Article By: Dr Bronwen Rees
The idea of consciousness and consciousness studies has evolved over the past century in the West as a way of helping describe our inner and collective experiences, and to account for mystical and spiritual experience.Yet what consciousness is remains still a mystery, ever open to change. Bronwen Rees offers some reflections on the nature of consciousness, drawing on the work of Jose Arguelles to suggest that our current understanding is based on a mechanistic view of time, one which is only relevant in a linear paradigm. A rethinking of the relationship between consciousness, time and matter may open up pathways to moving away from our current state of alienation in the universe to newer, more expansive and compassionate dimensions.
Consciousness, time and matter
How do we know what we know? The simplest of questions, yet by failing to ask this we have emprisoned ourselves in a uni-dimensional mechanistic universe. Our sense of ‘knowing’, based on its limited Newtonian assumptions, has lost a sense of wonder and the mysterious. Yet to question the source of our knowledge is dangerous territory, for it may lead us to challenge the value and nature of the manifestations of technologies that are built up on a rationalist and reductionist form of knowing. This way of knowing has lead us to cut up and fragment our beautiful universe into measurable ‘bits’ – be they atoms, particles, or quarks. Tragically, in splitting our material world into its constituent parts, we have also fragmented ourselves. In this article, I am examining the assumptions of this way of knowing, in particular the understanding of time.
The reductionist tendency can be traced back in recent philosophy to Descartes and Newton whose thinking and work together offered up the possibility that, as human beings, we could know ourselves purely through reason. By such reason we could measure and objectify the universe in which we found ourselves. Not only was Nature measured and objectified, but, through the work of Darwin, we ourselves became the object of scientific observation. We were no longer creatures of God, limited beings, but with a chance of reaching heaven, but purely a tiny spot of consciousness that had developed over millennia of evolution. A picture which was further enhanced by the new science of psychology which, at the beginning of the 20th century, brought even our unconscious under the light of rational investigation. So not only were our bodies objects of evolutionary trajectory, but also our psyches were seen to be subject to powerful biological drives - amoral, aggressive, erotic or mad.
These natural drives and instincts became subject to the gaze of psychiatrists and physicians. Those demonstrating passion or instinct became defined and hence incarcerated as those who were insane. Those defining the 'other' as insane, suppressed their own drives through so-called civilising processes of culture, science and economy, such that this cauldron of unacknowledged bestial drives was tragically acted out in the violent and amoral history of the 20th century. The gods, and God had lost their place, and humans were left flailing without the support of a benign universe.
With this reductionist fetish, the place for philosophy, and large metaphysical systems became lost. We had forgotten to ask questions about the basis of our 'knowing', since our relationship to the universe was no longer a problem. We had become defined and identified with Nature, and believed ourselves to be merely a social construction of our environment. Nature (and therefore, paradoxically, our selves) was to be manipulated to meet our own materialist desires. We no longer had much sense of our own personal destiny, which became just a figment of our imagination. The post-modern, fragmented subject, wandering round in an alienated universe was born – and with it the angst, terror and fear of being in an internal world in another, objective cosmology that was both incomprehensible and inconsistent. Nature was there merely to be utilised in order to serve material demand, but was increasingly irrational.
We became both the creator, and the object of, commodifying and homogenising forces that ensured the growth of advanced capitalist societies. With increasing mechanisation necessitated by industrialisation, human lives became increasingly objectified, subject to the imperatives of standardised work and economic measurements that lead to ever-increasing efficiencies in transforming matter into commodities that could be traded throughout the globe. Our innate creativity was turned in on ourselves and there were no longer any deeper universal truths to which the human mind could turn. The ‘war against terror’ manifested this enshadowed angst - where it was impossible to know who or where the enemy were – except that weapons of mass destruction were scattered throughout the world, which could be unleashed at any moment, by any government. As a result of this fear, governments could justify their own aggressive financial and war-like actions peaking in the second Gulf War, where ironically, these weapons of mass destruction were never to be found in the deserts and caves of the devasted, but once beautiful, Iraq.
The 21st century psyche and its managerial conditioning
This reductionist paradigm has so fragmented us from our universe, that we have become locked in our own worlds, from which there are few pathways of connection. We are emprisoned by the social and economic institutions into which we are embedded – monitored by systems of control that encourage and measure different behaviours in the name of efficiency and 'performance management'. These managerial systems govern our health, education and government processes and their tentacles reach deeply into the fabric of our intimate lives.
These tentacles operate through a rational, managerial language that has become the everyday medium of communication throughout the world. This discourse has taken over every aspect of our daily lives. The fear and angst of post-modern man is daily replicated in organisational rules and regulations where behaviour is controlled through the instruments of new technology such as e-mail which enables the development of vast paperless systems, rendering this surveillance ever more efficient. These rules and regulations run throughout public as well as private sectors, so that health and education fail to address the symptons of our malaise.
Thus, the very pinnacle of our conscious evolution as human beings – self-reflective consciousness – has lead us into a cycle where the mechanistic world, developed as a result of this newly-discovered skill, and the epitome of rationality and industrialised capitalism, becomes internalised and manifests as disconnected fragments in our psyches leading to alienation, helplessness, and madness. This is truly a double bind.
As a result of this fragmenting process, we have lost connection with our bodies, our souls, with the universe, and with one another. And more importantly, we have lost connection between men and women. This is not just in a physical sense – but in a sense of what men and women provide for each other. The attraction between the two is the most powerful life force we know, and it is this which has become damaged, etiolated, through these reductionist processes that know no God, no myth, no archetype.
Time and matter
And yet how paradoxical that it is that those beings who may be considered the most responsible for this reductionism, physicists, last century uncovered the undeniable truth, that the smaller we cut up the universe, matter actually escapes us. In the famous double slit-hole experiment, it became clear that matter could not be reduced to particles. When experimenters turned the instruments of their measurement on a particle, it turned into a wave. When they examined the wave, it turned into a particle. It seemed that at their ultimate, physical processes were actually affected by consciousness. Somehow, matter itself escaped their instruments of their measurement. In some indefinable, mysterious manner, the universe rights itself into a different whole, and cannot be objectified or measured.
However, the implications of this discovery have not been fully acknowledged at the level of our consciousness. So, whilst the discoveries of quantum physics are used in the development of new technology, such as mobile phones and instant world-wide communication, which form the basis for managerial actions, our thoughts are still conditioned in a Newtonian worldview, underpinning philosophical, educational and medical processes. This means that we are using technological instruments developed in one dimension, whilst our minds and institutions are structured and conditioned within another. This did not escape the attention of one of the greatest pioneers of these physical discoveries, Einstein, who saw the consequences of such an error:’ Since the advent of the Nuclear age, everything has changed but the way people think, thus we drift towards unparalleled catastrophe.’
One of the few scientists to address the paradigmatic issues of these discoveries was the Russian Vedansky. He posed the important question:'How can processes which seem purely physical be affected by consciousness?' For him this became a matter of our understanding of time, and he opened up radically new possibilities by noting that :' Minkovsky's and his predecessors' concept of time as the fourth dimension of space is a mathematical abstraction having logically no ground in scientific reality. Time is not a dimension of metric geometry. In geometry, time may be expressed vectorially, but it is obvious that such an expression does not embrace all of its properties in natural phenomena studied by the naturalist…The time of the naturalist is not the geometrical time of Minkovsky, nor is it the time of mechanics and theoretical physics.' (p.44)
The history of time
If our understanding of time may be erroneous, then maybe the current industrialised and painful conditions can be traced even further back to the beginnings of our consciousness of time. Mechanistic time as we know it began in the Sumerian period around 3000 BC, when the day became divided into 24 hours, 60 minutes, 60 seconds based on 360 degree circle, which even today is the basis for our modern clock even though it was not invented until 4,500 years later. However, there is here, as Arguelles (2002), has cogently argued, a manifest error, but one that humanity has taken for granted, and which has become a 'truth' that conditions our 21st century reality. The clock itself, based around this geometrical abstraction, is centred on the twelve-part division of a flat circle, a spatial plane that clearly has nothing to do with the dynamics of time. This error of mistaking the division of a two-dimensional plane in space for a measure of time was transmitted not only through the clock, but through the twelve-month Gregorian calendar as well. This gross error has resulted, from the origins of linear time, in humanity being lead away from natural time of the universe!
The consequences of such an error are enormous, and reaching their peak in the conditions that are currently manifesting in the universe. The calendar, since it organises our activities, is a macro-conditioning organising principle, which when developed over time, imposes sets of perceptions which are taken as natural. These perceptions become shaped by behaviour into economic and social institutions which further condition our perceptions. This is a very limited feedback loop, such that it is merely our mechanical world which is reflected back to us which, at the beginning of the 21st century has become naturalised into global capitalism. One of the consequences of this bizarre situation is that, as this mechanistic clock has conditioned every moment of our lives, we have the sense that our universe is speeding up, giving us an illusion that we have no time. One way of thinking of this phenomenon is that, as we are out of time with nature, we feel a constant sense of angst, that our collective consciousness conditions us to believe can be satisfied with material goods. So we speed up our production processes in the creation of more and more goods that equally fail to satisfy us. This is an exponential cycle. The earliest physical expression of this speeding up arose first with the transportation processes which enabled us to move faster than any other species beginning with the motion of the locomotive, and latterly with the motor car. Yet, now, the universe has shown us the folly of this behaviour: the love of speed (a movement in tune with the flow of energy) has clashed with our equal love of health and safety (a control mechanism of managerial systems). Millions of cars are being withdrawn from the market because, ironically, the accelerator pedal sticks and drivers suffer the frightening experience of not being able to control the speed of their cars. Reading the signs, it is clear that we are unable to control the speed of our own existence – surely the one thing which as rational beings we should be able to control. Thus the irrepressible forces of Nature are embedded even within the material transformations that try and control and manipulate her.
So we could say that the jailer of the mechanistic universe in which we jointly wander is mechanical time. The managerial systems which rule us are based on completing a certain action within a certain timespace. This action usually impacts on another department, institution or being in the system which has to carry out that action.These actions are co-ordinated throughout the globe by new technology. These actions lead to the transformation of natural resources into ever-more material goods. These material goods increase the speed of our communication, particularly through mass transportation of manufactured goods across the globe. The need for mechanical time to control these processes becomes more urgent. These processes are driven by mathematically-based economic systems which bear no relationship to the physical transportation and manufacturing processes. Thus, in a so-called period of leisure, most of us feel pressed by the ever more urgent demands of a voracious system which everywhere requires more growth – which both impacts negatively on the global environment, and at the same time demands more of our linear time. The consequences of our actions have become divorced from our senses. So our universe truly has become Huxley's brave new world. It is no surprise that we are overcome by physical and mental illness, as our bodies and minds attempt to adjust to a pattern that is out of keeping with the information of our senses, which convey emotional and physiological messages of a different order.
Thus the structures of a mechanistic universe have become embedded in the structures of our mind and the institututions that the mind creates, and this has evolved over a period of 5000 years – indeed since the beginning of the recording of existence as historical. Our effort goes into denying the perceived chaos that our senses bring in from the natural world, and therefore our energies become taken up with rigid denial, or escapism through narcotics, or abstract activities such as the internet, in which we are the passive participants narcissistically engaging with a computer screen. We do not feel, touch or smell those with whom we communicate. Or there is the uncomfortable suspicion that we might ourselves be mad, and therefore it is safer to keep quiet, and even further isolated. This jailer is unseen and out of awareness.
The Law of Time
So what is the nature of time? What if it existed in a different relationship to space and motion? How is it that in spring a flower begins to unfold its petals? What is the mechanism by which this happens? Jose Arguelles argues that time may not be the linear mechanism we understand, but that it is possible that it is in synchronistic relationship to natural cycles. In this view, time is not merely a vector of motion and space, but is a universal factor of synchronisation.This synchronicity can be seen through the ever-occurring biological cycles which demonstrate the manifestation of time in the space of living matter. These are the mechanisms by which events unfold mysteriously in our universe. It is these biological cycles which have been systematically eradicated from the industrialised world, bringing with it the severe symptoms of alienation. According to Arguelles, the factor of universal sychronisation is based around harmonic ratios that determine the different life processes of different organisms. These harmonic ratios have been recognised as the fractal patterns of nature, and Arguelles suggests that this is a 13:20 as extrapolated from the Mayan mathematical prophecies, based on natural cycles of nature, and not geometric principles of the Sumerian calendar. It is this flow of time that determines when a flower opens its petals, when the time of death has arrived.
According to Arguelles:’time is therefore radically non-linear, and as it is synchronistically instantaneous, is both “vertical” in relation to space (which is “horizontal” and “radial” from the perspective of its own dimension, the fourth). Thus rather than being the small t line or arrow at the bottom of the physicist’s graph, time as the fourth dimension is greater than and inclusive of the third dimension, much as the etheric atmosphere includes and surrounds the physical Earth in a radial “all-at-oneness.”' ( Arguelles, 2002, p.42)
This may not be as implausible as it sounds when we consider the findings of the biologists Sheldrake and Lipton who illuminate a new way of understanding the organising and evolutionary principles in Nature. One such principle, for example is that of ‘Formative Causation’ by which information about form and behaviour for systems (living things) may be passed across space and time in consonance with other similar communities with a similar resonance (for instance animals of the same species). This suggests a fractal resonance which implies in its turn a synchronistic principle. The findings of new physics also support this possibility, particularly in the work of the physicist David Bohm. Bohm has posited the ideas of the universe as a 'holomovement'. Here, matter is not fragmented particles, but rather consists of countless enfoldings and unfoldings between two orders: the implicate and the explicate. The implicate is a deeper and mysterious level of reality, in which matter from the explicate is enfolded in a constant dynamic. The flowing exchange between the two orders explains how particles can shapeshift from one kind of form to another. This existence of a deeper and holographically organised order explains how reality becomes quantum at a non-local level. Thus information, which informs the behaviour, of say different species, as discovered by Sheldrake can appear in different locations at the same time. It may be synchronised by the unifying factor of fourth-dimensional time.
This view of the world was already pointed to by the work of the depth psychologist Jung and his visionary work on synchronicity and archetypes. For all of this life, Jung had noted the phenomena of coincidences that are so unusual that they cannot be accounted for by rational explanation. Jung encountered many of these during his work, and noticed that they almost always accompanied periods of emotional intensity and transformation. The classic example of this is Jung’s scarab story. Jung was treating a woman who was strictly stuck in a rational mode. After a number of frustrating sessions, the woman told Jung of a dream involving a scarab beetle. Jung knew that the scarab beetle represented rebirth, and wondered if this meant she was about to change. He was just about to tell her this when something tapped on his window, and he looked up to see a gold-green scarab at the window. From a whole lifetime of witnessing such coincidences, Jung finally wrote his 'Theory of synchronicity' in which he argued that causality and non-causality stood in a mutual relationship and represented two orders of manifestation. Synchronicity is a a hypothetical factor equal in importance to causality as a principle of explanation. The difference being the intensity of affect present as determined by the meaning given to that event. The two principles provide a complementary explanation of two levels of connection between events. For Jung, physics could be compared with the conscious, and psychology with the unconscious (Main, 2009). These levels of connectivity can be accounted for in Bohm's implicate and explicate order.
Critical to all these theories and phenomena is a meeting point between consciousness or life and manifestation in time. If we return to our discussion of time, then, following Arguelles, time in a fourth dimension is considered to be an infinitely locatable point, and this point is the point of awareness at which an individual body becomes aware of matter in time. Here the subjective description or awareness of time cannot be separated from the issue of consciousness. This point, according to Arguelles, is the Locus of Consciousness. This is the point in the flow of moment-to-moment instantaneity that is synchronous with the flow of space, and is the point at which the time vector and space perception connect. From this defining point of consciousness, in the here and now, the flow of space creates a horizontal sensation – one direction flows to the past, the other to the future. This can be described as the sensation of time.
The well-known Buddhist question, whether a tree has actually fallen in a forest if there is no observer, points to this paradox. These are the paradoxes of time that have been the quest and experience of eternal countless saints, mystics and yogis, shamans, witchdoctors, druids, pointing, all of them, to experiences beyond time. But the time that they have necessarily referred to is the conditioned time of the mechanical clock and calendar. And even these experiences, belonging to the wisdom traditions, have become largely lost to the modern individual. Because we are locked in a mechanistic paradigm wherein we have no relationship to ourselves or one another, we have also locked our access to the understandings of the wisdom and spiritual traditions, whose practices and teachings can release us from mechanical time.This access has been locked since they are not compatible with the scientific method. Thus despite the longevity and authority of these traditions, which used to bear an organic relationship to the society in which they arose,they are deemed to be anomalies, subject to ‘paranormal’ scientific investigation. Since the experiences of mystics and saints are unnmeasurable in a scientific paradigm, they are deemed either not to exist, are only for the enlightened few, or are the experiences of the mad. Yet it was always in the relationship between the inner and the outer, between heaven and earth, that insight into the conditioned nature of our experience, and hence time itself arose. We have gone to sleep, and forgotten that our perception of the universe is the consequence of an iterative process between experience and so-called materiality.
So, rather than looking at our watches for a measurement of time, or responding to the warning alarm on our mobile phones, we may try to experience the flow of time through the moment of awareness at which we come into contact with any object, person, activity, through our different senses. Within this moment lie the possibilities for expansion inwards and outwards. In this way, we can say that consciousness is a point of meeting, and of transformation.
The world of a mechanistic universe does not contain these meeting or points of transformation, since it is linear, and pre-ordained, determined by the revolutions of the gigantic turn of the clock – arbitrated by others who are themselves controlled by the same mechanistic clock. It is not surprising that this has such a damaging effect on our relationships, since there is no real meeting in time. The mechanistic clock is out of synch with the natural, and truly unstoppable, energies of the universe.
And herein lies hope. Our brave new world can be transformed into a beautiful new world, if we can dissolve the structures of our mind conditioned by the mechanical clocks in which we have imprisoned ourselves, and open up to re-finding our place in the universe. New spiritual practices are acting as gateways to this beautiful world. This holonomic vision can be experienced through working with energetic blockages in the body which obscure the spirals of new time. Reconnecting with our senses through mind/body practices such as Kum Nye can facilitate awakenings to the energetic body. These are not rigidified by mechanistic time, but take into account the holistic nature of existence. We cannot be separated from the whole except by mechanical time which fixes us in an economic prison.
By not asking questions of our existence, we deny ourselves the spiralling, inflowing of the universal energies which are in processes of transformation. What might it be like to open to these energies, to embrace the powers of the universe, rather than re-creating it technologically on the computer screens and games, which emulate these processes? What might it be like to connect with another human in the ‘knowingness’ of these processes? What might it be like to embrace the possibility that our bodies themselves embrace an infinity of black holes, which lead us deeper into a sense of oneness?
Consciousness as time and matter in relationship
So how may we describe this point? I have offered a scientific explanation of what is actually a broadening and deepening exploration of consciousness as a flowing process; somewhere taking form, through being seen, met, and coming into relationship. Felt and experienced, the experienced and the experiencer move on. Movements that can be measured by time, yet where time as we know it expands or contracts, transforming, shifting. Where time is perhaps best conceived as a repeated pattern, but subtly changing.
Part of this transition from the old to the new, means finding a way back into relationship with ourselves and with myself to the Other, and with the Other, to nature and the universe. Opening to the idea of consciousness as flow is a gateway for making these connections. Consciousness is not just the ‘brain’, the ‘mind’ or that bubble in which ‘I’ exist. Consciousness can be likened more to a flowing stream, meeting and parting with different phenomena, which are also flowing in their own ways. This way, natural cycles repeat themselves, and change, but always there is a recognition, a ‘knowing’ that gives us ground. There is a recognition in the pattern, but always it is different. It is a constant dynamic – the ever-open play of the universe. Cycles within cycles. Whilst we may long for that which is lost, we are constantly surprised that it is just around the corner, maybe in a different form! To the early 21st mind, with its fetish for monitoring and fixing, this is truly terrifying. Time, exemplified in 2010 by the development of the world’s most accurate clock, loses its place, and we may embrace, that which has been predicted – a fourth dimension. And to understand that it is beyond anything that our conditioned minds understand. Slowly, we may find that there is a place for us all here – a sense of belonging, to that which we thought we had lost. We can discover confidence in a life that is different, which has resonances of the past, but which most importantly requires us to lower our barriers and open to ourselves and to one another – in our own ‘unknowing’.
By opening to these possibilities, we give ourselves some choices. We can risk the death of not-knowing, or we can remain in our post-modern alienation. This ‘unknowing’ is the place where individual consciousness meets the other, and is open to transformation. So, facing, rather than denying the inevitability of change, we face up to the loss of the known, as each foray into the unknown changes us, and our consciousness.
These are ways of knowing that can give us strength, courage, a sense of passion. Within this field that we find ourselves lie the past, present and even our future. If we touch into that field, we may feel the resonance of past experiences, the resonances of others experiences, the resonance of the future. This cannot be encapsulated by words, but needs to be felt into, listened to, paid attention to.
If we listen to the body, our habitual abstracted perception, that has already encoded and reduced experience to concepts, can be gently pushed aside, and we hear the deeper resonance of the universe below. Here lie the perpetual vibrations of silence. A deep silence of unknowing. This is not passive, but an enfolded world or ocean of sensation, that moves in deep and connected waves.
Here, as in the bottom of the ocean, the distracted and fragments of the superficial lose their sway and their pulls, and it is time itself which has stopped. What if we were to conduct ourselves in the everyday from this space? This is the space of transition, the bridge between the material and the subjective, or heaven and earth. It could just be called peace, a peace of interconnected knowing.
This is not the unknowing of the womb experience, but rather a depth of wisdom that encapsulates all we have ever known, all that there is to know. As we collectively, from all ages, open ourselves to the new energies of the universe, to a more powerful collective, then as a species, we move into a new level that reaches from the soul of the earth deep into the edges of our own galaxy, and embraces that which is wounded, or shamed, and welcomes all to the heart of our knowing.
Knowing is to understand the limitless of not-knowing
Not-Knowing is to let go of the knowing that forms the Void
Knowing is to understand the joy of Not-Knowing the Other
Not-Knowing the Other is knowing how to love the Other
References
Arguelles, J ( 2002) Time and the Technosphere: The Law of Time in Human Affairs, Bear and Company, Vermont,US
Main, R (2009) Jung on Synchronicity and the Paranormal, Routledge, UK
Vernaksky, 'Problems in Biogeochemistry II, ' 511, quoted in Arguelles ( above)
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Reply #1 on : Thu July 07, 2011, 11:51:50