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I got the seed for this post from a post on Facebook by J'aime ona Pangaia titled You, Me and Harry Potter.
Harry As you read the book in your hands, you follow Harry Potter’s journey from indistinct and unloved orphan to powerful wizard. The words take life in your mind, and Harry learns his craft, battling dark forces that killed his parents, forces that now threaten the world. He pursues adventures with friends, suffers setbacks, makes decisions and enjoys or endures consequences. It seems this Harry leads an extraordinary life. In a moment of pause, still feeling the book in your hands, you might catch your flowing thoughts and ask, ‘What does this Harry Potter experience?’ The book’s weight on your palms might remind you that Harry Potter, the boy wizard, the beloved character of J.K. Rowling’s ultra-successful fantasy series, experiences nothing. This Harry is a fictional character that Ms. Rowling, through the medium of her words, has created. He is, in one sense, nothing more than curved patterns of lines on a page, patterns that conform to an alphabet, language and grammar that have meaning to you. While Harry exists as this beguiling character, he does not exist as that which the story makes him out to be - a real boy wizard in the real world, a boy who experiences what is happening like you do. In another sense, we might say that Harry is not these words but rather the composite character that the words, together with your imagination and memory, create within you. If any experience is being had here, then you are the one having it. You are experiencing Harry’s adventure and that of the other characters in a way determined by the interplay of Ms. Rowling’s text and your mind. Because you are sitting in a chair and reading rather than rushing about a magical castle-school, that experience differs not only in content from your everyday life but also in colour and texture. Although in many ways it feels ‘real,’ its nature is clearly different from your full-sensory lived experience. You might rub the pages between your fingers as you consider four components to this reading-Harry-experience of yours: the author, the medium, the story and the experiencer. J.K. Rowling authored the story of Harry’s adventures. Ms. Rowling’s brilliant mind conjured Harry and the entire environment in which his life unfolds. From a verdant well within her, the story blooms. Although she almost certainly draws on personal experience, proclivities and perspectives to create this work of art, although it has come and could have come only from her, she knows that she is not the story. She knows that the story is not her life. What emerges physically from J.K. Rowling’s hand is words in patterns on paper pages. This is the medium through which she transmits the story to you. Through your eyes, you absorb the patterns, and thereby the story. The nature of the medium influences the story and your eventual experience of it. The story folded into these words is rich. It includes Harry - descriptions of him and his actions, a privileged view into his thoughts and feelings, perceptions from his point of view. Multiple other characters move through the story, and you may gain access to their perspectives as well as a ‘God’s eye’ view of some action. A whole world of sights, sounds, sensations, emotions, actions, decisions, happenings, things, people and strange creatures is woven into the medium of squiggles on paper. Harry as a character is part of that weave. It is obvious when you think about it that he cannot move separately from it. If J.K. Rowling writes, ‘Harry ran down the stairs,’ then that is exactly what Harry does. If she had written, ‘Harry decided to leave magic behind and become an accountant,’ then Harry would have decided just that. J.K.’s words on the page dictate the story’s every detail, which is what Harry’s life and the unfolding of everything in his world are. Harry and the other characters are not free; the story binds them. At the receiving end of this chain of story transmission, you, the reader, sit. Your eyes and mind conjure a final alchemical transformation. What began as thought sprung from a creative well in the author, what made its way to you encoded as ink on paper, transmutes into experience. The words on the page interact with your mind, which is to say with your history, your way of making meaning, your assumptions, your quirks, to create a unique instance of J.K. Rowling’s story, to bring Harry and his world to life. This life is known only by you and only as the private experience in you as you read. Harry, his friends and his enemies experience nothing; only you as the reader experience the story. The story lives in you. When you read of Harry’s sadness as he thinks of his lost parents, of his pain as the Hogwarts headmistress makes him write with that pen that carves its message into his skin, of his mortal peril as monsters corner him, you feel strong sensations and emotions, both for Harry and on his behalf. Deep down, though, you know that there is no Harry to experience these pains in the way a real human does. Although you can enjoy being swept up by his story, you recognise deep down that you are not Harry, so the nature of your experience is not the same as if the real you were sad, terrified or pained like the character is. You as the experiencer of the story are close enough for it to entertain you but not so close as to make you mistake yourself for Harry or to believe that the story’s ups and downs are your own. The story binds its characters, but you as the reader remain free. Blanche Not all stories arrive by written word. Tennessee Williams wrote A Streetcar Named Desire for performance on the stage. A creative wave issuing from him and traveling through time joined more recent ones from a director, costume designer, set designer and others to form a live audio-visual offering to today’s seated public. The playwright's submission does not complete the creative, pre-performance input. An entire team, with the playwright to the fore, replaces J.K. Rowling’s solitary role in generating the content and setting. And we might include the actors who play each character within the creative team, for create they do. But we might also consider them as part of the medium. It is through their words, facial expressions and actions, in the crafted setting of the stage and theatre, sporting costumes, employing props and furnishings, that the story unfolds. Their performance and the setting in which it takes place are the medium in this artistic form. When Blanche Dubois utters, ‘Whoever you are… I have always depended on the kindness of strangers,’ the words, born of Tennessee Williams, do not reach you through quotation marks on a page, but in the voice of Vivien Leigh. Vivien has latitude in her tonal and bodily expression when delivering this line, but except in limited cases of artistic licence, Mr. Williams’s script binds her. Vivien plays Blanche, but she is not Blanche. At the end of the performance, she will step from her role and engage in her offstage life. Even onstage, we might suppose that her thoughts, when she is less actively engaged in the scene’s action, browse any number of topics that have nothing to do with the play. She knows that she is not Blanche, and she maintains a personal distance from the great trauma and turmoil that Blanche suffers in the play. When Blanche is humiliated, raped or led away to an asylum, Vivien does not suffer. She must be able to get very close to Blanche’s feelings, words and movements so as to play her role convincingly, but we would have to pronounce her mad if she took herself to be Blanche, if she fused with the character itself. Vivien’s experience is not Blanche’s but that of playing Blanche. Let’s turn to the story, and within it, to Blanche herself. Like Harry in your book, the character of Blanche is more inescapably defined than Vivien is as an actress, for Blanche can only be what the summed creative efforts of the playwright, the director and the actor dictate that she is. Blanche is not free. Blanche cannot wonder, ‘Is it Vivien Leigh who is playing me tonight?’ unless Vivien Leigh utters the question for her, and that may be somewhat greater artistic licence than the director would allow in diverging from Tennessee Williams’s creation. Your experience, sitting in the audience, differs from what it would be if you read A Streetcar Named Desire from the page, differs from how you experienced Harry’s story. Whereas you could access much of Harry’s inner world, you only have access to what Blanche externalises through words or body language. You watch and hear the events taking place on the stage rather than looking at squiggles on a page. Perhaps this gives more vivid visual and auditory experience than your imagination mustered when you read the descriptions of Harry’s surroundings and events. Perhaps it leaves less to your imagination to fill in? Still, the final step in the chain, the step whereby the entire production becomes your experience of it, happens within you. Your eyes and ears take the story in, and your mind does the rest. Because it is your mind, the creative merging of the ‘raw’ story with it generates a unique experience - not an experience, like one of the actors, of playing one of the characters, but rather an experience of the story as a whole. If the story is a powerful one, if it is one that resonates with you, if your state of mind this evening is one that lends itself to immersion in the story, then it will move you deeply. You will have strong feelings of empathy with some characters, judgment of others. But you’ll not mistake yourself for Blanche or any other character in the story, and you’ll not mistake this story for your own. You experience it in an individual way no one else will, but it does not capture you completely. At evening’s end, you will leave the theater and proceed with your own story. As the audience, the experiencer, you remain free. Mike26 Mike26 is your avatar’s name in a near-future version of Call of Duty: Battle Sense, a multi-player online game. In Battle Sense, your avatar fights alongside other avatars and pre-programmed but flexible characters. The enemy unit is populated the same way. Behind each avatar is a human player, who may be sitting anywhere in the world, connected via the internet to the centralised game engine. Stealthy patrols, devastating raids and pitched battles fill your game time, fill Mike26’s life. Battle Sense is the product of a delicately balanced creative process of agile design and development that tip-toes the line between structure and openness. Hundreds of software engineers and designers contribute to the game world’s birth, to the pre-programmed characters, to the avatars the players adopt and adapt, finally to the dynamic engine that, along with the real-time input of the human players around the world, dictates how the game unfolds second-by-second. The authorship of any period of gameplay is therefore highly distributed, both across the team that created the product and among the players currently sharing it. This story has virtually countless parents. The medium through which the story evolves is paradoxical. On the one hand, the product that the engineers and designers create is a static collection of binary information: 1s and 0s storable in a small box that you could hold in one palm. On the other, it is a womb of structured potential that can manifest in unpredictable ways depending on players’ actions. It is, in a sense, both static and dynamic. Its resting state encodes movement. The name Battle Sense comes from its five-sense immersion. Players wear virtual reality headsets, noise-cancelling headphones and haptic bodysuits. They hold small, refillable bluetooth lozenges in their mouths and sit near a refillable vaporiser. All of this means that they experience all five senses from the perspective of their avatar in the game. When Mike26 takes a punch to the mouth, you taste blood. When a grenade explodes twenty-five meters away, you not only hear the deafening blast but feel its shockwave and smell the lingering cordite. You see the whole scene only through his eyes. You hear the avatars’ voices, each with a live human voice behind it. Mixed among them are the shouts and utterances of the game’s pre-programmed characters. The story here is a series of realistic battle scenes in which your actions and those of your fellow players determine the outcome. You see colleagues die. Your own injuries hamper your movement and sap your strength. You take enemies’ lives. Through occasional accidents as happen in all war, you even extinguish the lives of your own comrades. All around you swirl death and destruction. Sometimes, oblivion taps you on the shoulder: Mike26 perishes, and you wait out the remainder of the scene on the sidelines, reliant on the game for a regeneration. The game world cheats the real world by giving your Mike26 countless lives. Eventually, in each scene, one side emerges victorious, and the scenario shuffles forward to a logical next stage. Mike26 is not free. You control him. Considered more carefully, your control is only partial, for his life is also constantly influenced by the actions of the other players and by the intricate lines of binary code that determine the unfolding of the game. In truth, what is happening with Mike26 in any moment cannot be disentangled from what is happening in the game as a whole. In any moment, the game state determines Mike26’s state. Connected, watching, listening, deciding, feeling, tasting, smelling, you sit and experience technology’s best approximation of the fictitious Mike26’s life. The depth to which the game places you ‘within’ Mike 26 is impressive and unprecedented. In so many ways, you are experiencing him and his life. You are ‘wearing’ and ‘driving’ him. His part in the unfolding of the Battle Sense story is, to a large degree, what you experience. And you are the only one who experiences it; of course Mike26, as a computer avatar, experiences nothing. Still, as you remove your game gear and step out for a bite to eat, you consider how your experience falls short of perfect immersion. Setting aside any sensory imperfections, you focus on the most obvious aspects of experience that always remain yours rather than Mike26’s: your thoughts, your feelings, your memories, emotions and preferences, your hopes and intentions. Because of these and other personal specifics, the experience you have is different from what any other ‘driver’ of Mike26 would have. As a person, your experience derives from the collision of the ‘raw’ input to your senses from the game with your conditioned mind. The intimacy of your Mike26 experience is certainly greater than your Blanche experience and probably greater than your Harry one. Yet you always retain a degree of distance from identification with Mike26. Your identity doesn’t meld with this character. You know that you are distinct from these experiences. As a person, you have one foot solidly outside the game world and can contrast the game world with your own. You experience Mike26, but you are not him. DreamYou You sleep peacefully next to your partner under your favourite duvet, and you dream. In your dream, DreamYou is walking to class. DreamYou meets your friend, and you head to English class together. She mentions in passing that she was up all night completing her term paper. A knot forms in DreamYou’s gut as they step into class. The teacher welcomes everyone and announces that he’ll be collecting all term essays at the end of the period. DreamYou now fully realises that they’ve completely forgotten to start, let alone finish, their ten-thousand word essay, which makes up most of the course grade. You are the sole creator, the lone author of this story. It arises from the creative spring of your mind. Every detailed aspect of the dream is exactly as it is because your mind calls it into being. And yet, you don’t create it through any conscious effort or decision. You don’t decide that DreamYou will forget the paper; you don’t will the mistake into existence. Although you are the author, your creativity arises spontaneously. The dream issues effortlessly from you. What is the dream’s medium? Of what is it made? You’ve never really considered it before, but this and all dreams play out in your mind and seem to be made of nothing but your mind. There are no hardcopy materials, no screens or stages, no computers or speakers. The entire story unfolds within you. That story involves DreamYou, which during the dream seems to be you. But the story also involves your friend and your teacher. And both of these characters, just as surely as DreamYou, exist only in your mind and are made solely of your mind, as is the classroom and hallways you walk with your friend. Isn’t it interesting, though, how, when you tell your partner in bed the next morning and then your work colleagues later in the day about the dream, they all say they’ve had one just like it? So perhaps, though made only of your mind, the dream has also existed with small variations in and been made of countless other minds! You as the sleeping dreamer are the experiencer of the dream. DreamYou experiences nothing. DreamYou is an aspect of the dream, a sliver of what is experienced, a character in the story. Only you as the dreamer ‘hear’ the dream words, ‘see’ the dream images and ‘feel’ the dream anxiety. What’s more, during the dream, DreamYou is absolutely certain they are you. It doesn’t even arise as a question in the dream. Yet, upon waking, it is just as obvious that DreamYou was not and is not you. You are too old to be in high school English class. You have no paper due today. You are not in trouble. You needn’t worry. That sinking feeling, that escalating anxiety as DreamYou realised they had forgotten the assignment, was something you experienced, but now you realise that, even then, at the time of the dream itself, there was nothing for the real you to worry about. The unpreparedness in the dream was never a threat to you as the dreamer; it was only a problem for DreamYou. Having woken, you realise things are fine and that things were equally fine even as you slept and experienced an anxious dream, a disturbing story. You don’t have to scold DreamYou. No need to admonish, ‘How could you have been so silly?!?’ DreamYou couldn’t help it. They were just a character in the dream, in the story that existed within and was composed of your mind. DreamYou could do no differently than they did. DreamYou was not mistaken. As the character, they were bound by your mental creation of them; they were simply being themselves as they were. DreamYou knows nothing of you the dreamer, because they know nothing at all. They cannot understand you, because they understand nothing outside the context of the understanding you give them within your dream. They are a character whose composition may include ideas about a higher level reality, but those ideas, if they are present in DreamYou’s ‘mind’, are there only because the real you dreams them. You needn’t be disappointed in yourself either, ‘How could I have mistaken myself for that dream character?’ You didn’t mistake yourself for the dream character at all. You were simply the experiencer of the dream, and the dream was a story in the first person from the perspective of the main character, DreamYou. You experienced the story with perfect clarity and accuracy. It’s just that the story contained the strong sense of subjectivity that the main character was a conscious self with a will, a history, preferences, senses and thoughts. Upon waking, you realise the illusory nature of that sense, but within the dream, there was no perspective from which to see this. The perspective is part of the story. There is no perspective from outside while experiencing the dream, only once it ends. You were not mistaken. You experienced your dream exactly as it was. You Now, something to consider. What if the you who dreamed the DreamYou above is really a DreamYou itself? What if that which you’ve always taken yourself to be is not actually a subject at all, is not the experiencer, the knower of your life? What if that personal you is a DreamYou and therefore an object of experience in a greater consciousness? Would this be scary? Does it mean you don’t really exist? Wouldn’t it instead, since you rather than the person you’ve taken yourself to be? Let’s consider it as we did the previous scenarios: author, medium, story, experiencer (reader, audience, player, dreamer). In this scenario, the ‘greater consciousness’, which is You (capitalised here onward), is the author of the story. Like in the dream scenario, this author is the creator in the sense that the entire story arises from the well of potential that You are, but You do not choose how the story unfolds, do not sculpt its details through design decisions. You are the author, but not in the sense of a dictating director expressing a will. No, rather as pure creativity, infinite potential. This greater consciousness (which is really the only consciousness) that You are, is not a person drawing on preferences, experiences and imagination to create. You draw from your own essence - unbounded freedom and creativity. Of what is the story made? On what page is it written? What is its medium? It is made of experience. It is experience. The story is the experience of the story, the experience of itself. And that experience is made of nothing other than the greater consciousness itself. It is nothing other than You. You are both the creator and the medium of the story. This story is, from the perspective of the person (now recognised as a character) you once took yourself to be, absolutely comprehensive. It is your personal life. It is everything that happens, everything experienced from that personal perspective, across every second of the life that that experience constitutes. The story is a personal life including the person itself, all the other characters and the entire environment in which the life unfolds. From the personal perspective, the story is life, reality, manifestation, the universe, everything. Yet, the person is part of the story. The person is, like the rest of the story, experienced. It is not the experiencer. It, the person, is not You. You are the experiencer of the story, of life, of reality, of manifestation, the universe, everything. If your personal name is Bob Smith, then consider that Bob Smith experiences nothing. Only You experience Bob Smith, his life, the story of which he is the main character. You are this greater consciousness that is not any thing, is no thing, is nothing. None of the particulars of the story apply to or limit You. You are no object that has defining properties. All objects and properties arise in You, all are composed of You. You experience all properties but are bound by none. Yet, because the story is composed of nothing but this consciousness, this experiencing, You are everything. You are nothing in the story, yet You are everything in the story. The story is created by You, composed of You and experienced or known by You. The story is Your experiencing of Yourself. Consider too that, since all that differentiates Bob Smith and his life from any other character from any other life, all that differentiates any story from another, is detail, limiting and defining properties that apply in different measure and in different combinations in one story than in another, You, this experiencing consciousness, are the same You that experiences all main characters, the subject behind all perspectives, the author, medium and experiencier of all stories. In the previous scenario, the dreamer was a person. That person awoke to a more fundamental level of reality. From that waking level, the person could assess the dream ‘from the outside’. The person could realise from outside that DreamPerson was not the real person. The person could compare the dream to other dreams and to waking life. The person could analyse it, consider alternatives to it, judge it. In the current scenario, which is to say in reality, a greater intelligence, You, experience all stories, but experience each only from the inside. This is why Bob Smith is unable to know, can only guess at, Sally Brown’s experience. You know every story by experiencing it, but Your only experience, aside from the eventless knowing of Your eternal stillness, is through one or other of the countless stories, from countless different personal perspectives, that spool from Your creative heart. You are none of these people, but each of them exists only in and as You. These stories. These endlessly varied, uncountable, comprehensive lives and perspectives are each whole and perfect, as is Your knowing of them. Bob Smith may be accepting or judgmental, but You as the experiencer of his life accept every aspect of the story that arises within and as You, including Bob’s acceptance or judgment. All judgment, like its opposite, sits with Your perfect acceptance. Anything that exists, exists only because You have accepted it. Bob may understand his current situation, or he may be confused, but You as the knower of his experience see this understanding or confusion with perfect clarity. All confusion, like its opposite, sits within Your perfect clarity. Bob may seek pleasure and avoid pain, but You know his seeking, his avoidance, his pleasure and his pain without concern or preference. All pain, like its opposite, sits within Your perfect peace. All preferences and aversions sit within Your unjudging awareness. Bob may struggle or he may rest in the flow of life, but You know his struggle or ease with absolute effortlessness. All struggle and effort, like its opposite, sits within Your perfect ease. All that happens, including the feelings and thoughts of effort and struggle, happens with no effort whatsoever. Bob’s travels might take him to remote continents. He might even traverse the stars to distant galaxies. All locations and space itself lie within Your dimensionless infinitude. You occupy no space but hold all space enfolded within Your experiential field. Bob may be virtuous or sinful, good or evil, but You know his good or evil from beyond good and evil. All good and evil, all love and hate, sits within Your unconditional, welcoming love, a love that says Yes to all that arises to, in and as You, a love that blesses all with Your radiant awareness. Bob makes decisions, exerts influence, exercises his will. But all decision and action sits within the flow of manifestation arising from the creativity of Your unbounded freedom. Bob is free to be exactly as he is. You are freedom itself, the field of limitless potential and all possible manifestation. Yesterday, Bob may have been ignorant of his own true nature as You. Today, he may have realised that nature and awakened to his true self as You. But Bob always is You, whether he realises it or not. You are untouched by Bob’s or any character’s ignorance or enlightenment. Enlightenment, like happiness, wealth and virtue, are for the persons, the characters; they are not for You but in You. Bob was born and will die, but You know his and all birth and death, and You see each moment of every life eternally. All birth, death, movement and even time itself exist within Your eternal stillness. You seem to be a person living out an amazing story. You seem that way because that is what the story is. All that You experience is through story, not from outside it, looking in. The story is You. You experience Yourself, and thereby the world is born - not once and for all but in every moment of existence. All that can possibly happen awaits manifestation in Your infinite well of potential. Yet no story truly waits, because You bless each eternally with Your creative, radiant awareness. Every moment, from every perspective, spontaneously arises and instantaneously passes, side-by-side, in the timeless blessing of Your presence. You are. I am. All that follows is my amateur attempt to synthesise what I've taken from Matt Licata's The Path is Everywhere. I do add a few of my own twists, so don't hold Matt accountable for any silliness you discover here...
As a young child, I was by nature drawn to connection with those around me. In fact, in my early development I was dependent on their acceptance, recognition and affection. I had no fear that these were contingent, no worry that my love would go unanswered. Then, life happened, and I learned from my experience. Bear in mind that I was raised in a safe, healthy, loving, stable household like many children can only dream of. Still, my experiential learning in those early days included shocking, life-changing lessons. It taught me that behaving in certain ways, displaying particular emotions, saying the wrong thing meant that one or more of those on whose love I depended rejected me, failed to see me as I was, withheld (even for the briefest moment) their precious affection. Behaving in other ways won these most desired prizes in special measure. As a vulnerable little thing, I learned that I was not safe but was at risk of chronic misunderstanding, rejection and abandonment. As a charitably minded little thing, I knew that these precious, loving people around me would not do this without good reason. As an adaptive, capable little thing, I learned that while in some ways I was good, there was something fundamentally wrong with me. It became clear that I was unworthy of the very thing for which I most yearned, love. One term for this package of good things of which I was incapable or undeserving and bad things that I'd identified as the sources of my undeservingness is the shadow. In my simple mind, I think of it as: Me (the big, whole masterpiece that I am) minus this shadow equals me (the limited, 'acceptable' bit of Me that seems to stand a better chance of being loved and a lesser chance of being abandoned). The whole process of splitting (self-abandonment) that I've awkwardly summarised was the right thing for me to do at the time, given the capabilities I had as a young child. It was not a mistake or a crime. My best guess is that everything I've said above applies no more to me than it does to everyone else alive, although the specifics of what one shunts away into shadow differs by culture and by individual. Well, I guess everything above except that I was lucky enough to be in a peaceful, stable, loving household. Too many (and one is too many) children did not have that good fortune. Nor were the activities of the loving circle of people around me, their behaviour that preceded my splitting myself in this way, cosmic fuck ups. Those behaviours were simply adults carrying out the process that I'll now describe for my adult self. They were acting from a standpoint of their 'me' rather than their 'Me'. But as I'll discuss a bit further, the shadow - theirs, mine and yours - is part of the world, part of reality, and it WILL always find its way into the light of day, no matter how much we seek to sequester it in the dungeon. As an adult, I now possess, although for much of my life I did not recognise it, a richer set of capabilities for relating to the world than my young child self did. Not recognising this, however, I've spent decades relying on the once-appropriate child's toolbox anytime the splinters of me that that child hid away pop up to present themselves. These visits by members of the shadow community can appear as 'internal' experiences or as my filtering and interpretation of 'external experiences', including the words and actions of other people. My replaying of the child's solution results in my turning / running from these visitors. This doesn't make me a bad person, and there is no reason for me to beat myself up about it. But one might ask, why are these splinters visiting? Their visit is a necessity. They are part of reality, part of Me. As a child grasping for solutions, I tried to tuck them away as if they didn't exist, but that didn't change reality. Reality and the big Me are too magnificent to be bottled in such a way. These splinters know all too well that they are part of Me. Their recognition of their unity with me, coupled with their inescapable longing to rejoin me to re-organise as Me, is Love. Yet, the visits are always uncomfortable for me. This discomfort tends to be the trigger that activates my 'autoplay' of the childhood strategy of avoidance. So what am I to do? What is one to do? Well, there are whole books, including Matt's excellent one, written about that. My short oversimplification is that I can use those very same triggers, my noticing of sensations of discomfort in my own body, as signals to alert me to an alternative response. The good news is that, in one sense, there is nothing I have to do in lieu of my habituated avoidance response. The invitation that these signals issue is to sit with and hold, in a gentle, loving, non-judging way, those visitors, not seeking to do anything with them. I do this by sitting with the physical discomfort that announces and constitutes them - only for as long as I can. It may be just a few seconds at first. These few seconds of sitting with and holding the discomfort of these visits from the shadow allow me to see that they don't constitute an existential threat to me. I can survive them. Bit by bit, slowly, patiently, gently over weeks, months and years, I can welcome and re-integrate more and more of the historical visitors back into Me. At some point, it becomes apparent that these visitors were never outside of Me; it was only me who thought so. These visitors are part of life, and I love Matt's quote: Life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived. This doesn't culminate in a finish line, beyond which all is rosy and smooth. We don't purchase or earn exemption from the tough side of life. We don't buy certainty. Life remains mystery. Reality includes all opposites. Even once all historical visitors have been welcomed home, reality will send us guests. A life lived with the gentle, loving openness I've described isn't one in which reality filters out the unwanted guests for us. It is one in which we are increasingly able to welcome all guests, even the ones who bear discomfort and seeming threat in their arms. And perhaps, in time, it becomes clear that this reality that sends the guests and this Me who welcomes them are the same undivided whole. And that recognition of wholeness, too, is Love. I've been reading Michael A. Singer's The Untethered Soul, in which he expresses the need for openness very well. My paraphrase of what I take as his central message is, "All fortresses are also prisons."
We erect and occupy fortresses - be they physical, emotional, intellectual, psychological or ideological - to protect us from something outside them. And what are we protecting? Ourselves, which is to say our selves, our egos. Our egoic fortresses are the assembled constructs - collections of images, narratives and labels - that give us the impression of solidity, durability and independence from the flux of change that surrounds us. We hide in these redoubts in the hope of defining a realm of control within a vast sea in which we recognise we have none. We cower in them for comfort. These bunkers of self-definition need constant maintenance to keep them from crumbling. The insistent flow of reality splashes against them and drags at their foundations incessantly. What else do we expect to happen when we try to set fixed positions in a reality that rushes, dancing and laughing, at and past it in perpetual renewal? Our tenets and definitions of self, based on past pain and pleasure, now frozen, cannot help but conflict with ever-evolving reality. Which do you think wins? But let's come back to the twin-faced nature of these citadels. How are they also prisons? Do we not see that, however effective they are in keeping out the things that might cause us pain or discomfort, they are at least as effective at denying us access to much beyond the walls that would bring us delight. Our fortresses protect our comfort at the cost of our freedom. Avoiding exposure to that which we fear, we equally cut ourselves off from much for which we yearn. Alas, we cannot have both untroubled comfort and the freedom to recognise our own peace and wholeness. You can read Singer, who says all of this so much better, for yourself, but I'll let you in on some good news. These fortresses are a simple matter (not the same as an easy task) to bring down. The world itself, the collision of reality against the fortress walls, will bring them down, if only we will stop shoring them back up. A further happy truth: our repair of these walls has been soaking up untold amounts of our life energy, and all of that becomes available to us if we can relax and release from our defense of them. The Non-dualogues share the conversations between slumberfogey and the pilgrim (Gary), in slumberfogey’s flat in London.
slumberfogey: Pilgrim! At last. You're late! pilgrim: Isn't 11am a good time for you? s: No, I mean two months late. My biscuits ran out seven weeks ago. p: slumberfogey, I told you I'd be away for two months. I've been on a building project in Central America. s: Oh, I remember now. Still, no biscuits. p: I've got biscuits with me. Shall I put on the tea? What are we discussing today? s: Who are you? p: You recognise me, don't you? I'm Gary, but you always call me pilgrim. s: So "Gary" is your name or "pilgrim" labels you, but is either who you are? p: Oh, I get it. We're diving straight in, then. So I'll skip the bits covering where I'm from, what I do for money, what party I vote for, my ethnicity and my religion, because knowing you, you're looking for something different... s: So, you are...? p: Well, just a bloke. A person. A human. (An Arsenal fan.) s: Don't sell yourself short. You're not "just" anything. But let's take "person." Did you say you had biscuits? p: Yes! I'm bringing them out with the tea. Okay, so yeah, I'm a person. s: And when you say you're a person, you mean you are... what? What is a person? p: An individual. s: Interesting. Let's remember that word and come back to it. So an individual what? And don't say "person," because we don't want to go in circles. You've already said a person is an individual. p: An individual body, I guess. s: Anything special about the body? Would a cadaver count? p: No. A living body. s: Ah. So you are a living body. How are you aware you're living? p: Being alive is obvious. I'm moving around and stuff. s: To pick up on the line of questioning I'm taking you on, pause for a moment and hearken back to our discussion last time about "what is happening." Although two months have passed, I hope we don't need to replay the whole discovery. *** Intermission *** p: Right, so I'll try to keep my answers to what I can be certain of. My direct experience. s: Excellent! So, according to your direct experience, what is the body? p: Well. I see it when I look at my hands, chest, legs or feet. I see my face's reflection in the mirror. So an aspect of the body is images I experience. s: Great. What else? p: I feel it all the time. My hand can touch my belly or slap my thigh. I feel my teeth chatter. My stomach rumbles. (I hear that as well.) My heart beats. I sense my limbs' position. Body movement, warmth, cold, hunger. So I guess the body is also a bundle of sounds and sensations. s: Super. Anything else? p: I smell my breath, too. I taste my lip bleeding or sweat rolling into my mouth. I guess the body is a collection of the same types of perception that come from "out in the world" plus the internal sensations. s: Interesting. "Internal." Internal to what? p: Internal to my body. s: But you say - as far as you can tell from your direct experience - your body is those things. So some of those things can't be "internal" to the body. That's saying bits of the body are internal to itself, while other bits aren't. p: I'm not used to examining the body this way, so I get tied up in how to express myself. s: You're doing great. Just consider more carefully within what those perceptions and "internal" sensations rest. p: Wait! I've got it! They sit in my mind. I am my mind! s: So you are not your body but your mind? p: Well, perhaps it's not so simple, since the mind is dependent on the body. s: How so? p: The mind depends on the brain, which is part of the body. s: How does your direct experience tell you this? p: s: How do you experience your mind's dependence on the brain? p: I guess I don't. I base it on what others say and what I've read. s: Okay. I'm not saying it's wrong. The mind may be dependent on the body, but let's stick with the things you can know, from your direct experience. p: Yeah. So I'm sticking with saying I am my mind. s: Do you, as a mind, include or contain anything else beyond the perceptions and sensations of the body? p: Ah! Well, I have millions of ideas, memories, emotions, expectations, wishes and judgements in my mind. I guess my will sits in the same place. s: Yes. Lot's more stuff, huh? When you say those things sit in the same place, what is that place? p: My mind. s: But if you are the mind, what is the "My" bit? If you are the mind, then saying "My mind" is equivalent to saying "My me." p: But I'm distinguishing my mind from other minds. s: What is your direct experience of other minds? p: Ah, I get you. My experience is only through sights, sounds and other perceptions, which we've covered. I don't experience other minds. So are you saying they don't exist? s: Well, that would be hard for me to say, since slumberfogey is one of them! No, they may well exist, but let's stick with what you can be sure of from your direct experience. We're taking empiricism seriously. p: Okay, so I'll get rid of the "my." All those forms of thought and all perceptions of the body, plus all body sensations sit in me. s: You say the perceptions of the body sit in you. Do the perceptions of the rest of the world (the images of the surrounding room, the sound of passing traffic, etc.) sit somewhere else? p: No. Same place. s: So all perceptions, sensations and thoughts sit within you, yes? So who or what are you? p: I am the mind. s: What is the mind? p: I'm getting tired. I dunno. The container of those things? s: Seeing things in a whole new way can be taxing. Those "things," those perceptions, sensations and thoughts. Do you remember how we rolled them up in our last meeting? p: Oh yeah. I worked out (with your help) that I don't ever experience those different categories. They all come in bundled, undivided experience. s: Exactly! And my little term for undivided experience is "What Is Happening." So, who or what are you? p: If the mind is What Is Happening and I am my mind, I guess I am What Is Happening. Right? s: You sound uncertain. How can you be certain What Is Happening is happening? p: Arrrrrggggggghhhhhhh! This is exhausting. I always feel stupid when you do this. s: Sorry. Maybe The Trial of Socrates is inaccurate. Perhaps his students killed him out of frustration. p: What? What are you on about? s: A classical allusion, young man. You guys have lost touch with your roots. Not enough time. Back to my question... p: How do I know What Is Happening is happening? Because I'm experiencing it! It is my direct experience. s: Right. You're not an inert container of those aspects of experience, of What Is Happening. You are its experiencer. So who are you? p: I am the experiencer of What Is Happening. s: Perfect! And What Is Happening is the flow of experience arising to awareness and receding to make way for the continuing flow "behind." p: So I'm the experiencer, but I don't know what the experiencer is. I'm not the body - I experience the sensations and perceptions making up my direct experience of the body. Likewise, I'm not the mind - I experience the thoughts that are my direct experience of it. And, I'm not the external environment - I experience the perceptions composing my direct experience of the external world. So what am I? s: That's what I asked you! And you've peeled away a lot of confusion. You've worked out that you are no thing (nothing). The things are aspects of What Is Happening. You are the experiencer of the things. If you still seek yourself as an object, as a thing, you'll come up empty. You - the experiencer - are not a thing. p: I'm not sure how thrilled I am to be nothing. So my school teachers and ex-girlfriends were right. s: Maybe it's not so bad. You used to believe you were a thing - a body or a mind or their union. You now see you are not a thing. Perhaps a further step awaits discovery. Are you willing to take on some homework? p: Sure. s: Okay. Between now and when we next meet, look for boundaries. p: Huh? s: I'd like you to investigate different boundaries on several "levels." I'll email this to you, but hear me out.
What would this imply for what you are??? Let's discuss what you find. Until next week, pilgrim. The Non-dualogues share the conversations between slumberfogey and the pilgrim (Gary), in slumberfogey’s flat in London.
slumberfogey: Ah. You’ve come back! Excellent. Did you pass the Sainsburys on your way here? It’s just a few doors down. pilgrim: Don’t worry. I have biscuits. s: Biscuits. What a wonderful idea! Thank you. p: While I make the tea, can you tell me how we’ll get started? s: You are a quick study, aren’t you? Okay, why don’t you start by telling me what is happening? p: Let’s see… Arsenal lost to Nottingham Forest in the FA Cup this week, which has put my knickers in a twist. My mum’s boiler’s on the blink, so I have to find someone to sort that. I got a pay rise, which brings me almost up to minimum wage… s: Slow down. Everything you’ve said (except perhaps the knicker thing) is about the past or the future. I mean what is happening, now? Let’s even capitalize it - What Is Happening? p: Right now, I’d say, Prime Minister’s Questions are happening, for what it’s worth. Polar bears are starving. Tottenham fans are having a giggle. s: Pilgrim. Are you in a grumpy mood? Have a biscuit, and let’s be more precise. p: I’m not sure exactly how many polar bears are starving. s: I mean, none of those things is in your direct experience right now. Ideas about them are, granted. But tell me What, in your direct, indisputable experience, Is Happening. Now. p: I’m sipping tea, chewing a biscuit, and trying to speak at the same time. s: That’s an excellent start! How do you know you’re sipping tea? p: What do you mean, how do I know? I’m right here, sipping. And this, (slurp) is tea! s: You’re handling this moment with the precision of a World War II bombardier. Imagine yourself more like a laser eye surgeon. What Is Happening? p: I’m imagining myself as a laser eye surgeon. s: Are you taking the piss? Okay. How are you certain you’re imagining yourself as a laser eye surgeon? p: I feel like I’m missing something here. Or maybe you are. s: How are you sure you’re not dreaming of picturing yourself as a laser eye surgeon? p: Because I’m sitting here, awake, and a bit annoyed. s: If you were dreaming, wouldn’t it also seem like you were awake? p: Okay. I think I see what you are getting at. s: Good. Let’s try again. See this photo? What Is Happening? p: Light is reflecting off of a photo in your hand. Some of it is entering my pupils and striking my retinas, sending signals up my optical nerves to my brain, which creates a disturbing mental image of you wearing a mankini and stroking a llama. s: Ah. A scientific explanation. First, that’s my mate, Phil in the llama suit. I had a beige leotard on under the mankini, so relax. It was a fancy dress party. Outrageous! Second, I love science. Can’t get enough of it. But the scientific answer gets updated. Newton updated the theory of light. Maxwell updated that. Quantum mechanics updated that. What description would have been accurate in any of those eras, would survive science’s future advances, and would be accurate whether or not you were dreaming? p: I am seeing an image of you stroking a man in a llama suit. s: Better! Now, can there be any doubt you are seeing it? p: Well, I’m not smelling it, am I? Thank God. s: What if you were in a terrible car crash a year ago? What if the doctors could only save your brain and keep it alive in a vat? What if they could stimulate the visual cortex with electrodes to produce images of me in a mankini? p: Then I’d say science got its priorities terribly wrong at some point. s: (Sigh.) p: (Sip.) s: What description would be accurate in that scenario and all the others we’ve mentioned? p: I have an image of you in a mankini, stroking a man in a llama suit. s: Better. Better! But, you have it? What, are you inert? Like a bowl? p: I am experiencing an image of you in a mankini, stroking a man in a llama suit! s: Even better! But does the image, in itself, convey that it is me stroking a man in a llama suit? p: Is this ever going to end? Okay. I am experiencing an image of you holding an image. I am also experiencing a belief that the image you hold is of you stroking a man in a llama suit. s: Super! Terrific! Laser surgery standard. What was different about that final description? p: I only appealed to my direct, mental experience. s: That’s right. All of your older descriptions might have been accurate, but you can’t be sure they were. That last one, you could know. It was only imperfect in that you had to use words to render it for me. But now, it’s just a memory that may or may not be accurate. You see. What Is Happening is your complete, instantaneous, experience. Nothing more and nothing less. Shall we look at it more closely? p: Closer than we already have? Are you kidding? Can we move on from the mankini? s: You’ve sharpened your attention, but you’ve narrowed your focus to do it. Let’s see if we can maintain the attention but with a broad, open awareness. Are you up for it? p: Let’s go. s: Okay. Close your eyes. p: Please promise me you won’t take off your clothes. s: Of course I won’t! Please! For the next few minutes, don’t reply by speaking. Just think to yourself. Do you notice the sound of my voice? Its pitch? Its volume? What other sounds are you aware of, now—between the words or beside them? Do you sense the pressure of your bottom on the seat? Your feet on the floor? The clothes against your skin? The air on your face? What other touch are you aware of? Do you notice any tastes? Does the breath moving through your mouth have a taste? Are you experiencing any smells? From your bath or your meal? What other smells are you aware of? Now open your eyes. Experience the surrounding light. The array of colors. The shadows. Do you notice my image? Images of other objects? Which images are clear and which blurred? Do the images change, move? What other sights are you aware of? Eyes closed again, notice the position of your arms, neck and head. Which muscles are taut and which relaxed? Do you feel warm or cool? Hungry? Is there any sense of fear, comfort, impatience, or peace? Feelings of love or anger? Do you notice thoughts? In succession, each arises and dissolves as the next replaces it. Memories. Anticipations. Questions. Decisions. Are you aware of a sense of will? All these components of experience—these phenomena—in ever-changing, varied combinations, make up What Is Happening in every second of life. How was that? p: Wild! In a way, I know all that is always going on, but it has never struck me so clearly. s: See how comprehensive, how complete, What Is Happening is? How everything—including any thoughts or feelings of approval or dissatisfaction with What Is Happening, any wishes it were different—is an aspect of What Is Happening, within experience itself? p: A lot of it is thought, especially if you include memories, anticipations and judgments. I guess a lot is emotions as well. s: Your experience can be conceptually broken into sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touches, thoughts and sensations (where sensations include emotions and other bodily sensations). But do you realize that all those categories are just concepts? Do you experience things in those separate categories? p: I guess not. It’s all just one big multimedia wave, isn’t it? s: That’s right. There are no boundaries within your experience. Those categories, when they occur to you, are just thoughts. We’ll talk more about boundaries next week, and about where you fit into all this. p: Where I fit in? I’m right here! s: Perhaps. Let’s see next week. Until then! Mind your step. The Non-dualogues share the conversations between slumberfogey and the pilgrim (Gary), in slumberfogey’s flat in London.
slumberfogey: Welcome, pilgrim. I’m glad you could make it. pilgrim: Thank you, slumberfogey. Is that what I should call you? What sort of a name is that? s: p: slumberfogey? slumberfogey. SLUMBERFOGEY! s: Sorry. Did I drift off? Please, no words in caps. Let’s keep it peaceful. p: Sorry. Bad night? s: Is it evening already? p: No. I mean last night. You seem tired. s: No, no. I’m just being efficient with my energy. So, what would you like to talk about? p: Well, the ad said I could get enlightenment, or something like that? s: Is that what I said? Bit naughty of me. Felt like I needed to talk up the product to get people’s attention. Do you want your money back? p: I didn’t pay anything. s: Ah. Just as well. p: s: p: So… s: Yes? What would you like to discuss? p: Well, in the ad, your picture made you seem quite, um, old, like you are. And sort of peaceful and wise. And it said your teachings could point me toward my true nature. That’s why I came. Sound familiar? s: Relax for me. You can make yourself anything you like. p: So what do I do - breath deeply? s: No. You make us tea. I’ll have a Pukka Relax blend. You can have that or anything else I’ve got. Everything’s in the kitchen. Go on - that’s the price of admission. In the meantime, I’ll get started. The first thing we need to discuss is the main obstacle to our understanding one another. p: (Over his shoulder from the kitchen…) What’s that? s: Language. Well, actually just words. Our body language and tone of voice will be quite helpful. p: So… words might stand in the way of our having a good discussion? s: There’s no ‘might’ about it. They’re an absolute nightmare. Still, at least for a while, they’re what we’ve got. The first thing to learn is that nothing I say is true. p: You’re a liar? Here’s your tea. s: Thanks. No. That’s not it. What does the word ‘truth’ mean to you? p: I don’t know. Something like accuracy, I guess. s: Accuracy regarding what? p: Reality? s: Reality? Right. So, a true statement represents reality. p: I’m going with that. Yep. s: How different do you think it is to view a map of London or read an article about it, versus spending a week walking around and seeing it? p: There’s all the difference in the world. They don’t even compare. s: The same chasm exists between even the most exact description of reality and reality itself. Reality can’t be pinned down and captured by words. That’s why nothing I say is true. The best any of us can do is point toward the truth. Some statements point more accurately than others, but none are true. p: Okay, but you’ll give me, like, knowledge, right, of my true nature? s: No. Sorry. I can, though, point you toward understanding. But that understanding has to be something you experience for yourself. You’ll avoid knowledge at all costs. p: But I want knowledge! s: You think you do, but as you learn, you’ll see that knowledge is heavy and slow. It’s yesterday’s news. You’ll come to value lived understanding, which refreshes itself with every tick of the clock. p: So, you’re not going to speak the truth, and you’re not going to give me knowledge. What else should I know about the product? s: With any luck, by the time we’re through, you'll stop hoping for enlightenment. p: So I’ll stop caring about the thing I came here for? s: Yes. You’re catching on. p: No, I’m not! s: Okay, the product differs from what you thought it was. Decide whether you want to come back next week. Only return if you want to pursue the understanding I’ve hinted at, for its own sake. If you do, and if you’re willing to look at - to face - whatever truth you find, then I’ll see you next Thursday. You can bring biscuits if you like. Originally posted 29 Nov 2003. Back then, I took away some interesting practical points and identified some common ground. I didn't accept the metaphysics. I didn't really get the metaphysics. I sort of do get them now. Although the nature of metaphysics is that we can never know whether they are right (hence the meta), these days Tolle's picture is one that makes intuitive sense to me and is not inconsistent with any evidence.
Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now - A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment signposts a journey toward inner peace. I took much from it when I read it a year or so ago. I don't happen to agree with Tolle's metaphysics (time is an illusion, the role of the unmanifested), but I think he makes some good points. I am no interpreter of Tolle's work, so I do not seek to set forth his argument here. Instead, I would like to highlight a number of the parallels and tangencies between his points and the way I think about Being, Life, Sentience and Consciousness and about the relation between the objective and subjective perspectives. Tolle believes that we let our rational, conscious mind get in the way of real life. It is a useful tool, but we let it run out of control. How does this manifest itself? We spend too much of our lives planning and fretting about the future or reliving and regretting the past. Our memory and our capacity to form intentions and plan their execution keep us from opening to the raw experiences of life's moment - the here and now. Tolle goes on to say that there is actually nothing else but the Now. I disagree with this, instead seeing time as one dimension of space-time, just as real as the others, but different from them. Whereas we can move freely among the three spatial dimensions, we are dictated to by the time dimension. We have to move at its speed. Our access to that dimension is only through the narrow slit that at any moment is now. Our memory gives us imperfect access to the past, as if looking through a rear-view mirror. Our scientific understanding allow a very limited and narrow predictive look at the future. But we can only ever experience now - this moment. This differs hugely from what an objective observer, sitting outside space-time (a-la Flatland fashion) would see. He would see the stretch of all time just as easily as he sees the extension of space. To use a film analogy, he would see the whole reel unwound at once, rather than be restricted (like us) to seeing one frame at a time in quick succession. Metaphysics aside, I think that Tolle makes a good practical point. If we let our self-conscious powers run amok, dwelling on the past, reliving it, resenting it; scheming about the future, preparing for every eventuality, plotting moves, then we lose out on the wonders that our senses are trying to present to our (animal) sentient awareness. In over-exercising that which sets us apart from other animals (perhaps in the vain hope of convincing ourselves that we're not animals) we miss the simple pleasures of qualia - warmth, melody, beauty. Our unique subjective worlds become cluttered with 'noise'. Tolle also emphasises that we are not our minds. For him, each person has an eternal presence, an essence part of yet identical with the great unmanifested. I agree that we are more than our minds, though I see it differently from him. Rather than appeal to a supernatural 'unmanifested', I find a foundation in the natural world - the stuff of which we are made, the recipe by which we are made, the chain of actions of which we play a part - basically the eternal web, or flux, of everything. Our roots reach endlessly to the past and our legacy stretches ceaselessly into the future - two opposing cones with us at their common meeting point. Anyway, to re-iterate the common ground, don't confuse your self with your mind, especially your self-conscious, rational mind. It is a special, important part of you, but it is rooted in more fundamental stuff. First posted 29 March 2005 - Bohm's eastern influence was primarily Indian / Hindu, but I see strong parallels now with Taoism as well. An amazing man trying to unite worlds that we too easily assume are distinct, incommensurate and irreconcilable.
At the end of my post on Tim Palmer, I related his model to that of David Bohm. There's a lot more to say about Bohm, and this post will be my attempt to pull it together. David Bohm's name is associated with many things these days - his communist ideology (which cost him his academic post and nearly his freedom during the McCarthy witch hunts), his turn to Indian mysticism and close relationship with an Indian guru, his development of a new technique of dialogue for reaching more creative group solutions to problems and his call for a new scientific order. He did ground-breaking work in plasma physics and made important contributions to quantum theory (proposing the first EPR experiment, for instance), yet most of his work in quantum physics is viewed as outside the canon, ignored or embarrassingly dismissed by the physics community. Bohm always wanted to understand EVERYTHING, and not just in its details but also in its WHOLENESS. His scientific, mystic and social views were inextricably linked. The most useful metaphor for his model of the universe is that of the hologram. A hologram is sort of like a photograph, in that it is a visual representation of reality. But while a photograph captures only two dimensions, a hologram captures all three. When light is shone through a holographic plate, a three dimensional image is projected into the space before it. As you move around the image, you capture it from a different perspective, just as if it were the original object it represents. If the holographic image is of a person, you stand in front of it to see the face and chest; from the side you get a profile view; from the rear you see the back. Yet there is something I think is even more interesting: if you drop the holographic plate and break it, EACH resulting piece of the former plate still can serve to project the entire image. Shine light through a small piece, and you'll still get the full three-dimensional image, just at a lower resolution. The smaller the piece of plate, the less well-defined the projected image. Contrast this with what happens when you rip a photograph in half: each half only shows you half of the image. So, each piece of a holographic plate contains information about the ENTIRE three-dimensional image. How does this relate to the universe as a whole? Bohm believed that each particle in the universe contained information about the universe as a whole. I've put this sloppily, so let's look in greater detail at what he said. One of the greatest (perhaps the greatest) mystery in science is demonstrated by the double slit experiment. I've explained the experiment elsewhere, so I won't go further into it here. Suffice it to say that the experiment suggests that particles fired individually through the test apparatus 'know' how they would have interacted (interfered) with one another had they been sent through together. Physics has twisted itself into some amusing contortions (including the well-known ostrich head-in-the-sand trick) to account for this. Bohm believed that the particles themselves only 'knew' this because they were guided by a new field that he introduced, called the quantum potential. This quantum potential was holographic in its effects in that at any point in the universe, it contained information about the entire universe. Unlike other forces and fields in physics, its effects did not diminish with distance, so even very remote particles were in a sense linked by it. (Those steeped in quantum theory will recognise the link to the phenomenon of entanglement.) This potential was essentially a source of active information, intricately and infinitely enfolded (per chaotic non-linear dynamic systems) into scales below our ability to detect it. This enfolded order that lay under the seemingly random behaviour of sub-atomic particles, Bohm called the implicate order, which he differentiated from our observable universe, the explicate order. The implicate order was deeper and more fundamental than the explicate one, but only bits of it could ever be unfolded at one time (hence Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle). In a later, quantum field theoretical version of the same basic thinking, Bohm added another, yet deeper order, the super implicate order. In this model, the particle was replaced by the quantum potential as the fundamental building block of nature. Particles were just focused knots within the quantum potential itself, and the evolution of the quantum potential over time was guided by the super-quantum potential. In fact, Bohm reckoned there could be (and probably were) an infinite number of these levels. Since the super-quantum potential was sensitive to pseudo-particle-level phenomena, a feedback loop arose, and this calls for another metaphor. If you think of a video game, the screen images themselves are the explicate order (the particles, etc that we see in our world), the computer programme that dictates how the screen image alters as the game is played is the implicate order (the quantum potential) and the person playing the game and sending signals to the computer programme is the super-implicate order (the super-quantum potential). The loop is completed as the player adjusts his actions based on his perceptions on the screen. This super-implicate order is now the home of active information (but please don't see it, because of its analogy with the human player above, as an actual conscious thing). Bohm was able to express all of this mathematically and to relate it to the more conventional mathematical formulae of quantum mechanics. His theory predicts observed behaviour just as well as the conventional methods. Yet it never caught on. There are aesthetic grounds for this rejection, in that Bohm's interpretation gave a certain prominence to a particle's position (as opposed to its momentum). Penrose has said that Bohm's model essentially assumes that every measurement is a measurement of position. But the simplest explanation is that since the conventional view was already operationalised in the scientific community, and since Bohm's model made no different predictions than the conventional view, they should just stick with what they had. More cynically, you could say that physicists no longer cared about the ontological implications of the theories that provided their predictions. One thing that strikes me as odd is that Bohm himself did NOT view his system as mechanical (deterministic). He felt that the feedback loops (per the video game metaphor) opened room for contingency. I just cannot square this. Feedback loop or not, the dynamics are deterministic, even if non-computable. Palmer's approach, which arrives at much the same place (active, holograph-like information enfolded minutely and hidden from view) albeit with a bit less metaphysical baggage, does not shirk from this. What IS attractive about both - and let's remember that they are entirely consistent with experimental results - is the holism they bring to the universe. This holism brings nearly common-sensical answers to most of quantum theory's mysteries, and it does so in a way that does not violate the spirit of Einstein's relativity. Everything is connected, not in some new-age way but ACTUALLY inter-related. Doesn't this just seem to FIT well with the notion of everything having started with the Big Bang? If the entire universe started in a quivering instability the size of a dime, it would be hard to imagine bits that were NOT related to the rest. We are all connected - to one another, to all living things, to everything that exists. A universe undivided. |
AuthorI'm curious. I like looking beneath and behind the obvious, also looking for what is between me and the obvious, obscuring or distorting my view. Categories
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