms that exert enormous though unseen influences on our behavior. Though dismissing Freud is something of an international pastime these days, I think his model of the psyche, where old and unconscious impressions continue to affect behaviors later in life, was a remarkable paradigm shift that shaped the direction of psychology. It is still perhaps the prevailing model today, and indeed Freud’s detractors often use Freud’s depth psychology model in waging their attacks. Feel free to demur in the comments.

Or how about the four sheaths in Vedantic philosophies: physical, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual. They seem like four separate categories but isn’t it more intuitive to see them as part of one rainbow continuum? Think of the emotional and physical registers during sex. Surely they are part of one gradient of response and not separate categories, unless we deliberately separate them for the purpose of analysis.

Or how about space and time. They were generally considered two separate categories – either objective categories defining physical reality or subjective categories, as in Kant, by which we organize our experience of reality. But categories. Then Einstein. It turns out space and time are not categorically separate but are part of the same continuum. Same with energy and matter in Einstein. No longer separate categories but part of the same continuum. E = mc².

There are probably a million other instances in the history of ideas, but the point is that categories help us sort, evaluate, and make sense of things, but the categories are not the things. In fact, there are no things. Just the one big cosmic Thing. The kaleidoscope of cosmic oneness, which is of course the same thing as the kaleidoscope of cosmic consciousness. The objective world and the subjective world fold into each other at the cosmic level. There is no other way. You don’t need LSD see your way through to this vision. Well, in my case maybe that LSD trip to a remote Mexican beach helped just a little, but that was almost an accident. Almost an accident. Maybe that’s the window to the next level of discussion 😊

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Many bodies, one soul

Embeded photo from an animal sanctuary in China. Photographer unknown.

                                        

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We are many bodies

Hippies, Wholeness, and Human Touch

If you look at clips of hippies from the Summer of Love or Woodstock or their post-60s communes, you see, the sexual liberation of the times aside, lots of non-sexual touching and hugging. In the hippie zeitgeist, human touch was one of the primary glues of communal oneness. Physical touch was not just symbolic of healing and unity. It was the physical joy of human connection itself. It not only symbolized but manifested oneness with our fellow beings on the level of all the sheaths of identity (physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual). You could feel the bonds. Besides the cosmic, hippyish explanation, this may simply be evolution. For millions of years, grooming and snuggling and other forms of touch have defined primate behavior.But as with so many things in the hippie spring of the 1960s, the reinvestment in physical touch was part of a social vision, a push toward a society that was less materialistic but richer in human contact.

Nowadays, the focus on sexual harassment has brought shame to many who long deserved it, but has also raised a question for us hippie sympathizers: Was there a utopian naivete about the hippie zeitgeist on touch? Can it be exploited by those who would sexually harass? That is certainly a risk, and the anti-harassment movement we see today is a corrective to that risk. But I fear the baby being thrown out with the bathwater. Along with those who are justly punished, there seems a sense building that any touch on the shoulder or forearm, is a blip on a gradient that ends in rape. We have moved from seeing “human touch” as one of the great healing and redemptive powers at our disposal to seeing it as something intrinsically dark.

I don’t want to overstate my case. I understand that no one is proposing that all human touch be marked negative. But is that becoming the new default setting? In our eagerness to right wrongs, is “potentially toxic” becoming the first thing we think of when one human being touches another? Come to think of it, a lot of default settings seem to be moving the needle to “toxic.” Masculinity is increasing portrayed as toxic in itself, invested in violence and power and subjugation; heterosexual sex is seen as vaguely toxic, and even women with straight heterosexual desire should feel a little guilty for being complicit in the heteronormative patriarchy. Such are the times, at least as they are being engineered by the theories coming out of academic identity departments.

But touch, I hate to see touch go. Whereas the push in the 60s was for a society richer in physical human contact, the push now would seem to presage a society that valorizes a decrease in physical human contact. Granted the naivete of the hippie zeitgeist had a vulnerability that could be exploited, I just worry about the pendulum swinging too far. I am uneasy about the demise of that hippie optimism about human nature and human connection. I worry that the beauty of human touch will be lost in a new age of puritanism. I worry that this new idea we have of the integrity of the isolated individual – some would say an idea that really only emerged 100 years ago with the existentialist philosophers – that this idea puts us at odds with millions of years of evolution, in which identity formed as part of a group, with constant tactile confirmation giving “wholeness” to that identity.

A society depleted of that tactile confirmation may indeed make individuals safer,and there is an absolute value there that gives pause to my own thesis. That value alone makes today’s anti-harassment movement potentially a great positive in our effort to “form a more perfect union.” But great positives can become negatives without moderating voices, just as the heady liberation of the French Revolution (1789) morphed into the Reign of Terror (1793). Without a Martin Luther King or a Gandhi, the passion of protest can turn unprofitably violent. And if Facebook posts are any indication, there are certainly some cultural warriors out there harboring a little of the Robespierre bloodthirst. So yes, I am all for the increased safety that might result from the anti-harassment movement, but be aware that a lack of moderation always comes with its own risks. The risk in this case is a more general fear of human contact. People may slowly become more isolated, alone, bereft of the redemptive power that has always saved us from our fragmentary, individual lives and given us a pathway to fulfillment that only comes viscerally, through abundance of human contact.

Photo credit: Peter Simon (http://www.petersimon.com/)

              

Psychomachia and Autobiography (with frolicking hippies)

The first question people always ask me about Hippies is whether this romp through the psychedelics and sexual liberation and ideals, the music scene and the war scene, all the darkness and all the light of the late 1960s, is autobiographical. And am I like Ragman or Ziggy or Tex, etc.?

It’s not exactly autobiographical in that sense. But I draw from autobiography on every page. I am a bit part in every character. But perhaps this is tautological. Perhaps every artwork with more than one character is a kind of psychomachia, all characters projecting different aspects of the writer’s soul or psyche. Perhaps this is not just a psychological necessity (creative arts are after all self-expression) but a metaphysical one as well. How metaphysical? If all the people of the world – past, present, and future – are so many surface expressions of the single personality of godhead, then the whole great drama, the extended “vanity fair” of human history, is one great psychomachia. And divine history, too, as the figures that populate the collective imagination are just as much expressions of godhead as the figures that populate physical reality. Indeed, the figures of imagination may be more intimate expressions of godhead, as Jung’s collective unconscious transcends the individual psyche and gets one step closer the universal Psyche.

At least this literary theory, this metaphysics, seems consistent with the cosmic laws governing the created world of Hippies. And perhaps that is enough.

 

Particles and Swarms

Does anyone know about particle swarm theory? It seems close to a unified theory of everything. Or at least like a pebble whose waves ripple through everything – biology and computer science, quantum physics and relativity, metaphysics and religion.

Basically, it says that independent particles form swarms, wherein each particle spontaneously takes advantage of the experience of the entire swarm. Examples in the natural world include fish schooling, bird flocking, and ant colonies. Swarm intelligence (SI) has apparently (I’m no expert) become increasingly important in artificial intelligence and robotics.

Can this bridge the persistent gap between the predictions of relativity and those of quantum physics? The problem as I see it is that relativity assumes a universe with physical matter of determinate location and mass. Quantum theory says that when you get down to the building block elements in the atom, units of matter no longer have such determinate values, but can only be described in terms of clouds of probability.

The relativity/quantum theory discrepancy has been scrutinized lately by “oil drop experiments” and “pilot waves.” It seems that you can drop oil on a liquid surface and as it bounces along, it interacts with its own ripple waves, creating a pilot wave that resembles the blur that quantum physicists see when they look at an electron or elemental particle – this would mean (I think) that underneath quantum physics is a stable physical reality after all.

So what if you looked at all the fundamental particles (or waves or whatever units you prefer) of the universe together as a swarm, all those pilot waves interacting, the every move of each affected by the every move of all the others, all one singular pattern of vibration? Do you get a 21^st-century physics that recapitulates Leibniz’s 17^th-century metaphysics of the indivisible unit, the monad? To wit, Leibniz:

“Each monad … adapts itself to all the others outside itself … This connection of all created things … the connection and adaptation of every single thing to all others, has the result that every single substance [every monad] stands in relations which express all the others. Whence every single substance is a perpetual living mirror of the universe … They are but perspectives of a single universe, varied according to the points of view which differ in each monad.”

From Leibniz, it is an easy step to the world view of the Eastern religions. This connectedness of all things, objective or subjective, expressed as material or expressed as Soul – is particle swarm theory the underpinning here also? And in that swarm lies an immanent intelligence, transcendent and mysterious to the individual, but not requiring any external or anthropomorphic god.

To shift from this synchronic view (how the swarm functions across the space of the many particles) to a diachronic view (how the swarm functions across time), the swarm is the intelligence that drives the trajectories of evolution, terrestrial and cosmic, or, more viscerally, all a singular shudder in some vast cosmic orgasm. A fifteen billion year–old orgasm, you say? Why not? From what I know of Einstein and Hawking, the universe may be one minute old from some other reference point, but only seem fifteen billion years old to us because we are near the event horizon of some black hole, where time becomes stretched toward infinity.

I am no expert in these fields, but I hope that my lateral thinking about them can stimulate a few thoughts. Even if I do nothing but stimulate streams of imagination, I hope that that in itself is no mean accomplishment.

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” (Albert Einstein)

Three Takes on Time

(1) A linear flow from past through present and into the future. This sense of time allows us to plot things from start to finish, birth to death. It gives us telos-driven thinking, such as Aristotle’s entelechy, where the growth of the acorn tends toward the oak it will become, with the destination, the oak, as the final cause of the acorn’s process of becoming. And it gives us the eschatological religions with a clear endgame for the soul’s voyage.

(2) A cyclical flow of endless recurrence. This sense of time, often associated with the continuous death and rebirth imagery of Eastern religions, gives us patterns, seasonal renewal, do-overs, the possibility of the karmic wheel.

These can be presented as opposites, but also can be presented in a kind of symbiotic tension. Joseph Campbell might well play with both, as one can see the mythic structure of the hero’s journey in both eschatological and cyclical aspects. And myth is a well-suited lens on the concept of time. “Myth,” opines Timothy Leary, “is a report from the cellular memory bank. Myths humanize the recurrent themes of evolution.”  And no doubt we have been exposed throughout our evolutionary history to both linear and cyclical patterns in nature.

If you’ll permit me getting a little cosmic about it, both patterns can be related to the journey of the mother ship, planet Earth, which rotates cyclically around the sun, but which is hurtling with the sun and its fellow planets across the universe in a linear path (either out from the Big Bang or back in, depending on our location in the life cycle of the universe). Thus our sense of movement through time is an elegant cognate to the Earth’s movement through space. Space and time lose themselves in a space-time flow. Einstein wins again.

Really, though, if you plot the rotation of the Earth against its linear path away from the Big Bang, the linear and cyclical movements form a spiral in three dimensions. So perhaps it is best for us to view time itself as a spiral. So why do we always hear about “linear” and “cyclical” views of time and never hear about the “spiral” view? We need an advocacy group for the spiral.

Wait! We’re almost there. Now another funny thing happens. Our cosmic spiral still presupposes an absolute reference point, in relation to which we are moving at such-and-such a velocity. But relativity tells us that there is no ground zero, no absolute reference point. Even the Big Bang cannot be plotted to a “point of origin” in space. This conundrum brings us to the third view of time.

(3) Kant philosophized in the late 1700s that time and space had no objective reality but were subjective categories we use to organize an otherwise chaotic flux of experience. He starts at the breaking point of empiricism, which had risen to dominance in the previous century. If your five senses are the fundamental inputs of knowledge, they tell you nothing about the objective world but only about the imprints some presumed world out there makes on our personal sensory registers. Color is not something “out there” but is rather the idiosyncratic way our retina interprets certain wavelengths, etc. Similarly, all our acquired knowledge is based on interpretations made by our own subjective processing plants. So we need subjective ways of organizing the chaotic flux of stimuli, and plotting them into the self-constructed categories of “space” and “time” is our most fundamental organizing strategy.

I am obviously not a scientist and do not offer these three takes as scientific hypotheses. My interest is in the human experience and human conceptions of time. If my astrophysicist friends want to figure out how space and time work in their purely “objective” aspects, let them do the math. I’m sure they will generate many useful ideas along the way. But somewhere deep down, they too emerged from the subjective space of myth, they too are engaged in the hero’s journey. And somewhere along in their figuring, they will have to pass the dragon of the Kantian possibility – that time and space are subjective categories after all. So Joseph Campbell wins this one, with an assist from Kant.

From Depth Psychology to the Akashic Record

It’s commonplace now to hear how modern physics increasingly dovetails with the ancient world view of the Eastern mystics. If this is true of our evolving conception of the objective universe and how it works, it is also true in the vast space of the subjective universe, the space of the psyche.

Before Freud, you had “faculty psychology,” which seemed well seated upon the Western classical world view – a symmetrical row of nice, neat boxes, each representing a “faculty” (appetite, emotion, desire, reason, etc.). Freud’s theories signaled a paradigm shift to “depth psychology,” with layers of unconscious drives and desires and memories folded beneath our conscious awareness, influencing our everyday behavior from invisible, forgotten spaces in the depths of the psyche.

“Depth psychology” is still the dominant paradigm for the psyche, and even Freud’s attackers draw upon Freud for their weapons, but his breakaway student, Jung, expanded the “depth” of depth psychology. Freud’s locus of interest is the individual psyche, and his case histories typically trace back antecedents of adult behaviors to the formative infantile development of the individual. Jung traces the roots of the psyche deeper still, to a place that transcends the individual altogether; hence we get the universal archetypes of the collective unconscious, a deep space of psychic phenomena shared by us all. You can think of it as our common grazing land, or if you prefer a high-tech metaphor, it’s the “cloud” wherein our fundamental data are stored and from which we all download to configure our own machinery. Either way it is here, in this transcendentally deep “subjective inner world,” that Jung finds “the instinctive data of the dark primitive psyche, the real but invisible roots of consciousness.”

It’s a short stretch from Jung to the akashic record of the mystics. The akashic record in the Eastern mythos is the record of everything normally considered past, present, and future (in our clumsy linear sense of time). Every thought, every movement of every leaf, is contained in this vast database, as it were. But the akashic record is more than a database. It is the ultimate reality. All our daily actions are reflections of, or abstractions from, the akashic record. We are right now living the akashic record, experiencing it from one orientation point. Through yoga, meditation, or other spiritual practices, you can almost picture your self-reflection carrying you down to the Freudian depth of childhood and then infancy, then breaking through to the Jungian depth of the collective unconscious, and finally arriving at the level we metaphorically call the akashic record. At this point, we’ve not only carried depth psychology to a point where Western psychology merges with Eastern mysticism, but we’ve inadvertently married the “objective” and “subjective” universes that provided the point of departure in the opening paragraph of this fine blog entry. Cosmic consciousness, as the very compound of the phrase suggests, simultaneously expresses ultimate reality in both its objective and subjective aspects. When you hit that ultimate depth, the inside becomes the outside, the innermost psyche finds itself expressed as the objective cosmos. So om mani padme hum, and I’ll see my physicist friends on the other side.

Four Sheaths of Identity

alt. title: Paean to D. H. Lawrence and Walt Whitman

alt. alt.: The Meaning of Holding Hands

The Vedantic philosophy of the East sees human identity in terms of sheaths housing the true self. It gets pretty complicated, but we can settle on four sheaths: physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual. Think of each as a sock the Self is wearing. The sheaths are not actually separate, but coextensive, so they are really different ways of looking at the same sock, but seeing them as separate layers makes them more comprehensible from the everyday point of view.

When I hold your hand, it’s not merely a physical act, but a trigger, an indicator, an objective marker of all sorts of transcendental knots and connections forming at the emotional and intellectual and spiritual layers of being. If I go deep within myself at that moment, I can feel it to be so.

Today’s religious followers too often feel only the mock-spiritual, an economy of meaning perversely separated from the physical, which leaves them with something dry and unsensual. Obliged to deny sensual richness, they remain sensually impoverished.

Today’s materialists too often feel only the physical and “demystify” the other sheaths into anemic scientific formulas, abstractions with all the transcendental and cosmic life drained out of them. And they wonder why they are unfulfilled, or half-fulfilled, in life.

I feel within myself the measure and vanishing point of all sheaths.
I am the fulfillment of a destiny.
You are the fulfillment of a destiny.
We are the fulfillment of a destiny.

And we know this to be true.

We can fight against it and tie ourselves in knots of neurosis and frustration. Or we can untie the knots, accept the full freedom that destiny expresses through us, and open the flow.

Painting (“Ghost in the Range”) by Kyle Nugent (www.kylenugent.com)

Who sees dead people?

A friend recently inquired whether my oft-inflated sagacity could cast any light on mystical experiences involving a recently deceased relative. Some, it is true, may be overeager to accept such communication, or to accept apparent evidence for reincarnation, at face value. Some dismiss it all as nonsense. It is tempting to say that every case of communication with the deceased is self-deception, and every reincarnation tale a hoax, and for all I know they may be just that. But let’s take some ideas from the Vedantic religions of the East and see if we can work through to a place that alienates neither the claimant nor the skeptic.

The akashic record in the Eastern mythos is the record of everything normally considered past, present, and future (in our clumsy linear sense of time). Every thought, every movement of every leaf, is contained in this vast database, as it were. But the akashic record is more than a database. It is the ultimate reality. All our daily actions are reflections of, or abstractions from, the akashic record. We are right now living the akashic record, experiencing it from one orientation point.

All forms of prayer, meditation, yoga, etc., are strategies for bringing us closer to the akashic record (or God-consciousness), where all things past, present, and future are perceived as oneness. Who knows how many levels of transcendence are folded between our localized consciousness and the all-embracing God-consciousness of the akashic record, but if we could reach bottom we would recognize that we ourselves, at the deepest level of our existence, are living all lives past, present, and future simultaneously – we would be viewing reality not from the orientation point of our individual consciousness but from the orientation point of the akashic record.

It may be that if we stripped away all hoaxes and self-deception, and found some instances of communication with the other world still standing, those instances would be the result of a dipping down into the roots of consciousness in the akashic record, and bringing back up what fragments we could find.

So as of today that is my “unified field theory” of reincarnation, precognition, clairvoyance, and all manner of communication with the dead. I now reserve the right to come at this topic from mutually exclusive orientation points as suits my whim in the future.