Melanie Purcell, Department of Philosophy, University of Newcastle.
Reality is a fluid state of being, where the perception of a moment is but a glimpse of partial vision that we then use in an attempt to fix the unfixable in an analytical mode which becomes a subjective consolidation of partial truth. What we witness as the real world is a filtered perception that is delivered through a collection of senses that are in turn conditioned by the information of the real world that informs us. Paradox is paramount. Depending upon the way in which we wish to view things, our vision is perceived through the constraints of those choices. To raise our perceptions and transcend paradox is to realise the juxtaposition of reality with these mental activities and create a fluid mind that consciously moves in and out of various filtered states, gathering a multiplicity of perceptual experiences that one can then use to build a more coherent vision, a vision where oppositional perceptions are not mutually exclusive but considered as relative aspects of the whole.
Such a dynamic view can be illustrated through geometries that twist in their topology and describe a reality where the inside and the outside are not the exclusive domains that they seem to be locally, but are relative aspects of the whole. The tradition of paradox can be traced throughout both Eastern and Western philosophical traditions, and finds in alchemy a curious system where the dialectics of antithesis are realised through a dynamic process of reconciliation and individuation. These alchemical processes use geometries of higher dimensional topologies (one of the alchemists flasks called the pelican, is topologically, a Klein Bottle) that traverse the nature of exclusive domains, and reveal the dynamics of a reality that is seen as a majestic matrix of the sacred and the profane, of the ordinary and miraculous, the inside and the outside being the same side, and hence- manifold unity.
This paper explores paradox, alchemy, and the topologies of reconciliation and synthesis. It attempts to show that historically these considerations have explored deep channels of contemplation that for many centuries have been alienated and ill-considered, but now, through the insight of our post quantum view of reality, can be appreciated as fundamental to our understanding of ultimate reality.
How do we perceive the world? Generally we find ourselves engaged with reality in a number of ways. We can be conscious, unconscious, in a dream state, in an altered state, or in a partial state where we are in the process of becoming conscious or not and so on. All of these states are involved with the reality as an external realm, an internal realm and a unity of both.
There are often situations where we are not aware of the nature of the state that we are actually in, and at other times where we are far too conscious of the particular state that we are engaged with and desire to be “somewhere else”. Sometimes we are involved with projecting into the future and remembering the past, scenarios that concern our desires, fears, potential actions, memories and so on. These particular states take our minds out of an awareness of the moment of now and into a state where we are entertaining the illusions of potential future or past occurrences. There are times when we unwittingly engage with such concerns to the point where we may actually forget what it is that we are presently doing. There are many times when we have experienced a shift in our consciousness awareness. We may have been driving, or reading, or listening to music and become suddenly aware that a period of time has elapsed when we were completely unaware of the intentional acts that we were engaged with. We were engaged with something completely different, a memory, a thought about something, a concern about the impending future, etc. Similarly, we may be wanting to clear our mind of all thoughts as one would with various practices of meditation, and we find ourselves plagued with intrusions from the mind, worries, concerns, projections about the past and future and so on.
In many Eastern traditions particularly those that are contemplative, the development of the mind concerns this phenomena and schools the individual in clearing the attachments that they have to thoughts and problems that preoccupy their minds.
“Attachment to one instant of thought leads to attachment of a succession of thoughts and thus to bondage. But by cutting off attachment to one instant of thought, one may…. Cut off attachment to a succession of thoughts and thus attain nothought, which is a state of enlightenment.”[ii]
To empty the mind of mundane projections is to prepare it for the awareness of higher dimensional realities or what many metaphysicians would call processes leading to enlightenment. This emptiness is often referred to as the stillpoint or one point awareness and as Ram Dass laments,
“We don’t even understand in the West what it means to train consciousness, or what it means to develop these disciplines of one point. Because it is literally true that, were you able to keep your consciousness at one point- literally one point for twelve seconds, you would be in one of the highest forms of samadhi. You would be one of the most enlightened beings.”[iii]
When engaging with the variety of mental training schemes available from Eastern traditions, the early stages may be fraught with very interesting experiences. The following is a recollection of two events that I experienced during a fairly rigorous program of introductory arhatic yoga meditations.
On one occasion, I was reading aloud to my partner, and in mid-sentence answered a question directed to me from a completely different conscious state. I was in the process of experiencing two different realities. One, reading out aloud to my husband, the other conversing to another person in a different reality. When I was reading, I hadn’t stopped the flow of words, while another scenario was occurring in my awareness. It wasn’t until the point in time where I heard myself answer, and the listener to my reading alerted me to the fact that I had said something completely out of context to the reading, that I was instantly able to recall both what I had been reading, and quite a complex conversation that I seemed to be engaged with simultaneously.
There was also an experience where I had been in a state of meditation and my body responded to external phenomena in this case, someone coming to the front door of my house. My body has met my guest at the door, and upon the conscious realisation of the act of receiving the guest, I have found myself completely startled, the effect of which was so intense that I was shaking with the fright. My awareness of reality was once again split and I was both in a completely different environment through my meditation, as well as being in the room and answering the door to a visitor. The conscious awareness of the physical activity was not the main focus of my mental activity at that point. My memories, were such that I had no recall of hearing the door or of my body acting in response and walking to the door to open it and greet the guest. My mind was engaged with exploring an environment through the process of meditation. When the physical acts kicked in at the point when a conversation with the visitor began, I was startled and shocked to find myself seemingly displaced.
These events may not seem normal to some. In fact, most people would insist that I was deluded and find some ‘just so’ story about what had happened, assuming that my mind was playing tricks on me, or at least my interpretation of the events were suspect. Most reductionist and material theories of reality would naturally assume that there was some imbalance of chemistry in the brain that would lead to abnormal mental phenomena and perhaps attempt to rectify the situation by administrations of chemicals that would dampen down such phenomena. Or suggestions would be raised that I was too eager to accept some mystical explanation and was experiencing a fantasy projection or dreamlike phenomenon. Conversely, in discussing this phenomena with the teachers of arhatic yoga[iv], they exhibited a common knowledge of the subject and suggested that I was experiencing premature bilocations that over time would become more controllable. Nothing at all abnormal, simply a different world view that appreciates an extended reality that negotiates higher dimensional environments than our most easily perceivable reality.
In John McCrone’s book “The Myth Of Rationality: The Science of Mind From Plato To Star Trek” the necessity for world views to be considered when encountering phenomena that seems irrational is paramount to assessing the behavioural problem that is observed. The context is critical as the phenomenal experience is usually an expression of a practical application of a particular world view, in this case, one of esoteric yoga.
“Once we are given the right explanatory framework, the mysteries fogging our understanding of the human mind quickly evaporate. The trick is to know where to look for the answers- and mostly this means looking outwards to the social context rather than inwards for some irrational or unconscious explanation. The difficulty is that a belief in the irrational has become so ingrained in Western culture that it is near impossible to look at behavious in any other way.” [v]
The question of what is “normal” behaviour or for that matter real human potential is only constrained by the world view that one considers to inform ones impression of the world that we are viewing.[vi] When considering the multiplicity of world views we can locate an extreme opposition between such mindsets as the Indigenous “preliterate”[vii]and the mindset of the dominant Western culture. The dominant Western world view that is informed by its classical roots that are mechanistic, deterministic and atomistic, is certainly recreating itself due to the observations that Relativity and Quantum theory have made, however whilst there is much controversy concerning how one reads the physical evidence of this new science of the macro and micro realms, the predominant Western world view sees matter as the primary stuff of the universe, and considers consciousness as emergent from the complexity and organisation of the organism.
Opposed to this view, and paradoxically similar to the perspective generated by some interpreters of the “new sciences” are the animistic panpsychic perspectives prevalent in preliterate cultures. The essential difference in their cast of reality is that consciousness is seen as primary, and the complexity and organisation of the organism will determine the complexity of its consciousness. In this world view even rocks are considered as having some form of mind. Danah Zohar speaks at length about the similarities between these views and many scientists who believe in a “rather watered down innocuous panpsychism” as Feigl has been quoted as saying. In considering panpsychism, Zohar describes what she has called “limmited” pansychism. Accepted in its fullest form, the belief would consider that every mountain tree, flower and dust particle would possess an inner, psychological life. This is the view that many indigenous cultures and some early modern scientists and psychologists such as Spinoza, Leibnitz, William James, Henry Bergson, Teilhard de Chardin, Whitehead and others have considered. Zohars perspective does not go so far as she considers a perspective that views the stuff of the material world from a scientific perspective where she identifies her
“concern for the light that modern physics can cast on the nature of consciousness, to understand what it is about the relationship between matter and consciousness at the quantum level which now causes some quantum physicists, and a handful of philosophers informed by their work, to be counted among those in the panpsychic tradition. Theirs is , of necessity , a much more cautious or limited form of panpsychism, as there is nothing whatever about modern physics to suggest that mountains have souls of that dust particles posses an inner life.
The logic employed in limited panpsychism begins with the obvious fact that there is only one basic kind of matter. It follows then that all things- animate and inanimate – are made of it, that some of this matter has the undoubted capacity for conscious life, and that at the quantum level at least there is a creative dialogue between matter and consciousness such that the observer’s conscious mind actually influences the material development of that which s/he observes.”[viii]
The revelations that have been born out of relativity theory, quantum physics and dynamic systems clearly depict a dynamic view that is paradoxically chaotic and yet ordered, where light is both particle and wave, where the possibility of nonlocality is a potential and the parameters of a knowledge of the real world are still unbounded.
If we are to consider the recollection of a real event, a memory, we are attempting to ‘fix’ a block of time as we view it retrospectively. The flow of time that is the present, is forever moving into the future and leaving a trace of the past captured in part by the ‘real’ objects of the material world and by our impressions and sensations that are involved with it. Any point in time would necessarily be a composite of these three tenses; past, present and future. However, it is possible to look at a point in time, a moment that has a fixed duration encapsulated by the various recording devices that we impose upon time and space. Globally, the concept of that point in time will differ throughout the twenty four hour spatial relationships of that point in time, but a point in time it still can be. There have been many arguments concerning the nature of time, be it a point and a series of points, or a fluid motion. These arguments can be traced back to a stoic tradition where the paradox was perceived as a fundamental property of reality.
The understanding of paradox to the early Stoics was for them, paramount in understanding reality. They saw that it was impossible to determine whether a body was either a whole entity or a number of parts. They saw that it was both and like wise with concepts of time they realised that whilst you could consider a separate moment in time, time was a fluid stream where the present moment was both partially past and partially future. The arguments that developed between those who considered time to be fluid and those who saw it atomistically are interesting to examine as they expose the subtle differences that can be seen as early documentation of two opposed perspectives of reality, that of the dynamic continuum, and that of the static mechanistic world view. Whilst seemingly the difference between the texts is a play of words the Stoic refutation of Xenocrates’ atomic time elements depicts two completely different conceptions whose disparity stems from the difference between the customary static notion of the contiuum and the dynamic one of the Stoics. The Xenocratic concept describes time as indivisible atoms of time and the Stoic perspective asserts that the present moment consists of a small stretch of time spread over past and future.[ix]
Chrysippos’view on time quoted in Stobaios’ Eclogae illucidates this clearly as follows,
“He states most clearly that no time is entirely present. For the division of continua goes on indefinitely, and by this distinction time, too, is infinitely divisible; thus no time is strictly present but is defined only loosely.”[x]
Significantly Sambursky points out the remarkable similarity of the Stoic doctrine to the ideas on time of some Modern philosophers, and especially the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead which he quotes from Whitehead’s “Process and Reality” as such
“A moment has no temporal extension, and is in this respect to be contrasted with a duration which has such extension……” “A moment is a limit to which we approach as we confine attention to durations of minimum extension.” “There is no such thing [as the instantaneous present] to be found in nature. As an ultimate fact it is a nonentity. What is immediate for sense-awareness is a duration. Now a duration has within itself a past and a future; and the temporal breadths of the immediate durations of sense-awareness are very indeterminate and dependent on the individual percipient…. The passage of nature leaves nothing between the past and the future. What we perceive as present is the vivid fringe of memory tinged with anticipation…. The past and the future meet and mingle in the ill-defined present.[xi]
From Whitehead we find the present to be a mixture of memory and anticipation, both of which are states that have more to do with the projection of ideas about reality than actually reality itself. Any memory or anticipation of the present state is inevitably a subjective experience that effectively creates our perception of reality itself. The whole idea of the creation of reality and illusory projections necessitates a consideration of the state of illusion itself, or as the Hindu beliefs would call it, maya.
To define maya is to explore an extraordinary and deeply paradoxical environment. That is the idea of the coming into existence of reality itself. In Vedantic philosophy, maya is the illusion of the reality of sensory experience and of the experienced qualities and attributes of oneself. It is also called Mahamaya, who is a goddess personifying the power that creates phenomena. “Maha” means great and the archaic meaning of “may” suggests power and “maya” is considered in Hinduism to be the power to produce illusion or phenomena or simply the power of illusion itself.[xii]
“When , in the preliminary stage of any creation, the seed energy begins to grow in its desire to create, this desire, which is the first conscious impulse, directs the unconscious will toward action. The desiring consciousness is represented as the giver-of-seed (bijin). When it finds something to which to apply its will, that is, a recepticle, it becomes “ ‘possessor of maya,’ the illusionist (mayn) who creates the universe….”(Karapatri,”Sri Bhagavati tattva,”Siddhanta, V, 1944-45, 23.)[xiii]
In discussing the power of illusion and the nature of the universe, Alain Danielou describes the vedantic philosophy of the logic behind their creation ideas. The Substratum is considered to be eternally motionless. For there to be any form to this reality, thre must be a motion, a wave, that moves the unmoving Immensity.
“The power that creates the appearance of a polarization, of a localization of a rhythm-likened to the whirlpool that forms a star in the undifferentiated continuum of ether- is called illusion (maya). This pure movement without substance is represented as the mysterious source of all that is. The nonsubstantial character of this apparent motion, from which all forms develop, explains the nature of the universe, which seems to exist though it has ultimately no substance. The power of illusion may be compared to an introspective-deliberation (vimarsa) which would plan things. It may be represented as a “divine thought” of which the universe would be the materialisation.
“The energy, gross or subtle, by which an all-pervading seer thinks out, that is , create, all things is named the power of illusion, “the entity that visualized the universe.” The conscious centers of energy- the gods and the living beings- and the unconscious ones- the spheres and the atoms of the universe- are all the display of this power.
From the point of view of man “the power of illusion appears to be of two kinds. It is a covering (avarana) which, like a veil, obstructs perception, and it is an evolving (iksepa) through which the illusion becomes an independent, self-propelling entity. During deep sleep we experience the covering aspect; a veil seems to be cst around the mind, shutting off all experience; there is no perception, and there is nothing that may be characterised as development.” (Upanisad Brahmayogin’s commentary on Nrsimha-uttara-tapini Upanishad 9.4.)
In the state of dream we experience an evolving which resembles the creative aspect of illusion. When asked how illusion can be the substance of the gods and of the cosmos, the Vedantist replies: “O lovely visage: I never said that an illusion is to be worshipped. It is the conscious support of the illusion which deserves worship. Illusion, energy, and other like words merely point to a particularized stage. It is the worship of the Immensity which is aimed at through such words as illusion.’” …… “An illusion is a false appearance, but an appearance is of necessity based on a reality; for no illusory thing can exost without a support, and the reality of the support remains, pervading the illusion. In worshiping the illusion, or its manifestations, one worships the reality behind it, the unknowable Immensity on which it rests” “An illusion is different from an error. In the Abysmal Immensity, there can be no room for error. The Immense Subsratum, which is the only reality, forms the substance of the power of illusion and remains ever interwoven with it.” ( A Tantra and Karapatri, “Sri Bhagavati tattva,” Siddhanta, V, 1944-45, 243; 246; 275.) [xiv]
In the Western philosophical traditions there have been permutations of an idealist thought that has sought to negotiate some environments similar to that which is constituted in the concept of maya. What constitutes the main difference between these Western conceptions of reality and the Hindu concept of maya however, has much to do with the way that Western ideas of creation have coloured the notion of their God and His work. Structurally the arguments are extremely different, and have been the subject of a recent work “The Reconciliation of Opposites, Creation Stories and the masculinisation of Western Thought” What many of the forms of idealism have in common is the view that there is no access to reality apart from what the mind provides us with, and further that the mind can provide and reveal to us only its own contents.[xv] This perspective, when considered in its fullest extent, considers that thought is generative, and that consciousness is the causal origin of the material reality, and that without thought there is no such reality. The origins are therefore one of deity, or at least a conscious decision to become manifest, and revel in the following paradoxes of being one prior to and also nothing but the potential of everything, which in the act of becoming, becomes everything actual and nothing in potential, yet one whole as a collective and a consciousness that is greater than that which constitutes the whole of everything that exists.
In considering this perspective from a quantum perspective, Amit Gotswami, author of “the Self Aware Universe” calls forth Bishop Berkley’s notion of idealism, suggesting that without the engagement of consciousness, there is no reality. Whilst this idea seems fanciful to many when considered from a simplistic perspective for example that when one walks out of a room, the contents of the room disappears, Gotswami attempts to rescue it by invoking the decay rate of particles, which is something in the order of 10 to the –33 power. He then multiplies this by the trillions of trillions of particles that make up the various items of furniture that may exist in you room, and postulates that the decay rate would take a period of thousand of years to eventuate. Therefore, if one takes ones conscious attention away from an environment, over time it would decay. The fact that we are all constantly engaged in our various environments therefore suggests that we are constantly charging its existence by our conscious awareness of it.
A point of contention however is that if thought is generative and therefore a powerful agent in terms of manifestation, the projections of ones mind that deviate from the awareness of the point in time that is here and now, are not simply illusory, but are in effect constituting the potential that may become, or if many of the idealist or dualists claim, are actively affirming the future.[xvi]
Any of my projections into the future, however distance or near, may be illusory projections such that they have not come into actuality. And there is a relativity associated to the predictability of future events. If one was to project about possible outcomes at a distant point in time, the potential for that to occur is less likely than the potential for an event situated near to now, to occur. For example, the projections that I had concerning the presentation of this paper have undergone many transformations over the past days and weeks. Whilst on the one hand, they seem to have been totally illusory, they paradoxically have contributed largely to the outcomes of the future. Yesterday, my projections concerning this event were completely different then, than they are at the moment of writing this sentence in ‘this point of now’ which is approximately 14 or 15 hours prior to ‘this point in time’ as these words flow from my mouth. And that is only if I stick to this paper and don’t get side tracked or delete this entire tract. I am currently engaging in predicting the future to a certain extent as long as there are measures taken to ensure that the reading of this text goes ahead. In many cases the certainty of such a prediction over time is lacking such a structure, in which case the success of our predictions are restricted to more immediate events, and our projections remain useful but somewhat illusory and unreal.
Similarly, just as if we may be preoccupied with the occurrences that might come into being in the future, we often invoke memories of events that have already happened. When we feel joyful or concerned about various events, or when we feel nostalgic about an object, person or place, we become aware of a subjective nexus of feelings, emotions, sounds, smells and things that make up that retrospective impression of a past point in time. Particularly when we relive the experience and recall it to another or transcribe it into a written medium, we are in a similar way, indulging once again with an awareness of or conjuring of the past. Illusory or not, these impressions will be different for everyone involved in the event, and may even change over time. While there is a sense of realness about these impressions, there is also a sense of illusion or uncertainty.
We make judgements concerning past events and we often explore various perspectives to build pictures of the past that concern a multitude of individuals. We believe that we have some idea of a stable and concrete sense of what the events of the past have been. We trust in the discernment of the scholar to reproduce our histories with some type of exactitude. What we are discerning is that as things take place, the reality that we are involved with is in a process of transformation. Physical objects are continuously involved with the processes of natural decay and growth. There are also interactions and exchanges that occur between real entities, experiences that effectively undergo transformative processes but are often internalised and unseen. Things also occur that we are not involved with that may effect our reality in ways that are not obvious.
When we perceive the past, as with our projections of the future, we are engaged with a subjective analysis of that reality using the present as a point of departure to view the past from. With our memories, as fallible and selective as they are, and with our various inhibitions and neurosis, the reflection of the past in some cases has little to do with actuality at all. The reality that we perceive of the past is potentially only an appearance of it, perceived through the various senses in our own body, or through technologies that enhance our perception. To reiterate the past with precision, the perception of everything that was involved with the event of that period of time, would be necessary to formulate the history of the event itself an act that leads to an infinite regress.
However, if we return to the thesis of thought being generative, then there is the potential for the past to remain as a distinct hyperdimensional reality accessible to those able to perceive it. The notion of the axis of Akasha, which throughout many traditions has been the temporal dimension, is situated in the centre of the axis of the four directions, rising with the tree of life and falling with its roots. A further aspect of the dualist perspective that through the work of Jack Sarfatti and the Starlight Foundation that is associated with NASA, a consolidation of what Sarfatti terms Post Quantum Physics, suggests that there exists the theoretical calculations to describe various psi effects including the nature of Remote Viewing.
Through the work of Putoff and others, the research concerning remote viewing suggests that there is certainly an ability not only to view the past as if it has never stopped existing but also to view the future in any spatial temporal location in the universe. Whilst this seems fantastic, there are many exercises that one can perform very simply. It is however a requirement that certain meditative skills are necessary to perform the exercise. I will relate the exercise as I carried it out with my partner. I talked him into a meditative state, one where his mind was clear of all noise, or imagery. I had my computer turned on. I asked him to consider that he was engaged in observing the computer screen at exactly midnight of that night. It was ten p.m. I had at this point given him the equivalent of the time and place that he was tuning his perception to. I then asked him to write down any image or sensation or words that came into his mind without telling me. It is possible to employ a third person so that the subject can narrate the images to you as you record them, the third person unable to hear them. After all images have been noted, the subject has only to position himself in front of the screen and wait for midnight. The third person randomly surfs the net and upon the stroke of midnight the images recorded can be compared with the ones on the computer screen. The coincidence of this particular experiment was extraordinary. The subject had drawn a ship and the heads of people in the foreground. The image displayed was a travel brochure image that included all of the recordings documented. This type of work poses many questions. Are the past present and future simultaneously occurring? Are we able to construct reality or is it preordained or some mixture of fate and will?
Certainly, the complexities that are apparent within the many types of conscious and unconscious states of perception, chemical and arhatic states of conscious attunement, past present and future dynamics, etc present an picture of reality that is deserving of broader enquiry than that which is constrained through the reigning classically supremacist model of reality that the Western mindset holds so dear to itself. There is an urgent need for a non restrictive and nonprescriptive dialogue that is not constrained by the centrality of a particular world view. It is undeniable that the contemporary world is held hostage by the straightjacket of deterministic materialism.
The fewer examples of causal conditions, the more abstracted our perception becomes. Any event involves a manifold of causes both indirect and direct, both physical and nonphysical that effectively makes up the event that we may be considering. We are only able to know a fragment of the overall totality of an event as we are unable to separate ourselves from this world and perceive through the eye of an omniscient being. Our knowing may well remain a mixture of subjective and objective deductions and intuitions that will form only a portion of the ultimate reality that is the moment in question. Our abstractions too are inevitable and necessary to allow ourselves to deal with the vastness of such a question as the nature of perception, truth, and reality.
Alfred Tarski’s[xvii] contributions to the nature of truth are useful here. His formula for truth suggest that ‘snow is white and grass is green’ are 100% true and factual statements as long as snow is white and grass is green. What this reveals is the ‘all or nothing’ status of truth. The statement that grass is green 100% of the time is both equally true and equally false. Tarski was well aware that the various colours of grass ranged from blue greens to bright green through to various yellows and browns, just as the colour of snow ranges from various greys and browns through to shades of yellow.
The paradox revealed through this observation is that the bivalence, that is whether grass is green or not, is unable to be upheld as the extreme opposing statements are of equal truth. When we assume that all grass is green we are assuming that there is a standard greenness and exactitude of that colour, or that everyone knows what we really mean. The degree to which grass can be called green leads to an infinite regress as the scale of colours able to be attributed to the real object in question leads from green to not green at either end of the scale of green. There is no definitive percentage of green that is associable to the nature of grass. The assumption of bivalence or of rounding off a statement as if we really do know what is inferred, trades accuracy for simplicity. In Bart Kosko’s book “Fuzzy Thinking” (1994) he describes the problems that arise through such abstractions:
“When you round off, you pay in truth and accuracy and honesty for what you gain in simplicity and precision and conformity. Denial does not eliminate costs. A little rounding off like a little dept never hurt anyone. But even a little rounding off, like a little bit of pregnancy, can lead to surprises. If you round off too much, you pay the penalty of bi-valent self-contradiction and land in paradox. Then bivalent logic ends and fuzzy logic begins and the water in a glass is both empty and full.”
The sort of paradoxical situation is constantly raised when attempting to determine the parameters of things particularly the forming of definitive boundaries assumed through processes of categorisation. When does a number of sand particles become a pile? How much skin is needed to be revealed on a head of hair for the person to be considered bald? And in considering the statement spoken by a Cretan, “All Cretans are Liars.”, the nature of paradox is revealed with its full force.
These paradoxes are constantly with us. When tutoring a course in Ethics, my colleagues were surprised[xviii] at the number of students who believed one set of values but in practise, contradicted these values by performing opposed tasks. It is a paradox that we found many people who drive cars actually hate the pollution and chaos that motoring causes and believe that if they could they would choose not the drive at all, but the societal constraints disable their fulfilment of such an ethical decision. It is paradoxical that some meat eaters considered vegetarianism more virtuous. It is also paradoxical that some people who considered abortion to be ethically wrong had actually had abortions themselves.
In these cases the complexities of our modern life and our impression of an ideal reality, cause problems for ethicists. Many meat eaters don’t see the harm in eating meat per se, but disagree with the way in which the meat is farmed and slaughtered, with little or no concern directed to the animal. They are caught in a bind of appreciating the arguments of a vegetarian who may base all of their reasoning upon these same disagreeable aspects, yet the outcomes are opposed. In the case of the person who disagrees fundamentally with abortion, yet agreed to have one herself, we come face to face with the dilemma of actual reality and ideal reality. In this particular case the woman believed that ultimately it was wrong for an abortion to be performed as she considered that ethically it was akin to murder but the reality that she was involved with was not ideal and the act of bringing in a new life was problematic. Again the complexities of the argument disable her to perform an ethical judgement that she was comfortable with.
I personally was disagreeable to the idea of saving the lives of grossly premature babies who could potentially suffer a very low quality of life, until faced with the situation myself with 10 week early twins. Hypocritical? Absolutely. In fact the experience of this event made me realise how futile judgements concerning the actions of others really are. Abstraction allows one to make judgements but disables the complexity of honesty and compassion that is necessary to analyse the full implications of perspectives of truth, particularly where opposed positions are literally aspects of the whole conceptual dilemma. We are completely limited by our knowledge of the world through our experiences and assumed knowledge where we take on a perception of reality that is culturally ordered and often imposed and unquestionably considered to be the one true and morally just world view. Such a dangerous assumption is advocated by Howard Bloom, in his book “The Lucifer Principle” (1995) Here he sets out his belief that humans have such a principle of evil innate in their physiological and psychological makeup, and that he can identify the “new barbarians” as the Muslim extremists. These extremists not only threaten to take the world by force but in turn they provide the “new frontier” necessary to reassert Americas focus and maintain its failing status as a “Superorganism”. Surprised by his general assertions, I sought an audience with him and was able to pose some interesting questions at a contemporary media conference held in Newcastle in October 1999. After this realtime exchange and ensuing email exchanges I realised that he believed emphatically that the ethical and moral judgements maintained by the Western civilisation were not only superior but were necessary to uphold with no consideration of the relativity of differing world views.[xix]
We forget our limitations and assume to know with certainty the nature of things. The dominance of a perspective is particularly present when comparing the world views of the Western mindset that is still heavily indoctrinated by a classical perspective, and that of an indigenous culture that assumes a seemingly opposed world view. We forget at times that the world view that informs our judgement is primarily based upon abstractions. We use Euclidian geometry to measure lines and graph two and three dimensional space, which is very accurate in the scale of everyday tasks of measuring and engineering, however in a world that is curved, at both a macro and micro level the abstractions and limitations of such a system become obvious. In a world where the diversity of humanity is expressed through dynamic world views that are often completely opposed to the classical framework of Western perception, the apparent dilemma becomes profound.
Complexity theory has shown us how important it is not to ignore the fine details that are generated by a nexus of events or by equations that generate fractalisations. The butterfly effect that has been discussed since the late seventies is a popular expression coined by those attempting to explain the various concepts of chaotic behaviour and randomly generated systems that ironically generate pictures of perfections and harmony on macro and micro scales as they iterate the infinitude of their systems. What the butterfly effect is, corresponds to the fact that a minor detail or “noise” such as the minute measurements incurred in infinite decimal places, actually builds over time to cause major effects, in this case the flap of the wings of a butterfly in one part of the world could generate enough movement to cause a tornado in another part of the globe. (Gleick, 1988).
Complexity theory has bridged a transdiciplinary field concerning mathematics, physics, biology, chemistry and even the social sciences. (Coveney and Highfield 1995) Made famous initially by Benoit Mandelbrot with his computations of Lorenz strange attracters[xx] which are computations that create randomly generated patterns that build out of the chaos of random irregular shapes that look the same on all scales of length, hence creating harmonious patterns. Mandelbrot was interested in computing “Julia sets” that similarly were equations exhibiting chaotic behaviour. What was riveting about this work however was that there hadn’t been the possibility prior to the complex computer power of the late seventies, able to handle the detail necessary to see the harmonious beauty that was to take the world by storm.
“Mandelbrot’s work has shaken the way we think of dimensions. We are all familiar with the idea that a line has a dimension of one, while the area enclosed by a rectangle is two dimensional. But in fact these are almost always idealisations: objects can be one-and-a-bit dimensional. The and-a-bit means it is a fractional of fractal dimension. Mandelbrot illustrated this in a paper in which he posed the question: “How long is the coast of Britain?” A little thought shows that the answer depends on the length scale chosen to measure the coastline. Fractal shapes abound in nature, from cauliflowers to clouds; they can even be found in a dripping tap, when an infinite cascade of structure forms between tap and falling drop.” (Coveney and Highfield 1995)
The nature of these fractional dimensions has shown how self-organisation is generated out of seemingly chaotic and random origins. The paradox of there being harmony born out of chaos and indeterminable perceptions illustrates how necessary it is to break with the Newtonian tradition and realise the nature of relativity in its broadest sense of the word.
“In the Newtonian tradition, science has been concerned with the abstraction from appearances of the ‘irreducible mathematical essence’ of things; and in a reductionist manner, it has been involved not with the whole but rather with what that whole is made of. In recent times, the science of complex systems has been helping to change this perception.”
What then are our histories? To seek factual information about an event the historian attempts to consider as much of the documentation concerning the occurrence. Often however, there are serious limitations involved with this collection of information. For example, in situations of war it is difficult and in many cases politically dangerous to include the perspective of the “enemy” if it is even available. Our histories are often compilations of information sourced from institutional documentation, and records of anecdotal information from people involved with the events. Prior to the advent of film, our reconstructions relied heavily upon the memories and embellishments of the narrator telling the story and the eye witness accounts that were accessible to him or her. There are obvious problems involved with such reconstructions of “truth”. Today many of the limitations are ironically involved with the importance that video recordings have gained. We often don’t have a story unless it is captured upon film, and so it is the case that we assume that “truth” is conveyed by the “objective” recordings and that anecdotal memoirs are potentially inaccurate. Often in this way entire events may go unseen and unheard by the general public at large. Again we are attempting to consolidate some trust in an objective evaluation of reality and assume that the potential for abstraction is limited, however we are well aware of the potential for film to be manipulated in a number of ways from selective in-camera editing, to computer manipulation of the actual footage.
Is the truth then an inaccessible environment of fragments and impressions that negotiate opposing territories and defy any conception of completeness? If our perception of truth is determined by our collective understanding of reality, then the various cultural constructions of world views would be important in considering the nature and relativity of an individual’s or groups perspective. History shows us however that differences of opinion lead in many cases to execution and death.
Boethius, as he despairs in his cell prior to execution, witnesses the spirit of philosophy consoling him, and placing him in honour with great and similarly executed minds such as Socrates. She describes how she was with others who had been similarly executed, those she considers initiated into the arts of wisdom. She also describes how her garment was torn into fragments signalling the descent of wisdom into the ill advised errors of the uninitiated, as the rise of reductionist thought began to take hold:
“Should I not share and bear my part of the burden which has been laid upon you from spite against my name? Surely Philosophy never allowed herself to let the innocent go upon their journey unbefriended. Think you I would fear calumnies? That I would be terrified as though they were a new misfortune? Think you that this is the first time that wisdom has been harassed by dangers among men of shameless ways? In ancient days before the time of my child, Plato, have we not as well as nowadays fought many a mighty battle against the recklessness of folly? And though Plato did survive, did not his master, Socrates, win his victory of an unjust death, with me present at his side? When after him the followers of Epicurus, and in turn the Stoics, and then others did all try their utmost to seize his legacy, they dragged me, for all my cries and struggles, as though to share me as plunder; they tore my robe which I had woven with mine own hands, and snatched away the fragments thereof: and when they thought I had altogether yielded myself to them, they departed. And since among them were to be seen certain signs of my outward bearing, others ill-advised did think they wore my livery: thus were many of them undone by the errors of the herd of uninitiated.”
Boethius is one of many who have been executed for their ideals, and Socrates too was executed for “impiety and the corruption of young minds”(Honderich 1995).
Socrates was thought to have not written anything down and was known to consider himself knowledgable of nothing. Such a paradox is born out of his interest as it was recorded by Plato, in coming to know the truth by posing questions, and therefore assuming to be ignorant and in doing so pursues truth through analytical dialogue. This became known as the dialectic. If a student chose position A, Socrates would choose position Not- A, if a student chose position Not- A , Socrates would choose position A: for it was believed that both positions, although opposed were ultimately the same. (Papadopoulas, 1984)
“Truth and error interlaced oppositionally (dialectically), so that no matter where the participants in a dialogue positioned themselves, in time through dialectical discourse, they could weed out the error and come to know the opposite- that is the truth! Socrates did not feel that he was skilfully and deviously manipulating (or controlling) the flow of a student’s thought in asking his questions. He would have considered this sophistry. We erroneously interpret him as sophisticated today because Plato’s written account of the dialectical method in the Dialogues makes it appear that we are reading a cybernetic program. Socrates never wrote a book precisely because he did not believe that knowledge could be recorded ‘univocally’ in this fashion. Two men, each of whom had ‘potential knowledge’ within their capabilities, had to bring reason to bear in discussion in order to create knowledge dialectically.” (Papadopoulas 1984).
The dialectical methodology doesn’t view oppositional aspects from an hierarchical structure, which is often true when emphasis is placed on the association of unipolar designations which stand basically clear of each other. Rather than applying a law of contradiction, the dialectical method assumes oppositional aspects to be an interlacing of complementarities into an overall pattern of ‘one and many’ or ‘many in one’.
“Rather than hierarchical, the dialectical conception of a ‘body’ of knowledge is as a complex pattern. The demonstrative pattern of meaning ‘emerges’ from the elemental factors making it up hierarchically ‘from below’ in constitutive fashion. The dialectical pattern of meaning is conceptually ‘there’ (or given) from the outset of meaning-extension in knowledge creation, lending its order ‘from above’ rather than from below.”( Papadopoulos 1991)
For Hegel “nature has presented herself as the Idea in the form of otherness.”(Leclerc 1986)
“By means of this dialectical method Hegel seeks, moreover, not only to show each logical category as in itself an organism of opposed and yet mutually complementary elements, but also to show all these fundamental notions as forming one system, wherein the most apparently diverse and disparate ideas are actuallly interrelated as parts of the highest and inclusive category, the divine Idee, or total thought of the world, whose full realisation in the absolute self in its spiritual wholeness. The absolute Idee is the notion of the complete self regarded just as a logical category. As true self, it appears to us later, in the philosophy of spirit. In the “Logic” it is only this thought of the total nature of things as being in the Hegelian sense self determined. This thought contains all the subordinate categories as organic parts of the total, and as parts whose organic relation is precisely such as this dialectical, this paradoxical nature of self-consciousness demands.”(Royce, 1983)
Hegel, writing in the late Eighteenth Century was influenced strongly by the NeoPlationists but was overtly abhorrent to mysticism. In the post Reformation era, the interest in Neoplatonism was apparent but as with the mechanistic science of Newton, who is considered by Keynes to have been the first great scientist and the last great alchemist (Dobbs, 1983) the esoteric gave way to the necessity to formulate deterministic schemes. Hegal sought to systematise a philosophy of being and attempted to
“reduce all our emotions to purely abstract logical terms, and conceived his absolute solely as a incarnation of dead thought…his great error lay, not in introducing logic into the passion, but in conceiving the logic of passion as the only logic; so that you in vain endeavour to get satisfaction from Hegel’s treatment of outer nature, of science, of mathematics, or of any coldly theoretical topic”. (Royce, 1983)
Hegel’s inability the address the very irony of his inability to deal with his rejection of mysticism as an opposed yet necessary aspect of the dialectics of nature is indicative of the vision constrained by rational determinism that was by his time quite heavily enforced and is still deeply entrenched in the nature of human perception. Marx similarly rejected the ideal from his scheme and similarly sought to house the spiritual from within a physicalist world view.
Ultimately the perception of reality from a dialectical position sees opposites as complementary aspects of a manifold unity.
The manifold unity of the entire universe is invoked within the conception of such a term as truth. It is here that the domain of philosophy and the sciences sit in attempting to determine the nature of reality and in turn the nature of the human and its involvement within the reality that its philosophies have cast. And it is here that we become aware of the paradox that is at the foundation of reality. Our attempts to grasp impressions of the real world is like attempting to grasp infinity. Our perceptions are never purely objective, nor are they ever purely subjective, the two opposing potentials are entangled within our observational faculties. We are a dynamic fusion of an inner perceptual reality and a perception of reality that is external. These oppositional parameters create a tension that is the cause of much consternation if only one dynamic is assumed to be in play. That is, if we deny our subjective involvement with the world and assume that we can perform tasks objectively, then we are open to assumptions that are bound by the limitation of a dogma that sets the constraints of how we are involved with reality. As Richard Feynman (1985) suggests,
“The paradox is only a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality ought to be”.
In considering the nature of illusion, Richard Gregory, (1987) points out the problems that are perceived through perception.
“Illusions are an embarrassment for those philosophers who would like to hold that knowledge is based securely on perception. Such a view is part of the empiricist tradition, which is the basis of science, but it is easy to show empirically that perception is not reliable; for a least in the laboratory, and the art gallery where interesting illusions abound, it is easy to fool the senses systematically so that all observers agree on what they perceive, though all are wrong”.
More fundamental however are the revelations of quantum physics that has shown how involved the observer really is in perceiving the results of various experiments. The dual aspect of light is one such phenomena that is consistently cited. That light can be perceived as both a wave of photons or as individual particles, has led to light being called wavicles. The Principle of Complementarity [xxi] which states that each way of describing the quanta of light, as a wave or a particle, complements the other, is a fundamental tenant of quantum theory. Both aspects are fundamental to reality. Matter can present itself in either state, but both states together are what matter is. We can never focus upon both states simultaneously as they are mutually exclusive.
As Danah Zohar (1991) suggests, according to the Uncertainty Principle[xxii] which, like the Principle of Complementarity is another of the tenants of quantum theory, while both states are necessary to fully grasp what being is, only one is available at any given time. It is the choice of the observer that determines the nature of the perception, as they are mutually exclusive. We can either measure the exact position of something like an electron when it manifests itself as a particle, or we can measure its momentum when it expresses itself as a wave. Furthermore, most electrons are neither fully particle or fully waves but rather some ‘confused mixture of the two known as a wave packet’, therefore we can only measure wave properties or particle properties, the exact properties of the duality must always elude any measurement, the most we can hope to know about any given wave packet is a fuzzy reading of its position and an equally fuzzy reading of its speed. It is this essential fuzzyness that has replaced the Newtonian concept of determinism where everything about reality is fixed, determined and measurable.
“The central problem in quantum physics is that the classical distinction between observer and observed system does not hold, and this results in the lack of a one-to-one correspondence between every element of the physical theory and the observed physical reality. What troubled physicists about this prospect was not that the reality disclosed by quantum physics could not be visualised based on experience in everyday visualisable reality – the unvisualisable character of the physical reality in modern physical theory had already been convincingly demonstrated by relativity theory. What was troubling here was the suggestion that we can no longer “see” the pre-existent truths of physical reality through the lenses of physical theory in the classical sense.
The essential paradox of the Wave-particle dualism as visualisable phenomena is easily demonstrated. View the particle as a point-like something, like the period at the end of this sentence, and the wave as continuous and spread out. The obvious logical problem is how can a particular something localized in space and time, the particle, also be the spread out and continuous something, the Wave? Quantum mechanics not only says unequivocally that quanta exhibit both properties, but also provides the mathematical formulism governing what we can possibly observe, or see, when we co-ordinate our experience with this reality in actual experiments. In Quantum physics, observational conditions and results are such that we cannot presume a categorical distinction between observer and the observing apparatus, or between the mind of the physicist and the results of physical experiments. The measuring aparatus and the existence of the observer are essential aspects of the act of observation in the quantum domain.”(Kafatos and Nadeau 1990).
So it seems that the problems raised by quantum physics should have instigated a complete transformation of our perception of reality from the classical deterministic model of Newtonian mechanics into what some theorists have described as a model of reality far more in tune with ancient sacred texts and the world views of indigenous cultures. David Bohm would be the most constantly cited theoretical physicist whose work has led to a number of publications concerning the esoteric implications of Quantum Physics as can be seen from the following passage. Bohm was deeply aware of the implications of his work and the similarities it had with sacred teachings particularly of sacred mystical origins. Matter and light are different vibrations of the same thing, as David Bohm suggests in a conversation with Reneé Weber, (Williams 1992) matter is like frozen and condensed light;
“D.B. Light is not merely electromagnetic waves but in a sense other kinds of waves that go at that speed. Therefore matter is a condensation of light into patterns moving back and forth at average speeds which are less than the speed of light….When we come to light we are coming to the fundamental activity in which existence has its ground, or at least coming close to it.
R.W. Why is speed the determinant?
D.B. We say that there is no speed at all at light. To call it speed is merely using ordinary language. In itself, when it is self-referential, there is no time, no space, no speed….It’s just a primary conception. As you move faster and faster according to relativity your time rates slow down and the distance gets smaller, so as you approach very high speeds your own interval time and distance become less, and therefore if you were at the speed of light you could reach from one of the universe to the other without changing your age at all.
R.W. Isn’t that saying its approaching a timeless state?
D.B That’s right. We’re saying that existentially speaking or logically speaking, time originates out of the timeless.
R.W. This is primary and time is a derivative of it, cutting it down, freezing it, arresting it.
D.B. Yes arresting it to a certain extent, not absolutely, but to a large extent.
R.W. When mystics use the visualisation of light they don’t use it only as a metaphor; to them it seems to be a reality. Have they tapped into matter and energy at a level where time is absent?
D.B. It may well be. That’s one way of looking at it. As I’ve suggested the mind has two-dimensional and three-dimensional modes of operation. It may be able to operate directly in the depths of the implicate order where this [timeless state] is the primary actuality. Then we could see the ordinary actuality as a secondary structure that emerges as an overtone of the primary structure….[light] is energy and its also information- content, form and structure. It’s the potential of everything….to understand light we’ll have to understand the structure underlying time and space more deeply…light transcends the present structure of time and space and we will never understand it properly in that present structure….[the implicate order] could handle it more naturally, mathematically speaking, because it doesn’t commit itself to the idea of separate points in space; but it may say that the underlying reality is something which is not localised, and light is also something that is not-localised. One view says that light moves from one place to another through a series of positions, and the other view says it doesn’t do that at all. Rather, light exists; it just simply is”
The paradox of this state of reality is profound and through it we can locate an entanglement of oppositional values where the relationship between infinity and zero seem to be located in a singular position. As light is no space-time it exists everywhere and nowhere. As the speed of light is approached, the distance travelled reaches infinity and the time taken becomes instantaneous that is, no-time. This relationship of extremes echoes the problem set out in the contemplation of nothing which blows up in a singularity as nothing can’t be divided by nothing. The term remains undefined as anything even nothing, that is attempted to be divided by nothing invokes infintisemals which in turn invokes something so the statement nothing is nothing equals the statement nothing is something. (Kosko 1994).
Fitzrov Capra (1988) Gary Zukov (1984) both physicists, led the way in the 1970’s with attempts to not only popularise the new physics and write it in a language that was accessible to the lay person, but they were also struck by the similarity that the revelations of quantum theory shared with eastern mystical and esoteric texts. With their perspective they attempted to reconcile Eastern philosophy and Western science which in turn revealed a humanistic vision of the universe as a ‘cosmic dance of paradoxical yet unified relationships.’ Their work has instigated a huge market of popular science writing where the illusive “Theory of Everything” was for a while considered the ultimate potential, that science would be able to cast aside the veil to reality once and for all and declare all of her secrets revealed. Nearly twenty years later[xxiii] we find the problem still to be too vast, but the thirst for knowledge creating interesting transdisciplinary studies that focus upon the unity in diversity that is the complexity of the reality has prevailed. Micheal Talbot’s (1996) book “The Holographic Universe” has explored these connections between ancient mystical religions and contemporary physics, with particular interest in re-establishing a spiritually rich view of the universe that sees thought to be generative and the universe a conscious living organism. Relying heavily on the work of David Bohm, Carl Pribram, Illya Prigogine, Henry Stapp and many others who have been integral theorists in mapping out the nature of the contemporary perspective of reality that Western science is building, Talbot shows how the world views of indigenous cultures and the views that support the complementary medical perspectives share similar territories that he describes through the analogy of the hologram. David Peat (1996) and George Johnson (1996) are two authors who have compared the cosmological world views of American indigenous cultures with that of contemporary Western Science. The similarities are striking and suggest that perhaps we have, in this paradoxical science of unity born out of complexity, the very means though which some form of reconciliation between previously opposed cultural perspectives may take place.
Although it is apparent that contemporary science has come full circle to appreciate the perspectives of a more spiritually based understanding of reality, the physical reality that we are engaged with every day assumes the perspective of a Western Classical Model that is upheld as a central embodiment of truth which informs the politically and socially active institutional bodies that allow continued manipulation of cultures, environments and anything that fits the identification of otherness.
In his introduction to “The Spirit of Philosophy”, Josiah Royce (1983) considers the problems that beset the philosopher as being limited by 1, the fact that it is one persons impression of reality and 2, that it is one persons impression from within the age and culture that s/he is writing. In a universe that is full of oppositional perspectives, truth is perceived through the manifold unity of all that is expressed.
“How difficult it is to comprehend that seemingly opposing assertions about the world may, in a deeper sense, turn out to be equally true…how for instance, the optimist, who declares this world to be divine and good, and the pessimist, who finds in our finite world everywhere struggle and sorrow, and who calls it all evil, may be, and in fact are alike right, each in his own sense; or of how the constructive idealist, who declares all reality to be the expression of divine ideals, and the materialist, who sees in nature only matter in motion and law absolute, may be but viewing the same truth from different sides…the truth about this world is certainly so manifold, so paradoxical, so capable of equally truthful and yet seemingly opposed descriptions, as to forbid us to declare a philosopher wrong in his doctrine merely because we find it easy to make plausible a doctrine that at first sight appears to conflict with his own…..It is the union of many such insights that will be the one true view of life.”
This perspective is echoed by Walter Watson in his book “The Architectonics of Meaning” where he explores methods for approaching the diversity of philosophical discourse from a pluralistic perspective.
There is a strange irony involved in the twisted nature of Western science revisiting the sacred ideas of Ancient and Eastern philosophical systems. The new physics, in its attempts to understand the nature of reality, has found that the Western lineage that grew out of the Baconian, Cartesian and Newtonian models of reductionism and Empiricism, has found its limitations to lead it into a point of no return literally. Associated with the re-enchantment found in Eastern philosophy, there was simultaneously an outcry for change as the mechanistic attitude was recognised as a limiting constraint that perceived nature as a static and inhuman environment as opposed to the dynamic process reality that was beginning to be illuminated once again. With this picture of reality, classical science was cast as the destructive force that had the potential to destroy the planet and its inhabitants. Yet ironically within the Western tradition itself, there was a philosophical lineage that passed through the work of Whitehead and Bergson, particularly, who considered the process of reality as a unitory whole to be fundamental. This line of thought has been able to lead us back into an original philosophical system based upon dialectics and the reconciliation of opposites, and which has been the centre of all of the great flourishing of Western Humanitarian Epochs[xxiv], as it can be traced to the translations and republishing of a particular collection of books called the Corpus Hermetica, or the books of Thoth. Furthermore, the hermetic doctrines have been influential if not the basis of Eastern, Middle Eastern and Indian Philosophical systems. The books of Thoth or Hermes Trismagistus, are considered to be the original writings authored by the creator of heiroglyphics. He was the god of mathematics, science, magic and the primary creator god that participated throughout all of Egyptian history. He held the key to life and death and was able to resurrect the dead through complex rituals as exemplified through the Pyramid texts of ancient Egypt.
“Some of the Demotic sayings, however, go back to much earlier sources in Egypt. Some Hermetic Themes have also been traced to Egypt by Erik Iversen in his book Egyptian and Hermetic Doctrine (Copenhagen 1984), where he shows that the Memphite Theology contains the beginnings of a Nous-Logos doctrine. Other Egyptian elements rightly assigned by him to the Hermetic works are the bisexuality of the demiurge, the concepts of time and eternity, and the correspondences of (1) psyché and ba and of (2) pneuma and ‘the breath of life’. The teaching about death and judgement, especially about the ‘Second Death’, also bears an Egyptian stamp, although the theme of judgement seems to have been taken over by the Greeks from Egypt at a much earlier stage, with Crete probably acting as a mediating instrument. In the case of the Hermetic borrowings one need not assume a direct contact with Egyptian texts; bilingual literati may well have provided the material.”(Griffiths 1991)
Thoth is the reconciler of Opposites, and through this he stood between the two worlds of life and death and had the power to resurrect the dead and fragmented. He said to have
‘succeeded in understanding the mysteries of the heavens and to have revealed them by inscribing them in sacred books which he then hid here on earth, intending that they should be searched for by future generations but found only by the fully worthy.’[xxv]
“It was his will and power that were believed to keep the forces of heaven and earth in equilibrium. It was his great skill in celestial mathematics which made proper use of the laws upon which the foundation and maintenance of the universe rested.”[xxvi]
The process of Alchemy as a transformational art, sought to separate the base substance into its constitutive parts and through various processes of separation, purification, putrifaction and sublimation the substances would have its opposing extremes revealed; all impurities would be removed and the essence remaining, the tincture if you like, would be reconstituted into a pure form. As a magical process the physical practical work was reflected in the spiritual process of self purification, where the physical embodied the spiritual as a transubstatiational process.
The primary tenent of Alchemy was the Credo: All is one and one is all, where the essential teaching assumed that the macrocosmic was reflected within the microcosmic and hence man was a reflection of the universe itself.(Jung, 1977,1990,1983) The dynamics of opposition were the fundamental generative processes of manifestation that “became” out of the bifurcation or chaos of the rising logos. (Schwaller de Lubricz, 1986) This rising logos, or primary cause was the expression of nothing into everything literally. The original nonspatial non temporal consciousness that was the singularity of God itself, is seen to literally turn inside out and upside down, that is it inverts itself to become its opposite, which is everything as expressed by the infinite expanse that is the rising logos. And in the beginning was the word and the word was God. (Gospel of Saint John, Holy Bible, NIV, 1984) The tension is realised when this infinite expanse twists upon itself as is seeks out and is attracted to its opposite, that is its origin. Here the two opposed extremes unite in a “Mysterious Coniunction” and out of this union that manifestation of spacetime is generated. (Purcell 1998)
Many creation myths describe this paradoxical moment where the One original being realises that it was born of a mysterious origin that presents itself as the offspring of this original being and in uniting the mother daughter bride become one with the father son and groom. ( Von Franz 1995)
This moment of becoming into existence has been symbolised through many traditions both pagan, hermetic and Christian, as a pelican opening its breast to feed its seven young. The mother sustains at the expense of her own life, the multiplicity of her progeny. This symbol is also the same shape as the flask that the alchemists used to prepare much of their work. It too was called a pelican. It was the symbol of the universe, and as Jung understood it, it was the primary symbol of transformation. It was the Mercurious, the universal essence as depicted by the pelican and the Ouroborus, the snake eating its tale. Jung knew the relationship, (Jung 1990) but was unaware that both of these shapes have a single unifying relationship. The pelican and the Ouroborus are actually two postures of the one topological shape, the Klein Bottle.
The Klein Bottle is the closed non-orientable surface with Euler characteristic = 0. There are a number of ways to create a klein bottle, however all of these physical constructions ignore the attributes of the singularity that is characteristic of this shape. The neck of the bottle passes through its body and reunites with its base. The position where this passing through occurs is zero point as the is the neck at that point. A Klein bottle may be created by attaching two Möebius bands of opposite chirality, along their boundary circles, or by attaching a circle to the boundary circle of a single Möebius strip. Sheila Morgan has approached the construction of the bottle through diagonally weaving with metal thread. Interestingly, she has been able to construct the entire model with a single thread of copper wire that joins its end to beginning without breaking the weaving sequence. Through graphing the structure of the bottle from this perspective, the point of passing through the body is a point between the threads of the weave, and we find some interesting results. At the point of singularity, that is where the neck is of zero dimension and the body is of zero dimension all of the structures body it channelled through itself, and the shape can be seen in a new and dynamic way. Here, the Klein bottle has the totality of itself passing through itself. In a sense, the extreme relationships of infinity and zero become located in the one position.
Pulling the neck through its body, we find a most curious surprise. As I mentioned earlier, Jung was aware that both the Ouroborus and the Pelican where symbolic of the Mercurious, the universal essence. Here in the Klein bottle we find the main postures of the Klein bottle describe these two symbols perfectly. In “The relationships between Zero and Infinity” (Purcell 1998) I speak in detail concerning the historical references associated with this shape, and also how the structure of the Klein bottle was well known as a representation of the universe itself. For the purposes of this paper however I will not repeat myself, but suggest that references be sought out by those who are interested.
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Johnson, George; (1996) “Fire In The Mind; Science, Faith and the Search for Order.” Viking Press.
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Zukav, Gary; (1984) “The Dancing Wu Li Masters; an Overview of the New Physics” Flamingo Press.
[i] I would like to acknowledge the support that I have received from the Department of Philosophy, University of Newcastle, particularly from Dr John Wright, Dr Cliff Hooker, Dr Bill Herfel, Yin Gao, Sheila Morgan, Dr Wayne Christenson, Dr Norton Jacobi, Dr David Dockerell and Dr John Collier.
[ii] Phillip Yampolsky, quoted from “The Myth Of Irrationality: The Science of the Mind From Plato to Star Trek., By John McCrone, McMillon 1993.
[iii] Ram Dass, quoted from “The Myth Of Irrationality: The Science of the Mind From Plato to Star Trek., By John McCrone, McMillon 1993.
[iv] Mastert Choa Kok Sui, “Meditations for Soul Realisation”, Institutes for Inner Studies, 2000.
[v] John McCrone, “The Myth of Irrationality: The Science of The Mind From Plato to Star Trek.” , Carroll and Graf Publishers, 1993.
[vi] There have been a number of efforts to design a model of reality that takes this multiplicity of world views into consideration without the assumption that any model is a “true” model. The Multi Modal Framework conceived by anthropologist and physicist Geoffrey Samuels is one such model. See “Mind Body and Culture: Anthropology and the Biological Interface” Cambridge University Press 1990.
[vii] Preliterate is a most unfortunate word as it assumes that given enough time literacy would develop in these cultures. In many cases it is as unsatifactory as the word “Primitive” .
[viii] Danah Zohar. “The Quantum Self” Flamingo, 1991.
[ix] “Physics of the Stoics”, S.Sambursky., Princeton University Press 1987.Page 104
[x] Ibid Page 104
[xi] Alfred North Whitehead, “The concept of Nature”, (C.U.P. 1920) Chapter III; “Science and the Modern World” (Macmillan 1925), ch. VII; “Process and Reality” (Macmillan 1929), ch. II. Quoted in “Physics of the Stoics” S.Sambursky.
[xii] The Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language, Portland House, 1983.
[xiii] Alain Danielou, “The Gods Of India, Hindu Polytheism”, Inner Traditions, NY, 1985.
[xiv] Alain Danielou, “The Gods Of India, Hindu Polytheism”, Inner Traditions, NY, 1985.
[xv] “The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, edited by Ted Honderich, Oxford University Press 1995.
[xvi] Many writers have focused upon affirmation particularly in association with the evidence gained from placebo experiments. Most alternative medical modalities rely upon the notion of thought being generative and hence the power and usefulness of positive affirmation. There are many books that would be useful, one that gives a detailed bibliography of relevant material is “The Holographic Universe” by Micheal Talbot for a transdisciplinary study of the post quantum cosmology and its implications concerning alternative medicine.
[xvii] Alfred Tarski, (1902-1983), was a mathematician from Poland who’s early paper “The concept of Truth in Formalized Languages (1935) established the foundations of modern logical theory. (Honderich 1995)
[xviii] Students were asked to consider certain ethical problems and to come to a conclusion as to which position they would take. It became apparent that the more the students consider the complexities of a problem the less capable they were of making a definitive decision about their ethical choices.
[xix] Lengthy email exchanges between the author and Howard bloom over a period of six months explore these assumptions.
[xx] An attracter is an equilibrium state or set of states to which a dynamical system converges. Formally a closed set E such that for a given mapping f,,f(E) is contained in E, and for all x in some given set containing E, the distance from f*(x) to E tends to zero as m tends to infinity. It is usually required that the orbit of f is dense in E for some value of x. If the attracter E, is a fractal set, then it is said to be strange, for example in the julia sets zà z*- m makes E strange for some values of m . (m is the micro or Möebius function). [*=m *=2]
[xxi] The Principle of Complementarity was devised by Niels Bohr from his observations of the waveparticle duality of light where the opposites aspects were perceived as complements of the whole.
[xxii] The Uncertainty Principle was devised by Werner Heisenberg concerning the indetermination of knowing the complete nature of light at any given moment.
[xxiii] The first of these books Capras Tao Of Physics was originally published in 1976.
[xxiv] The Renaissance was attributed to the Rebirth of Pagan knowledge, instigated by Cosimo, the king of Florence, and his earnest passion for the scholarship of ancient Greek texts, particularly Platonic and Hermetic, that is attributed the Hermes Trismagistus, the Thrice Great, who was Thoth. These texts were said to be copies made at the Library of Alexandria, of ancient hieroglyphic texts that were translated into Demotic and Coptic script at about 400 to 200 B.C. Wallis Budge, Frances Yates, Carl Jung, Maurice Nicol and many others who have explored the nature of alchemy and its relationships through other cultures have together revealed an extraordinary history of pagan illumination and Christian execution.
[xxv] “The Egyptian Hermes”, Cambridge University Press, 1987, Garth Fowden, as quoted in “Keeper Of Genisis” by Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock. Heinemann: London, 1996.
[xxvi] Wallis Budge, “The Gods of The Egyptians”, Volume 1, quoted in “Fingerprints of the Gods” by Graham Hancock.