Dear Friends,
Be Well.
David
The Cosmic Eternity System
Richard Grossinger
The following is excerpted from Dark Pool of Light:
Reality and Consciousness (The Convergence of Physical, Philosophical,
Psychological, Psychospiritual, and Psychic Views), Volume Three: The Crisis
and Future of Consciousness, recently published by North Atlantic Books.
"The current Eternity System is rich and complex,
startling and challenging, mystifying and elegant." --Ellias Lonsdale [1]
"Imagine that not only does your soul withdraw
into itself, but that all souls likewise withdraw, and in withdrawing, dissolve
into a single over-soul that now recedes into its own inner deeps, the ancient
taproot of creation. All is perishing except His Face.
"Reality holds its breath. All is still and
silent. Life lives, but without any sign. The Earth was without form, and void.
"Sunk deep in unity, the One engulfs in its abyss
the shimmering wealth of all that ever was and all that ever will be. Obsidian
and jade, tropical waterfalls and Olympian peaks, the attar of roses, wild
honey, herds of aurochs, hieroglyphs and cantos, cathedrals and soup kitchens,
melancholy, mirth, the Aurora Borealis and the Pleiades, the reveries of
teeming worlds beyond number-all these are present and yet absent. Absent
because there is no witness. Darkness was on the face of the deep." --Pir
Zia Inayat Khan [2]
"The universe is a divine play of phenomena. To
humans those phenomena appear to be separate; we seem to have the experience
that there's a ‘me' and a ‘not-me.' That's an illusion. Everything is
interdependent with everything else. Everything arises in oneness, and every
apparently discrete package is merely that: apparently discrete." --John
Friedlander [3]
"He will not merely rule the universe; he will
also be the universe." --Philip K. Dick [4]
i. Cosmic Eternity as Unified Field Theory
Before we sail into this chapter, let's take a deep
breath. I know, the book is already more than a few breaths deep. But this is a
mystery universe, and our path is via consciousness -- not the objects of
consciousness (though them too) but consciousness itself.
We will never have a map for reality in the way we
have Google Earth. Reality as consciousness cannot be represented in reality as
matter. But that doesn't mean it is not real or "scientific." This is
my basic refrain.
In order to assay reality, we need science. That
should be obvious.We need everything that science has to tell us about
moleculo-atomic structure, electromagnetic and gravitational fields, the
organization of biological form, and the flow of information through
neurons-these are esoteric as well as secular truths, sacraments above and
beyond their liturgically inflated presentation by their own priests. They are
the operating system.
For science to function or even emerge from the mists
of unsignified existence, all subjective filters must be removed or disengaged;
objective mind must encounter objective reality through the transparency of
pure measurement and the neutrality of egoless witness. This means no universe
except its own tangible physical map. But that's also the minimum baseline for ascertaining
where we are and what's going on, for getting out of a perplexing jungle of
cries and appearances.
No other way -- you have to separate the explicit from
the implicit, the deduced flow of energy and matter (turning handaxes into
thermo-dynamics) from the induced flow of meaning (turning scapulimancy into
signification) -- but that doesn't mean that the world will tell you anything
more than that something is happening (rather than nothing) and it is wrapped
around its own mechanism snug as a glove.
The display format is pretty much as science calls it:
a set of anomalies generating a temporal fortuity from the atomic properties of
molecules, the molecular properties of cells, the cellular properties of
tissues, the matrices of tissues underlying vertebrate underlying mammalian
under-lying primate socio-symbolic acts. But the universe is also a direct
emanation. It is disclosed through ordinary experience interpreted by trained
inquiry: formal meditation, shamanic induction, aesthetic mimesis, divine
petition. To project an abeyant shape into a "rose" is to ask it to
become what it is. Yet to exist at all is to be projected by the universe into
such an icon or thoughtform. Existence is revelation: a rose. There were always
twin ways for humans to divine the universe and our presence in it. Even Stone
Age hunters knew that: men and women of action and men and women of
contemplation -- bump at it or reflect it, assay it or hex it, Coyote -- man
and Robin-man. [5]
Objective consciousness maps the apparent universe by
its propensity for durable and self-repeating emanations. Subjective
consciousness maps everything else.
For all the vaunted chains of neurons, sockets, and
monitoring modules, there is no scientific theory of consciousness worth the
name (see Volume One on that one). Scientists may build models of mind and
write formulas without remainders, and there is plenty of scuttlebutt about how
the nervous system and brain work, how we make decisions, initiate actions, and
run cognition grids, but no -- even hypothetical -- way to turn matter
inside-out and illuminate it from within, no way to get the city inside the
acorn, to originate the damn thing's glow inside its own mechanical
contraption, to explain even how nerves really work. No matter how resolutely
the experts gyrate, it can't be done. The universe (or meaning) is too
comprehensive, and the brain is too morphological and literal. Just try sizing
reality down to a neuron or even a fat fur-ball of synapses.
Science has no inroad whatsoever to anything that
can't be measured or counted, while consciousness has zero quantitative basis.
Neural behavioral maps, electroencephalograms, and ablated circuits in lab cats
don't constitute real measurements of consciousness in the way that everything else
under science can be submitted to metrics. However tight we squeeze nanometers
through the mind-matter barrier, there remains an uncrossable bumpless region
between bodies and thoughts.
For that matter, how does a mind -- or my mind, or
"I" -- know which neurons to affect in order to do what I want to do?
There would have to be some sort of subliminal sub-mind that tracked
physiological networks scrupulously, got its orders from the
"conscious" mind, and then faithfully carried them out. But that
sub-mind would need its own sub-mind, and we'd be well on our way down Infinite
Regress Highway, which is the Highway to Nowhere, Zip Code 99901.
If you were a scientist and somehow put all the nuts
and bolts, levers and pulleys, circuits and switches together tantamount to
creating a credible, metabolizing cyborg or even a motivated robotic mouse, how
would you click it on and, if it turned itself on automatically, where would
the effective bump come from? What would that bump contribute, what would
elicit it, and how would it recognize its own possibility and then install
itself in the rest? And I don't mean "install" any differently from
how electricity installs itself in thunderclouds and power lines. How does a
golem mouse (or man) take on an identity and embark on its human or rodent
mission?
Okay, let's finally call a spade a spade:
consciousness is not located in the brain. I stand on this point
unconditionally. I do not deny that neurons and mind are joined at the hip --
evolutionarily, developmentally -- but consciousness as a stream of
phenomenological shit in which an objective reality is mirrored is something
else altogether. It has a different ontological basis from the nervous system
or the brain, and it operates otherwise, probably throughout the universe,
without need of them. Science does not know how to cross the bumpless zone, not
even close.
Consciousness's "awareness" property is
elicited by nervous systems and brains probably because it is already in the
mix -- "we" are already there; we exist somehow at large, prior to
experiment -- as identity, as agency. In fact, the flow of synaptic data into
the brain is more likely the result rather than the cause of consciousness.
Ignoring this telepathic super-highway is a joke, a misnomer, and science's catchall
sleight of mind.
There cannot be a unified astrophysical field theory
without a theory of mind, and likewise there cannot be a theory of mind without
inclusion in a unified field theory of space and substance for, without
phenomenology, where would you begin to look for meaning's as well as matter's
thread? And meaning has to have a thread because, after all, it's here.
Though there cannot be a theory of matter without the
inclusion of mind, where (again) would you attach one to the other? We lack even
a unified field theory of space-time or matter by their lonesomes.
No comprehensive theory means no place wherein to
attach consciousness -- so no theory of matter means no theory of mind.
And it's not as though there is a higher court of
appeal for this stuff. There isn't a context, let alone a structure, within
physics that neuroscientists and biologists can jointly petition for redress or
a yardstick to which they can even hypothetically affix mindedness or
materiality, let alone enlist to officiate over a shotgun wedding. Movement
toward one absolute wall is as good as toward another, and none of the walls,
in this room anyway, are promising (or, finally, walls).
For starters, we don't know what gravity is.
"Does," yes; "is," unh-uh! Think about it: a scientist
can't do gravity. The stuff holding you to the Earth, the djinn propelling the
Earth around the Sun, keeping the Sun compressed together in a blaze, the big
oomph itself, is a total ringer. Plus there is no smoking gun tying it to
either thermodynamics or entropy; they are like separate governments pretending
to rule the same polity under different laws. Then quantum entanglement and
superposition rule the identical polity under even less plausible laws and
without heat's verifiable basis, while strings and superstrings fail utterly at
anchoring their own bottom rung. They are all drifting in one another's
contextlessness.
It takes slamming protons into each other head-on at
relativistic speeds (i.e., close to the activation of light) to get even a
glimpse of the Higgs boson or the original sticky nest of matter -- its
purported building blocks plus the twenty-three percent that went missing into
superparticles (dark matter, dark intelligence) at the beginning of time -- not
to mention the possibility of composite quarks or the infinite mass of empty
space and its "vacuum catastrophe." It is a series of tautologies
running into other tautologies as well as into its own paradoxes, oxymorons,
and quantum uncertainty states.
A universe of matter, which presents itself solely
through mindedness, is infinitely dense and utterly transparent at the same
time -- so it is as unmeasurable as it is undeniable.
In the late twentieth and early twenty-first
centuries, speculative physicists and science-fiction authors have floated
field theories to unify metaphysical and physical realities. Try these: 1. A
parallel universe next to ours (hidden mass) has formed in a four-dimensional
bubble and continues to impose itself here as gravity and dark matter. 2. When
stars collapse, their black holes torsion matter through a wormhole (an
Einstein-Rosen bridge) into white holes that shoot it into a different universe
where it bubbles up as if from nowhere, so that the Big Bang forming this
entire set-up may be mere discharge from the white hole of a collapsing star.
3. Billion-year-old civilizations are sending gamma-wave signals to us from
another universe at the edges of our own space-time. 4. After anti-matter and
matter annihilated each other a long time ago, we formed in shreds left by the
götterdämmerung. 5. Every atomic configuration here, including you and me,
repeats somewhere else in infinite space-time.
All these theories consider that 6. our universe is
not a conventional all-inclusive universe but one aspect of a Multiverse, so
the Big Bang may not be an originary explosion but one of many "Big
Bangs," each creating a discrete continuum, each with its own laws.
Even so, science provides no waiver whatsoever for
consciousness in its unified field theories because, of course, how could it if
it doesn't even know what it is? Insofar as mind is officially the sum of
trillionfold quantum -- synaptic calculations, it is never going to make it
through a wormhole, black hole, white hole, cosmic bubble, or umbilical cord
between parallel universes anyway. Consciousness is circumstantial, finite,
eminently disposable. I would consider this one exception: perhaps the
primordial ground luminosity of Big Mind is what ignited the Big Bang in the
first place, gave it its intrinsic radiance, and bound light in a molten ball.
Then it was distributed with matter into the expanding elasticity of
three-dimensionality. Behind the material universe is a nonmaterial universe.
I want to take a shot at an alternative unified field
theory to those of particle physics and astrophysics, the potpourri informally
codesigned by Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein, Steven Weinberg,
Stephen Hawking, Freeman Dyson, Michio Kaku, Nikodem Poplawski and the boys. Of
course I am not constrained like them by laws of mathematics and physics, so I
have a much easier task; still I can't just make stuff up or throw together any
old hand-me-downs and contrivances; you wouldn't find that believable or
interesting. What I say has to be rooted in parity at the depth and complexity
of an actual system, not only sufficient but necessary, and address (as well)
the existential situation in which we find ourselves: the condition of having
to be wherever we are, no matter what is happening to us there. It has to be
both metaphysical and physical, Swedenborgian and Einsteinian.
During Q&A after reading a few sections from a
draft of this book (Boulder, Colorado, April 13, 2012), I was asked by a guy in
the audience if I thought matter and spirit were separate things. I paused
briefly, smiling at the absurdity of answering, then said simply,
"No."
Everyone laughed, so he changed his question: "Do
you think that matter came before spirit or spirit before matter or did both
occur at the same time?"
To that I said, "Well, if I had to choose, I
would say, ‘Both at the same time,' but as soon as I said that, I would be
faced with the fact that it was presumptuous and false and the other
possibilities were equally true in their way. Matter first, spirit first, both
together? -- it's not any of them because the moment you choose one, you
realize that something else you have excluded by your answer is demanding equal
time. It is matter before spirit, of course, and spirit before matter, of
course, and both at the same time too, of course."
A few questions later another man asked, "Do you
think we are inside the forward flow of time or is everything really happening
at once?"
"Same question as that other one," I
offered. "I think that everything is happening at once, but clearly that
is not true because, well, here we are, demonstrably in a time-line and moving
linearly one swift way. So, what we have to do is explain how everything could
be happening at once and yet we could still be inside a flow of time. We have
to make it so that everything happening at once can occur in such a way that it
also feels like this, that it is embedded uniquely and discretely as well in a
chronological belt. And the only way to do that is to move toward exactly what
time feels like to you rather than an abstract epiphany of timelessness. The
simple and indisputable circumstance of being in time, of being born into tick-tock,
is what it feels like right now to you. That is the key, because by feeling it
consciously and expansively, you begin to develop a sensation of time's
timelessness. The paradox is, that by trying to feel its actual timelessness,
you only experience the drumbeat of time, even more readily. It's all a
paradox, but the resolution of that paradox is living the precise complication
that it is."
Okay, for starters, why call it a Cosmic Eternity
System? Why not just an Eternity System? An Eternity System transcends cosmic
ghettoization. It is by far the more accurate designation.
I have tried the slicker name several times but always
abandoned it and set it back the way it was, (one) because a "Cosmic"
frame sets the Eternity System in cosmological space, parallel to the
astrophysical field theories cited above; (two) because it draws our attention
to the transgalactic sky; and (three) because it grounds us in the physical
cosmos of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, et al.
So where in Sam Hell are we? That is, where are we
located relative to anything or everything else? And where is the semblance
(that we cling to so fundamentally, absolutely, and tenaciously) located?
The other night (October 8, 2011) I was invited to a
young friend's birthday party in a backyard in Oakland. These are very sentient
people, but they are also foodies and involved in the restaurant business so
they decided to roast a whole pig on a spit over a fire. From any standpoint it
was a graphic presentation. The animal's body had already turned into edible
pork, but it was attached to landmarks of independent life and spirit: its
teeth, toe-nails, and dead eyes reflecting the flames made the truth
inescapable. As sunlight was slowly extinguished, fire more than sky
illuminated the backyard-fire and the glistening pig. A few stars were visible
beside a bright, near-full moon. The event wasn't only pagan and primitive; it
was transubstantiational. The body-shape and residue of the pig were being
transubstantiated, but so were we. Offhandedly someone remarked on the
similarity of the pig to Christ nailed to the cross, but no one seconded the
motion.
I couldn't find a way to get comfortable with the
roasting pig except to go right at it. I took its vibration up above my crown
chakra as high into the planes of consciousness as I could. I didn't count
tiers; I just opened to a shift and jumped.
There I saw it, not so much against life on Earth,
against humanity, or even against the stars as against everything that is
anything. Only there did the roasting body of the pig fit and adjudicate itself
with grace, integrity, or hope. Only there did it have a fallback position that
didn't indict the universe for this outcome.
The Cosmic Eternity System is quintessentially about
this: what is happening couldn't possibly be what it seems. What it seems
either leads nowhere and is nothing, or leads everywhere while contradicting
itself at every portal. Either way, it is impossible and uninhabitable-as much
for magpies and hornets as for us. Just look around.
Well, nature must be filled with something, so here it
is: mist, fires, wind tunnels, gaps, pivots, surf, tornados, dances, elections,
wars, World Cups, online dating. Each stands for something, even stuff that
makes no sense at all: the exorbitant, the cavalier, the wanton, the vicious,
the shabby, the degenerate, the sadistic, the vandalistic, the inconstant.
But then again, if it is not what it seems, it is not
happening -- so it is not a problem. It is habitable because its unlikeliness
doesn't stop us from being here and getting the job done.
The Cosmic Eternity System in all of its richness,
vastness, and surprise is the only thing that gets us out of our trap -- our
trap of identity, our trap of neurosis, our trap of impending death, our trap
of enlightenment, our trap of ennui, our trap of every lockdown theory of the
universe (scientific or religious).
Only the Cosmic Eternity System provides a clue as to
what we are going to do with the cosmos's shitload of absolute time and
space-to say nothing of pure existential reality, to say nothing....
"Ding dong bell/Pussy's in the well./Who put her
in?"
I am as clueless as you, so like Heraclitus's god
whose oracle is still at Delphi, I shall neither reveal nor conceal but
henceforth speak in riddles.
Little Johnny Green, indeed!
1. Mark Borax and Ellias Lonsdale, Cosmic Weather
Report: Notes from the Edge of the Universe (Berkeley, California: North
Atlantic Books, 2010), p. 191.
2. Pir Zia Inayat Khan, "A Hidden Treasure,"
unpublished manuscript, 2011. "All is perishing except His Face" is
from the Qur'an 28:88; "The Earth was without form, and void" is from
Genesis 1:2.
3. John Friedlander, "Focused Meditation,"
September 11, 2011.
4. Philip K. Dick, from "The Exegesis,"
unpublished essay, 1974, www.philipkdick.com/new_ex-thevictory.html. (In 1974,
after he had an experience which he described as "an invasion of my mind
by a transcendentally rational mind," Philip K. Dick began recording his
thoughts about it in a journal called "The Exegesis.")
5. See Paul Radin, Primitive Man as Philosopher (New
York: Dover Books, 1955), pp. 238-256.
Photo of a protozoan in a dark pool by gurdonark,
courtesy of Creative Commons license.
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