The Serpent's Wisdom

For a while now i've been toying around from time to time with the idea that mind is a field. Under this view, mind is given the respect it is due as a phenomenon in its own right, but without a metaphysical dualism of the sort with which mind/body theories typically wrestle.

Some implications of this are interesting. Fields have properties like resonance, and theoretically extend over the whole universe. Noön particles would be quantum-interlinked just like other particles. So our individual minds, thoughts, feelings, are not as isolatedly individual as we seem to experience them. While noöns may be concentrated inside living brains, they wouldn't be found only there.

If noöns exist, why haven't we seen them? I think they possess a rather unique place in nature, in that they serve as an explication factor which draws spacetime reality into being from the melange of the holomovement. Trying to observe one directly would be difficult for the same reason it is hard to pinpoint the exact nature of first-person experience. Noöns are, in my hypothesis, what acts on quantum fields to produce what we perceive as the "quantum wave collapse." In other words, what defines "reality" as distinct from the fullness of existence is the influence of a noönic field. So to look at a noön would be analogous to looking at a mirror; you don't see an image, but only a reflection of what is around. Seeing anything at all *is* the process of seeing a noön.

(It sounds like i am proposing a duality here between explicated and otherwise, but i do not imagine a universe where explicit matter is free from influence by that which remains enfolded. If you said this sounds like a hidden-variable-invoking Bohmian interpretation, you'd be right. Heck, noöns themselves are a hidden variable.)

There is a lot that might be explained by the supposition that each mind extends over all of spacetime. It might partly explain, for example, instant attraction or repulsion. Have you ever met someone and felt like you recognized them immediately? Perhaps there is a strong resonance between your noönic fields. If however you meet someone whose noönic field is dissonant with your own, you might be inclined to dislike them, and you'd likely be right: that person would think and act in ways very different from you.

Many different aspects of collective human behavior might be explained this way, from mob consciousness to the intuitive appeal of ideas like Jung's collective unconscious, or Teilhard de Chardin's noosphere as the endpoint of human evolution.

It also allows for the possibility of noönic solitons or persistences. I could write a whole entry on what that means, persistent noönic waves floating around free of brains to shape them, affecting thought, feeling, and perhaps even matter. Some memes might be noönic solitons -- as might memories or experiences some people attribute to "reincarnation." Perhaps instincts and patterns of human behavior i referred to recently as "human nature" are noönic solitons as well.

There are interesting implications regarding will and causation, too. Jeffrey Schwartz proposed a notion he called "mental force" to explain the observable change in brain structure which can result from focused meditation. That the brain is capable of self-reprogramming is fascinating and opens a wide range of potential for human improvement. But this result also gives us hard evidence that consciousness is something real. (Contrast the views of Daniel Dennett and other eliminative-materialists who claim that consciousness and self are pure memetic illusion, on the basis of the observation that there is no place within the brain where consciousness resides.)

I've come to think that being abusive, hateful, and intolerant is evidence of having a weak will in the face of external influence. A person who displays these traits is less of an individuated person; they are blown about and easily carried along by external currents. In my opinion, the work of individuation, of learning to focus one's will by way of discipline (meditation, contemplative prayer, martial arts, esoterica, and other kinds of discipline) is inseparable from the work of cultivating a better human society.

E-Sheep's famous Saturnalia tract (NSFW) is ten years old!

It's been a very dark fall... i'm very gladly welcoming the return of the light!

Two nights ago i dreamed of the Green Man... which i thought was very unsual, since i have not been overtly "pagan" in years. But it's not about what religion you are, or what you believe. Personally, i try to "believe" as little as possible. It's about having the bravery to seek awareness of the interconnectedness and interbeing of life. In a cannibalistic society like this, that's an act of bravery.

I've been working on the Rheomic project.

In my last post on the subject i asked, "[H]ow do I come up with a way to say a sentence like, "My dog is playing on the front lawn"? The problem is parsing this perception in a way that does not divide into subject-verb-object, which is the whole point of the endeavor to create a verb-based language that captures perception in terms of flow.

I have a start on an answer to that. The verb-flow at the center of the thought is play, in this case specifically the kind of play of a dog on the lawn. There is also a flow of interbeing between the playing dog and the observing speaker; the observer's amusement -- or lack thereof -- feeds back into the dog's enthusiasm and enjoyment -- or eventual lack thereof -- of his play. There is also an archetypal flow, the emotional and cultural flows of comfort and world-at-ease brought up by the experience in general of watching a dog at play. The last part is implied in the making of a statement and so does not have to be explicitly stated. The second part, the interbeing between playing dog and observer, i want to bring to mindfulness with at least a grammatical particle expressing, in a word, how the speaker feels about what she is describing.

So the sentence in Rheomic would have a literal translation of "Play 'dogly' flows, and mutual-amusement-comfort-affection flows." Or, alternately, if it entails a different emotional dynamic, "Play 'dogly' flows, then annoyance-impatience flows towards this flow to dampen the flow of play, then obstinance-disobedience characterizes the flow of play."

I don't know yet how to speak about where and only a vague idea of how to speak about when.

Edit. The implication of this linguistic style of parsing is that it downplays the notion of will and volition, where actors are seen as agents guiding the course of events. Rather, events are depicted as flows which sometimes occur via living beings (which are themselves flows). The implications of this kind of view are manyfold... The dog isn't even parsed out as a specific element; the statement is not about the dog but about the playing that's going on. Note also that there would be no way to translate "my" into Rheomic, at least easily. These are all things which were stated as desirable from the project's outset.

It occurred to me the other day that wealth is not an accident, it is a choice. By that, I mean that often when we have a resource we don't need (or might not need in the future) we choose to keep it, even if there is someone near us who needs it more.

I'm not saying straight out this is a bad thing, in itself; when we have something we don't need, we can either keep it, or give it to someone else. I often do this myself, when I encounter people on the street who need the small amount of cash in my pocket more than I do. But looking at this matter makes for an interesting perspective, especially the implications of a whole culture that chooses to keep and not to give.

There is a lot of memetic self-defense against the idea of altruism in our culture. For one thing, it seems like there is so much need "out there," that any of us can give away everything we own and still not make a dent.

Along other lines, we sometimes tell ourselves that the needy are not worthy, or will not do anything "useful" with the money we give them. "Oh, they'll just go and spend it on alcohol" (as if drinking alcohol is only allowed to those who have a permanent residence) or "giving to street people encourages them to do nothing" (as if scrambling for survival on the street is doing "nothing"). Myths about "welfare queens" abound.

In many cultures, giving to someone who is needy is not just virtuous, it is seen as normal and expected. There's a strong emphasis on hospitality; strangers in town can often expect to be fed and housed, even if the family who takes them in has little space and the household is stretched to its limits. In other places we find the tradition of "potlatch" -- conspicuous giving, often with destruction of excess, as if the possession of excess resources were a grievous offense.

In some places, notably among the Islamic nations, charging interest on a loan is seen as sinful. It magnifies the wealth of those who have it and makes it harder for the poor to pay their bills. Interest ("usury") was at one time considered sinful among Christians, too, but that's in the past.

I know that in some ways these things are simplistic and perhaps romanticized, but these concepts and ideas say something about cultural values. I present them as alternatives to the values of our culture which favors individual wealth as the yardstick of success. "Success" could mean "we all live another day," or it could mean, "I have lots of stuff," and these are things we collectively choose, not accidents of reality, and not the impersonal way of the world.

There is one exception -- Christmas -- which is really only a celebration of conspicuous consumption. The best Christmas gift (so the barrage of advertising tells us every year) is a consumer good, especially one that is not connected to a person's immediate survival. The spending that occurs in the month of December means the difference between economic expansion and recession; so there's a sense that we as consumer-bots have a Duty^TM to rack up lots of debt. So it's not really about generosity.

If wealth is a choice, then the worsening of poverty among the have-nots, and the widening gap between rich and poor, are not accidents. These are cumulative detritus from millions of individual decisions to keep and not to give.

Suppose our idea of profit changed to a holistic model, where "profit" is only counted as such if business brings about a win-win. The balance sheet for Merck would include income from sales of Vioxx, plus the economic benefits of people with less pain -- minus the cost of thousands of people dead or ill. The balance sheet for Wal-Mart would include income from sales minus the lost potential for empowerment among thousands of employees.

I know I'm pipe-dreaming here, but our idea of "profit" doesn't have to be rooted in "What's in it for me" or the tyranny of the written word. At the heart of it, I think, we are all frightened; we are deprived of affection, we are deprived of pleasure, and we live in a cannibalistic society where few of us can see beyond our own need for survival. Wealth may be a choice, but for most of us it is a choice made under duress. We make the choice because our experiences tell us the world is full of uncaring predators, not caring neighbors.

Such is life in the heart of an empire.

This post is meant as a starting point towards demonstrating the parallels between the philosophy outlined by Neil Douglas-Klotz, and the concept of the holomovement as developed by David Bohm.

From Douglas-Klotz's thoughts about God:

In Aramaic, the name Alaha refers to the divine, and wherever you read the word "God" in a quote from Yeshua, you can insert this word. It means variously: sacred unity, oneness, the All, the Ultimate Power/Potential, the One with no opposite. It is related to the name of God in Hebrew, Elohim, which is based on the same root word: EL or AL. This root could be translated literally as the sacred "The," since it is also used as the definite article in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic.

If we think deeply into this, we find it suggests that every definite "article" -- every unique being -- should remind us of the one Unity. If only one Being exists, then every other being must have a share in it. Individuality is only relative in this view of God. (The Hidden Gospel, p. 27)

Compare this to David Bohm's depiction of the cosmos as an undivided wholeness, and every "object" discerable as such as a hologram which, if we examine closely enough, would reveal information about everything in the cosmos. (Compare, also, Thich Nhat Hanh's description of "interbeing" as the state of existence of all things together and each thing individually.)

To generalize so as to emphasize undivided wholeness, we shall say that what 'carries' an implicate order is the holomovement, which is an unbroken and undivided totality. In certain cases, we can abstract particular aspects of the holomovement (e.g. light, electrons, sound, etc.) but more generally, all forms of the holomovement merge and are inseparable. Thus, in all totality, the holomovement is not limited in any specifiable way at all. It is not required to conform to any particular order, or to be bounded by any particular measure. Thus, the holomovement is undefineable and immeasurable. (Wholeness and the Implicate Order, p. 191)

The sense of all as movement depicted in Bohm's understanding of the cosmos reminds me very strongly of the image given by Douglas-Klotz of ruach:

God is breath.
All that breathes resides in the Only Being.
From my breath
to the air we share
to the wind that blows around the planet;
Sacred Unity inspires all. (renditions of John 4:24 "God is a spirit" based on the Aramaic; The Hidden Gospel, p. 41)

In both Hebrew and Aramaic, the same word -- ruha in Aramaic, ruach in Hebrew -- must stand for several English words: spirit, wind, air, and breath. Translations that arise out of European Christianity assume that only one of these possibilities is appropriate for each passage. However... when we meditate on the words of a prophet or mystic in the Middle Eastern way, we must consider all possibilities simultaneously. So "Holy Spirit" must also be "Holy Breath." (p. 41-42)

From the perspective of Sacred Unity, my breath is connected to the air we all breathe. It participates in the wind and in the atmosphere that surrounds the whole planet. This atmosphere then connects to the ineffable spirit-breath that pervades the seen and unseen worlds. (p. 43)

Postscript. I think too that the vision of Universe as described by Bucky Fuller can be reconciled with this. Fuller was interested in the geometry of stable forms, and so on the face of it his conceptualization might seem to be exactly opposite of Bohm's. However, Fuller included in his understanding of system and conceptuality the existence of "things" as unique unfoldings from potential. His views come close to dualistic Platonism, but I think he keeps from going over the "edge" and describes a monistic tension. In this context, then, chew on this:

Universe is the aggregate of eternal generalized principles whose nonunitarily conceptual scenario is unfoldingly manifest in a variety of special-case, local, time-space transformative, evolutionary events. Humans are each a special-case unfoldment-integrity of the multi-alternatived complex aggregate of abstract, weightless, omni-interaccomodative, maximally synergetic, non-sensorial, eternal, timeless principles of Universe. Humanity being a macro-to-micro Universe-enfolding eventuation is physically irreversible yet eternally integrated with Universe. Humanity cannot shrink and return into the womb and revert to as-yet unfertilized ova. Humanity can only evolve toward cosmic totality, which in turn can only be evolvingly regenerated through new-born humanity. (Synergetics, 311.03)

Thich Nhat Hanh on the prisoner abuse in Iraq:

The statement President Bush made that the U.S. just sent dedicated, devoted young men, not abusers, to Iraq shocked me. Because committing acts of torture is just the result of the training that the soldiers have already undergone. The training already makes them lose all their humanity. The young men going to Iraq were already full of fear, wanting to protect themselves at all cost, being ready to kill at any moment.

In this state you can become extremely cruel. You may pour all of your hate and anger on prisoners of war by torturing and abusing them. The purpose of your violence is not only to extract information from them, but also to express your hate and fear. The prisoners of war are the victims, but the abusers, the torturers are also the victims. Their actions will continue to disturb them long after the abuse has ended.

Preparing for war and fighting a war means allowing our human nature to die and the animal nature in us to take over. We should never be tempted to resort to violence and war to solve conflict. Violence always leads to more violence.

Thay Hanh's compassion is notable. But do you think he is correct that the problem is one of "human nature" versus "animal nature"? This strikes me as uncharacteristically dualistic thinking for a Buddhist.

crossposting to my journal and crossposting to buddhists

akaiyume has done the blessed task of calling on me to face what exactly it is that I really think of as "spirit," or what "spirit" really means to me. In her last response to my post in darkpaganism she wrote:

This bit means of tying in the workings of the human animal with subtler aspects of existence confuses me greatly. Our animal body contains all the aspects of existence that it is possible for us to experience; the body, the mind, the emotions, the will are one and inseperable. Any "subtler aspects of existence" we can experience originate within the human body.

One way I can answer that is that I think of "spirit" as a kind of codeword for the string we pull on that unravels into a paradox.

On the one end of this paradox is the fact that at times "spirit" seems to be distinct from matter. It is something that I sense the presence of, a single "flowing" or "interconnectedness" shared by all things that moves just under the perceptible surface of reality -- the "spark" of unity by which it is possible to experience things.

On the other end of this paradox is the fact that at other times I am incapable of perceiving any distinct "spirit" at all. It is at these moments of mindfulness that I am actually experiencing the interconnectedness of things, the fact of "interbeing." When you try to close your fingers around spirit you get nothing, because following the perception of spirit, like Alice down the rabbithole, you arrive at this state of mindfulness.

I Corinthians 15:44 Speiretai swma psuxikon, egeiretai swma pneumatikon. Estin swma psuxikon kai estin swma pneumatikon.
Translation: [It] is sown/planted an animal body, it is raised/awakened a spiritual body. There is an animal body and there is a spiritual body.

The common translation makes this a contrast between a natural (or animal) body and a spiritual one. But this begs the question, what is a "spiritual body"?

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