Mutually Arising
Most of us have had moments when, asked to explain or describe something, we have truly felt, “I don’t know where to start”. Perhaps a bit awkwardly, we begin anyway, hoping to develop a momentum and flow which achieves some continuity, some coherence. This conundrum precisely describes that which we will do here; we will “start”, with the understanding that starts are arbitrary points of convenience.
An easy, and perhaps cute way to start would be to say that we all have the answer, but some still have the questions. The sensation one has when looking at a group that has the answer, but still the questions, is similar to what a group meditation guide must feel when, after sitting for a while, someone asks “Are we there yet?” The presumption that there is a There, at which we are not yet, is the single greatest obstacle to being “there”. Indeed, it makes the position of the guide at least temporarily a contradiction.
But let’s revive that apocryphal story of the group of blindfolded wise men trying to describe an elephant. Each wise man, a specialist in his own field, fumbles about and feels a part of the elephant, leading to disparate exclamations of solution. Modern management consultants, advising big corporations, would label this the “silo effect”; each department is growing upon itself while losing track of what other departments are doing. The end result is widely disparate concepts of mission, goals and objectives; no coherent elephant.
Now let’s re-empower those wise men to examine the nature of Being, giving them backgrounds in the following fields: Philosophy; epistemology; anthropology; linguistics; mysticism; and quantum mechanics. Just as the management consultant looks for connective tissue in the organic institution, we will look for the common fibers, the warp and the weft, which will enable us to birth an image from the seemingly random tapestry of existence. In doing so we will see many fibers we have seen before. But, hopefully, the artificial silos, the mental constraints that impose limits and boundaries, will recede and fade so that we are left to puzzle how we ever thought they were there to begin with.
In addition to the “are we there yet” problem cited earlier, there are several more problems we need to at least name at this point. I see these as including, but not limited to:
1. Common sense;
2. Superficial thought;
3. Truncated memory;
4. Magical thinking.
5. Ego love.
Common sense, an agreement to agree, informs much of our everyday concept of reality. The social power of “common sense” lies largely in the enculturated drive to conform. Faced with the authority of “they say” or “everyone knows”, we are encouraged to avoid being different, particularly where different is often interpreted as “less than”. However, this does not make it correct. Although the early mathematicians of Classical Greece had calculated, with astoundingly close accuracy, the circumference of this spherical planet almost two thousand years before Copernicus and Columbus, the average person – so we are told, saw everyday proof that the world was flat and the sun revolved around it. After all, the sun did “rise” in the East and “set” in the West on a regular and predictable cycle. The Earth did not appear to move at all, either revolving or hurtling through space. A flat and stationary Earth was then a “given”, a self evident element of common sense. The English language preserves that element in daily usage such as “sunrise” and “sunset”, events we might go out to admire, taking in the illusion like a David Copperfield performance, only free.
Of course, it was Isaac Newton, particularly in his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687), who pushed Europe past the tipping point in the revolution of thought, laying the empirical foundations of science with the building blocks of: Reality; locality; causality; continuity; and, determinism. Newton’s “Clockwork Universe”, a comprehensively deterministic concept mechanism yielding such necessary primal causes as the (divine) “Prime Mover”, held sway throughout the world of the sciences, with or without the Divine, until the early 20th century. Indeed, some fields, such as Behaviorism, are only reluctantly letting go while others, such as neuroscience, are simply seeking new clothes for a fossilized Emperor.
As we will see in further discussion, quantum mechanics turned common sense completely inside out beginning around 1920.
Somewhat related to common sense is superficial thought. I am referring here to the information, derived from external sources or from internal thought, which is taken at the “uh huh” level and left at that.
Many children are taught very early that they have a non-corporeal spiritual component, often called a “soul”. Every quality which can be ascribed to consciousness is ascribed to this soul, perhaps in even greater degree. The children are taught that, upon physical death, this soul goes on forever; it is “eternal”, or “immortal”. Uh huh.
Children who persist in asking what eternal means are usually told something on the order of “endless”, “it never dies”. And when does it begin? It begins when God creates it (here we have a fill in the blank continuum from conception to birth, depending on the orientation of the speaker). Who is God? Answered more often by description than by identification, the child is usually told God is Omnipotent, Omnipresent, and Omniscient – the “three heavy Omni’s”.
An anthropologist, a mystic, and a physicist walk into a bar…… Someone, who has obviously preceded them by some hours, is professing her eternal love to the bartender.
Sufficiently possessed of a few glasses of spirits, our specialists begin to consider “eternal”. Coming from different perspectives, the mystic and the physicist agree on what to them is obvious: “eternal” is nonsense. Although the anthropologist, nurturing an avocation as a quantum physicist, agrees, citing Einstein’s comment that, “Time is Nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once”, there are still those inconvenient fossils of early hominid forms stretching beyond 3 million years in age. Indeed, the “Big Bang” cosmic background micro-radiation, predicted by quantum theory, has been found and dated to just short of 14 billion years. Something appears to be on track. But what?
The mystic begins by exploring the conceptual nature of “eternal”. Himself citing the 3 heavy omnis, he clarifies that, by definition, having any one automatically gives one the other two. Having omniscience would mean having omnipresence; it would mean that, at least in consciousness, the omniscient entity is entirely and fully in everything, everywhere. There is no thing and no where which is unknown to it. And, having all knowledge and all presence would give one all the power – omnipotence, inherent in everything. Like the shells on a sidewalk huckster’s game table, these variables can be interchanged in any order, all yielding the same result: At Oneness. Eternity, by definition, has no boundaries; it is infinite. Infinity is non-dimensional in that it is not, as commonly conceived, a line stretching endlessly. A line has dimensions; width and depth. Eternity (infinity) is at once everywhere. It does not begin and go on forever, for a beginning, seen backwards, is an ending; it is a point.
And how, asks the anthropologist, does this apply to the “eternal”? The physicist, who up to now had been quietly vibrating to his own private frequency, snaps into consensual existence and explains that what the mystic is saying, in his own intuitive way, is what physics has realized since the advent of quantum mechanics in the 1920’s: Not only is everything – every thing, interrelated, every thing is interrelated even with the potential from which it arose and with the no-particular-thing which it eventually becomes.
This is known as “quantum entanglement”. The concept arose from Einstein’s position that time and space are the same thing, just seen from two different perspectives. They are entangled. Yet Einstein was very upset by the implications of his own intuition. When confronted with the many demonstrations of this concept, as shown in the complementarity of paired photons at a distance, the so-called Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) effect dealing with non-locality, he called it “Spooky action at a distance”.
The anthropologist brightens then and says he now understands what Joseph Campbell (the “Father” of modern Mythology) was saying when, in his Masks of God series he said, “There never was a time when there was no time. There will never be a time when there is no time.” It wasn’t just word play; it was the intuition of the truth beneath the words.
The physicist quotes Werner Heisenberg’s book, Physics and Philosophy, saying “The world thus appears as a complicated tissue of events, in which connections of different kinds alternate or overlap or combine and thereby determine the texture of the whole.”
To which the mystic replies, citing the two thousand year old works of Nagarjuna, “Things derive their being and nature by mutual dependence and are nothing in themselves.”
And yet, who saw beneath the words, or symbols? In the 1960’s an easily drawn symbol became ubiquitous, not for its inherent meaning as much as for its prima facie rejection of Western authority. The so-called “Yin-Yang” symbol was held out as deeply meaningful, especially in an age of sexual revolution. Even more than the “Peace symbol”, seen by some as a chicken’s foot and by others as a stylized lingam/yoni of Shiva/Vishnu, perhaps locked in the Sardonic ecstasy of a lysergic acid diethylamide embrace, it supposedly epitomized the non-dualistic conundrum posed by the apocryphal Zen koan regarding the “sound of one hand clapping”, or what you might overhear in a public restroom.
The actual meaning of the symbol was rarely sought. And, should it happen to creep into squeaky, breath held conversation, it often elicited a quasi-meaningful “That’s heavy, Man” response to be followed by offers of another tok. The meaning resides in neither the dark field or the light field; it resides in relationship of the two as expressed in the Chinese concept Hsieng Sheng, or Mutually Arising.
Truncated memory and magical thinking are symbiotic; one feeds off the other to a large degree. This pairing is an example of the principle that, when it comes to people, 1 and 1 make 3. On a societal level truncated memory is seen in those masses of the 2000’s who are old enough to remember their whole hearted embrace of 1970’s literature and concepts, but don’t. A song title resurrected in the 1970’s film hit All That Jazz was seemingly prescient; “Everything old is new again!” At least, it is for some people. Thus, untold numbers of people who should know better have recently foamed and gushed over The Secret, convinced it is the long awaited release of esoteric knowledge, and not remembering Shakti Gawain’s Creative Visualization of 1970. Hence the rush to buy it and try it out; magical thinking. Before we presume that such movements run their course and die quietly it might be wise to recall an old maxim circulating in the publishing world of such literature, “You never see a house with just one cook book or one diet book.” Meaning that no matter how thin the new veneer, the old stock will keep on selling. “Reincarnation”, once the province of “that Eastern stuff that Beatniks (1950’s – early1960’s) mess with”, roared mainstream in the late 1960’s with major film releases such as The Reincarnation of Peter Proud. Since the 1980’s it has been reissued, under the new cover featuring an outspoken psychiatrist, as demonstrated through “regression hypnosis”. Of course, there is no discussion of either the mystic or the physics point of view, and as yet no response to the belatedly current realization that “repressed memories”, as released by hypno-therapists (in some notably serious criminal cases) are >99% intrusions implanted by the hypno-therapist.
The desperation to prove cyclical reincarnation as a cohesive and intact entity hopping from body to body through time not only ignores all the fundamentals we are coming to understand about quantum entanglement, “time-space”, and the delusion of linearity, it speaks of a level of ego-love which borders on the pathological.
Even acknowledging the risk of Cartesian reductionism, we can still reasonably say “You’re not the person you were a moment ago”. This is fundamentally self evident. But should I grieve the “loss” of that former person-state? Or, should I celebrate the flowering of the new, incorporating as it does all that came “before”? The deeply felt need to cling to the “now” person-state is in truth a deeply felt fear of becoming.
But what of all those reports, especially of children who claim to be reincarnations and who can speak other languages, name other people, and describe other places?
William of Occam, lost to history except through his axiom of the principle of parsimony (“Occam’s Razor”), would remind us that the complex weave of ifs connected to maybes, seasoned with defiant ignorance, underlying the Western view of body hopping “reincarnation” logically collapses of its own weight. Far more elegant is the view that, as entanglement shows us, nothing ever “dies”. In the same way that a thoroughly authentic “medium” such as Jamie Butler is able to access and facilitate the being-components of a “previously living” individual and enable that individual to communicate in the “now”, these children are unwittingly channeling, through their unhardened openness, the being-components of someone who, by circumstances and ways presently unknown to us, exists on a common substrate with them. It’s not that there is a deceased person sitting in the cosmic penalty box (the ultimate “time out”) until a young skater drifts by whom they can ambush. We all, at once, at every given “time” are interconnected – entangled; most of us do not sense it, a few like Jamie do.
Our revels are now ended. These our actors
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air……….
……We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
–Shakespeare, The Tempest