Eight Eight
he developmental history of human knowledge – be that of the sciences, humanities, arts, or divinities – may be reasonably considered in terms of innovation and novelty. Concomitantly, perennial principles of processional growth and evolution have consistently been renewed in cultures around the world, as this book has served to indicate. Natural, social, cultural, and spiritual patterns found in every great tradition’s stages of development attest to this. However, during our recent and comparatively short two-century span of human history, rapid change on all levels and quadrants of organization on the planet has become systemic. An industrial and technological revolution has been enabled by burning fossil fuels (essentially involving consumption of Gaia’s great storehouse of ancestors) and subsequently discovering how to exploit natural energy resources through machines. Spurred on by that tremendous energetic input, a speeding up of exploration in all fields of knowledge has occurred. This has repeatedly given rise to new worldviews and technologies promoting environmental, sociocultural, and psychological transformation. In the process, radically changing models regarding how the natural world works have appeared to overturn traditional knowledge on many levels of understanding.
Brilliant physicists and other scientists during the past hundred years have contemplated and argued the veracity of varying frameworks purposed toward integrating the most essential and universal theories of natural law. Because scientific study of the physical world has not occurred apart from psycho-socio-cultural development, principles addressed in this book that have advanced social, cultural, and spiritual growth have also affected the material growth of humankind’s physical environments. The Great Principles reviewed in previous chapters can also be found reflected within the evolving course of scientific discovery. From Heraclitus’s ever-changing Chaos to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, a history of rational observation and intuitive insight composing the essential knowledge of science has unfolded in tandem with the history of metaphysical wisdom and whole-body realization of evolving consciousness. The present work finishes with a consideration of primary principles being established within the new sciences and identifies those with ten essential and unifying principles of cosmic evolution and immortality. These affirm perennial wisdom understanding of unity through eternity. These principles, stages, or domains of world development formed the origins of the Tarot system of Image-Exemplars and divinatory storytelling. (A science version of the Triumphs may readily be imagined based upon this chapter; we will leave that for a forthcoming project, which promises to be of great interest.)
Scientific laws are thought by many scientists to embody “truer” knowledge than philosophical laws. Unlike Platonic philosophers, scientific materialists rationalize that the cosmos cannot be known purely through logos, or enlightened intellect. Scientists know the world by reducing it to and interpreting it through mathematical measurements and mechanical models of linear causes and effects. These follow rules of logic that can be objectively tested in the physical world via repeatable experiments. Scientific materialism places maximum emphasis on experimentally verified theories of law involving measurable, material object-events. Such laws are always limited to a specific level, aspect, or model of nature. We begin this chapter by noting the limitations of material and mechanical reductionism. Later, we introduce such exotic theories as vibrational superstrings and antigravity dark energy that are now propelling scientific research back into the realms of Pure Thought.
Within the subconscious is a collective longing for the miraculous transformations of an authentic Mage.
The scientific belief that all phenomena can be explained through a limited number of principles and laws is called reductionism. Among early Greeks, Thales (who lived in the early sixth century B.C. and was Greece’s first historically honored sage; often regarded as science’s first Patriarch) believed this to be true, while Plato did not. Science holds principles to be more fundamental than laws. Unlike laws, principles are not by definition proven experimentally. However, they compose a conceptual foundation for precise statements about how the universe operates. Such statements, when verified through experimental testing, become accepted as scientific laws.
Philosophers of science now commonly agree that known laws of the universe will historically keep being changed, superseded, or abandoned as new or complementary worldviews warrant – occasionally zealous claims by sectarian physicists notwithstanding. (For instance, it is now commonly held that the famous law E = mc2 only refers to a massive particle in its “own” hypothetical rest frame, in all other cases the law is subject to relativistic corrections. Of course, that view may well change.) This chapter reviews some of the major shifts scientific theories are currently undergoing. It then posits Ten Universal Unitive Principles that bridge modern science with the perennial wisdom represented by the Tarot and introduced in this book. The alpha-omega stage of emanationist cosmology has been referred to as Unitive Law. That is itself the greatest of universal principles.
Along with reductionism, other principles guiding orthodox scientific doctrine include those of mechanism and causality. Scientific materialism generally minimizes acknowledgement of principles other than these few. Knowledge is thus reduced to that of causal mechanisms.
Within every soul, be that of opponent or ally, dwells a way of righteousness; once viewed, that Way will never be totally forgotten.
Human minds identify and establish world-principles in accordance with philosophical and sociocultural orientations. Although some scientific materialists claim that their methods of knowing stand apart from cultural, social, or psychological influences, it is clear that the principles adhered to by scientists guide their creation of models and construction of theories. The principle of beauty, for instance, now widely appreciated in the world of science, is usually limited to laws of symmetry. Beauty that arises from unique asymmetries or symmetry-breaking is often ignored by material reductionists. This would appear to be influenced in part by cultural and psychological factors.
Although laws may be legitimized through repeated experimental verification, it was proven by Kurt Gödel in 1931 that every mathematical theory rests on axioms that are presupposed and not provable. This puts an absolute limit on the effectiveness of mathematical laws to fundamentally explain such universal principles as chaos, space, time, and law itself. Nonetheless, many physicists claim that these and other principles, such as symmetry and causality, come under scientific jurisprudence. The importance of metaphysics (literally, “after physics,” as Aristotle’s book on First Principles was called, perhaps because Aristotle’s editor placed it immediately after his works on physika or nature; generally referring to “the branch of philosophy that examines the nature of reality, including the relationship between mind and matter, substance and attribute, fact and value, and the theoretical or first principles of a particular discipline, e.g. the metaphysics of law”) regarding psychophysical and sociocultural processes of lawmaking and realization of truth is commonly denigrated.
Science must move beyond the religious dogma of nineteenth-century scientism. Humankind can no longer afford to believe that scientific “facts” contain no fiction. On one hand, history has repeatedly made evident the tentative nature of scientific models. On the other hand, scientism presents a utopian vision whereby the unending powers discovered by science will enable mankind to live so comfortably, in such super-abundance, that social politics, cultural rituals, and spiritual realizations will become obsolete. There remains a scientific priesthood that controls access to the enabling tools of science and that passes judgment upon any and all new theories. Science theories retain their authority only as long as such ruling experts deem it so.
Transformative powers of female grace inevitably involve an engulfing of the Questor’s most crucial purpose.
Privileged and politically connected scientists holding the reigns of socioeconomic power in their fields all too often remain silent about where and when the power generated by their scientific communities’ experimentations and technological implementation is used. This socially irresponsible position – justified through dogmatic conceits of “objective, non-engaged observation” and “political neutrality” – is enforced through peer pressure, fear, willful ignorance, and status or monetary craving, if not outright pathologies involving emotional repression and psychological dissociation. Regardless of whether a scientist believes corporate and political authorities will actually listen to and respect him, he is dutifully bound to state and abide by ethical guidelines. In other words, the scientific community is fully capable of including wisdom in its behavior and the world needs it to do just that.
This requires philosophical understanding regarding truly essential and universal principles. Just as exoteric scientists experiment with the outer world, esoteric philosophers verify laws of wisdom through contemplative experimentation with the inner world. Such involves and produces the study of metaphysics. Both communities and their practices naturally integrate with those of rulers, artisans, and traders creating, governing, and regulating social and cultural spheres. Ten universal principles, foundational for scientific, spiritual, cultural, and social law, have emerged through Great Tradition schools and are now being applied to modern technology in conjunction with their application to personal and social cultivation of love, freedom, happiness, and well being.
Through concentrated resolve, the Emperor touches every subject’s soul, reflecting the dreams and aspirations of each.
Through material reductionism, scientists posit that they are able to construct progressively more fundamental models that describe progressively more essential theories regarding the laws of nature. This then supports claims of discovery regarding the most fundamental principles of the universe. All of this is predicated on experimentation employing mathematical, geometrical, and largely visual models. However, consistent models of the most basic parts and processes of our material world are very difficult to construct. For example, there exists no consistent model of even the simplest atomic element known: hydrogen.
From Niels Bohr’s well-known shell model, to Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger’s Quantum Mechanics (QM) model, to Paul Dirac’s relativistic quantum mechanical model, to Richard Feynman and Freeman Dyson’s Quantum Electro-Dynamic model (QED), attempts have been made to explain the sequence of bright lights emitted by hydrogen gas when excited by an electric current. Even the latest of these models, QED, is only approximately accurate in describing fundamental experiments with the universe’s simplest of elements. A calculated model of any atomic element greater than hydrogen is far too complex for QED to handle and still be remotely cognizable.
Other basic aspects of reality, such as how a particle gets from one place to another, are not modeled by QED. Although very successful at predicting the outcome of subatomic physics experiments, QED is a good example of a scientific model that describes neither the elemental nor living world in a way that can be essentially understood.
When normal material density reaches a size of about one cubic micron (about one-fiftieth of a hair’s width), the sum total of its atoms’ gravitational forces exerts an effect upon any singular atom so as to break QM’s ability to define that atom, as QM is unable to account for gravitational effects. Furthermore, the Second Law of Thermodynamics (which addresses the universal tendency of a closed system to become random) becomes inescapable and thus introduces an “arrow” of time: irreversibility. This too is not accounted for by QM. Microscopic and macroscopic laws and models thereby do not “connect” – so which are the true laws that the others reduce into? It is far-fetched to claim that any mathematical model of physics on any given level realistically addresses all of human knowledge about all of the universe’s processes through an epitomized representation. Again, that is best left to the work of philosophy and what can broadly be described as metaphysics.
Throughout the cosmos, quanta concentrate energy in a manifestation of infinitely radiating dimensional space; abetted by the laws of physics, the Hierophant’s blessing penetrates the myriad.
Nature as set forth in Newtonian, Einsteinian, and QED physics is “time-reversible.” That is, the laws of Time as understood in classical, relativistic, and quantum physics do not make a distinction between past and future. A presumption that time is reducible to symmetrical operations wherein the spatial world is equally able to function backward and forward in time is fundamental to the basic laws of orthodox physics. For instance, the Earth revolves around the Sun in a trajectory that can be mathematically defined. Having done so, it is possible to extrapolate either forward or backward in time the movement of the Earth. Its path and place in revolution around the Sun apparently are not affected by time per se. However, complexity theories of natural flow and movement have revealed that we cannot exactly retrace bodily movement. This holds true even for a steadily orbiting planet. We can know if an orbit has remained the same over time, but not where exactly a planet was within its orbit at any defined moment. Working the numbers backward does not produce exact coordinates locating a planet in a position to other bodies that we can state is the known position that the planet was in at that time.
A waterfall, to give a more obvious example of the irreversibility of dynamic movement according to mathematical logic, comprises a great many water molecules whose trajectories chaotically vary through persistent interactions as they fall. It is mathematically impossible to extrapolate their trajectories or paths back in time. The laws of thermodynamics cannot be reduced to aforementioned models of time-symmetrical physics.
The Questor, in light of earthly success, will either be awakened in a lasting transformation and established in a wisdom-bound community or will, through the conceit of completion, threaten to disrupt a yet brighter alchemy beyond the Questor’s ken.
In QM, the wave function of a particle defines its location and velocity in terms of probabilities. However, when a physicist makes an actual measurement on a particle, he does not measure the probability of its movement, but rather defines it with an exact location or speed. Once measured, a particle never reverts back to a probable existence. Knowledge of the world in terms of microcosmic particles appears to be based upon “arresting” in time or space an otherwise always fluctuating reality. Once measured, a particle’s wave-function permanently collapses. By measuring particles, a probable world is given permanent definition. That which has a future potential becomes that which has a past manifestation.
Experimental knowledge based upon the certainty of measurement identified with the past is wedded to the breaking of time symmetry. The irreversibility of that process in actual reality contradicts the reversibility idealized in mathematics modeling the physical world. That an observer or measurer somehow forever changes that which is measured remains problematic to physicists. Yet, it would seem by many to simply be common sense. Knowledge derived from quantum observations is claimed by some physicists to be the truest form of knowledge humans have of the world. To identify knowledge with essential truth is to cross into the realm of existential meaning; it is not a trivial claim that warrants being bantered about in a play of intellectual conceit. For humankind, living reality is the ground of primary truths. Mathematical theories attempt to address extremely limited aspects of that living reality, and thereby mathematical theorists have no business appropriating claims of truth from all the rest of humanity.
Real life valuation of quantum and relativistic equations, even as they enable production of atomic weaponry, nuclear power plants, and quantum computers, is relatively small (if not radically negative) for practically every human being in every culture, educated or not. Even with the fantastic production of enabling technology such as computers, how many humans value such over love, freedom, and life itself? Every reader may know someone who offhand seems to, but who can honestly state that it is wiser for a human to love his computer more than any human being? How many computer, television, stereo, or phone users would sacrifice a loved one’s life just to keep their devices? Positing truth in any meaningful way involves association with corollary value propositions. Few humans really believe that truths discovered through knowledge of love, arts, politics, storytelling, health, humor, consciousness, family, and cultivation of life are of smaller value than the truths discovered in knowledge of equations found in a QED textbook. There is intelligent cause for this.
Love of life is the Love of self fully revealed to another; it is this that empowers a Questor to Love others as if they are oneself.
A supreme valuation of quantum mechanical “truth” may remain championed by certain physicists, but such is clearly untenable even within the broader community of material scientists. Unless, of course, the essential principles underlying QM’s laws are realized to be universally true. Essential truths from personal, social, cultural, and physical domains in actuality share a foundation of Common Principles that produce holistically integral value propositions. Thus, universal principles deserve everyone’s full attention.
How do materialistic scientists answer essentially metaphysical or philosophical questions such as: How is it that an electron carries a charge opposite but exactly equal in magnitude to the charge carried by a proton? These are claimed as answered by whatever mathematical theory might produce equations that crank out values to its variables that match the questioned observations. For instance, mathematical models of certain five- and ten-dimensional Grand Unification Theories produce an almost exact equality of the magnitudes of electron and proton charges. The equations are thereby claimed to have “solved the mystery” of this most essential cosmic polarity. The principle of polar symmetry itself, however, remains a True Mystery. Therein dwells its actual beauty. If we do not recognize that, then we reduce reality to the cold calculations of math and engineered machines that math may lend itself to.
Psychic autonomy is an exercise of self-empowerment, a gathering of the reigns controlling one’s mind; but know that self separate from other, autonomy without communion, is a dangerously precarious illusion.
While we consider the nature of truth and the principles most universally describing such, let us keep in mind that while nuclear physicists have proven adroit at creating weapons and massive computers, they have not in general fared well at all with creating happy, wholesome, harmonic bio-socio-psycho-cultural spheres of life (heroic and holistic physicists such as Amory Lovins are exceptional). Truth is integral.
There are numerous fundamental and essential unknown “hows” regarding mechanistic explanations of natural processes. The progressive formation of embryos, inheritance of instincts, presence of memory, and nature of consciousness are just a few examples of processes materialistic science is at a loss to explain. Since an angel revealed to René Descartes (the famous seventeenth-century French philosopher whose favorite place to meditate was inside a large bread oven) that mathematics was the sole language of truth, science has championed the geometrical (from Greek geometrein, “to measure the Earth”) study of moving bodies over all other forms of knowledge. Consciousness was thought to be the only natural phenomena that could not be known through Descartes’ “enlightened science,” which was devoid of any animating psyches, spirits, processes, or principles not reducible to material mechanics. This philosophy merged with the ancient Greek belief in atomism via Newtonian physics. Of course, we now know that the essential principles or axioms upon which science and math must perforce be based will never be reducible to proven laws of logic, let alone to measurable mechanistic models representing interactions of separative things.
In Descartes’ mechanistic worldview, energy is understood to remain eternally constant; it neither increases nor decreases in the universe. All change is but a mathematical transform upon a given delineated matter-energy quantity. (As we will see, cosmologists are now radically questioning this.) That quantity presumably can be transformed either “forward” or “backward” in time, for that is how mechanical equations work. The great traditional six-stage process of cosmic becoming was thus conceptually reduced by Descartes to a static identity of eternal being undergoing reversible mechanical operations. This denied all reality to evolutionary development as it had been understood for many centuries through philosophies positing cosmic emanation and spiritual procession.
To feel beyond the charms of physical, emotional, and mental distraction is to feel the Force of transcendence and the strength of intimate caring; adhering to such sublimity, the way beyond Death can be discovered.
As science faced the fact that evolution is indeed a material reality, not just a metaphysical myth, evolution was incorporated into mechanical conservatism through a conceptual reduction of Unitive Law (the True, Bright, or One of great traditional philosophy) to a law positing separative random survival. It was supposed that things and environments only evolve by accident through interactions contingent upon an almighty principle of Randomness, the belief in which identified a new priesthood of “enlightened” scientists. According to this worldview, there is no purpose of unity to universal law destining the natural evolution of a galaxy toward ever-higher forms of complexity and consciousness such as life on Earth. Principles that imply Unity as an inherent alpha and omega – basis and outcome – of natural laws were and are thereby denied. Along with the genuinely universal and unitive principle of synchronistic contingency, such includes the now broadly accepted new science principles of field resonance, hierarchical emergence, and holistic causality.
Cosmic order, organic life, and human consciousness are amazingly improbable features of a “survival-driven but death-determined” random cosmos. So improbable do they appear to be, that life on Earth must presumably be unique in the universe. In fact, the probability of our known universe having randomly happened at all is astronomically small. Many facts support this: If the ratio between the masses of an electron and proton were ever so slightly different, intelligent life in the cosmos would not exist. Even the minutest change in the electric charge of an electron would have prevented the stars of the cosmos from exploding, and planets would never have formed. If the expansion rate of the universe had been different by even an infinitesimally small amount one second after the Big Bang fourteen billion years ago, the universe would have collapsed before it ever took shape as we know it. Therefore, it has been supposed that a practically infinite number of universes must be co-arising. The fact that ours is defined by hierarchical levels of order does not play against probabilistic odds if there are an astronomical number of other unordered universes. The need for this sort of ad hoc supposition is clearly a sign that mechanistic reductionism is coming to the end of its road.
Unbeknownst to the ambitious, only an earthly state of compassionate reflection can successfully embrace Enlightened paradox – fortune mirrored upon misfortune; see beyond the illusion of high and low to the insight of unified destiny.
In medieval times, nature was thought to be animated or spirited and thus to be innately creative. After the seventeenth century, a mechanistic philosophy of nature became prevalent. Only God was viewed as creative; the world was created, but not in any way endowed with self-creative principles. Charles Darwin isolated an ancient metaphysical concept that Death rules nature. He then denied the rest of traditional metaphysical understanding regarding those principles that rule over death. He thought that through natural selection as survival of the fittest, creative evolution occurs as an innate drive to thwart death (or shall we say, innate mission to realize immortality), randomly leading natural bodies into more and more complex development. Ultimately, this produced the human capacity to adapt to any environment and neutralize the otherwise deadly effects of natural catastrophes. (Perhaps witnessing how humans handle massive climate change, species extinction, environmental poisoning, and the exhaustion of oil and natural gas will serve as a test of Darwinian theory and its embedded cultural psychology of supremacy. Will altruistic cooperation prove to be the key not only to happiness but to survival itself?)
In the mechanistic worldview all forms of chaos can theoretically be reduced to analyzable factors and mechanics, allowing nature to be totally controlled. If lack of information and resources prevent nature from being fully controllable by any given technology-enabled social group, scientists can at least show it to be predictable. In this dream of science fiction, a civilized world can be systematically structured as a permanently stable environment supporting human survival by predicting, forestalling, and undermining natural catastrophe. Death through species competition, including sociopolitical tribal and national opposition and random mutation, can be, in this vision, permanently thwarted through engineered physical, cultural, social, and psychological structures. More accurately, the world can be restructured to support survival of the fittest types of humans – the fittest societies, cultures, races, and genomes.
Probe the space before you, peer into the darkness of mystery, dispel the shadows of delusion; cloak your awareness with wisdom and nurture the union of mind and body.
We will not carry on with this train of thought. It quickly becomes lost in delusions of a eugenically engineered utopia, while ignorantly and greedily justifying eradication of all organic life that seems to compete with an inevitably self-elected “fittest” group of humans or their “most efficient economy.” Such a worldview lacks awareness of the necessity of interdependency regarding gene pools, species habitats, food chains, community responsibility, etc. Complex and holistic worlds such as Gaia Earth require the principle of chaos for the maintenance of creative evolution. As mankind attempts to arrest that process, it discovers in a regrettable manner that its own growth and thereby living reality is dependent upon it. Few humans seriously feel they would be happier in a totally fabricated, synthetic world “living” as an inorganic, even if “immortal” machine. More importantly, it cannot be overemphasized that recent beliefs in manifest destiny associated with weapons-and-media-controlled fascistic “governance” based on psychospiritual suppression enforced through societal policing and technological surveillance have not produced tenable structures for humankind that are sustainable.
Scientific knowledge regarding closed systems of physically identifiable, individuated particles and mechanisms represents only one quadrant of a four-quadrant world. The study of group systems that are open and definable as networks or social groups forms another quadrant. Henri Bergson was a sagacious philosopher of science who lived at the turn of the twentieth century. He considered the study of non-isolated biological systems to be more primary to humankind than the studies of physics or chemistry. He insightfully contemplated the primacy of time and the sense of duration; duration as interior reality of conscious beings, living cultures, and even the entire world as it is in flux. Conceiving duration to be immanent to the whole of the universe, he stated:
When subtle devices have played to the end of their innate consequences, a convergence of causes sustains an awakening underlying the mechanics of the psyche – such is the perfect time to sacrifice to Eros.
The more we study the nature of time, the more we shall comprehend that duration means invention, the creation of forms, the continual elaboration of the absolutely new.
Humans evolve physically, socially, culturally, and psychologically, and evolution is marked by history and irreversibility. The processes of natural evolution inherently contrast with those of manmade machines. The latter are founded upon types of memory composed of habitual representations embodied by unfurling mechanical parts juxtaposed with each other. The mechanical, materialistic worldview is driven by a mind-set oriented toward productive utility. Evolution, however, is embodied by active entities undergoing continuous, interpenetrating phases. The principles, stages, and phases of whole systems, most evident in living beings, involve relationships of bodies with the world; i.e., life, growth, and evolution are marked by vital activity, open exchange, and resonating fields – discriminated mathematically, rhetorically, practically, or otherwise. Mechanical, materialistic representation subtracts from and narrows the real. Just as time is not merely a rearrangement of parts, continuity is the movement of a whole.
Knowledge of the world that is most relevant to human life is founded upon ontological reality. Beings with inertial identity sense their world through vibration and frequency. The nonlinear multiplicity of rhythm experienced by dynamic identities creates tensional, integral duration appropriately referred to through terms of symmetry, resonance, and emergence. Cyclic vibration inherently resonates through duration. Duration on any level cannot be truthfully reduced to the polar extremities of an interval, which materialistic scientists habitually then reduce into singular and spatially separate “instances.” The interval of any vibrational state in reality is not the same thing as the measurement or representation of the extremities of a vibration’s interval.
Contemplate the transformation of self into Eros not as a series of little deaths, but rather as a sacrifice into utter essence, becoming Immortal via a concentrated gift of ambrosia drawn from the marrow of Death’s bones.
Representational or mental habits are in the business of abstracting “instantaneities.” Reality, however, is without a doubt a vibratory flux of space in and as time. Life and nature are not actually like the movies. The continuity of being becoming is not reducible to a series of discrete, juxtaposed “immobilities” that are reconstituted by mental habits into an illusion of continuity or life. Materialists limit the knowledge of science to mental operations upon imagined symbols of spatial instances that are in reality always continuous and mobile. The flux of the universe cannot be arrested through measurement and simultaneously be deemed as “truly known.” Adding up a myriad of truly unreal instances of such measurement and calling such “reality” simply does not create true knowledge of that which is real, but rather creates a grandiose representative illusion of that which is real.
When materialists reduce reality to their personal mental constructs, symbolic knowledge is then presented as reality. Pre-existing concepts of immobile things are used to reconstruct a symbolic representation of the actual flux of spacetime. Intuition, or the fourth stage of consciousness as introduced in this book, is cognizant of the duration of wholes and cultivates fluid concepts adopting the life itself of things. Intuitive reasoning does not presume that time is a derivative of space. This fourth-dimensional awareness realizes time as frequency and duration, prior to space as dimensionality and position. Mind’s radiance is not, thereby, limited to body’s shape and location.
The principle of hierarchical emergence ensures that evolution cannot be defined solely by spatial multiplicity and mechanisms that serve only to represent pre-existent possibilities. When that which is deemed possible is abstracted or projected backward from what is real, then our models of future possibilities merely resemble what has been already measured. Organic creation, evolutionary phenomena, and hierarchical emergence of every level and phase of nature come through a multiplicity and divergence of tendencies that resonate in highly complex correlations; connecting, merging, and creating fields through pervasive synchronistic contingency. Hierarchy is time’s way of introducing greater and deeper complexity and thereby greater consciousness into the three dimensions of spatial manifestation.
It is the lot of this beastly angel of earth to guard the gates of extraordinary power, wealth, and fame; thus must the Questor engage the Abaser of all processes, the Degrader of all stages.
Put in other terms, fourth-dimensional time is the transcendental dimension of the causal chains upon which spacetime is based. Hans Reichenbach, a contemporary of Einstein and interdisciplinary philosopher-physicist of unusual empirical clarity and holistic erudition, succinctly stated: “Time is the direction of the grain of manifold along which the causal chains extend, whereas space reflects only the neighborhood relations between the coexisting causal chains.”
The scientific definition of an interval must be based upon physical phenomena, not geometric/spatial abstraction. Any and all observation of interval must precede any and all proclamation of uniformity of successive intervals. Materialistic scientism presumes that event-things do not exist with the directionality of time, but rather exist as “instances” with the ability to be present, past, and future “at the same time.” Thus do mechanical equations equally work backward and forward in time. Fortunately for life, this presumption simply isn’t true. Time is initially understood on the fourth-dimensional level as comprising processes of temporal relations periodically phase-shifting or emerging into new hierarchical realizations of spacetime.
The second law of thermodynamics states that the universe evolves on a course of progressively greater entropy. It is popularly thought that entropy implies disorder, and that thereby the cosmos is destined toward a deathly state of random incoherence. However, that is only true for isolated systems near a state of equilibrium. When a system is in a state of unstable fluctuation, which actually defines cosmic reality, the most ordered states are the highest in entropy. In The End of Certainty, Ilya Prigogene elegantly argues that unstable systems serve as a good basis for the most fundamental description of our cosmos; in short, Chaos rules Death and cosmic nature. The beauty and goodness of chaos is found in the world as a constant state of flux evolving through emergence and an arrow of time toward synchronized systems progressively manifesting ordered phases of resonant symmetry beyond that of equilibrium.
Tantric alchemy reveals the ancient way of cauldrons and currents – containment, heat, circulation, pressure, catastrophe, chaos, emergence, transmutation, and hypostasis; key to all is always remembering Eros.
Equilibrium can be represented by the “zero point of the scale” (readers may wish to explore Zen Buddhism’s Blue Cliff Record for a deeply intuitive understanding of that illusory indicator). Development of being, consciousness, and bliss infinitely transcends manipulations around zero-point concepts, rules, and measurements of nature. This is true not only for human domains, but for the whole universe and its ultimately unitive way. Being, consciousness, and bliss are reducible to neither scientific nor spiritual beliefs that are defined by human psychological states keeping to “zero-point-ignorance” that serve only to delude rationally intuitive and discerningly dynamic states of knowingness. Beyond any ignorance of zero-point beliefs is a reality of transformative chaos in the form of extreme nonequilibrium stages of spacetime flux. Appropriately called spiritual realization, this constantly causes manifestation of a universe principled on holistic unity.
A new science focused on irreversible, nonequilibrium processes emerged in the latter part of the twentieth century. Cosmic processes observably give rise to coherent attributes, including those of resonant interiority, biological life, and consciousness. The study of time-based coherence is fundamental to modern chemistry, biology, ecology, and cosmology. The presumption that given initial conditions of any object or system of objects, the future and past of those objects can be known for certain no longer holds. At best the behaviors of unstable systems or objects can be probabilistically gauged. Irreversibility is inherent to the nature of time, consciousness, space, chaos, and the universe.
By the brilliance of the Star, the Questor sees the wholeness of the cosmos, the outcome of alchemical intercourse, the reality of Grace – no longer blinded by the abyss of dualistic opposition and catastrophic confusion.
Process philosophy itself is as old as Heraclitus and Gautama. Heraclitus preeminently countered the atomistic view that reality is composed of unchanging and inert material particles. In accordance to that early theory of science (in a fashion, still prominent amongst current scientific materialists, who have added a number of novel quantum symmetries to their hypothetical particles) atoms’ involvement with process does not go beyond an alteration of their positions in space and time; change affects only the relations between particles, never the actual substance of the particles. Countering such beliefs in modern history, Gottfried Leibniz, Henri Bergson, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and Alfred North Whitehead continued the tradition of process philosophy, with the school commonly being identified with Whitehead and his community.
Process philosophy posits processes at the forefront of ontological concern. Processes are construed as structured sequences of successive stages or phases. Processes are understood to be complex – a holistic unity of distinct stages or phases. Process complexity has a certain temporal coherence and thereby an essential aspect of time which cannot be eliminated. A process has a formal generic format or structure by virtue of which every concrete process is equipped with form. If the work of metaphysics is to provide a cogent and plausible account of the nature of reality at the broadest, most synoptic and comprehensive level, then process philosophy posits time and change as principal categories of metaphysical understanding. Furthermore, process is itself posited as a principal category of ontology or beingness, more fundamentally so than things. In process philosophy, causation, contingency, emergence, resonance, and creative novelty are understood to be essential principles of metaphysical understanding.
Merciful power reflects a source of forgiveness that endures all instances of confusion, chaos, and repetition; the cosmos continuously re-creates, with the Sun giving first, the Earth constantly elaborating new dimensions, and the Moon reflecting the whole process.
Materialistic physicists’ attempts to appropriate the insightful knowledge of perennial wisdom philosophy all too easily promote mathematical quagmires, if not absurdity. More importantly to humankind and planet Earth are the privileged claims and positions justifying irresponsibility that have been made by key conceptually dogmatic scientific communities in powerful commercial and governmental sectors. Intellectually arrogant scientific materialists adamantly adhere to the position that “real science” or “true knowledge” is “value-free” – based upon nothing other than “objective measurement” – and that “pure scientists” needn’t concern themselves with psychosocial-cultural-environmental contexts. This has abetted groups claiming “rights” associated with often brutally self-serving interests. “Survival of the fittest” theories of political science held to by political and economic leaders who hire scientists in order to gain personal power and money at the zero-sum expense of others have come to dangerously threaten the whole planet. The study and implementation of knowledge regarding life in our world, including experimental technology and procedures that enable scientific study, rightfully and simply are not “free” of valuation processes and essential ethics.
Take as an obvious example the invention and testing of the hydrogen bomb, or the very act of certain genetic manipulations and medical trials. Discovery and experimental testing of scientific theories often require destruction, invasion, and danger to life beyond that of the experimenting scientists. As an extreme example, behold the next generation of super particle colliders. These will be “recreating spacetime” as it existed at the “birth of the cosmos,” ripping powerful, new, unknown types of particles (never before created in the cosmos) out of the “Void” in such a way that no one knows what will happen to them or the fabric of spacetime that they have been ripped from. Doing this thirty million times a second for long periods of time, which CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland is designed to do, may create a new type of cosmic flux akin to black holes or who-knows-what. Possible disastrous scenarios conjectured by the physics community are beyond scary: such as immediate annihilation of our galactic segment of spacetime. Lesser disasters that might actually be experienced are generally not publicly discussed.
“And a great portent appeared in heaven, a woman clothed with the Sun, with the Moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve Stars” – such is the revelation of She who consorts with the boy-god, the Saint of the Sun.
Imagining, building, and observing powerful scientific experiments can be exciting until they kill life forms of personal or social value. Obviously, scientists do not and should not have carte blanche to experiment with every manipulation possible in the world based upon a proclaimed “scientific right to know.” Owning up to inherent psychosocial, cultural, and environmental responsibility is the deeply ethical duty of every practicing scientist, from geneticist to physicist to chemist. Unfortunately, the essential observation that knowledge is power has been turned into a toss-away cliché. Acquisition of knowledge carries a profound responsibility; honoring such might well entail enormous right effort.
While mathematical models and ideas delineating theories such as QED have enabled subatomic experiments to be successfully trialed (e.g., particle streams to be produced and collided or otherwise controlled) it is hubris to then posit that the cosmos is based upon those mathematical models, as if man’s mathematical logic is really the mind and power of a world-creating god. Are man’s mathematical concepts truly “existent” in a dualistic, Platonic sphere “beyond the cosmos” in the same way that a Christian God is generally thought of? Is it not more reasonable and scientific to suggest that Chaos, Space, Time, and Law as a Unified Reality is itself already always mysterious and transcendental in terms of ultimately being beyond man’s attempts to “figure it out”? Is this not what Gödel’s Theorem simply indicates? We can conceive of Essential and Great Principles, but they will never be mathematically provable. The Universe is awesomely and mysteriously Real. Models are wonderful tools until a modeler deludes himself into thinking that reality is founded upon his models; and that thereby his equations and numbers are the essence of all Truth.
Divine ignorance stems from the root of compassionate forgetting, therein allowing Angelic forces to concentrate and intensely transform; it is such perfect indifference that awakens enlightenment and magnifies wisdom.
Modern cosmology hypothesizes a “beginning” to spacetime reality, but that concept is self-contradictory. How can there exist a beginning, if there existed no time at that beginning? Orthodox materialism does not allow that time must be prior to space. Instead, time has been mathematically reduced to space; with ensuing math theories posting that time does not “really” exist. The domain that ideal math-space has been accorded contrasts so strongly with the real world as humanly observed that the physics community appears to be committing itself to a type of mythological dualism; one that holds to its dogma religiously. What is more, as physicists gain an ability to “cause” cosmically unique materialization of trillions of colliding particles, including the Higgs or so-called “God-particle,” a substantial portion of that community is apparently thinking that this is the very act of god-power. It does not require great insight to see the dangerous path this type of thinking may lead nuclear physicists and their military-industrial funders down.
While scientists have yet to approach the level of an “all-powerful knowledge” defined by an ability to externally create integral miniuniverses (although there are more than a few who think this possible in the not-too-distant future), they nonetheless individually and socially do have the potential to proceed through stages of psychophysical realization and sociocultural organization that reflect the great and unitive processes of cosmological and biological development. That is what spiritual and socially enlightened cultivation, communion, and teaching are about. Human consciousness as whole-body gnosis is far more enlightening regarding the essence of reality than are mathematical constructs. This most certainly does not denigrate or in any way deny the power found in mathematical manipulation, or the bliss found in logical contemplation.
Insights regarding universal processes, durations and radiance of time, and self-ordering complexities of chaos promote a wisdom that considers and contemplates unitive principles, truly illuminating the processional nature of space becoming a myriad of events in our cosmos. But how did Law, Time, Space, and Chaos themselves originally arise? Modern science has put forth numerous theories regarding the origins of the cosmos. In general, it is accepted wisdom that our universe arose out of a Big Bang, as the modern scientific creation myth is called. In a highly compressed version, the story reads as follows:
An indestructibly golden diamond body dwells upon the Throne; an all-pervading and sovereign agent felt as world-encompassing Justice – the original and destined Truth, Beauty, and Goodness of all.
Cosmic birth first entailed the creation of spacetime and laws determining the radiance and movement of indivisibly fundamental particle-events potentially infinite in number. As determined by the universe’s very first laws, operating within Planck’s scale of time and space (i.e., the size of a period if an atom was the size of a galaxy), a type of primordial, chaotic flux initially emerged from the expansion of spacetime gravity.
Cosmic flux was and is composed of a very limited number of types of mass and force-field particles. This original and still underlying invisible soup of energy quickly expanded into a spacetime world exhibiting causality as physicists currently measure it. Entities from atomic elements (mostly the first and simplest: hydrogen) to galaxies (whose material is largely the enormous fusion-flux of hydrogen and the second atomic element: helium) then emerged.
A cosmically creative, unimaginably rapid inflation occurred during a very small period of time in which the laws of causality and all cosmic matter-energy or space-time were created. In a hundredth of a second, the original cosmos of quantum flux was formed. In a few minutes, a chaos of atomic nuclei was forming. In half of an hour, a universal, elemental flux of hydrogen and helium emerged into existence. Within a million years, an atomic cosmos was manifesting in the form of billions of young galaxies, each destined to contain billions of radiant hydrogen-helium suns compressing atoms into heavier elements, ultimately producing a fusion core of radioactive uranium and its weighty atomic cousins.
Enlightenment of self means enlightenment of the World, for what is awakening if not the realization that self does not exist apart from the World and that both do not exist apart from utter Unity?
Albert Einstein showed via his theories of spacetime relativity that what has been observed over the millennia as dimensional and geometrical attributes of the world are actually naught but the force field we have since Isaac Newton’s time called gravity. Einstein stated that spacetime claims existence on its own only as a structural quality of the gravitational field. Space is gravity.
Can we equate any other phenomena or force with space-gravity? How about, for instance, the force of electromagnetism or Light? According to General Relativity Theory (GRT), in pure space – what may be called the Void – electromagnetic fields can be mathematically eliminated, while the field of gravity cannot. However, all attempts to define electromagnetic fields in the mathematical terms of gravity (keeping in mind that math is the sole scientifically material way of defining anything) have failed. The laws governing each are mathematically completely distinct. This is but a single example of the substantial discontinuity embedded in the sets of laws that physicists have created in order to explain, define, and manipulate the world.
Einstein held to a classical scientific worldview that every element in a physical theory must have a counterpart in physical reality. This commonsense, objectively practical worldview was associated with two primary, old science principles: those of Realism and Local Causes. The latter states that a physical event cannot simultaneously influence another event without direct mediation, such as the sending of a signal. The former assumption states that physical reality exists independent of any observers and is not dependent upon acts of observation or measurement. Quantum mechanics theories and experiments have shown these two foundational beliefs to be untrue.
Because GRT does not address the atomic level of physical reality (i.e., it does not offer a single property of atomic matter), matter does not appear to be an intrinsic aspect of GRT’s description of spacetime. However, matter quite apparently is an aspect of our world; thereby it is left to other theories to explain it. Since classical Greek times, a belief has held that breaking matter into its smallest constituent parts will explain what matter really is. Gravity as a force can only be measured on macrocosmic levels, however. The math that defines gravity cannot be used in any way to break matter down to small event-pieces.
Given the power to fly, to conjure images and sounds of the past, to instantaneously communicate regardless of distance, to move objects without physical contact, what more does the Questor need, lest it be the true ecstasy of a Simple One?
This is where the mechanics of Quantum Field Theory (QFT) have reigned supreme. QFT addresses atomic and subatomic levels of matter. GRT presents space as wedded always to time, with spacetime being defined by the field of gravity. It integrates mass with energy and the constant speed of light via spacetime. However, QFT has led to a worldview whereby most all of cosmic matter must actually be conceived as field-energy of types other than gravity.
Contrary to the old principle of local causation, Irish physicist John Bell suggested in 1964 that paired atomic particles would retain their correlation over space-like separation (meaning a situation whereby no signal traveling at the speed of light can carry information between two paired particles in the time allowed for measurement). This was experimentally verified in 1972, proving that non-locality or non-separability is a universal dynamic in our cosmos. The principle of nonlocality for events that have a common origin in a unified quantum system is no longer disputed. Although one of the most profound discoveries of modern science, its philosophical and ontological implications have yet to be broadly appreciated.
Given that the universe was quantumly entangled at the time of its origin, then that unification must remain throughout the universe; i.e., the cosmos must presently exist in nonlocal, non-separable entanglement. It has been observed within perennial wisdom tradition that the principles underlying quantum nonlocality apply to other aspects of reality through the essential principles of holistic causality and synchronistic contingency.
Neils Bohr, Einstein’s famous contemporary and good-natured debater, foresaw the disproving of the principle of realism, for QM (even before Werner Heisenberg, a student of Bohr’s, developed his now famous Uncertainty Principle) was strongly indicating that the universe is naturally affected – even radically so – via relationships produced between observers or measurers and that which is observed or measured.
Bohr posited an extreme aspect of polar symmetry that he called complementarity, whereby apparently incompatible properties or constructs are naturally tied together like poles. When two constructs (e.g., part and whole, wave and particle, mass and energy, space and time, wave-particle and field-quanta, etc.) are required for a complete view of an aspect of nature, but the conditions for observation or measurement preclude the simultaneous application of both constructs, then they are deemed as forming a complementarity.
Materialistic physicists have ignored the above new science principles because taken together, nonlocality and complementarity imply that the dynamics of the cosmos’ quantum level are always present on the macro levels of integral reality. As Bohr stated, this requires “a final renunciation of the classical ideal of causality and a radical revision of our attitude toward the problem of physical reality.”
We have inherited a twentieth-century scientific view of the world whereby it is understood to exist as a chaotic flux of particle-antiparticle pairs surrounded by force fields whose emergence from space in time breaks their zero-sum symmetry, bringing matter particles into existence with duration that becomes always greater as units of mass cohere through self-organizing fields.
Force fields behave like invisible clouds of particles surrounding conglomerations of matter. When force particles are “exchanged,” matter particles “sense” their “pushes and pulls” as force. For instance, every electron has “around it” a swarm of photons, or electromagnetic force particles, constantly being created and destroyed – “ripped out” of and “returned to” the Void. In the mathematical world of physics, virtual photons are as “real” as real photons of light, and are able to transmit the electromagnetic influence of an electron over a great, nonlocal distance. How this happens is realistically an utter mystery. Emerging hierarchical levels of existence combine with fields of resonance to create music of the spheres. Resonating vibrations literally cohere in a manifestation of polar identities on diverse levels: subatomic, atomic, molecular, biological, planetary, solar, galactic, and supergalatic.
Only 3 percent of a proton or neutron’s “mass” is what physicists call actual mass. The energy carried by the fields (called gluons) that hold together the atomic nucleus’ bits (called quarks) make up the other 97 percent of an atomic nucleus’ energy-mass. So while mathematical equations of matter may indicate that energy is mass and vice versa (E = mc2), and atom bombs have proven that math to be effective, the universe comprises varying types of massless energy to an enormously greater degree than it does mass. Mass-less energy moves at the speed of light; such as photons, which are “packets of light” that hold atoms together and apart.
The picture of reality that we have been composing so far, based upon roundly accepted laws of physics, becomes ever more brilliantly paradoxical the longer it is studied. QFT has led to experiments demonstrating that particles of matter are also fields. However, particle-fields of mass are always distinct from particle-fields of force that bind all mass. In all cases, every energy field, it is theorized, must also have a corresponding energy particle (although a graviton particle of gravity has yet to be discovered).
How does mass-energy get created out of the Void? While GRT identifies gravity with all of spacetime, GRT does not address how mass arises from gravity. Neither in fact, does QFT. Thereby a new field has been conjectured, named the Higgs field (giving credit to British physicist Peter Higgs). It is theorized that at high enough energy states, such as at the “beginning of the cosmos” or inside super particle colliders or collapsed stars called black holes, even the particle-fields of mass (i.e., quarks, electrons, etc.) have no mass.
The mass-creating Higgs force is like the essence of Chaos, the Crack in the Space-Void Kosmic Egg. The Higgs field, like gravity, must be a universal principle of time-space – it is not caused by any other aspect of the universe, for it is prior to the material cosmos. Problematically for QFT, however, is that like the “graviton,” a Higgs particle has yet to be discovered; even though it logically should have been by now, given the many particle experiments that have carefully searched for it where it is supposed to be found.
The Higgs chaos-creator-force affects not only the masses of real particles, but also the masses of virtual particles. The latter emerge and return to the Space-Void in potentially endless numbers at every moment everywhere. This is the mathematically metaphysical bedrock foundation of QED. The Void itself has no ordinary particle-field energy. Virtual particles effectively manifest a time-energy uncertainty principle inherent to the Void; e.g., there is no objective number of particles in any given space, but rather a probability of particle manifestation. Such is the essential nature of Chaos.
Particles are almost always created in symmetrically polar pairs with antiparticles (massless photons and theoretical gravitons lack antiparticle partners, however). Theoretically, the visible universe should not exist according to quantum math. It remains a complete conundrum how the symmetry of matter-antimatter pairs is broken – the two should always cancel one another out, generally leaving “residue” particles and large amounts of energy in the process. It is estimated that at the time of the Big Bang, for every ten billion particle-antiparticle pairs created, there was one extra particle that was left without an antiparticle, and thus did not self-annihilate into the universe’s background radiation (this near-absolute zero radiance of all-pervading cosmic wave-frequency is cosmologist’s ancestral evidence of cosmic creation).
How empty is outer space? One cubic inch of air on earth contains ten million trillion atoms. The most empty vacuum scientists have experimentally obtained has a density of three thousand atoms per cubic inch. Interstellar space, in contrast, contains only one atom per cubic foot. Keep in mind that a hydrogen atom’s proton, neutron, and electron are not little whizzing hardballs. That single atom is a field-density defined solely by contingency as to “where” that atom is and where it is “moving to” “next.” Every atom exists in contingent relationship with the world about it – it does not contain “objective” independence that may be identified isolated from the world. Space-Void is a spectrum of energy states inclusive of the materialization of causally contingent, emergent fields with polar identities. That cosmic spectrum of energy materializes from the chaos of Higgs potentiality and the gravitational realization of spacetime itself underlying both that very quantum flux of potential and its actual cosmic materialization.
Space would be energy-less void if it were not “filled” with Higgs-Chaos. Excepting, of course, that space itself is gravity, and so gravity cannot be subtracted from it. The essential natures of both gravitational and Higgs fields have not been “figured out,” GRT notwithstanding. In any case, physicists have been attempting to merge their mathematical models of the two field-aspects of Space, just as they have been trying to unite their models of the weak and strong atomic fields (respectively, the cause of atomic decay – the fusion power of all Suns – and of the cohesion of constituent quark parts composing protons and neutrons). The nature of Higgs and Gravity, whose difference in both magnitude and type of “force-power” is too extreme to warrant a sensible attempt at cognizing, must somehow be unified mathematically if cosmic evolution is to be understood in terms of scientific models.
It is reasonable to suggest that each of these most primary aspects of the universe may be appropriately understood as the realization of an essential immortal principle.
Given that the fields of energy, including all light, cannot be mathematically identified with gravity or space, then how about time itself? QFT physicists generally regard time as a property reducible to space. However, it would logically seem that time defined as duration of vibrational, polar reality (be that of a superstring, a wave of any sort, or subject-object cognition) has to be prior to particle existence. As mentioned, no particle has yet been discovered as “producing” Higgs or Gravitational realities. While attempts to find candidate phenomena for “pre-cosmic cosmic particles” produced inside super colliders will no doubt continue into the distant future, it is possible if not likely that QFT simply will not ever be able to subsume or otherwise merge with GRT’s model of space-gravity.
Perennial wisdom understanding of cosmic evolution suggests that Time itself is an immortal principle whose realization encompasses and underlies the principle-reality of Space. Spacetime gravity is the Void (or pure Space) sensed, felt, or cognized as vibration and inertial duration (i.e., Time) by every polar identity or event-thing-holon in the universe. Space is the soul of time that then becomes spacetime Chaos or soul of the world. This in turn emanates or flows forth as a myriad cosmic souls or identities that are all created by and returned to a shared “original soul” or Source.
Perhaps complexity and chaos theories defining Higgs reality will merge with spacetime theories defining Gravitational reality. If so, then a coherent Grand Unification Theory may be effectively defined, bridging the essence of identity with that of space, and inertia with that of geometrical gravity. Be that as it may, the principles of identity, symmetry, resonance, emergence, contingency, causality, chaos, and space will remain distinct while being understood as coherently Unified through Time.
The cosmos is holistically caused through ineffably deep entanglement with and as chaotic flux. QFT attempts to define this level of manifestation. It has met with measurable success, and modern technology will continue to evince such. However, there remains much more to be worked out. Theories of time are just beginning to be conceived, with one-dimensional zero-state vibration being posited as the most fundamental aspect of literally unimaginable string-identities now conjectured to compose all particle-reality of matter and force.
QFT is being radically revised through new theories attempting to include and unify all of the known forces discovered by physicists. Extending what are popularly known as string and superstring theories, ten-dimensional brane theory incorporates a concept of physically dimensional membranes. It consists of variant mathematical models, all of which suggest a reality underlying spacetime composed of multidimensional vibratory objects based upon one-dimensional “strings” (unlike any actual visual that commonly comes into mind) whose vibrational overtones extend into an infinite number of point particles. Membranes of such strings are formed via higher dimensions. Brane theory predicts both gravity and general relativity, along with elegantly describing how quantum particles interact with one another. However, a substantially negative feature to this theory is that because enormously high-energy states are needed to test it, direct experimental validation appears to be impossible.
String, superstring, and subsequent brane theories posit abstract mathematical structures of varying dimensions as a way to supersede the many inconsistencies and impossible values of QFT. We will not attempt an overview of these exotic theories, but it warrants mention that in general the thousands of theoretical variants rely on a new principle: Super-Symmetry (SS). This principle importantly states that particles that transmit forces may be changed into particles of mass and vice versa. When such a conversion occurs, a particle’s location shifts in time and space. This must thereby involve the geometry of spacetime. To fit this conceptual model of quanta, gravity-space must then be defined as embodying particulate granularity, identified as hypothetical gravitons. Unfortunately for many speculative physicists, the hypothesized math worlds do not at all resemble the observed world of particle-identities.
Having abolished all distinction between force and matter, other supersymmetrical particles called sparticles are predicted by SS. The fundamental particles produced during cosmic creation – leptons, photons, and quarks – hypothetically emerged with partners called sleptons, photinos, and squarks. Many orthodox physicists despise brane theory and its family of multidimensional, metaphysical mathematical constructs. Yet it remains the touchstone of attempts to unify all cosmic laws of matter. Unification theories address the original source-state of the cosmos, as the universe was during its first ten trillionth of a ten trillionth of a nanosecond. Only then, it is thought, could there have been the astronomically high energies needed for universal forces to be unified. For this reason, it is impossible to directly test these theories.
Superstring theories attempt to model the physical world at its smallest imaginable scale, commonly referred to as the Planck scale. It is at that level of reality that the speed of light (defined as the universally constant speed of anything with a zero rest mass, such as a photon of light) and Newton’s gravitational constant (a physical constant which appears in Newton’s law of universal gravitation and in GRT; it is based upon the fact that attractive force between two bodies is proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them) “meet” with quantum mechanics’ Planck’s constant (used to describe the discreet size-steps of quanta). These three important constants of the universe can here only be mentioned, as they and their corresponding theories duly require a full treatise to be regarded properly. However, to gain some sense of the Planck scale, at which the above universal constants or laws affect one another, imagine an atom to be the size of our Milky Way Galaxy. The Planck scale would then be the size of the following period. (Many have wondered how a Planck size superstring can possibly carry causally sufficient information about, say, a meter-long radio wave proton – which is what superstring theory suggests; but we must leave these fascinating abstractions at that.)
Given how precise any physical measurement of the subatomic world must be to manipulate it with the type of exactitude that engineers and chemists are accustomed to, we cannot help but be amazed at the marvels of quantum devices. Nonetheless, while mathematics can seemingly represent anything, imaginable or not, we know for a fact that nature does not allow mathematical exactitude. Irrational numbers (that is, numbers whose decimal expansion never repeats or terminates) define much of the physical world, and these numbers are by definition endlessly inexact. We will never exactly know, for instance, the mathematical relationship between a circle’s circumference and its diameter, a constant relationship commonly represented by the symbol p. Regarding our lack of mathematically exact knowledge of nature’s particles, we cannot know a particle’s exact energy at a specific instant in time.
Space-gravity and time are experienced, observed, and measured in constant flux – they simply are not static or solid. SS theories attempt to mathematically recognize this as fundamentally as possible. For instance, the general indication of symmetry in physics is when a quality of a thing can be manipulated – e.g., through rotation, reflection, or interchanging of parts – and the new configuration remains indistinguishable from the initial one. In other words, symmetry involves transformations that appear to do nothing. Symmetry is normally a property of a static system upon which procedures can be applied to rearrange the system while leaving all measurable physical properties unchanged.
Quite beyond static notions of symmetry, elegance, and beauty, SS addresses the beauty of self-transforming flux itself. SS is conceptually attractive to many physicists, particularly those of younger generations, because it is elegantly metaphysical in its worldview, particularly through its overriding principles of Symmetry and Unity. Embracing instead of deriding an intelligent proclivity to reincorporate universally metaphysical principles into materialistic physical theories is an initial step toward bringing philosophers and physicists back into a healthy and wise dialog.
Prominent physicists have presented no-nonsense arguments for the need of having an ontologically coherent theory of quantum mechanics. Currently, QM simply cannot address the world as it is observed by human consciousness. Theories of gravity are much more tangible and sensible to conscious, planetary beings dealing with macrocosmic laws of matter. QFT has been plunged via superstring theories into the mystical depths of one-dimensional vibratory potentials, infinitely populating a Void that is full of massless energy expanding into eternity. This appears to many commonsense observers to look like spiritual poetry as much as scientific theory. Perhaps realms of metaphysics and physics may here appropriately merge. In any case, regarding universal, unified theories of natural law, QFT has yet to be made applicable to the domain of biological life (which we will shortly consider) and its many hierarchical levels.
To many scientists, SS seems to be such a fanciful and hugely resource-consuming developmental path that its experimental funding will prove to be unsustainable. Roger Penrose, a highly awarded mathematical physicist who has extensively argued that materially mechanistic laws of physics are inadequate to explain the reality of consciousness, spoke for many of his fellow practical scientists when he stated that he found himself “to be totally unconvinced of the physical relevance of the scheme of supersymmetry” and that “observations probably do not provide any support at all” for the theory’s claims.
Supersymmetry’s primary value to Quantum Field Theory has been in canceling away uncontrollable infinities, primarily through the mathematical device of super-symmetrically rotating matter particles (bosons) into force particles (fermions). In standard QFT, different types of mass may be transformed into one another; likewise for types of force. Doing this through energetic particle collision and creation is what CERN and other particle-colliding centers are all about. By unifying this most fundamental polarity of subatomic reality, and introducing a whole new half of the universe, namely SS partners for every particle presently measured and conjectured, QFT math becomes much more elegant. That elegance is a compelling attractor for many fine minds in the world of physics.
Whether or not SS proves to be “true” within any given mathematical framework, at this juncture in time so many theoretical changes to the Standard Model of QFT have ensued that are reliant upon SS that should essential core theories of SS prove to be false, the whole current body of QFT will have to be called into question. By all appearances, current physics is now involved with mathematical metaphysics, plain and simple. Conceptually, “spiritual” worldviews have once again crossed into the visionary realms of physics. As Penrose vs. SS indicates, circles espousing variant metaphysical views are having to compete for monetary funds, social status, and the power to construct new experimental technologies.
SS attempts to unify all known forces, but is there a unifying symmetrical aspect between time and space at their most fundamental levels of reality? GRT certainly posits that there is, but can only address this through the reduction of time into space. Higgs, however, breaks underlying time-space symmetries and thus Chaos is able to create the cosmos out of the Void underlying gravity-space. Because gravity fields cannot be created by scientists (unlike electromagnetic fields, for instance) scientists are unable to do controlled experiments on them. Physicists hope that gravity can be quantized like other forces, and thereby manipulated. However, it is now dawning upon many that Space is a principle that cannot be reduced to either chaos or the six lower principles (as presented in this chapter) of cosmic materialization. Nor can the principle of Chaos be reduced to the latter, although its laws are closer or more similar to those discovered on the causal level of cosmic materialization. Similarly and most importantly, Time cannot be reduced to the laws of Space.
Cosmologists suggest that the universe “tunneled” into existence (given that there was no space, this of course suggests yet another mysterious conundrum: tunneled from where?) via a mathematical reality of imaginary time (produced when time is multiplied by the square root of negative one). This same mathematical process defines the manifestation of quantum potential, whereby particles tunnel in and out of spacetime so rapidly that they are impossible to measure. In other words, there “is” a Void “beyond” cosmic spacetime (let’s call it “pure Timespace”) from and back to which all material “bits” of our known universe emerge and converge, for eternity. Eternity because for a universal singularity that emerged as space destined to accelerate as a whole to the absolute speed of light, time-space relative “to anything else” realizes Eternity.
However metaphysical such concepts may seem, they lend a quality of constant sameness to all of space throughout the universe at all times, which physicists find most helpful to their theories. Albert Einstein enumerated an early-twentieth-century variant of this concept as the cosmological constant. Although he and many other scientists found such a constant space-energy to be philosophically unpalatable (involving as it does, an apparent infinitude of contingency), it has recently returned to the fore in cosmological theory. Einstein’s theories allow for an accelerated cosmic expansion via his infamous cosmological constant. This constant represents a type of “vacuum energy,” which permeates “empty” space in a constant manner everywhere and at all times in the universe.
Recently, a new, unknown type of energy has been discovered and verified by astronomers. It is associated with the accelerating expansion of the universe. Space is expanding: not “into something,” but rather simply is expanding itself – the Void into the Void, yet always greater in measurable reality. It is impossible to objectively observe this space dilation, for as observers we are also always dilating. Scientists infer that space is expanding via their measurements of local gravity fields. Similarly, cosmologists infer that spacetime is accelerating its expansive movement. An estimated three-quarters of the universe is composed of an extraordinary kind of otherwise unknown energy that is adding an anti-gravitational radiance to the universe.
Cosmological knowledge of the universe’s history, “present” state, and vast spread of matter and fields remains highly theoretical. Our telescopes convey only a miniscule amount of information regarding the cosmos. Beautiful pictures of galactic light, while glorious to behold, hold little measurable value compared to in-depth information gathered through space probes; and the snapshots of galaxies caught by high-powered cameras show only a tiny portion of the billions and billions of galaxies known to exist. Our telescopes simply are not powerful enough to capture a wide array of electromagnetic information beyond that of our local cosmic surroundings. Yet, even with these limitations, cosmologists are sure of important aspects of their knowledge regarding the greater universe. For instance, they are confident they know within a relatively small range of error how much mass is in the cosmos.
When all possible forms of cosmic mass are added up, the total does not allow for the acceleration of spacetime as it is now broadly agreed to be. Cosmologists are left imagining a new “antigravity force” that has unfortunately been named Dark Energy (DE) – it may or may not be energy, and is called “dark” simply because we are ignorant of what it is. DE is definitely not Gravity, Higgs, or any other known energy, field, or force.
It is herein suggested that the antigravity-like acceleration of the universe is the most fundamental evidence we have of pure Time-energy, distinct from and not reducible to Space. This is the most essential and creative principle of cosmic evolution after universal Law itself. When the cosmos emerged on hierarchical levels of a contingently synchronistic and causally holistic chaotic transformation of spatial dimensionality, it did so through a “radiance of time,” rather than a “point in space.” All of space emanated or radiated from and as time, which is to say that space is inherently a process of time itself. We cannot locate the cosmos’ original “center” somewhere out amongst the galaxies. Rather, the original spacetime “point” of the material cosmos is in the ancestral history of every particle in the universe – of every field and polarity and identity.
Because mathematical symbols offer no clues to what is “outside” or “beyond” space-voidness, they are incapable of “explaining” Time. Rather, humans must utilize existential interior consciousness in order to cognize, verify, and understand time. (Reflecting that process, symbols of contemplative art, such as the Tarot, address aspects of real law beyond the mathematical.) Time simply will not pop out of mathematical models of cosmic creation; spacetime matter, chaos, and force fields, however, readily do. The lawful principle of time is beyond the laws of matter and chaos, gravity and space.
A commonly known law of physics is that of energy conservation: There is never a loss or gain of energy in the universe – it simply “moves around.” But if space can keep getting greater, and most of the universe’s energy (an estimated 74 percent at the time of this writing) is an unknown, universal accelerator of space-gravity expansion, we may reasonably suggest that a non-space or beyond-space or original-space energy is radiantly growing our space-gravity reality at all times and – more aptly stated – as all time.
Since it is senseless to concern ourselves with the question of “from where does time-energy pour forth or emanate?” we will simply refer to DE as the pure energy of Time – the First Realization of Unitive Law or Essential Cause Beyond All Causation. Time in this view can be called the Radiance of Light and Gravity before cosmic photon and graviton manifestation. Time is a Radiant Principle that is no less real for being always prior and greater than physical space. It is Unitive Law or Transcendent One of the Kosmos – Alpha-Omega, Source-Destiny, Cause-Purpose – as Radiant Energy creating, emanating, or otherwise generating its consorting principle, Dimensional Space.
Unitive Law, Radiant Time, and Dimensional Space are the key Principles merging spiritual realization and scientific knowledge. Greater bliss, greater consciousness, greater being: the universe is becoming always greater, interiorly and exteriorly in its lawful realization as eternally radiant energy and dimensional space.
Those who believe that all principles must be reducible to material measurements argue that a deathly cold equilibrium of entropy is the destiny of the universe. Equilibrium is defined by physicists as the state of a body or physical system at rest or in non-accelerated motion in which the resultant of all forces acting on it is zero and the sum of all torques about any axis is zero. Entropy is popularly defined as a hypothetical tendency for all matter and energy in the universe to evolve toward a state of inert uniformity. Such is a worldview wherein the universe slows or spreads into uniform darkness, leaving only a hypothetically separate God or Heaven as the Once Creative and Eternally Moving Principle of Reality. This is a worldview wherein the Transcendental is not actually Real, i.e., existing as the World. After the concept of God is then jettisoned, this becomes a worldview whereby nihilistic materialists proclaim proof that Death Rules All.
Entropic destiny used to be imagined as an inflating universe that will over the eons lose all coherency, disintegrating into a totally random, non-organizing absolute-zero state of equally dense (or “denseless”) bits of space-gravity that might appropriately be described as the Zero Space of Eternal Death. Materialists who choose to ignore laws of self-organizing complexity or chaos appear influenced by occult beliefs permeating their cultural programming. Ironically, they posit metaphysical presumptions in opposition to the religious sects that have created the dualistic dogma they are unwittingly reinforcing. In reality, the constant acceleration of space into light and eternal time nulls any truth to the myth that entropic equilibrium essentially defines past, present, or future.
The perennial wisdom realized as nondual Unity of Being informs us that radiant consciousness is realization of the Bright; that eternal light is the true source and destiny of the Universe; and that universal radiance as the essential duration of all presence is simply the immortal realization of Time. Time-energy allows for an explanation of consciousness or universal cognition as the interior of space-gravity itself. Furthermore, time serves as the perfect explanation of the cosmic acceleration that originated in a Big Bang expansion of space from a three-dimensional size trillions of times smaller than a proton to that of a basketball in what might poetically be called “a brief moment.” General Relativity theorists will attempt to extend their concepts of the universe to account for its expansive growth by merging complexity theory with GRT. Attempts at such mathematical unification of models will no doubt prove enlightening. However, Time will inevitably remain undeniably fundamental and non-reducible.
Physicists agree that their latest theories (such as SS) seem to work miraculously, pulling together otherwise disparate fields of mathematics. In fact, mathematical fields are being theoretically created that have never before been construed or observed, and which may not in fact exist. It is reasonable to inquire: What kind of meaning does such knowledge hold for the seven billion human minds living in a world of biological life? How can physicists disparage the contemplative observations of sages over millennia regarding principles at play in the world about us, while holding high as the “one true light of knowledge” immensely complicated, completely hypothetical mathematical suppositions?
While such theories as QED, GRT, and even SS may be utilized to engineer a new millennium of technology, if the past is of any indication, that technology may well bring with it more death of life through delusion, craving, and malice than it does bliss of life through wisdom, compassion, and love. During the timeframe in which the present work was written, it became widely apparent that technological productivity was a major contributor to the largest global mass extinction of life since the age of dinosaurs. Weaponry, from spears to missiles, has only been one part of that causative contribution. Otherwise productive machines – involving, for instance, transportation, building, computation, and communication – have also proven to be part of the whole causal process of planetary mass extinction.
Contrasting to the complex mathematics of quantum and relativistic physics are complexity theories based upon deep simplicity. During the latter part of the twentieth century, complexity theory was developed building in part upon Ira Prigogene’s work in thermodynamics and French mathematician René Thom’s brilliantly intuitive re-visioning of life-transformative catastrophes, viewing biological processes and evolution in terms of topological bifurcations, discontinuous development, and causal attractors. Thom’s genuinely innovative organic models (presented in his seminal work, Structural Stability and Morphogenesis) conceptually harmonized with Prigogene’s dissipative structures, which modeled open systems that maintain themselves in stable states far from equilibrium. Prigogene awakened the scientific world to the import of such dynamic structures remaining even while embodying an ongoing flow and change of components. Importantly, the dynamics of dissipative structures include the spontaneous emergence of new forms of order. System flow may increase to a tipping point of instability, at which juncture bifurcation occurs, whereupon system and structural processes branch off into entirely new structural forms and systemic orders.
In the fields of thermodynamics and biology, developmental principles have come to the fore that present a universal model of dynamic process: an environmentally resonating polar structure builds a field of force or interactivity that energetically breaks some crucial aspect of the structural identity’s symmetry; the structure then emerges on a new level of organization, order, and relationship. This creative process is the universe reaching out into novel identity even while always maintaining reunification of such. Through it, morphological complexity and evolution develop. Pre-biotic evolution of non-living dissipative structures continues through biological evolution to develop trans-biotic neurochemical consciousness and sociocultural networks of sustainable, synchronistic order.
What actually defines a biological organism? As an identifiable polar system, an organism is defined and subsequently relates to its environment via its membrane. Creation of molecular membranes first occurs through the electric polarity of H2O or water, one of the most basic atomic structures in the universe. In general, some molecules are attracted by water, others are repelled. A third type of commonly found molecular structure is that of fatty/oily lipids, which contains a both water-attracted and water-repelled polarity. When coming into contact with water, lipids spontaneously form structures that then form membranes similar in function to cellular membranes. Cellular membranes themselves are in fact lipids with proteins attached. (The above process can be seen in bubble formation when oil and water are shaken together.)
An organism by definition autonomously rearranges patterns of membrane connectivity and interior structure in accordance with those environmental disturbances that the organism is determined to respond to. Observation of this most fundamental view of organismic behavior has led to the theory that every organism possesses an inherent ability to influence its own ongoing structural changes, an ability that may be called biological cognition. A cognitive domain is established through an organism determining which environmental perturbations will trigger its own structural change. Cognition or consciousness (the latter indicating a greater level of cognitive complexity) may thereby be defined simply as the process of living and interacting with the environment. A machine constructed from without as an assembly of parts is an utterly different system than that formed by resonant boundary conditions of cells and organisms producing living processes and entities.
Cognition and consciousness define the core process of a unified whole body – an entire organism – not just an organism’s “programming center,” be that of genes or brains. Cognition and structure as mind and body determine the life forms and transformations of organic spheres of existence. It is not an unreasonable jump in theory to suggest that this holds true on all levels of existence, including pre-biotic molecular and atomic levels, for identities that possess a defining membrane or boundary of extension and polar structure within a field of environmental relatedness.
It has been demonstrated that within a flux of plasma, complex, self-organizing structures may form capable of replicating themselves, i.e., a helical polar structure naturally forms within plasma (caused, for instance, by lightning) that can bifurcate into two copies of itself. These structures then go on to interact with similar entities, changing one another and evolving into further forms as unstable structures break down and stable adaptations continue propagating. Exhibiting the necessary properties to qualify them as inorganic living matter – being autonomous, reproducing, and evolving – these plasmic entities evince the six principle-stages of immortal process addressed herein.
Atoms and molecules may thereby also be said to realize mind-body cognitive structure, even if they are not in the sphere of life. Arguably, it is unreasonable to dogmatically presume that atoms existing in a natural system of dynamic self-organization, such as stellar plasma formation, are unable to influence their own ongoing structural changes; although clearly the mechanisms of doing so must be far more subtle than those of biological organisms. Modeling such is how the abstractions of mathematical physics and cosmology can truly shine.
The considerable efforts of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela have precisely clarified the interior reality of organismic identity: the perception and cognition of a living system does not represent external reality but rather specifies one through a process of circular organization. This is true even with organisms lacking a nervous system. Circular organization defines a self-referencing process: a closed network of interactions in which every change of the interactive relations between certain components always results in a change of the interactive relations of the same or of other components. (This may well also define the actual interior-dynamic process of atomic continuity.) The circular process of life allows for evolutionary change in such a way that circularity of energetic interaction is always maintained, even in the midst of transformative chaos. The first six immortal principles of cosmic evolution define and ensure this.
Reductionistic materialists do not understand natively holistic principles of resonant, emergent, and synchronistic causality. Primary to their dogma is a symmetrical identification of structure with organization. In reality, structure is the actual relationship between physical components of a system, while organization comprises the greater field of hierarchical synchronistic holism. Organization cannot be reduced to mechanical causation of physical components. (The human nervous system’s organization as traditionally studied, cultivated, and expounded upon by yogis from India to China is a prime example that demands respect by structural reductionists in the fields of physiology, medicine, evolutionary biology, neuropsychology, etc.)
It would seem obvious that when referring to or studying living beings, the lived experience of the beings, or subjective cognition and consciousness, must be duly and rightfully regarded. Scientists cannot “know” life while blindly disregarding as unimportant the experience of life as interiorly realized by every life form. In other words, objective worldviews are only one half of the knowledgeable content a scientist must respect and consider. Indeed, most aspects of the world cannot be objectively measured without being subjectively influenced. Most certainly, subjective interpretations of measurements are the norm.
Simple trajectories of singular macro-size objects and reactions of molecular chemicals under highly restricted environments form grossly limited aspects of the complex interactions composing our universe. Known chemical reactions occurring within radically controlled laboratory settings, for instance, become unknown chemical reactions once they interact with a natural environment. Studies of ecological and biological poisoning have made this clear. As a simple example, knowledge of how to make Teflon materials that maintain remarkably stable chemistry pales in comparison to the ignorance of what those laboratory-produced molecular constructions do when exposed to nature. Incredible doses of Teflon products have been found in the tissues of polar bears and seals in the Arctic, tropical birds and dolphins, and in humans across the planet. While not knowing how Teflon has spread throughout all of animal life, it is known that it damages biological reproductive systems.
Our twenty-first-century knowledge of complex systems has made it painfully clear how cupfuls of scientific knowledge can be overwhelmed by waves of scientific ignorance. First and foremost, scientific theorists and experimenters need to apply their attention to a broader and more essential base of foundational principles than they were accustomed to doing in the twentieth century. Greater and in particular more resonant spheres of interaction must be considered when studying atomic, chemical, and biological processes. Scientists have a responsibility to take into account systemically emergent and contingent relationships that are not artificially banished through laboratory techniques. The world needs corporations and universities to fund holistic studies, not limiting their knowledge to what is required solely to implement profitable known processes or materials while being ignorant of their effects once they are produced and distributed outside of the laboratory. It is now clear that massive global environmental damage will not be mitigated until social pressure (or social disaster) compels university and corporate scientists to own up to a responsible, critically needed framework of integral ethics.
Education regarding the essential and universal principles of nature addressed in this book is the most effective way to inform scientific, political, and corporate authorities how to integrally govern and regulate their fields of responsibility.
Evolution of the cosmos includes evolution of biological life and human consciousness. If we widen the meaning of consciousness to indicate all interior cognition naturally arising through coherent existence, then it makes sense to state that the spectrum of consciousness is the interior aspect of the hierarchy of complexity deeply realized throughout nature. Hierarchical depth unfolds through evolution as greater consciousness. Such is the realization of time through directionality that may be called the destiny or telos of the universe.
Human consciousness grows into radiance through transcendence, here defined as “the cognitive process of coherent beingness involved with differentiation and integration.” Consciousness reduces into inertia through regression, defined as “the cognitive process of coherent beingness involved with dissociation and alienation.” The polar symmetry of these two processes is such that both are complementarily required up to a point of symmetry-breaking, which is initiated by fifth-stage gnosis and finalized by seventh-stage enlightenment. Evolution compels consciousness beyond its inertial boundaries, ultimately emerging or unfolding into a realm of cosmic consciousness identifiable with immortal flux.
Consciousness does not equal objective perception. Consciousness equals the vibrational duration of subjective actualization that integrates objective perception. There are disastrous consequences embedded in the rabid movement amongst “philosophers of science” to restrict consciousness to and as mechanical, objective logistics. Clever abstraction of logical systems into rarefied realms of analysis and algorithmic dialectics can subsume the very living consciousness of logicians to such a degree that they become blindly obedient to a privileged social system machine through which habit-cogs of non-intuitive rationalization may manipulate the world without any concern of life, wholeness, love, or altruistic compassion. That egoic way of being in no way represents, let alone actually realizes, the peak and destiny of human evolution.
Cognitive psychologists and practitioners of neuroscience advance a commonsense realization that concepts of mind need to be integrated with and understood through physiological patterns and processes. However, by using reductive, grossly limited definitions and presumptions of physiology, orthodox cognitive and drug-and-gene-based psychologists inevitably become mired in their shifting groundwork of physiochemistry.
When the human body itself is understood as already being consciousness or mind, and the human mind itself is understood as naturally being a wholly formed body, then any presumptions holding to positions of body-mind dualism are demonstrably fallacious. Mind as body and body as mind imply metaphysics as physics and physics as metaphysics (or put another way, inter-physics as intraphysics.) This view posits a complex, self-organizing nature to living bodies, and an understanding of cognitive psychology that fully integrates transpersonal actualization and spiritual development.
Consciousness studies were significantly advanced in the twentieth century when studies of nonlinear dynamics merged with complexity theory and neurophenomenology. The latter has focused on analysis of “first person,” or interior, experience. The corpus of Edmund Husserl remains central to that field. Experiential clarity can be attained by a self-observant witness engaging subjective experience through suspension of belief habits and mechanisms that obscure or otherwise confuse what is being experienced. This allows for a systematic reflection on one’s phenomenological (i.e., the context of all possible appearances in one’s experience) attitude.
Scientific approaches to the study of human mind have primarily focused on neurological and chemical measurements and feedback loops, which deliver types of objective information regarding subjective experience. However, perennial wisdom realizers have without doubt posited that higher (i.e., subtler, deeper, more complex and integral) levels of knowledge emerge from whole-body consciousness. While neurochemical measurements can inform us about specific causal associations (e.g., eating chocolate and making love both raise endorphin levels), that quality or level of information is not comparable to the quality and level of knowledge attained when integral, enlightened consciousness is mindful of its own interior states and developmental procession in tandem with its sociocultural fields of the same.
Francisco Varela and others have made it clear that consciousness cannot be identified with special “neural structures,” but rather emerges from the formation of transient functional clusters of neurons and resonant cell assemblies. Combinations of many different cellular, chemical, and neurological functions create series of coherent states that stabilize and self-maintain as levels of organismic consciousness, even while transitory states continually arise and subside. Emergence of fluctuating experiences cohering synchronistically and transforming holistically is contingent upon an aspect of resonating phenomena termed phase-locking. For instance, brain regions can become interconnected in such a way that neural activity becomes synchronized, creating a non-conjoined flux of cell assemblies formed by widely dispersed (i.e., non-local) neural circuits.
In other words, consciousness (whether limited to the brain or extended to include the whole body and even social/communal/ancestral networks of bodies) is not a product of mechanical, linear, and local neurochemical structures; but rather of chaotic, holistic, and synchronistic organization of cell assemblies with dynamic cores that hierarchically emerge from resonating electromagnetic, neurochemical fields. In actuality, both gravitational and quantum fields contribute non-trivially to biological identity and thereby most likely to an entity’s quality of cognition. For instance, both a human body’s gross inertia and subtle reactivity to molecular chemistry (as evidenced by the effects of heart and pineal hormones, LSD, photons striking the iris, etc.) can clearly impact and even radically alter its states of consciousness over any given duration. Given that we are now able to engineer quantum computers, it is reasonable to suggest that the human system already engages quantum mechanisms via its subtle molecular-atomic biology. Numerous theories focused upon this are now being explored.
Regarding gross inertia’s effects upon consciousness, these are most obviously felt and observed whenever a body is suddenly stopped or accelerated. Both sitting completely still and accelerating/decelerating can effect potentially massive transformation to the whole human system, both momentarily and when occurring over time.
Concerning the complexity of communication within brain networks, chemical synaptic signaling between neurons is not the only means of neuro-computation. Cells of the glia – the connective tissue of the nervous system – also function as communicators, both with each other and with neurons. Thus, the complex communication of the human system also involves coordinated structural changes within neuro-glial processes. This immensely complicates any attempt to create reductionistic models of brain functioning and the procession or evolution of animal consciousness.
Nonlinear dynamics form core processes in both the human neuro-system and the greater body. Holonic body parts hierarchically cluster not only through mechanical connectivity but also as a flow of continual exchange, self-organizing as a synchronistic whole. Maturana elegantly states that “communication is not the transmission of information, but rather the coordination of behavior between living organisms through mutual structural coupling.” (In this context, language is effectively communication about communication, and we might say that the image-exemplars of the Tarot are a most rarefied form of such symbolic communication.)
In currently accepted scientific terms, how does biological synchronization occur? A core comprising a critical number of polar identities resonating as oscillators must first sync, whether by pure chance or by holistic probability. Their combined coherence serves as a nucleus attracting other resonating identities through forces operative at the oscillators’ natural level of dimension and frequency. This increases the nucleus and thereby amplifies the signal. A positive feedback process leads to an outbreak or emergence of synchrony. In this process, there is no singular controlling oscillator or polar structure. However, both nucleating and resonating processes are required to gain coherence.
Mechanists have repeatedly denied that cosmic principles involve inherent self-organization integrally purposed toward an always greater unity innately emerging through and as evolution. Supposedly, the only way reality is oriented toward “unity” is through the “sameness” or zero-point equilibrium of entropic death. Life is viewed as an accident, and not a divine or otherwise essential one at that. Yet secretly, practically in an occult fashion, organizational principles have been appropriated by hardened scientists via concepts of “particle symmetry,” “atomic memes,” “genetic programs,” and “germplasms.”
Some scientists still posit a theoretical ability to computationally model a full-blown adult human solely from the information packed into a human egg. Where does this program of presumed linear instructions dwell? Within the DNA of germplasm? Molecular biology holds that DNA germplasm somehow programs the synthesis of proteins, which forms the somatoplasm of living organisms. Organisms inherit acquired characteristics through germplasm, which orthodox scientists dogmatically believed to never be affected by subtle or causal feedback of the actual functioning or life of an organism. It was commonly held that while random mutations may change the DNA of germplasm, nothing else in the rest of an organism’s system, behavior, experience, and environmental relationships (unless perhaps it is a relationship with nuclear radiation or overwhelmingly toxic chemicals) affects an organism’s genetic program, which goes on to reproduce itself via a new organism. This has been proven false.
It is known that intelligence is in part genetically determined. The volume of both the brain’s grey “processing” cells and white “connecting” cells is heritable and correlates with certain elements of IQ. The quality of brain matter connections is governed by the integrity of the protective myelin sheath that encases them. While myelin integrity is also largely genetic, and correlates with IQ, it also changes throughout life. Our genes drive us to environmental and social interaction in ways that can lead to changes in myelin integrity and be passed down to future generations.
We also now know that types of brain chemistry catalyzed and prolonged by drugs will produce genetic mutations that may in fact be passed down to offspring. Of course, catalytic states of consciousness prolonged by means other than drugs may also similarly affect such brain chemistry, and thus genetic evolution. In other words, an extended, purposed practice of meditation, contemplation, or prayer can cause a human to genetically evolve.
In fact, a mother’s love can manipulate genes. It is commonly known that sensual maternal care in the animal world produces young ones that grow up less fearful and more courageous. It has more recently been shown that motherly care alters the expression of a gene that governs a mammalian brain’s response to stress, leading to a greater number of stress receptors in the hippocampus, which act together to ameliorate the body’s reaction to stressful situations. These genetic changes are then passed down to future generations. This is one way a body tunes itself rapidly and purposefully to its environment, bringing evolution into conscious daily life.
In the limited worldview of molecular materialism, evolution is believed to be a result of random mutation expressed through birth and the survival of whichever mutations are most fit for continued reproduction. This principle has been extended deeper: the survival principle of “selfish genes,” “DNA programs,” and ultimately atomic “bits of information” is determined solely through molecular and atomic identities being purposed toward self-survival. As much as scientific empiricists find the concept of purpose repugnant, this remarkably limited view of materialists still remains reliant on a purposeful principle: Survival or what may be called Inertial Identity. Atoms, molecules, and genes are thus presumed to maintain a type of instinct toward future self-preservation. Things “keep on going” “as long as they can” or until their energies are “impinged upon or usurped” by other things.
The study of evolution’s punctuated equilibrium has made it clear that species evolution comes via sudden transitions, and cannot be reduced to the causal mechanisms of random mutation. Furthermore, we now know that altruism is hard-wired into the human system and that giving freely – as in authentic love – is an inherent act of higher evolutionary life. “Survival of the fittest” as a theory of selfish competition and random mutation is obsolete in terms of understanding how sustained, global evolution occurs. As long as its reductionistic concepts are championed by scientific authorities, who claim to see no alternative other than superstitious belief in “creationism,” dissociated, “independent” local survival of the most brutish human societies and dispensers of violent power will be promoted. This will come at the expense of all evolved life on the planet, most certainly including the brutes – who are always in actuality inter-dependent with the very life they subjugate. This unfortunately cannot be overstated.
It is supposed by mechanistic reductionists opposed to principles of emergence, holism, and unity that from a survival principle merging separative identity and competitive polarity all levels of the cosmos and consciousness have formed. Individuated “things” in the universe are presumed to be intrinsically purposed solely to survive as separative things, and thus continue with some sort of natural duration (even while the concept of duration as being inherent to an entity is also found repugnant, with hard physicists attempting to reduce the principle of time to mathematical transforms of “grainy” matter). The essential duration of any entity in a natural context of ongoing transformations occurs via morphogenetic laws that remain deeply obscure to scientific materialists.
Earlier, we observed that the second law of thermodynamics posits entropy to be a fundamental principle of our cosmos. It is usually supposed that this leads to ever greater randomness and disorder throughout spacetime. Yet the universe has undeniably continued to grow in organization and order over time; that is, it keeps concentrating in deeper forms of order such as in planetary, biological, and conscious systems. Here we find a classic example of universal polar symmetry and complementarity: a principle of ever greater local contingency is paradoxically balanced with a principle of ever greater global unity. Before the principles of chaos and emergence were brought into accepted scientific thought via theories regarding complexity and autopoiesis (meaning self-organization), scientific philosophers scarcely utilized laws of nonlinear causality that could be applied to organic and dynamic systems of life and transformation in the universe. Interdisciplinary acknowledgment of the new sciences suggests that it is time for orthodox scientific authorities to recognize and affirm the truth of essential, universal principles found in the perennial wisdom tradition. As this chapter may serve to indicate, these principles are well along the path of scientific verification and integration.
Advancements in the field of molecular biology and recombinant DNA engineering are technically enabling specific operations upon DNA strands that produce astounding results, such as cloning life forms and creating novel inter-species creatures. Nonetheless, this is being done with remarkably limited knowledge of how exactly DNA and growth processes actually unfold in natural contexts. Indeed, chemical “cut-and-paste” operations upon DNA snippets can be so simple that do-it-yourself kits are available for teenage experimenters. It is not unusual for complex cloning techniques, once they are successfully implemented through a great degree of trial-and-error guesswork, to be reproduced with relative ease simply by following technical procedures. Manipulating DNA and causing entities to mutate or grow with specific attributes is, however, a far cry from understanding the whole natural process of biological generation, holistic integration, and environmental interaction. Thus, biologists do not have a godlike ability to create life forms from scratch out of a soup of molecular components comprising the chemicals that make up DNA and its protein partners in the composition of life. Nor are they near to understanding or responsibly directing the resonant environmental contexts, both exterior and interior, that every organism interrelates through and as.
For DNA to carry both the mechanism of organic growth and the “program” directing that mechanism, a direct, one-to-one correlation must be able to be made between the sequences of chemical bases in DNA and the complex, three-dimensional structures of proteins. Although such a causal chain can be found between the chemical sequences in a DNA molecule and the amino acid sequences of peptides, those peptides then fold up in such complex, variant ways that it appears impossible for a DNA molecule to hold enough information to programmatically instruct them how to do so.
What is more, it is known that the nervous system cannot possibly be pre-specified by genetic instructions. Such complex systems arise through stochastic, probabilistic processes that emerge as systems containing greater order than the linear sum of system parts would causally allow or explain. Mathematical studies in the fields of networks, synchrony, and complexity are greatly assisting to create conceivable models regarding how nature actually works.
A philosophy of organism has developed in the wake of obsolete mechanistic philosophies. This involves systemic principles of organization, broadly modeled in terms of field resonance, hierarchical emergence, synchronistic contingency, and holistic causality. The reader is referred to the works of Alfred North Whitehead, L. L. Whyte, and Arthur Koestler (father of holon and holarchy theory) for an introduction to this branch of philosophical thought. Laws governing organized systems – be they of herds, cells, crystals, etc. – are innate to our evolving universe. Viewed within a lawful context of autopoiesis, it is clear that unitive survival is not reducible to separative survival.
From the viewpoint of scientific materialism, imitative reduction of a complex, organismic, human life form to a simulacrum resemblance comprising computational machinations of an artificially intelligent (AI) android would practically represent the epitome of engineered knowledge. Is this not obviously mad? Ironically unable to perceive the metaphysical dualism embodied by their materialistic tenets, AI mavens of the twenty-first century such as Marvin Minsky unhelpfully popularized dualistic romanticization of “machine intelligence.” That said, an interactive augmented intelligence engine such as a divination oracle may well prove to be beautiful, good, and true, but only to the degree that it integrates perennial wisdom and serves as a tool extending human users’ mindful awareness.
How do biological entities incorporate changing components, fluid dynamics, bifurcating structures, and self-organizing patterns to proceed upon a course of developmental growth? It has come to be widely recognized that the unfolding of life occurs through three primary processes of evolution:
1. Least important, but most widely known, is the process of random genetic mutation. This is caused by chance errors in the self-replication of gene structure DNA. DNA forms a helix structure of two molecular strands that can separate and form templates for the replication of new chains. During that process, chance errors of chemistry can produce chains that are slightly different than the originals. These mutations are generally harmful or not of beneficial use to the organismic development that they affect. The number of useful variations that happen in this process of genetic mutation is far too small to account for the evolution of planet earth’s enormous diversity of life forms.
2. Far more prevalent and effective in the process of biological evolution is the global trading of genes. DNA recombination occurs through the passing of hereditary traits between organisms connected in a network of organized, ongoing exchange. For instance, many bacteria change up to 15 percent of their genetic material daily. Sharing hereditary traits in such a manner is an inherent ability of all bacteria. The process occurs as bacteria transfer their DNA into their environment, which are then picked up or transferred back into other bacteria. This can be a hugely rapid and broad process of inter-subjective communication; so much so that bacterial communities can spread quickly around the world, forming a living, microscopic, organismic cultural network blanketing the earth in an unseen continuity of biological flow.
Gaia is a holistic organism comprising myriad emergent sub-levels of living field-systems. Gaia’s global feedback loops are based upon over two billion years of evolution during which bacteria and other microorganisms were the only form of life. This biological reality remains prominent even within the human realm. Though of much smaller size, there are ten times more bacteria cells than human cells in the human body.
3. The role that symbiosis plays in organic evolution evidently surpasses the previous processes of genetic mutation and recombination. Lynn Margulis brought to the scientific world’s attention the vastness in nature of permanent symbiotic arrangements between life forms. She insightfully pointed to how new life forms were thus created in a process called symbiogenesis. In great measure, hierarchical levels of life merge through organisms living in close association with and often inside of one another, with bacteria in animals’ systems serving as a prime example. Asymmetries of symbiotic interdependency can be striking. For instance, a species of bacteria that lives symbiotically in humans’ large intestine manufactures vitamin K, which is essential for blood clotting. Symbiosis is now known to be the primary process of evolution for all higher organisms.
While symbiosis is an obvious aspect of biological life, its enormous import is given appropriate respect only when living beings and environments are viewed as whole systems. Appropriateness of the term new science is affirmed by the fact that biologists have just begun associating bacterial functions with critical aspects of animal health. Lack of knowledge in this regard has allowed and even promoted a seriously dangerous worldwide overuse of antibiotics.
Until recently, modern definitions of “healthy” had been reduced to referential contexts involving abundance of energy, food, and clothing supplying homes, cars, and malls. Health was identified with access to medicine and environments separated from nature. An obese person would be deemed healthy “in a normal modern context,” for example, even if he or she was unable to walk or otherwise move for hours at a time. An ability to scavenge and survive in the wild was certainly not viewed as indicative of “a healthy lifestyle.” Holistic health practices and studies are thankfully renewing appreciation for both finer and earthier aspects of biological balance, complex organic interdependency, and robust ability to actualize human potential.
In terms of human consciousness, evolution proceeds largely through symbiotic relationship with greater social, cultural, environmental, and spiritual levels of holistically generated realization. All four of those contexts must be appreciated and understood for the principles of wisdom and immortality to be realized.
Margulis assisted James Lovelock in his developmental modeling of Earth as a holistic system. Lovelock is credited with bringing to the fore of biological theory Earth’s self-regulating nature, popularizing the ancient reference to Earth as Gaia. While not holding to a belief that Gaia is a “living conscious being” as the ancients might have viewed her, Lovelock nonetheless created a radically new conceptualization of the whole planet as a living system in which symbiosis reigns supreme. The Unitive Principle so apparent in life on earth is sacred in its own inherent right, quite apart from any vision of supernatural purpose.
Understanding the world about us in terms of holistic systems sheds much-needed light on how our biological bodies and environments work. Just as importantly, we can come to know so much more about how our cultures and societies work. On an immanently practical level, game system theory enables implementation of principles integrating holons, evolution, change, transformation, and regeneration. Axioms of modern game theory are best developed so as to involve the “vertical axis” of immortal principles primarily addressed in the present treatise in conjunction with “horizontal planes” of four-quadrant holonic manifestation. In general, the latter realms have been referred to in this book as environmental, social, cultural, and psychological.
Integral Theory, advanced largely by Ken Wilber, refers more broadly to the universal quadrants as: exterior individual (body, objective, third-person individual perspective); exterior collective (society, objective, third-person collective perspective); interior collective (culture, inter-subjective, second-person perspective); interior individual (mind, intra-subjective, first-person perspective). These quadrants form the ontological reality of every holon. Together, as an integral and whole identity, they undergo a process whereby their symmetry is interrupted or broken, allowing for reconnection with other holonic spheres and processes, and then reintegrated and reunited.
Most importantly for game theory that models a world-space in such a way as to be universally applicable, the vertical axis of cosmic evolution or growth-process is always recursive. The magically physical stage of human development, for instance, contains its own processional realization of universal principles, as does the mythically emotional, rationally mental, psychologically intuitive, subtly virtuous, and causally heartful stages. Universal principles are recursively unpacked or unfolded within their own levels or spheres of development. In many ways that this chapter does not have space to explore, we live in a “fractalized,” holographic spacetime continuum proceeding through recursively encapsulated depths of complexity embodying the deep simplicity of ten immortal principles. Readers wishing to explore more regarding how they may truly know and understand this are referred both to the study of tantric alchemical yoga and to companion projects of this book that may be found within both physical and digital game spaces.
Unification of natural Law regarding astronomic, planetary, human, organic, molecular, atomic, and quantum spheres can only be established through common principles, not objectively identical models, mathematical or otherwise. Those principles must be applicable to all aspects of the world as humans are able to essentially view it, including psycho-spiritual, socio-cultural, and environmental-physical. As scientific thought evolves into fourth-stage intuitively integral understanding, universal principles of hierarchical emergence, synchronistic contingency, holistic causality, and transformative chaos are coming to the fore. These are unifying not only the laws of physics, but also those of the natural world within all levels and complexities of manifestation.
What would a set of universal, scientific principles optimally include? As will by now be familiar to readers, the Great Tradition’s ten-stage ascending/descending developmental philosophy converts into a nested set of Ten Unitive and Immortal Principles of the Kosmos:
10. Unitive Law
9. Radiant Time
8. Dimensional Space
6. Holistic Causality
5. Synchronistic Contingency
4. Hierarchical Emergence
3. Field Resonance
2. Polar Symmetry
1. Inertial Identity
Translating perennial wisdom cosmology into a modern view of cosmic origins and present ontological procession forms:
An Immortal Story of Cosmic Creation and Evolution
At the beginning and remaining in every moment – implicate in time itself – there is Law. That Law is indefinable except to say that it is Unitive.
The first realization of its Unity is time. Time radiates. Time is all radiance. Its radiation is perpetual, absolute, constant, and infinite. While there cannot be “no time,” there can be eternity as “only time.”
Within time’s radiance, dimensionality comprising infinite potential vibrational identities of time emanates as space. Through emptiness, infinity is realized. This is the first and most universal polarity of cosmic symmetry.
Realization of an infinite myriad in Unity occurs through creatively transforming chaos. All forms possible are potentiated and transformed from and as this most universal and all-pervading resonant flux of innately indefinably complex chaos. Although mysterious as an underlying field of unfathomable depth and complexity, chaos remains Unitive.
Primordial chaos emanates as a whole causing simultaneous, interdependent arising of a cosmic myriad of spacetime vibratory-particle event-frequencies. The unitive field-flux of chaos is dimensionally transformed into a coherence of infinite durations that emerge as a spacetime cosmos with a universal hierarchy of discreet quantum states. Holistic causation is realized through stochastic (literally “divining the goal”) and holonic (always both whole and part) materialization of time and space, creating a finite cosmos of relative and contingent motions, positions, and densities of event-mass. The hierarchically fluctuating cosmos holistically self-organizes on quantum levels of nonlocal causation.
Entities manifesting with a similar level of vibrational duration and holonic manifestation revert to a common source-space through the gravitational inertia of their mass identities, slowing coherently and in totality toward entropic contingency even while simultaneously, through the energetic radiance of time, resonantly accelerating toward ordered synchronization. That is, in every whole the parts co-dependently arise synchronistically contingent upon the same cause. Every holonic level of interdependent arising coheres through duration of that which is similar.
Spacetime randomness dissipating holonic coherence varies discontinuously, creating emergent levels of depth and complexity. These levels form distinct magnitudes of organization that are defined by field geometries with four aspects: interior and exterior of both individual and collective. The more a holon identifies with a greater, deeper, and more complex holistic level of hierarchy, the less it is truly defined by randomness. Emergence is the process of time hierarchically realizing a four-dimensional world.
Fields resonantly inform patterns representing chaos as self-organizing, geometrically recursive processes that realize three-dimensional space through dynamically networked radiant spheres.
Spatial discontinuity as objective separation becomes subjective novelty defined by the duration of an identity’s polar separation. Polar symmetry determines how an identity maintains structure while reacting to forces operating on its level of similarity. All polar separation strives to express its inherent unity either by reducing into inert stasis or growing into dynamic relationship.
The inertial stand and presence of every identity within its own frame of relative stasis combines with all others to form a myriad of qualitative existences and autonomous ways in accordance to the always true Laws of Unity.
As introduced in chapter 1, the holistic causation and processional identification of the cosmos can be explicitly summarized:
1. Inertial identity, being both whole and part, and potentially vibratory
2. Separates as a polarity in symmetrical extension
3. Organizes as a field-system cycling through and as these poles, resonating with other fields
4. Transcends limited polar definition via hierarchical relationship, emerging both within and without
5. Synchronistically aligns contingent relationships interdependently arising through the universal field-polarity of emptiness and infinity (space and time)
6. Transforms via holistic catastrophe (chaos) the whole causal process
Such transformation:
1. Vibrates the original identity.
2. Extends its polar symmetry.
3. Nonlinearly resonates within a group of interdependent fields.
4. Reinforces traces of an emerging hierarchical pattern.
5. Breaks symmetrical formation and then vanishes through nonlocal but synchronistic contingencies.
6. Holistically regenerates through transformative chaos a similar but uniquely changed, causally self-organizing duration of coherent identity.
Every identity, cognizing its lifespan within the context of its polar vibration, subjects itself to the whole causal process of material coherence through an inherent impulse to endure. The inertia of an identity is time-created duration of material coherence accelerating even “at rest” toward the speed of light. An inertial identity’s impulse to survive in order to realize the speed of light and eternal time is ultimately the singular Unitive Principle recreating an always-greater cosmos of Being, Consciousness, and Bliss.
We finish our chapter and the narrative of this book’s reckoning with a summary overview of the immortal principles of cosmic evolution and perennial wisdom.
Inertia as it defines every physical thing correlates with relationally unique identity. The objective law of inertia is simple: if something is moving, it will keep moving until something stops it; if something is not moving, it will remain unmoving until something else moves it. Though simple enough for anyone to observe and experience, physics theories are able to mathematically model neither how a thing moves from one location and time to another nor how it is that an object keeps moving forever unless something else stops it.
Inertial force is involved with the phenomenon of acceleration. Not only are GRT and QFT unable to explain how the force accelerating the whole universe’s expansion is generated, they also cannot answer how acceleration of anything essentially comes about. Like car passengers, astronauts in a space shuttle feel the centrifugal force of acceleration when making a turn. Yet according to GRT, acceleration can only be felt by an object relative to another object, not mere space. That is built into the very foundation of relativity theory. A space shuttle is far from earth, so in respect to what object does it accelerate, the whole of the universe? Einstein had intended to show how the distribution of matter in the cosmos caused inertial force. However, GRT allows for the construction of a cosmic model empty of matter, yet still giving rise to inertia.
Inertial identity is a fundamental principle, which along with the origin of any thing remains a mystery, for we do not know what a single thing is. One can progressively break up a holon into its parts, but that leads only to the absurdity of “preons” – of non-particle particles constituting all other mathematically suggestible particles. What is the ur-stuff from which one-dimensional zero-vibrating vibratory superstrings are made? Is it Time itself? What does it mean to know what Time or the very essence of Space is?
Was Plato right that in truth idea as essential reality – whether in the form of transcendent law or incorporeal form – exists prior to spacetime and cosmic manifestation? Is the cosmos based upon the math and logic of materially separate thing-events or do we need to imagine essential, universal principles that ontologically define the primary processes of cosmic development, which may then be symbolically idealized through mathematical representation? Everyone can agree that reality can be modeled by mathematical logic. Few, however, agree that such models are equal to, let alone greater than, reality.
Neoplatonic philosophy in modern terms suggests that Law, Time, Space, and Chaos are all transcendentally absolute principles of reality. Furthermore, since Causality and all other spacetime principles are but emanations of Transcendental Reality, so too is the Cosmos right down to the inertial identities of every material thing. We are able to conceive and truly understand such grand principles only through our whole-body realized consciousness.
Identity is the enduring outcome of reiterated, recursive cycles of death, temporarily renewing an event-object in space over time. Identity appears to arise from the breaking of symmetry even while embodying such. For instance, to physically identify a particle, one must measure either its movement or position. However, only one of these can be identified for certain at a time – with that “certainty” being observer-specific – thus breaking a symmetrical aspect of the particle. The origins of spacetime symmetry-breaking may be found in the universality of transformational Chaos and the Higgs force-principle. In an opposite and complementary way, when inertia reigns, transformation looms. The universe consistently realizes such paradoxical complementarity.
Polarity conjoins with inertia in defining every physical identity, be that through attributes of interior and exterior, positive and negative, female and male, movement and rest, electric and magnetic, etc. Measured identification itself – both subjective and objective – implies an asymmetrical discontinuity of an otherwise inherently unified polar symmetry. When consciousness identifies with the beauty of symmetry it may do so through discovering the wondrous and enduring uniqueness as which symmetry temporarily materializes. Or it may transcend the limitations and powerful seduction of inertial identity, culturally extending its dimensions of awareness into a resonant field of polar relatedness.
In modern science, the principle of beauty is intimately tied to the concept of symmetry. Classically, symmetry and beauty were equated with proportionate harmony. As presented earlier, a more current definition of symmetry speaks of invariance under certain transformations such as rotation or scaling of size or change of velocity. It was Einstein’s genius to discover a set of symmetries in Maxwell’s equations governing behavior of electromagnetic fields. Thus, just as Newton’s laws were mathematically shown to be unchanging under varying frames of inertia, by positing that the speed of light was constant and space and time were always unified, Einstein showed how Maxwell’s laws were also invariant.
Symmetry has practically become the reflection of goodness in modern physics, as it is equated with essential beauty and truth. In this way, the Platonic Triad of transcendent principles has been reduced to concepts of mathematical and geometrical symmetry. Ideal measurements must de facto break such symmetry even while mathematically presuming a reality based on unitive wholeness. For instance, quark theory has been progressively deemed good, beautiful, and ultimately true largely because it embodies numerous aspects of polar symmetry (matter and force particles, left and right spin, balanced charms, etc.). Modern science not only understands spacetime itself to be symmetrical, but views the laws of nature themselves as exhibiting symmetry. That is, the laws of physics are deemed to invariantly operate throughout the cosmos regardless of cosmic transformations. At its deepest level, universal symmetry is an essential principle, not a merely mathematical law.
Conceptual glorification of symmetry has perhaps stunted scientific understanding of higher principles such as nonlinear field resonance, interdependent hierarchical emergence, and nonlocal synchronistic contingency. This chapter has pointed out that scientific materialists recognize an overly limited hierarchy of principles operative in the universe. A dogmatic tendency holds sway that refuses to acknowledge hierarchy except in terms of scale and power. This plays most unfortunately into the hands of unwise politicians. As this book has shown, the concept of a universal hierarchy of principles is age-old, but for some reason anathema to many modern materialists and logicians. Distinct laws arise in association with every fundamental principle-sphere of the world. Those principles exist in a nested, holistically hierarchical (or holarchical) relationship; that is, some principles are more encompassing, encapsulating, or essentially greater in their unitive reality than others.
We have argued in this chapter that the fundamental principles of the universe cannot be reduced to symmetrical mechanisms and logistics of causation. For instance, although a hydrogen atom exhibits various symmetries, upon adding a third-body electron to the hydrogen’s neutron-proton pair, producing a hydrogen ion, the atom becomes chaotic. At that point its resonant field can no longer be reduced to its previous symmetries. Its symmetries are re-integrated via processes defined by higher-level laws, developing into a process of symmetry breaking beyond inertial identity that evolves and grows or otherwise transforms into a uniquely new – even if indistinguishably similar – holistic identity. Similarly, original and underlying chaos cannot be reduced to or simply equated with causally synchronized emergent field-systems of identified symmetries.
Fields are always associated with symmetrical particles in relativistic physics. For instance, photons are the particles of electromagnetic fields. For a hundred years it has been thought that all forces of spacetime operate through fields, which were first postulated by Michael Faraday in the nineteenth century. Following him, James Maxwell’s equations showed that electromagnetic radiation traveled at a limited velocity; i.e., energy does not travel instantaneously. Maxwell’s equations allow freely radiating fields to exist independent of masses or charges. Interaction or resonance of these fields results in an inherent irreversibility or time-symmetry-breaking primed through the emergence of networks that then initiate new identity-domains via synchronization in the context of a common and wholly integral source.
Modern physics posits the existence of many fundamental fields, as every primary subatomic particle embodies a distinct field-type. There exists in the cosmos a hierarchy of fundamentally different field-domains. Even within theoretical conceptualization of ten-dimensional supersymmetry, mathematical unification of the primary force fields known by physicists – gravitational, electromagnetic, strong (nuclear), weak (atomic decay), Higgs, and cosmos-accelerating “dark energy” – through reductionistic procedures are nowhere near to being figured out. Inevitably, it will become evident to physicists that hierarchical emergence is a fundamental, universal principle beyond the biological world; encompassing all particle types of the cosmos and levels of field resonance, complex order, and material coherence.
In Newton’s theory of gravity and Einstein’s theories of relativity, material objects are related to each other through force fields. In fact, matter is identified as properties of fields. In GRT, the field properties are described through mathematical tensors. These can also be viewed as describing the curvature of spacetime. General relativity was viewed by Einstein and his successors as a geometric theory. All space, matter, movement, and transformations of matter are defined by the fields surrounding, permeating, and indeed manifesting cosmic matter.
While a human being, as with any holon, may be characterized by both structural organization and functional fields, the order human life represents can be properly measured and thereby valued only if it is viewed as a holistic organism. The vital life and essential nature of human existence cannot be known in truth through a modeled analysis of the mechanical parts and operations of the human body. The human system is a self-organizing, complex organism. It has a unique interior realm sensed, felt, and cognized in such a way as to be irreducible to computations. The identity of any holon must include the resonant effects of both its internal and external interacting vibratory structures of polar symmetry and relationships of hierarchical interdependency. Every being is constantly becoming; holistically determined within any given duration through characteristically resonating fields, which proceed to form its inertial identity. Resonance between similar organisms is a critical aspect of evolution at every level of cosmic growth. Neoplatonic understandings of “likeness” are based upon this anciently observed fact.
Organisms are always vibratory, rhythmic, and cyclic. Resonance of molecular, cellular, and organic vibration is primary to instilling order and subtle organization in integrated systems, including collective systems such as human society. (While superstitious notions of “harmonic convergence” have permeated new religions, that is no reason for the science community to devalue the potency of this universally true principle.) Contemporary theories of chaos, complexity, and emergence address this. A major advancement in those fields was the realization that in the natural world most highly organized and evolved systems are unstable and intensely entropic. They develop through symmetries of oscillation resonating in field patterns; this then gives rise to hierarchies of organization. Within every hierarchically emergent domain, a myriad of contingencies interconnect in a simultaneous moment-to-moment continuity of the present universe. Here we define a moment as a vibratory duration interiorly extending as and exteriorly limited by an essential symmetry. The causes of this whole process are Transformative Chaos, Dimensional Space, Radiant Time, and Unitive Law, with the latter two being what has traditionally been termed the First Cause. The Tarot’s Neoplatonic wisdom presents a cosmological understanding of emanated principles that is now being confirmed by scientific knowledge.
Resonance is a true and universal principle, whether operating on atomic, biotic, solar, or galactic field domains. While various types of physically detectable waves radiate from a human body, the concept of an underlying morphogenetic organization guiding both the parts and whole of a human system toward patterns of integral duration is provocative to scientific materialists. René Thom’s elegant modeling of singularities addresses the genesis and change of biological forms, wherein creation, coherence, and destruction are represented by dynamic geometric structures evincing attraction. Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of formative causation, though much derided by mechanical reductionists, brilliantly suggests the use of morphogenetic “fields” to describe how holistically caused, underlying synchronistic contingency arises. David Bohm’s theory of an implicate order is another example of a well-thought-out attempt to explain the principle of holistic causality in terms that embrace the deeply chaotic and synchronistic flux of the cosmos.
At a time when prominent scientific authorities deem 96 percent of the universe to be of totally unknown types of “mass,” “field,” or “energy” – or something different altogether – it is no longer reasonable to limit one’s considerations of life, relationships, and the world to beliefs in remarkably limited, linearly and locally causal, mechanical laws of physics.
Systems become nonlinear and complex through interaction between events that resonate in a manner that is interdependently causal. Spacetime trajectories of such events cannot be traced because nonlinear resonance produces non-computable effects in terms of measurable projection. Interacting fields, light emission, and the movement of interacting particles toward equilibrium all involve resonance; as does the human neuro system, about which yogis can expound even while materialistically objective medical scientists remain largely in the dark. Resonant fields involve nonlocal and diffusive operations. While these may be approximated by probabilistic contingencies, they cannot be measured as determined trajectories. For transient, immediately local interactions of objects and their fields, diffusion into contingency may appear to be minimal. Thus, for simplistic physics experiments, the parts of a system can be tracked and predicted with seeming certitude. However, for persistent interactions (i.e., the organic world beyond sticks and stones, machines and bullets) the subtle effects of resonance rule.
Hierarchical levels of cosmic complexity systematically organize as global and holistic world-domains, stages, or phases that are not reducible to a summation of projected mechanical actions of systems’ parts – most certainly including social and cultural systems. Even a Newtonian system of only three gravitational bodies exhibits such complexity in its resonating interaction as to become truly unpredictable. Unstable systems often demonstrate a breaking of symmetry, either systemically de-structuring or trans-forming, and thus causing both death and rebirth. Phase transitions such as vapor to water and water to ice arise from such symmetry-breaking.
Persistently interactive systems require holistic, synchronistic, and hierarchical description. These primary principles – hierarchical emergence, synchronistic contingency, and holistic causality – gained little attention from twenty-first-century scientists. Arthur Koestler notably stated that hierarchy had been such an important principle for so long that modern scientists decided to effectively relegate it to the dustbins of tradition.
Emergence is a concept now common in evolutionary theory, even though it is viewed as antithetical to mechanical materialism. As reviewed earlier, Darwin and his followers postulated that all evolution must be based upon gradual processes of random generational genetic mutation. Problematically to Darwinians, evolutionary, creative jumps of natural development cannot be solely explained by a series of causal mechanisms founded upon random occurrence. To those raised amongst or otherwise indoctrinated with Christian dogmas – whether rationally believed in or not – concepts of inherent cosmic and organic creativity seem to imply a need for an interjecting God. However, that dualistic conceptual need arises only because cultural mythic programming habituates communal mind-sets to it. From within both rational and transcendental frames of mind, unity of poles becomes obvious, progressively viewed and realized as being primary. Darwin and his followers were ardent in their scientific conviction that a cosmic need for a supernatural deity did not exist, yet they replaced theology with the equally dualistic metaphysics of mathematical materialism, and universal unity with fundamentally disordered randomness.
Unlike the physics concepts of Neil Bohr’s quantum chance and Wolfgang Pauli’s irrational matter, wherein principles of emergence and nonlocal synchronicity are complementarily acknowledged, Darwin’s biological theory allows no resonantly self-organizing synchronicity, no emergent order, no hierarchical patterning of universally actualized evolution; no resonance of essential natures, no fields of vital life. The cosmos, during Darwin’s lifetime, was not viewed as evolving; Darwin’s worldview was not of an infinitely vibrating, field-resonating, entangled flux evolving order out of a singular pre-space time of absolute unity. He and many peers supposed the universe to operate in a random, mechanical fashion without unitive and self-organizing laws.
Cosmically innate evolutionary design does not require a supernatural creator or unnatural “divine power.” The essential nature of the cosmos is plenty super as it already, inherently is. It is simply inappropriate that beautiful, good, and true scientific and perennial wisdom principles keep being placed in opposition to dualistic “meta”-physical beliefs in which “beyond” and “transcendent” imply unnatural “separation” from the cosmos. Tomes of scholastic argumentation are not required to discern the nondual gist of cosmic evolution, emanation, or developmental transformation by any other name, conveyed by great tradition sages.
Modern examination of organic life on earth along with the fossil records of that life has conclusively led to a worldview of cyclically sustained development punctuated by periodic rapid emergence of new species. Mammalian life forms arose on earth within a short span of time during the dinosaur age. Not many changes occurred until after that age, when a great amount of adaptation took place within another relatively small timeframe. (Of course, such accepted facts may well be revised as new information is accumulated or theoretical frameworks are rebuilt.) Since then, very few new mammalian species have emerged, even while the existent species have gradually mutated and adapted to changing environments. Similarly, the extinction of dinosaurs happened within a short span of time.
Within our own grandchildren’s’ lifetimes, it is likely that over half of all species on earth will become extinct – the largest mass-extinction since the age of dinosaurs. The study of evolution’s punctuated equilibrium has made it clear that species evolution comes via sudden transitions, and cannot be reduced to the causal mechanisms of random mutation. By all appearances, our current era is a naturally catastrophic age (influenced by the nature of human developmental processes) that has set the stage for a regenerative explosion of conscious human evolution. Holistically causal factors such as massive societal and technological growth enabled by the extraction and burning of earth’s fossil fuels in a remarkably short span of time are determining future human species’ self-selected courses of development. These will necessarily include altruistic, cooperative, and intelligently holistic design; sustainable technology; and intercultural ritual and art.
A relatively recent field of evolutionary biology includes in-depth study of developmental processes occurring within the lifetimes of individual and collective life forms. Termed evo-devo, it has led to discovery that the genesis and evolution of complex forms is ofttimes accomplished through small and rapid changes of genes and developmental plans. A process of many genetic mutations over generations is not necessary for substantial evolution to occur. Furthermore, within any level of organismic formation, the number of genes that can be reorganized so as to catalyze (however that may happen on deep and implicate levels of biological formation and order) the creation of new forms and body parts is remarkably few. The same set of DNA sequences appears to be involved with a great many radically evolutionary developments. Natural hierarchy, including that of genes, actualizes the evolution of certain forms while simultaneously disallowing the growth of others. Random contingency does not rule, but rather synchronistic contingency limits and promotes every organism into a developmental and evolutionary course of life that is holistically determined.
“Control” genes are proving to be involved with the core processes of “directing” development of life forms. Because so few such genes exist, there is no need for a constant production of new genes via mutation in order for morphogenesis to occur. Instead, modification of a relatively simple set of existing genes and processes is evidently primary to the processional production of our planet’s cornucopia of biological formation. This explains how chimps and humans can share 99 percent of their genes, yet be so obviously different. This has also brought to light amazing discoveries, such as the fact that the potential development of animal appendages was already existent in fish before any earth-life crawled out of the sea; those developments were simply awaiting the right environment before proceeding to activate a process of tetrapod formation. Major evolutionary phase-transitions like that of water-life to land-life were not “caused” by genetic mutation, but rather, new environmental feedback to organisms promoted the emergence of already nascent, relatively rapid genetic reorganization and continuous morphogenetic development marked by creative discontinuity.
Evolution is an unfolding of possibilities already in part destined to manifest in ways that will converge amongst different life forms. When evolutionary convergences are considered from a holistically coherent viewpoint, it becomes apparent that trajectories of evolution are indeed highly constrained. Given the enormous degree of biological plentitude found on earth, it is truly remarkable that life is marked by such a great degree of limitation.
Regardless of how many discreet stages it may take for complex structures such as eyes and wings to evolve, there exists much evidence for the emergence of functionally whole biological structures. On the macro level, life forms in general fall into distinct types, as the study of plant and animal species makes quite evident. Universally, cosmic existence is marked by hierarchy comprising discontinuous levels of ordered coherence and discreet forms of self-organizing complexity, which emerge first and adapt later. Or, as evo-devo suggests, they emerge already enabled to express an implicated developmental path of adaptation. Once again, this “intelligent design” is simply how whole systems in our cosmos work. It is based upon the truly great Unitive Principle proceeding at all times. This chapter’s worldview and understanding of immortal, universal principles is not comparable to dualistic monism, gnostic dualism, or other popular forms of theology.
Properly understood, the cosmic plethora once symbolized by medieval philosophy’s Great Chain of Being is a holarchical plenitude of nested reality spheres or emergent domains of both spacetime and lawful principle. Hierarchy interiorly emerges psycho-spiritually through cognition and consciousness just as it does externally in environmental and social worlds through species and castes, etc. As this book has argued, the world is marked by the principle of hierarchy in both interior and exterior realms, for both individuals and collectives of entities.
Distinct laws of nature emerge with every complex and unstable level of cosmic organization. Laws applicable to macro domains of thermodynamics, for instance, are not reducible to laws specifically describing quantum particle flux. This is how the Great Holarchical Chain of Interdependent Causation works. Thus, while laws of physics and organic chemistry and molecular biology all apply to the human system, other unique laws emerge in the human domain that are not reducible to the laws of those lower or less complex levels. It is obvious that laws of culture and consciousness must be developed for anything to be actually known and intelligently discussed about human behavior. Defining happiness or anger in terms of chemical reactions does not inform the human mind whatsoever about the actual experiences and relationships involving feelings and cultural patterns of happiness and anger. Knowing how to make a pill that makes one feel a particular way and understanding how one’s feelings develop in natural contexts are utterly different types of knowledge regarding oneself.
A simple, not-so-futuristic scenario suffices to clarify the importance of distinguishing between what we may here refer to as interior-subjective and exterior-objective knowledge. It is reasonable to extrapolate current brain-wave and psychochemical studies of advanced meditators and spiritual practitioners into the next decades. Likewise with the development of “lifestyle drugs,” including psychoactive drugs that create euphoric or ecstatic states of mind-body sensation. Imagine a daily dose of an ecstasy-producing drug we will call neo-ambrosia. If neo-ambrosia was to prove non-debilitating in terms of general life activities, standards of health, and operative modes of relating; produced states of happiness comparable with brain-scan measurements of life-long meditators; cost minimal money to produce; and was not outlawed, it is easy to imagine the drug replacing many of the drugs currently consumed by the masses (e.g., alcohol, barbiturates, antidepressants, caffeine, amphetamines, chocolate, and even sugar). Let us imagine what would happen if in order to solve a great many psychosocial difficulties, political leaders around the world successfully promoted introduction of neo-ambrosia into their cities’ water supplies. Would the measurable knowledge held by pharmaceutical and CAT scanning scientists wisely and successfully replace the need for people to learn about how the human world best operates naturally in terms of developmental stages of consciousness, feelings, relationships, sociocultural rituals, and degrees of intimate engagement – including love?
Synchronistically and nonlocally, hierarchical levels or realms of the natural world quite evidently evolve through time via processes which involve interdependent, identifiable polar holons exhibiting symmetry, field resonance, and emergent organization within contingent communities defined by similar elements. The remembrance and inheritance implicit in the synchronous continuity of the universe is holistically caused through a process of morphogenetic realization implicit to an underlying universally creative, chaotic flux.
Morphogenesis means “the coming into being of form.” In our age of uncertainty, philosophers, scientists, artists, and contemplatives agree that very little is truly understood about the moment-to-moment continuously and coherently sustained creativity of reality. The world is no longer conceived in terms of simply identified cycles of polar recurrence. Not only are there lifecycles of manifested forms, but such beingness keeps evolving by transforming in unpredictable ways. The corporeal world is always in the process of becoming an ancestral history of formation that makes ordered sense.
Contingent relationships can be observed amongst spontaneous events occurring upon a similar level of organization even if unlinked or removed in terms of spatial proximity. These may evince synchronicity when viewed as a whole. Quantum entanglement is a form of nonlocal contingency that remains synchronistic, while circadian rhythms and pacemaker cells of the heart are resonantly local flesh-and-blood examples. In twenty-first-century material sciences, classical mechanistic determinism is giving way to probabilistic laws of contingency. Undetermined (in terms of mechanical linkage and linear causality) spontaneity is now thought of as commonplace.
The transformative chaos of environmental catastrophe and the synchronistic contingencies from which emerge hierarchies of new species cannot be explained by old Darwinian theories of evolution. When Darwin attempted to fit the concept of organismic development into a mechanistic worldview, he had to deny all orientation toward natural unity propelling the future design of life. While we may not know what order will emerge, knowing that order will emerge is to understand that the future is as present as the past and that the two are not equivalently symmetrical. Paradoxically, the past indicates the future, for the future is always prior. Such is the primary, Unitive Law of Time.
Studies of thermodynamics, chaos, and unstable systems in general make clear that the cosmos and its natural organization develop in a manner that is irreversible. The bulk properties of a chaotic system cannot be equated to a decomposed set comprising the individual properties of that system. Resonantly entangled, contingently synchronized interactions of a complex system must be treated as a whole. Occurrence, movement, and relationship of events may then be rationally defined and to varying degrees identified by probabilistic functions. In complex systems or worlds, no outcomes are known for certain, but the statistical mathematics of contingent manifestation enlightens scientists’ knowledge of the universe nonetheless.
Contingency does not simply indicate randomness, but rather implies a spectrum of synchronicity arising through holistic causation. Forms emerge in the cosmos based upon contingencies that contain structures definable solely in terms of probabilities. We identify forms and movements through categorical rules involving likeness. Such similarity involves probabilistic field-structures. When we sense patterns that are similar to those already known, we assume they can probably be identified, categorized, and known in terms of associated significance or function.
In what is herein termed fifth-dimensional consciousness, four-dimensional spacetime is cognized and lived as a deeply ancestral, virtual, and historical domain of entangled reality; holistically radiating beyond gross, structural mechanics and psychic, resonant influences. It is this sphere or level of reality that David Bohm, Rupert Sheldrake, and fellow luminaries have intuited as subtly existent, compelling them toward noble efforts to conceptualize new scientific principles and mathematical models that may verifiably model such. In previous chapters, we have reviewed traditional concepts oriented toward fifth-dimensional consciousness and realization, including nondual gnosis, ancestral awareness, and transcendental virtue.
Clear realization of this stage of human consciousness involves an evolution of sensing-feeling-thinking self beyond intuitive levels of body-mind integration. Virtue identified traditionally by wisdom-realizers involves a moment-to-moment spontaneous awareness of the synchronistic entanglement of communal events in a world-space fundamentally defined by contingency. Every archetypal identity at every moment serves reality as a coherent event-process in a state of probabilistic and temporal becoming. Cognitive realization of such may be called Mindful Emptiness, be that on cosmic, human, or atomic planes.
Through realization of the principle of synchronistic contingency, the world proceeds into and then transforms beyond emergent field-identities marked by inertia and polarity. In this state of subtly living interconnectedness, human consciousness evolves and returns to the source-principle that causes manifestation of four-dimensional spacetime. Arising from the animating flux of chaos, spacetime is holistically re-created as a materializing cause. Every contingent network of events – all fields of symmetrical identity on every level of emergence, from micro to macrocosm – materially remembers its common and unified source at every moment and place via its ancestral synchronicities. Our universe’s Original Singularity remains as the underlying Unifying Law of all.
Causality as a cosmic principle is now being re-cognized in the context of nonlinear, trans-local principles of chaos, contingency, emergence, and resonance. Hierarchical emergence in the universe exists prior to and deeper than all fields and thereby causally encompasses and underlies all resonance. This means that polar symmetry and field resonance are destined toward emergence of holarchical synchronicity. That which is prior in principle is that which the material world evolves into. All hierarchical emergence – whether of particles, elements, species, psyches, or galaxies – is derived from synchronistic contingency and holistic causation.
Holistic reality ensures that contingent events are always definable by some degree or magnitude of synchronicity. Every quantum is entangled with every other quantum since they were all One at the time of cosmic creation. As importantly, a universal hierarchy of holons emerging as a depth-spectrum of existence and duration of time are constantly recreated through the holistic history of synchronicity. Self-organizing fields resonate in particular with fields emerging with a high degree of similar synchronistic holism. By tuning in to the resonance of that which is similar but more essentially and integrally complex than itself (including a group of similar selves), vibratory cognition can transform its own body-mind system. On the human plane, this is how vitality is regenerated and consciousness is developed through yoga. Such cognitive or conscious evolution happens through psychic, hierarchical alignment and subtle, synchronistic similarity. Esoteric transmission as holistic informing of whole-body consciousness works through such resonance, emergence, and synchronicity; as does the soulful love of wedded hearts and spiritual community.
Even from a twenty-first-century cosmological perspective, it can well be said that the cosmos is fundamentally, fully United. We have seen that wave functions of atomic particles extend to their disintegrated parts even when extended over light-years of spacetime. The particle-parts do not “communicate” to “align” themselves; rather they continuously form a whole entity. Thus, they behave as a single identity maintaining a common symmetry in an extended field potentially limited only by the size of the cosmos. The quantum-level law of nonlocality reflects the greater principle of holistic causality, which is similarly reflected through laws operative on biological and human consciousness levels. Regarding the latter, for instance, studies have shown that concurrent with a conscious feeling or intention, materialization and release of neuropeptides simultaneously occur in cells throughout the body. Universal laws are measurably operable on differing hierarchical levels of existence in accordance to distinct level-bound laws. Thereby, non-local synchronicity at the quantum level is bound to be observed and experienced differently than that at the human level. In all cases, nonlocality requires a priori unity via genesis from the same source.
Non-equilibrium systems such as the universe, the sun, the earth, and life in general dynamically give rise to collectively novel effects coherent as and throughout the whole. These effects are caused holistically, and can only be measured through the synchronicity addressed by aforementioned stochastic models. Mechanical materialists refuse to acknowledge the intuitive beauty of the world’s paradoxically deeply simple complex chaos, even though the study of such has lent itself to elegant symbolic expression – mathematically, artistically, and literally. From within new science developments, a worldview has emerged whereby contingency coheres holistically and statistical properties are understood as cosmically fundamental. This view acknowledges innate duration and associated underlying formative limits of duration – properly understood as the most primal aspect of reality – which are set by emergence-designs, field-systems, symmetry-structures, and identity-definitions.
Chaos deeply encapsulates nascent, potential order. When order emerges from chaos, ethereal boundary conditions are initially in flux, dynamically undefined, and stochastic by nature. Whole, integral identities first form patterns through hierarchical emergence of otherwise shapeless contingencies non-locally assembling synchronistically (after which they may become localized). Pattern definition of a whole’s contingent parts emerges simultaneously and integrally on multiple levels of depth (perhaps understandable as holographic resonance) because of an encapsulating, higher-level source-cause (perhaps understandable as morphogenetic fields) from which a holon emerges. Durations of natural patterns may be defined in general as fields. Because energy becomes matter and matter reverts back to energy, fields always contain polar aspects that serve to identify their uniqueness. Through dimensional concentration and recursive magnification of a unified time-space-chaos process, things are caused to happen.
Transformative aspects of nature – found, for example, in Big Bang creation, symmetrical atomic structuring, elemental and molecular formation, biological evolution, and all other essentially beautiful, good, and true corporeal aspects of reality – have been considered (before worldviews of chaos and emergence blossomed into lawful study) by mechanistic material scientists as arising totally from chance. From their perspective, that which is viewed as causally immeasurable is deemed to be so for reasons solely based upon an observer’s lack of information. While admitting and allowing for chance occurrences (a concept that reductionistic materialists conflate with transcendental essence) of transformation, the world is otherwise considered to be mechanically computable. It was once thought that theoretically, given a large enough computer, the linear progression of every event in the universe could be retraced, extrapolated, correlated, and determined with certainty. In contrast to this, contemporary theories of chaotic and complex systems posit that most all events in the universe are caused to manifest through laws that arise out of untraceably eventful chaos and complexity.
Causal relationships emerging from chaos are related through a mutual cause such as a common source of origin. In defining a whole, separate events effectively synchronize via a common cause underlying them. That cause may be a chaotic or complex source-law unnoticed by an observer. Or it might be a creative union operating on a level of dimensionality and depth, or frequency and radiance, that human observers are unaware exists (flocks of birds, swarms of bees, and schools of fish are common earthly examples of organized unions operating on levels deeper than human perception is able to fully cognize). The Ten Immortal Principles outlined in this chapter define universal dimensionality as an interiorly omniscient and exteriorly omnipresent realization of conscious cosmos through all of its domains. Modern theories of catastrophe, chaos, complexity, and morphogenesis are significantly advancing scientific understanding and technological implementation of the world’s multidimensional unity.
Dimensional depth and co-arising interdependency are concepts primary to a fourth-stage, intuitive understanding of the world based upon holistic and transformative models of twenty-first-century scientific knowledge. The belief that physical dynamics are caused solely through the linear interactions of spatially discreet and disintegrated field-events does not conceive the world to be inherently, already unified and thereby holistically causal. Worldviews encompassing deeply integral, underlying levels of causation operating upon the physical world usually elicit unreasonable antagonism from scientific materialists. Intraphysical concepts of emergent design are still rhetorically attacked as “metaphysical,” even if abiding by accepted scientific methodology; as if eighteenth- and nineteenth-century mechanical scientism was the last word in scientific theory and natural knowledge.
Given that this book bases the system of Tarot Triumphs upon a philosophical worldview that historically combined cosmic emanation and evolution with principles of spiritual realization involving immortality, this chapter outlines an elegant way to encompass and unite both physical and metaphysical principles of an eternal universe. We may cognize a six-dimensional cosmos by identifying the materialization of spacetime with the first six of our Ten Unitive Principles as follows:
Inertia, polarity, and field identify symmetrical resonance as three-dimensional space.
Hierarchy is the fourth-dimensional processional emergence of space becoming time, wherein time itself is the attracting pole of the world’s spacetime axis.
Evolving further into unity as time-attracted reality, synchronicity is the fifth-dimension involving entangled contingency.
What is universally cognized and experienced as simultaneously present source and destiny is the sixth-dimension holistically causing the cosmos.
Beyond that, a further three “dimensions,” if indeed that is the proper term, compose a transcendent realm that is paradoxically always corporeal while simultaneously lawfully abiding beyond separative cognition and human measurement in any terms of objective or provable certainty.
A Grand Unification of universal dimensionality, including all manifestation of time itself, perforce defines reality in terms of Immortal Principles. World Unity as the First Principle fully includes and involves but is not limited to corporeal dimensionality, for from that One all other principles, laws, and matter arise.
This total and complete interdependency of unitive, lawful principles and attributes of reality may be realized consciously by humans through that which perennially has been called spiritual awareness – mind-body realization of immortal Law through and as the unity of living light and creative being.
Space in all of its cosmic, chaotic, and empty dimensionality is preceded, permeated, and encompassed by radiant time. Fields, and all events located within fields, are delimited by the speed of light. Thus, linear cause-effect relationships between fields or between field events that are not already unified through time cannot occur simultaneously. Spatial events are radiantly connected in momentary duration through the constancy of time as light-speed. In other words, Time emanates Space. Time cannot be reduced to laws of matter and quantum energy. Rather, matter must be understood as radiant energy, which is most fundamentally defined by the laws of time.
What are time and space as underlying principles of the universe that are not merely reducible to cosmic manifestation upon any particular level of chaos, organization, or mathematical abstraction? Can a human be cognizant of pure space or conscious of just time?
Time is universal cognition – what humans realize as Consciousness. Time is Universal Mind – duration as all interior cognition, which is to say all vibration, even at its lowest possible magnitude and highest possible speed. When twenty-first-century cosmologists tell the story of Cosmic Birth and Death, it ends in an ever-more-quickly expanding world-space of light. Light-traces of the cosmic past will, over the next hundred billion years, pulverize at an edge of absolute energy, leaving little more than a local galactic space that hypothetical future astronomers may be able to locally observe. In no way a dark and dismal death, this futuristic cosmic creation myth tells a brilliant story of Mind as the destiny of the Cosmic Body and World Soul – cosmic flux wholly transformed via material realization back into its Source Union of Mysterious Void and Divine Light.
Radiant Time is de facto present in every other universal principle. Radiant Mind and Present Reality are literally One and the same. The mind of time is evident in the essential indifference to all transformations shown by spatially dimensional inertial objects; that is, in the constant duration of the cosmos beyond and regardless of its underlying flux of quantum chance. Time as a principle encompassing all space, chaos, causation, and contingent and emergent fields through which symmetry and identity manifest, moves the universe forward. Through Time, the ordered entropy of the cosmos universally increases. Called Logos, Consciousness, and Immortality, such is asymmetrically matched by the gravity and inherent immobility of Space. It is the latter universal aspect of our material world that laws of entropy refer to when positing that all spacematter is ultimately destined to randomly “equalize” in spatial identity through loss of creative (i.e., working) energy – that there is a hypothetical tendency for all matter and energy in the universe to evolve toward a state of inert uniformity.
A dogmatic presumption of death-believing hard and cold scientists is that the universe is a closed system and thereby the Law of Entropic Equilibrium rules over all other laws; that anti-gravitational dark energy or cosmological constant or quintessence, such as it may be deemed, is not a creative force absolutely and immortally energizing the heart of every moment everywhere for everything. If that appears like a twenty-first-century God-Principle, then so be it; but please, dear friends who have made it to the end of this treatise, know without a doubt that the Unitive Principle is Always Here Now As the World. This is Immortally True.
Unitive reality is indicated by the fact that gravity radiates at the speed of light. Although gravity and electromagnetic radiation have not been mathematically unified, the unitive nature of the universe needs to be understood beyond mathematically limited suppositions. Space radiates in its fundamental essence at the speed of light – i.e., as time. Spatial radiation or movement sensibly “marks out” time. The fastest “time can go” in the universe is at the speed of light; or, put another way, time slows to zero relative to other eventframes as the speed of light is approached. The eternity of immortals is simply that time-space of purely radiant being.
Law as the incorporeal essence of Unity is the Heart of wisdom-realization. The study of physics up till now has been unable to directly approach this truly greatest principle, that of Unified Law. Einstein’s reduction of time as a dimensional extension of space did not assume a deep enough worldview to allow formulations of time without unnecessary spatial limitations. Einstein intuitively understood that the universe develops already unified. Radiant Time bridges Dimensional Space with Unitive Law. However, quantum mechanics defines time through the dimensional units and trajectories of material particles. While this has proven to be an insightful view of chaotic space materializing, it has fallen far short of conceiving the true Laws of Time.
Applying perennial wisdom understanding to the most essential aspects of reality – Unity, Time, Space, and Chaos – gives us a set of scientific principles, laws, and definitions:
Unity is universal principle.
Unity emanates present law.
Unity as law is always transcending.
Unity as present law emanates radiant time.
Time is radiant cognition.
Time emanates durational energy.
Time as energy is always slowing.
Time as durational energy emanates dimensional space.
Space is dimensional force.
Space emanates coherent gravity.
Space as gravity is always accelerating.
Space as coherent gravity emanates quantal chaos.
Chaos is quantal matter.
Chaos emanates immanent mass.
Chaos as mass is always transforming.
Chaos as immanent mass emanates organizational causality.
Further to the above, are the observations that:
Time is infinite.
Space is infinitesimal.
Time and Space are the mind and body of Unified Law.
Space and Time realize universal symmetry.
Materialistically reductive belief systems are unable to posit how principles and laws themselves originally arose and continually arise. Of course, principles are not reducible to or caused by the mathematical models that use those principles as foundations upon which their theories are built. By all accounts, the fundamental principles of the universe are destined to manifestation of not only material reality, but of absolute light-reality. For against all odds of chance, the cosmos does in Truth already exist in such a Beautiful and Good Way.
Principled Unity does not imply “willful nature” in the style of an anthropomorphic, separative “God-power.” Disbelief in theism catalyzes a core reaction that affects many scientists’ ability to observe and consider the principle of Unitive Law. In the understanding of nondual emanation, principle-realities of Law, Time, Space, and Chaos are not separate from the Cosmos, but neither are they essentially limited by cosmic definition. Unitive Law does imply that cognitive life is a cosmic imperative and that Light (or what esoteric Buddhism calls Buddha Mind) through infinite cosmic manifestations – causal, subtle, and gross – serves as the purpose of such.
Scientific materialism generally conceives of matter as being informed. “Informing acts” are presumed to occur through practically ideal mathematical laws of nature. It is a small step from such Platonic ideation to a Neoplatonic realization that the essential laws of the cosmos are inherently purposed to the realization of conscious unity. As it is, scientists believe that life occurs through genes mysteriously coded for self-survival and the creation, maintenance, and destruction of unfathomably complex, dynamically unstable self-conscious beings over time. Science will come to affirm that universally unitive laws manifest as cosmic bodies, thereby becoming unveiled; and that Time is the quintessential Unifying Principle. Mind and body are truly and completely nondual, regardless of the polarities contained by every identity.
This book has attempted to summarize and elucidate for modern contemplators, spiritual questors, interdisciplinary scholars, and holistic scientists the immortal heart of ten essential principles championed by a great and perennial tradition of wisdom. If the reader is amazed to find a book on the perennial wisdom origins of the Tarot ending with an exemplified summary of universal, scientific principles, remember that science is embarking on a new journey; a journey whereupon the natural world of complexity, creativity, time, consciousness, and evolution are explored without the blinders of reductionistic materialism and dogmatically atheistic scientism. If in fact there are infinite cosmic realities, Ten Great Unitive, Universal, and Immortal Principles are realizing them all.
