Part Two of The Afterlife of Memory

The Afterlife of Pantheism,Metaphysics and Mysticism In Physics: A Counterpoint To The Synthetic Age



Dedicated To The Inayati-Maimuni Tariqat of Sufi Hasidim and The Desert Fellowship

"Consciousness requires kind of a reflection or a mirroring. You can't have consciousness without something reflecting. So, there's a looping going on, a reflection which goes from the big bang to the big crunch, we'll call it. This is outside space and time, but it's bouncing around in that universe which, in a sense, the beginning and the end are already out there. And that reflection process is soul. Self is a reflection of that process, but it's a reflection in matter, and matter is something which is also a reflection process, but not of the soul, but of the spirit, and has to do with the fact that once you put in boundary conditions, like a beginning and an end, that sets up certain wave patterns, standing wave patterns, which are string patterns, and that's where we think particles come from. In the beginning of the universe when the strings first started going, these strings got caught into material substance, and that's where particles began to emerge, and the process keeps going. Particles are constantly emerging and disappearing and the universe is a constant bubbling dance of these things going on. But some of these things remained, and that's what has made up the material world. Now, that is matter, kind of a reflection of spirit. Self is a reflection of soul within the matter itself. Once the material field is formed, then it begins to reflect the soul pattern. So we have reflection upon reflection upon reflection. So self is a reflection of a reflection, so it's more of an illusion than anything else. That's why Buddhists talk about the illusion of "I" or the self."
-Physicist Dr Fred Allan Wolfe

The Metaphysical Connection To The Physics of a Parallel World
Notice the recurring conceptual theme of a mirror in metaphysics as well as in theory of quantum physics which is represented by the theory of parallel worlds. Readers familiar with this blog have probably have noticed my many repetitive references to Ibn Al Arabi. One of the most daunting and dense metaphysical conceptual modeling I have ever encountered was my intial introduction to his teachings, which was the incomparable medium of, "The Bezels of Wisdom." His thinking made Gurdjieff's "Beezlebub" a walk in the park while at the same time the precision and enfolded nature of this discourse deeply added to an understanding the context of my earlier foray into The Four Way and "The Work" as well as the approach and purpose of "Monsieur Bon Bon's" techniques.

The term "bezels" refers to each character being the human setting for the sign of different aspects of human discernment, which also directly relates to esoteric Christianity, which was Gurdjieff's forte. Each chapter focuses on a different historical prophet as the locus for a distinct type of divine self-manifestation by a reflecting principle. Ibn Arabi's favorite metaphors and principles emerge in almost all of his chapters, but several ruminations in particular may provide readers with reflections that--while still complex--provide relatively lucid accounts of tenets such as the Oneness of Being (wahdat al-wujud) the mirror, and the Complete Human Being (insan kamil). Within this there is a theme in the possible evolution of the human species.In the Shu'aib chapter, Ibn Arabi reveals the Oneness of Being as manifested in and through the Complete Human Being: "Who is here and what there? Who is here is what is there. He who is universal is particular, and he who is particular is universal. There is but one Essence." If you replay the video of the late physicist David Bohm from the first post, notice how he uses the word "essence." For the one who has realized the comprehensiveness of divine unity, no distinction emerges between the divine self and the human self. Ibn Arabi's intentional ambiguity concerning the third person pronoun bewilders the reader; to whom is Ibn Arabi referring when he writes "He"--the complete human being or God? Ibn Arabi strives to keep his readers' minds perpetually in motion, unable to reduce God or humanity to a static image. In having to struggle constantly to grasp Ibn Arabi's meaning, the reader remains open to the infinite possibilities in the text and by extension in the notion of self. This is the crux of a still evolving relationship between two enfolded realms of Arabi, the similarities in light to a incomparable, which was "mirrored" by the late physicist David Bohm in the last post.

Robert Foot of the University of Melbourne and Sergei Gninenko of CERN, spurred a renewed interest in the mirror matter conjecture. Each type of fundamental particle has a ‘twin brother’ in the theory, where ordinary photons, for example, can interact with ordinary electrons, but never with mirror electrons or mirror photons. Likewise, the mirror particles can only interact with each other. Right-handed neutrinos exist in the mirror universe, with the same mass as a left-handed neutrino.

The reason mirror matter is invisible is because objects are only seen because photons, the particles associated with light, reflect off them and into our eyes; however, mirror matter uses mirror photons, and our eyes are made of ordinary matter. The two are incompatible. The same is true with all of the other forces. The strong nuclear force is carried by ‘gluons’, but the mirror force is carried by ‘mirror gluons’ meaning that they are also incompatible. Thus, mirror matter is also undetectable, to a certain extent.

To Ibn Al Arabi, the term God is a comparable unifying principle in this mirror universe which he places in an interesting question which he also answers deftly in the "Metaphysics of Imagination".When you throw a ball, was it you who threw it or was it the unifying principle of God? In a realm of a parallel universes this seemingly zen like question which also addresses the modern term for God in the search for a singularity in causation which of course is a simplification of a complex relationship that can be distilled to Arabi's own answer to his original question which, also relates to implicate ordering in that it is both, qualified by the nature of relationships, again echoed by Bohm, between an incomparable and a similarity of "that" and "not that".

The Secret Heresy of One: David Bohm abd Ibn Al Arabi
Ibn Arabi's Abraham chapter likewise upsets customary perspectives toward the relationship between the individual and God: "He praises me and I praise him. He worships me and I worship him. He has no other becoming except mine." Statements such as these would ordinarily be seen as constituting a form of blasphemy--putting oneself on a level with God. However, for Ibn Arabi, to assert a unilateral relationship with God is to limit God; only through realizing God's presence within the self can a realization of one self begin to emerge. Hints in other teachings of this concept abound as when "Thomas said to them, "If I tell you one of the sayings he spoke to me, you will pick up rocks and stone me, and fire will come from the rocks and devour you." As they say, each according to their own capability to assimilate new conceptual models in an unconditioned analysis, and this in turn, leads to the clues that abound where the distribution of new models of reality had to be vouchsafed.

The image for depicting this unity arises in the form of the mirror metaphor. Ibn Arabi writes in the Adam chapter, "Thus the [divine] Command required [by its very nature] the reflective characteristic of the mirror of the Cosmos, and Adam was the very principle of reflection for that mirror and the spirit of that form." In order to know himself truly, God creates the cosmos so he can see himself reflected in it. The Complete Human Being, exemplified here by Adam, becomes the perpetual polishing of that mirror so that one can know one's self fully. At the stage of perfect self-realization, what is the mirror and that which is reflected? Another perspective comes from Christianity which mirrors Sufism can be transposed to "When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female, when you make eyes in place of an eye, a hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image, then you will enter [the kingdom]." Reflection and reflected are essentially one--a level of understanding Ibn Arabi strives to have his readers not know rationally but experience directly. This was the point of The Christ Teaching which was unfortunately turned into a franchised socially political power base for the inserted rule of obedient intermediaries between ourselves and the universe as a tactical ploy against the power of the Roman Empire by one of it's former intelligence agents. Lesson learned. But that's another story which continues to this day as there is the movement in this country to create a theocracy, mirrored by the Taliban in another, which is one of the signs of our time. Religion turns strangely upside down.

This essence or essential unifying principle, in turn, can be further refined by the study of quintessence, in this synergy between metaphysical technical language and physics, the five enfolded forces within a locus of any manifestation which are in turn are conditional to essence. This is in both a theological and electromagnetic sense in that a polarity must be present to actualize the middle as any electrical diagram will demonstrate as in the Trinity of Catholicism. The "Holy Ghost" is enfolded into physics as a faint reverberation of yet something else altogether, that is neither theology or simply physics.The symbol of The Tao could be considered a diagrammatic principle of this lost physics of enfoldment.If you think quintessence is a abstraction, consider that the new buzz word in cosmology these days is the one and the same 'quintessence', originating, at least in recorded history, from the ancient Greeks who used the term to describe a mysterious 'fifth element' - in addition to air, earth, fire and water - which held the moon and stars in place. Quintessence, some cosmologists say, is an exotic kind of energy field that pushes particles away from each other, overpowering gravity and the other fundamental forces. And so it goes.

Albert Einstein, Scientific Pantheism and The Afterlife of Memory
The last post on this subject was the transition of memory from one medium to another using examples from physics and metaphysics which are inexorably approaching tentative agreements on the general principles of a parallel world, which is a necessity for this phenomenon.This has a cautious secondary movement which is the growing rank of scientific pantheism. Many examples of acute critical thinking on this subject by physicists on this subject abound. Here is one example in addition to the opening quote on this subject.: http://www.worlditc.o/f_19_pearson_afterlife_quantum.htm

Where did this shift toward pantheistic movement begin? Pantheism is as old as human speculative thought. It dates as far back as the Upanishads, the Tao te Ching and the first Greek philosophers such as Thales and Heraclitus, the Chinese Taoist Chuang Tzu, and the Stoic philosopher Zeno of Cittium.

After Christianity was enforced as the state religion of the Roman empire,not surprisingly, it became dangerous to express pantheistic beliefs. Pantheists such as Meister Eckhart were marginalized, while others were burned and their books suppressed. Giordano Bruno, the first post-Christian pantheist, was burned at the stake in 1600 CE. Pantheism began to spread more widely in the later 18th and early 19th centuries, in Germany with Goethe and Hegel, and in Britain with the romantic poets - Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley, and the transcendentalists in America, above all Emerson and Thoreau. Mac Tonnies was certainly a pantheist although he would deny it. Not surprisingly,it's reemergence in the 20th Century began with Albert Einstein.

"A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. The true value of a human being is determined by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive." (Albert Einstein, 1954)

'The most beautiful and most profound experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their primitive forms - this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness."
( Albert Einstein - The Merging of Spirit and Science)

I purposefully chose the title of this series as a metaphor of both the afterlife of human memory after the physical host as the support of its transitional nature ceases to exist as well as the afterlife of certain philosophies that were overrun at the initial onset of the economic synergy of science and capitalism, which are being pushed upward further by the pressures imposed by it's successor, the synthetic age, of which Mac Tonnies so brilliantly documented in "Post Human Blues"

What is the successor to the synthetic age? The stage is being set, the tables are being arranged behind the scenes and so, I listen and listen carefully as to where and when the reservoir that lies underground pushes past the crust of these psychological layers of self comfort, shills, dupes and kingpins to break the surface as a spring. The thirst I see is so immense that it cannot be measured. It is as if I have become an old man in a proverbial desert whose gravitational pull brings the dark clouds of a storm to renew life, should I live long enough to see it's fruition. Something wonderful is about to happen.I feel it in my arthritic joints.