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Stephen Pickering

Tag: Metaphysics

  • Rumi Quotes and Poems

    This one makes me think of like the bodies’ organs, the intelligence of life itself which is below the pre-frontal cortex consciousness, but which has this ability to do, if you take it all the down to the quantum level, perhaps an infinite number of processes per second and seemingly without effort. This “without-effort” motif really makes me think a lot of the sub-conscious and especially of dreams. Especially in vivid adventurous dreams you are doing and experiencing so much, maybe 10 or 100x or what you have done even in your most amazing real-life adventures, yet your consciousness seems transported there without effort. If you think of fairy-tales and mythology in general this seems a very common and central motif.

  • The Key Insight of Mysticism and Meta-Physics

    After having listened, watched, read hundreds, perhaps thousands of hours of material from and about mysticism, over the course of more than a decade, the primary message that keeps coming through these experiences, if I could boil it down to one sentence is this:

    Consciousness creates reality. Consciousness creates matter and not the other way around.

    It’s tough when 99.999999% of the time your mind, all of your senses (And I would say those false messages are directed by the ‘Ego’) are telling you just the exact opposite. But then, looked at one way, that’s part of the game. That’s the challenge of the game.
    And that consciousness is not just our personal consciousness, or even our deep, archetypal consciousness (‘atman,’ ‘soul’), but a pure consciousness that is deeper and “a priori” to the Universe (or even ‘Multiverse’) itself. This could be called “The Ground of Being” which in the language of mysticism “neither is, nor is not.” The fundamental error of our experience is the belief of just the opposite: That “reality” or matter “out there” creates our consciousness “in here.” This is the fundamental source of all of our frustration. Because this latter belief leads to the feeling that life is a prison, that our consciousness, our experience. is determined by an outside force that we have no power to change.

    Let’s look at an analogy in nature: An apple grows out of the tree. The apple isn’t made somewhere else and then placed on the tree. It grows out of the tree.

    Well, wait, you might say, you are contradicting yourself. If the apple grows out of the tree, isn’t that analogous to consciousness grown out of, coming from matter?

    Only if you mix up the metaphor. In this analogy, the tree, the “Axis Mundi”, is a metaphor for consciousness, and the Apple (The “Knowledge of Good and Evil”) is a metaphor for the duality of the “objective” world.

    So the question would be, if one believes this theory, or perhaps has even had a mystical experience themselves, is what do you do? How does one expand on that, how does one change? When does the adventure begin?

    My answer is that I’m not sure. It may take me another decade to even come up with a hunch. But my gut tells me a practice of meditation is one if not “the” answer, or at the very least a way to get to “first base.” Because when you can step back from your thoughts, it starts to take the energy out of them, to quiet them, and then the mind starts to become “transparent to transcendence” which feels like taking a psychological shower, cleansing the mind, cleansing the personal consciousness, so that the connection between it (Your everyday living body and wakefulness) and your archetypal consciousness (Your ‘Atman’ ‘Soul’ or  ‘Wisdom Body’) becomes reopened. Then the billions (if not infinite) of years of wisdom consciousness becomes immediately available to your present, your ‘right now’,  experiential consciousness.

    If that’s not the “It” itself, it would seem, at least at the gut level, to be a great jumping off point. A place where many more options or ‘doors’ become available. A place where an adventure may begin. Like the earlier analogy I used, if the “Ultimate” is like a home run in baseball, then it seems like meditation, or some form of it, is at least a way to get to first base, from where you’ll automatically know, from the wisdom level, of what to do, or not to do, to continue your progress.

  • If Everything is Made of Atoms Who or What is Doing the Seeing?

    If everything is made of atoms, who is it that is doing the seeing, the feeling. Atoms don’t have eyes, so who or what is it that is doing the seeing? It’s striking how much that galaxy looks like an atom. Infinite Worlds above, Infinite Worlds below, and your wave function exists in all of them simultaneously, forever.

    Richard Feynman said that the greatest discovery in history is that everything is made of atoms. That made me think of this. My entire body and everything around me is made of atoms, or more precisely three primary constituents, protons, neutrons, and electrons. So that’s what drives me to ask the question “Who or what in me is doing the seeing?” If you say the neurons, which is a collection of atoms arranged in a specific way, it makes me think of an instrument like a camera. But does the camera have consciousness? It collects photons through a lens and arranges them in a pattern. But until we look at the photo, does anything happen? And even when we do, again who is doing the seeing? Because we are made up of exactly the same three ingredients as the camera, only arranged in a different way.

    Update: 10/13/12: As I was stirring my coffee today, the white powdered sugar at the top, as it was swirling around looked just like a galaxy. As I stirred harder the middle of the white froth started to sink in the middle reminding me how space curves inward from gravity. It reminded me that gravity is simply energy. In this case my “Mini” galaxy was spinning from the energy of my hand being transferred to the coffee. So the coffee was like the fabric of space itself. But what I was curious about was although I knew the energy was there and causing the sugar to swirl, I still wondered why the swirling energy made the coffee suck downward in the middle. The coffee wasn’t being sucked downward due to gravity. It was being sucked downward by the swirling energy. Was it only being sucked down because the energy of my straw was pushing the coffee outward towards the sides of the cup? So is gravity not really a force in and of itself but merely the after effect of energy pushing space outward? In that case then somehow this energy pushing space outward must cause a vacuum within Hyperspace (some Physicists refer to this as “The Bulk”) that sucks the the fabric of space inward towards the bulk itself. Interesting. So Hyperspace itself must be causing the attractive force of gravity. Really, when you think about it the “sucking” of gravity is caused by energy moving a portion of space towards the “wall” of Hyperspace (aka the wall of the cup) and so the middle of that portion of space loses its volume and moves away from Hyperspace (In this case the Hyperspace is like the surface of the cup of coffee.)

     

     

    Related Posts:
    Qualia Principles: The Foundation For A Science Of Consciousness – DeepakChopra.com

    And if you have a Facebook, it was this photo/post from Deepak that sparked this thought of mine.

  • Want to Travel Through Space and Time? Don’t Collapse Your Wave Function!

    Technology is like stealing fire from the Gods, that’s one interpretation of the fire theft metaphor you see in mythology, most notably the Prometheus story, but it never satisfies because it is piecemeal, and the second we observe it, it freezes, its wave function collapses. So the more we get, the more we want, and the void is never filled. Part of the symbolism of the Cross is that the horizontal bar represents the divide between the conscious and unconscious, logic and emotion, and they have inversely proportional relationships. The more “Leviathans” that Logic destroys, the Dragon of the Ego grows and further suppresses the unconscious energies, spontaneity.

    But an important step in the “Marriage of Heaven and Hell” developed at the turn of the 20th century with the discovery of Relativity, Hubble’s observations of an expanding Universe, and Quantum Mechanics. Overthrowing “determinism,” the prevailing theory at the turn of the century, these discoveries and their validation gave birth to most of the “magical” things in our lives today: radio, TV, computers, the internet, and on and on, all wonders of the mysterious Planck Length world making themselves known, felt, and realized in our “macro” conscious world of everyday living. This is one way that the horizontal cross and its barrier starts to be dissolved.

    But also, ironically, the sense of Science being the great Antithesis of Religion, also was cut through like a lightening bolt from Zeus or Indra. In fact, beginning with Special Relativity and up to this day, the more Science digs and discovers, the more Mystery it finds. We find that Science is actually coming to the aide of Religion, at least religion in the since of Metaphysics and Mysticism, although even to this day this sense doesn’t not have much mindshare. Mostly because of the institutionalizing of the arts and sciences and their systems which produce “walled gardens” that can’t nourish each other. I talked about this a little bit in another article, “No Possum, No Sop, No Taters.”

    It’s important to realize that without a wave function you couldn’t be reading this message, PC’s couldn’t exist, the internet couldn’t exist, because its all based on the ability of the electron to exist simultaneaously at every point in space. Fortunately we can’t “observe” an electron, so its wave function doesn’t collapse, and our Micro Processors still compute, and our emails go through. Even more fortunate still for our bodies’ sake, or it would collapse. The electron cloud keeps all of our bodies’ trillions of molecules that are constantly colliding, stable. The electron cloud is based on the electron’s ablity to be in an infinite number of points around the nucleus, simultaneously. Fortunately, someone wishing to do us harm has not the sensory organs to observe our electrons and collapse their wave function!
    Every object, including your body has a wave function. In fact the probability of the wave function's statistic looks exactly like you, your actual wave function, which is real, seeps into space and actually occupies the entire Universe. That is until you or someone else observes you. Then your wave function collapses, and you become frozen in space in time at the point they or you observe you. Want to travel or be in an infinite number of places simultaneouly like a God? Don't collapse your wave function! How do we do that? I don't know!!!!! But I have a few ideas. (Of course having an idea, itself, especially attached to the idea of myself having it, is automatically collapsing my wave function!) Until we get the engineering prowess, which will be at least thousands if not millions of years, to build Star Trek like devices, we are going to have to look at the Mystical route. I can't stop my neighbor from observing me. I can't stop even my dogs or cat from observing me, but if I were alone in a room, could I stop ME from observing ME? It seems to me (even saying "me" collapses my wave function) that observing myself, either in a mirror, or looking at parts of my body is very analogous, if not the same thing, to Ego. I. Look at your hand. The whole Universe is behind it, and when you look at it, it "freezes" it as separate from that Universe. MY HAND. Not the Universe's. It seems there would be one easy solution for not observing yourself: Close your eyes. But even when your eyes are closed, your other senses are involved with observing YOU, your sense of touch, smell, sound and even without those, your mind has only images of yourself as you have seen yourself for years, since you were born. That's a very ingrained image, one that perhaps gives birth to the Ego itself, and then once born, the Ego's needs, desires, and fears, propels one's body towards actions that keep it (the Ego) fed. This lock is not easily broken. Years upon years of habit are like mounds of soil and a rusty padlock in an indistinguishable field, on top of the treasure chest that is your Authentic Self (Self in the Eastern tradition as distinguished from Ego). The practice of Meditation and Yoga (re-linking, ie 're-ligio' to source or unseparation consciouness) are the only two practices I've encountered that show, perhaps, a way or solution to stop observing yourself and collapsing your wave function. Actually its been a long time since I've engaged these practices, so maybe I am writing this post to remind myself of their value and not the World. But the successful moments, even if fleeting, that I have had with these practices were very freeing in the sense that the gap between thought was achieved and these frozen architectures of the mind, these complexes as Jung would say, that have been years of memories in the making, seem to collapse in an instant. Can the simple act of meditation and yoga keep my Wave function alive and have me or you traveling to any point in the Universe (and perhaps time) instaneously, while at the same time keep one part of you, grounded, here on Earth, keeping your day job, keeping the bills paid? I don't know, but the feeling just occurred to me now, reading Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos and coming across a passage about Quantum Mechanics:
    "To resolve the discrepency between waves of probability and our commonsense notion of existence, Bohr and Heisenberg assumed that after a measurement is made by an outside observer, the wave function magically "collapses," and the electron falls into a definite state-that is, after looking at the tree, we see that it is truly standing. In other words, the process of observation determines the final state of the electron. Observation is vital to existence. After we look at the electron, its wave function collapses, so the electron is now in a definite state and there is no more need for wave functions." - page 152 "Before an observation is made, an object exists in all possible states simultaneously. To determine which state the object is in, we have to make an observation, which "collapses" the wave function, and the object goes into a definite state. The act of observation destroys the wave function, and the object now assumes a definite reality. The wave function has served its purpose: it has given us the precise probability of finding the object in that particular state." - page 153
    If I'm thinking of Eastern philosophy, the "Third Eye" represented as the red dot on the forehead of many Indians, is a symbol of observing without collapsing the wave function. "Seeing the infinite" as Blake would say. So before I walked into my bathroom and see my cat reclining on the chair, was he really on Mars and every other place in the Universe for that matter? Yes, according to Quantum Mechanics, which though is still just a theory, is the most successful scientific theory of all time and is responsible for the microchip and this Mac I'm writing on. So one must take pause. So if you want to travel through space and time, don't collapse your wave function! And one of the ironies is in order not to collapse it, you have to stop wanting not to collapse it! How else do you do it? I don't exactly know. My path might be different from yours and everyone else's. The Authurian Romances tell us "Each adventurer entered the forest in a different place and made his own path which had never been made before. To follow another's would have been a disgrace." So no one knows exactly, but mythologies give us hidden clues. The rest we have to find for ourself, and in our own way. What are your thoughts on this topic? Am I on to something, am I completely wrong, or somewhere in between? Love to have a conversation with you about it. Related Posts: