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The Pleromatics Project
6. Modeling the All
The Evolving Cosmos
Imaging the Nuocontinuum
Biological Systems
Paranormal Experience
Medicine and Healing
World Age Spirituality
For
the believer, as for every man who can see and think,
the universe stands out with an organic unity, a coherence,
a compelling emphasis, a brilliance, that dazzle us,
no matter how tightly we screw up our eyes. Teilhard.
Einstein's question -- Is the universe a friendly place, or not? -- is a question whose answer I have always taken for granted. After all, how could it not be? Of course, we do have reason to fear other humans at times, and even ourselves, but if creation is the work of a loving God, is not the universe as a whole, in its deepest essence, a "friendly place?"
It came as a surprise, given the context, to learn that other Christians might have a different answer. Several years ago, when I was participating in a seminary extension course through our local parish, the group was asked to list one-word emotional responses to several concepts. My surprise was that one member associated "fear" with "universe".
There could be many reasons for such an individual answer -- some unconscious association from past personal experience, perhaps, or maybe just too much TV or science fiction. But -- given the context -- could not the answer have been based on some deep theological (mis)understanding? Traditional theology has set up a "God versus cosmos" duality in its emphasis on the remote transcendence of a person-God. Matter is devalued, for it a baser substance than "God-stuff", and (at least in its human manifestation) carries the taint of original sin. Could it be that such dualism leads some to fear the cosmos?
Accepting the notion of reality as nuocontinuum profoundly changes that, and therein lies the theological subtlety in Einstein's question. How do we, as Christians, move from the ideological safety of being saved by narrowly-construed "belief", and instead be "born again" into a more liberating consciousness of God who is both in us and of cosmos. To express the question in another way, how do we move from a consciousness of a cosmos which is narrowly construed as only matter, to that of cosmos which is all-that-is?
In his far-reaching book Spectrum of Consciousness, Ken Wilbur sees consciousness as something like the familiar electromagnetic spectrum, in which energy manifests differently according to its different "bands" or wavelengths, for example, radio, xray, microwaves, and different colors of light. He states that such a concept helps psychotherapists discern which type of intervention is needed for a particular patient's problem, for, in his view, differing "schools" of psychotherapy are not really in conflict, but are complementary, each atuned toward problems at specific levels of consciousness.
Wilbur describes four principal levels in his schema of the evolution of consciousness. All consciousness originates in that transcendent consciousness which is the nonlocal reality, which he associates with such terms as Absolute Subjectivity, Void Mind, Brahman, and Godhead, [p.94] and which I have associated with the term nuocontinuum. That is the unitary level of cosmic consciousness, but evolution (and the birth of the individual) brings forth a "fragmentation through duality", which psychological/spiritual maturation (for cosmos and for the individual) reverses (involution).
The human population expresses this spectrum. Some people function at a "shadow" level of consciousness, in which the person identifies self with the outer "mask" of persona, rejecting even certain aspects of ego which become projected onto others. Others function at the level of ego-body duality -- "I have a body". Others he vividly describes as "centaurs", those people who have integrated the psyche-body duality, but whose organism stands distinct from the rest of cosmos. Most of us, perhaps, weave back and forth among the levels according to circumstance. However, each of us has the capacity for blissful moments when consciousness passes through the "transpersonal bands" to reach again the unity of mind-universe.
These dynamics have considerable implications for our understanding of the expanding of religious consciousness, from judgmental fundamentalism, through the body-soul and God-self dualities of cognitive theological belief, and on to deep mystical consciousness of unity with and in the divine. That is the level at which Teilhard finds the cosmos to be dazzling in its brilliance.
It certainly seems to take different theological approaches for different people, in the varying times and circumstances of life, to work through to that experience of the "kingdom of God within" ourselves. The main lesson is that we must continue to "work through" and not bog down in a narrow and rigid theological position. That I think is what Saint Paul must have meant by "work out your own salvation".
The unity level of consciousness seems to have come naturally to the great saints of the Christian and other traditions, and with little assistance from the cognitive level of belief. Rather, cognitive theology begins in the attempt to "rationalize" spiritual experience, and to reconcile it with knowledge of the universe as we know it. That is the level which the concept of the nuocontinuum is intended to serve.
In due course, we will deal with the implications of the nuocontinuum for psyche and Christian spirituality. However, whatever concept is put forth as a rationalization of spiritual experience must be able to integrate all other experience as well. It must "model" the All. Let me offer several additional speculations as a substrate for the later discussion about the relationship between the nuocontinuum and spirituality. Here, I will only state the points, without attempting to develop or defend them.
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The Evolving Cosmos
I speculate that "before" creation, the nuocontinuum was conscious of the potential of the act of creation, but of course, could not be aware of matter which did not yet exist. In some sense,creation involved a "sacrifice" of that level of consciousness. Creation itself (spacetime) was unconscious until the development of a certain level of complexity of particle organization, and remains largely so today. (Primitive life forms have some minimal ability to sense the spacetime environment by whatever means, and in that sense have primitive or precursory consciousness.)
Unconsciousness is not a "vacuum" state, since the nuocontinuum "contains" its potential, as "nuons" which for purposes of discussion, might be considered a psychic substance. It is an excited field of potentialities; it is "negative" in that "positive" creation and consciousness flow into it (are potentiated by it). Unconsciousness pulls creation toward complexity-consciousness. Psychogenesis (meaning in particular Teilhardian noogenesis) involves the progressive "absorption" of unconsciousness and the progressive organization of spacetime (particle) creation, by which the nuocontinuum provides for its own perpetuation through information storage in the ordinary processes of the spacetime cosmos.
The nuocontinuum contains all potentialities. The only potentialities actualized are those which cohere with the development of consciousness, by which in turn we (self-reflectively and collectively, using "self" in the Jungian sense) seek to explain actualities. The conservation of energy (as understood within spacetime) is a function of the conservation of cosmic psyche/soma.
There is a flux or tension between consciousness and unconsciousness which pulls cosmogenesis. As the nuocontinuum stores information in the material cosmos, it "absorbs" entropy. Thermodynamically the universe is "closed" in spacetime, where the entropy principle obtains; but spacetime is "open" to the nuocontinuum: the information principle obtains for the whole, and cosmogenesis proceeds toward greater complexity, greater information storage.
God is cosmopsychic and cosmomorphic. Cosmomorphy (spacetime creation) occurs within cosmopsyche (the nuocontinuum). Human psyche/soma is a parallel of cosmic psyche/soma. The unconscious drive for human individuation (Jung) derives from the cosmic drive for integration.
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Imaging the Nuocontinuum
How do we manage to think about a non-physical realm which is an "excited field of potentialities"? Somehow we must make models which conventional language can describe. One primary feature at work in the nuocontinuum must surely be its principle of order toward equilibrium. In physiology, we use the term homeostasis to describe that living equilibrium which all organisms demonstrate, and which also seems to operate at all larger scales, even at the level of biosphere itself. Jung's work shows homeostasis operating also within the psyche, to intergrate the whole organism with the collective unconscious, that is, with the whole cosmos.
The existence of the law of conservation of energy and the other symmetries and constancies of the universe suggests that there is also a nonlocal aspect to the equilibrating ordering principle. From that nonlocal (nuocontinuum) level, the universe would look like a "steady state", such as in the model previously proposed as the alternative to the Big Bang theory. The evolutionary expansion of material cosmos from an initial event, as the current physical evidence very strongly supports, can only be true for observers in spacetime.
Somehow, then, each quantum wave which looks like a particle in spacetime has its "dark side of the moon"; to an observer in the nuocontinuum, the particle has the nonlocal nature of a nuon. It is as though each quark were a tiny barbell, having both its local and nonlocal features.
The nuocontinuum can also be modeled abstractly, as mathematical formulas. The familiar distance formula, d = rt (distance equals rate times time), expresses a fundamental and invariant relationship within spacetime, which we commonly think is "just the way it is", an empirical formula expressing the way spacetime happens to be organized. However, from the perspective of the abstract mathematics of the nuocontinuum, that formula is the reality which governs the way spacetime is, not merely a secondary property. The nuocontinuum is the unknown "master" formula, of which all such simple applied formulas are only shadows.
The nuocontinuum can also be modeled poetically, as music. As David Bohm's illustration (chapter two) suggests, and as my own reaction to the deeply mystical music of Bach attests, there is something quite profound in the way music points to a deep reality. Music is considerably more than the physical phenomenon of certain tones in succession. Music is the reality which is seen through the intervals between the notes, much as the ornate geometric designs of an Islamic screen in the foreground point to the light of spiritual reality beyond it. The deep nonlocal abstract mathematical relationship which governs the music of Bach is the "music of the spheres."
Another way of modeling the nuocontinuum is psychologically and spiritually. It is this type of model which is most familiar in the religious context, for we describe the actions of the nuocontinuum in terms of images. In Christianity we visualize God as Father, who is also the person of The Holy Spirit. Yet that implies not All-spirit, but one spirit among many not-as-holy spirits, including the Holy Mother of God, angels, saints, etc. Native traditions often speak of the All-spirit as Mystery, or as Grandfather and Grandmother, and see forces of spirit as images of animals.
The archetypal images of the collective unconscious, as described by Jung, are manifestations of the nuocontinuum. Seen as spirit, a composite image of the nuocontinuum would blend all images, as in a dream. That quality is seen especially vividly in the shamanic paintings of Susan Seddon Boulet, in whose work human, animal and other forms merge and emerge one from the other, as though in motion even though fixed to a page. It is the distinguishing characteristic of shamanism to be able to image the nuocontinuum, the world of spirit, using various rituals to achieve an ecstatic vision for the healing of self and others. However, "shamanism" can be taken in a more general sense, to refer to the ability of any person, not just a shaman, to live within a state of spiritual awareness, in touch with "the spirits", whatever the ritual tradition.
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Biological Systems
It is possible to conceive a non-evolutionary steady-state in which life forms do not change. Why is it not so? Doubtless it would require a "principle" which prevents change. Is there not then a principle which "draws out" the homeostatic state, so that life can evolve, so that homeostasis itself evolves, perhaps in quantum steps from one equilibrium to another?
There is a suggestion of that in the evidence presented by Eldredge and Gould in support of their theory of "punctuated equilibria." They created quite a stir by proposing that evolution has not always proceeded with the slow gradual change of classic Darwinism, but by a series of adaptive "saltations", a term derived from the Latin word for leap. At least some species find their adaptive niche and hold constant in their form for very long geologic periods; this equilibrium is then "punctuated" by relatively sudden changes (as geologists measure time) into new adaptive forms which find a new equilibrium.
Such "punctuated" growth is seen in some other biologic systems, too, such as in some tumor models. Even a study which daily measured the growth of young children has shown that they too grow in spurts, "overnight" just as grandmothers have often said. Could it be that the nuocontinuum, through some abstract mathematical principle, "pulls" biological systems too into a series of "quantum jumps"?
Biologist Rupert Sheldrake has proposed that the development of biologic (and inorganic) forms occurs under the control of a hierarchy of "morphogenic fields" (or, morphic fields) which also influence behavior. [See file: Resonance and Reality]
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Paranormal Experience
Nuoflux effects are collective rather than individual, and any individual matter-effect by ordinary individual human consciousness must be weak indeed. I do not seek to justify theories of "brain waves", "mindreading", or similar occultist claims. However, the nuoflux concept, in its intimate correlations between psyche and matter, could perhaps encompass observer effects on delicate electronic operations claimed by some paranormalists.
The concept of psyche as the unifying nonlocal reality might also have some implications for eventually understanding the phenomenon in psyche of "visitor experiences", such as in the especially vivid recent writings of Whitley Strieber. If there is any expression of human-like consciousness elsewhere in the universe, given the distances involved it seems much more likely that any "alien" contact would take place nonlocally (in the nuocontinuum) rather than through an exchange of signals in spacetime. The problem, of course, will be how to confirm whether the psychic reality of any such contact is actualized as a local reality on some other "home planet".
The theory of a nuocontinuum also has implications for how we construe out-of-body and near-death experiences. If there is indeed a transpersonal psychic reality, individual human consciousness is always, ultimately, an "out of body" phenomenon, even when immediate awareness (as it ordinarily is) is identified with body. The temporary disengagement of awareness from body-image may be thought of as a special case of participation in transpersonal reality.
Similarly, near-death experiences, often involving perception of mystical light, need not be thought of as evidence for life "after" death (a spacetime concept) but rather, as vivid mystical participation in the eternal now, which is potentially available whether or not one is near death biologically.
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Medicine and Healing
The traditional medical practice model focuses on fixing the biological mechanism at the most reductive level which is appropriate for the diagnosis at hand. For example, the current interest in gene therapy focuses on disease at the submolecular level. In this model, the healer is the fixer, the patient is passive observer, and there is no place at all for the concept of nonlocal effect.
The concept of a self-ordering nuocontinuum, however, profoundly changes the way one looks at disease and healing. It is the patient who is the healer, who must cooperate as consciously as possible in restoring whole-organism homeostasis. (That is an important shift in emphasis, but I want to be sure that when we use the concept, no patient will be made to feel guilty or spiritually inadequate when an incurable illness is running its course.)
Under this model of healing, the physician, surgeon or other therapist is not the "fixer" but the helper, using specific "local" (physical) techniques as appropriate. This model is open to the possibility that prayer-meditation and other nonlocal means might have an effective role. That pattern, of course, closely parallels the traditional shamanic model.
The nuocontinuum is that spiritual realm which mediates the profound and healing sense of connectedness and mutual trust which best exemplifies the doctor-patient relationship. The "placebo effect" of a good physician's bedside manner is communicated "locally" and ritually through voice and touch, and even through symbols, not unlike a shaman's work. There also often seems to be an important nonlocal quality at work, especially in conveying whether or not the physician cares about and shares in the patient's suffering.
The Latin root of our word patient conveys the idea that the patient is the one with whom one suffers (the word has nothing to do with "paternalism"). Healing looses a very important word-symbol when, as is fashionable in some circles, it substitutes the word client, conveying only the idea of an arm's-length economic relationship. Maintaining a sense of connectedness is profoundly important for patient satisfaction with the medical encounter, whatever medical or surgical "intervention" is involved.
The nuocontinuum concept, that each physical particle intimately straddles spacetime and the nonlocal psychoid reality, suggests an inescapable connectedness between healing and spirituality, and points to the importance of restoring awareness of "soul" to medical practice. That of course may, and must, be done while maintaining a homeostatic balance between spirit and reason.
Medical science, however, faces a profound challenge in proving the value of "spiritual adjuncts" to therapy. Medical research is founded on the principle of testing treatment groups against control ("placebo") groups. But how do you demonstrate nonlocal healing in a strictly scientific way, when investigators, treatment groups, and controls are all coupled to the same nonlocal reality, the nuocontinuum?
Despite that, there has been an extensive body of research on the subject, recently summarized by Larry Dossey, an internist, in his study of prayer-meditation and healing. (He is speaking of prayer in its broadest sense, as an attitude of prayerfulness, rather as specific petitionary praying.) He describes a modern model of prayer which is also based on the concept of the nonlocal reality (his preferred term is The Absolute). As he reports, spontaneous regressions of advanced cancer, unexpectedly long survivals of AIDS patients, and other medically recognized but unexplained cases are often associated with patients whose response to illness has been to deepen their personal spiritual sense.
The relatively new field of psychoneuroimmunology is opening up better understandings of the physical relationships between psychology and physiology, but given the intimate coupling between those two "realms", it will be hard to prove whether a particular neurochemical link is cause or effect. The traditional biomedical research model presupposes that psyche follows soma. But if one takes that literally and absolutely, one would have to postulate that the bloodstream's rise in epinephrine levels (Adrenalin, the "stress hormone") was what had made the grizzly bear materialize in the trail ahead!
Psyche does have its somatic effects, which medicine has only vaguely begun to recognize. In the perspective of the nuocontinuum, the same spirit which materializes cosmos governs healing as well.
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World Age Spirituality
Now laid out before us on the chart table of Spaceship Earth are four charts, cosmograms, from among which somehow humankind must find its way. Just as Columbus, five hundred years ago, set out for new lands and made discoveries which changed all charts, so too are we on a voyage which now requires a re-mapping of the cosmos of human consciousness.
A chart shows the shape of the ocean, but more importantly, helps determine our place within it, in relation to where we need to go. Each of the cosmograms has helped map a particular segment of human experience. The general navigational task now is to correlate the various systems of thought, to bring the charts themselves into unity, and to set our course with confidence.
In plotting a fix (a point representing a confirmed position), a navigator performs a "reality check". But we theological navigators, unlike some traditional theologians, may not be content to stay there; we must move on. Our mapping of the cosmos also has to do with reality checking. Whatever our level of view, we tend to think that all that matters lies within our view of the horizon, for that is the nature of consciousness. However, it is necessary from time to time to test one's personal thought system against that of others. Many purposes are served.
Individually, we may grasp larger meanings within our own belief system. Collectively, we may increase understanding among people of different belief systems. Further, mapping of the Whole fosters further exploration of the "truth" of the cosmic system. In a sense, the theory of evolution was made possible by a holistic "map" of biological species. From Darwin's (and Wallace's) willingness to observe dispassionately the phenomena of a large system came a totally new way of perceiving life process. The anthropic principle similarly derives from a holistic map of many phenomena in quantum physics and cosmology. What other understandings may come as we further explore that holistic model?
A common map of the spiritual cosmos also helps foster a growing sense of spiritual unity, by allowing us to see, perhaps for the first time, how human spiritual experience fits together, rather than conflicts. As was presented in Living Ethics, a concept of the whole is also essential in ethical problem solving in complex systems.
A map may also be a guide to permit seeing what is there. Which is first: sight or belief? Do we believe because we see, or do we believe in order to see? Most of us have had the experience of finding unexpected views without a map, but more often, we searched out new destinations and explored local details for ourselves because we first trusted a larger-scale map.
There is a collective dimension of seeing. Most of us have known, or known of, individuals who have seen what had not yet been perceived by others. They may have been thought geniuses or crazy, depending on how many others they could convince, but in their seeing, they offered us the possibility of seeing too. Indeed, as recalled in Wholeness and Ethic, Jung's "seeing" of archetypes was made possible by taking seriously the imagery of a psychotic patient.
Most of us see only what we have been prepared to see, through our learning from maps of past experience and the experience of others. We have to believe that it's possible, if we are to see what is there. If we are to see more than we have seen, we must expand what we expect to see, and expand what we believe to be possible. Of course, since we must maintain a careful distinction between what is and what is possible, we must correct our maps as we explore.
It is also the case that we can see only what is illuminated by a certain very narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum. For example, special equipment sensing the radio or xray energy emitted by certain stars literally opens up new worlds for our seeing. We are also limited by our biological capacity to focus, register and interpret the images presented to us. It is said that embryonic chicken eyes have an autofocus character, keeping in focus during growth. So too must it be with human consciousness. What we can see collectively is determined in part by our stage of development as a human race, and by what we each contribute in support of the tasks of society.
The problem now is to move to a higher vantage point from which the perspective is broader and deeper, and the horizon farther. In this century, the thought of Teilhard (theology), Schweitzer (ethics), Jung (psychology), Bertalanffy (systems theory), and Einstein (physics) all represent significant individual expansions of the consciousness of the times, and require a similar expansion by many individuals if they're to be made effectively collective.
In the study so far, we have looked at cosmos physically, psychologically, and spiritually from east and west. It is as though we have been looking at individual facets of a crystal. So far, each side has presented a circular image with different labels. Now we must turn the crystal in the light to see it whole. We must merge the images, to see one image at the center.
Each of the individual cosmograms consists of three concentric circles, as does the composite. In our ordinary language, cosmos is the general descriptive term for all-that-is, emphasizing its material nature. Positivism sees only that outer circle labeled cosmos. Such consciousness is aware only of the world of matter and the physical forces. Its cosmos is only the narrow outer band which correlates in eastern language with karma, samsara, and prakriti. Western language calls it "nature", and its phenomena, "natural".
In depth psychology, the cosmos of the individual is represented to others as persona (mask), and is known to the individual as the "I", that is, the ego, which is the "cosmos" of ordinary individual consciousness. The collective level of consciousness can be labeled by Teilhard's term, noosphere, the product and process of all human thought. The noosphere is the collective consciousness of the cosmos. It is the realm of the known, the obvious, of that which has been tested in experience.
The second non-shaded circle represents the nonlocal reality of the non-spacetime dimensions. It is the realm of that which is "more than matter", and of the physical forces and symmetries which govern it. Because it is ordinarily unconscious to us, we have labeled it psyche. In religious terms, it is the realm of spirit: In Christianity, Holy Spirit; in Judaism, Wisdom; in Sufism, Khalq, Bari, Musawwir. In Indian religion and philosophy, it correlates with the concept of dharma. It is the field of the nuocontinuum presented in Chapter Five.
The innermost circle probably should be represented as a point (this map is not to scale!), for it stands within the "superpoint" dimensions, representing the non-spatial ordering principles, the "initial conditions" of the Big Bang, and the teleological meaning of cosmos implied in the anthropic principle of physics. If matter is crystalized from the spirit of cosmos, it is this Meaning which first aligns and joins it, thus to determine its forms.
In western monotheisms, that Meaning is Word, Logos, Christ. In the east, it is represented by tao and by atman, the Cosmic Self. In Jung's terminology, it is the self, a term which applies to the cosmos of the individual as well as to the ordering of the archetypal collective unconscious. The goal of individual wholeness (individuation) is to bring the ego into balance with the unconscious, under control of the self, just as the Logos orders material creation. So too, it evokes in human consciousness the mystery of the cosmos and seeks to draw all toward unity in a sense of sacred place and purpose.
This cosmogram maps a cosmos which does not readily lend itself to the old distinctions between theism and pantheism, and the natural and the supernatural. It recognizes that matter, in its phenomenological aspect, is discrete and plural, but in the blending of the so-called supernatural dimensions with the natural spacetime, the natural participates within the supernatural. The transcendent is so radically immanent that each particle of cosmos is a necessary individual serving the mystery of the all. So too must we see ourselves and all other humans.
Teilhard writes that "there will be no permanent peace for our faith unless we succeed in understanding that God and the cosmos are not real enemies ...
If we are to convert the earth and give it peace, today, we must see and make our fellowmen see that it is God himself who is pulling them and making his influence felt on them through the unifying process of the universe.
In that statement, Teilhard is addressing an ideological problem which has been particularly difficult for Christianity, dating at least from the conflict over original sin. Those who view the process of "converting the earth" only as a call to proselytize toward the exclusion of other faiths, would give the Earth not peace, but more strife. By contrast, Teilhard is sounding a call to a new level of collective consciousness, in which we understand faith in truly universal terms. "The unifying process of the universe" calls all creeds to respond to its pull of cosmogenesis.
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Notes: Modeling the All
"For the believer, as for every" -- Teilhard. "Pantheism and Christianity," Christianity and Evolution p 65.
Wilbur describes four principal levels -- Wilbur, Ken. The Spectrum of Consciousness (1977). Wheaton IL: Quest Books, 1993.
Teilhard and noogenesis, cosmogenesis -- Teilhard de Chardin, P. The Phenomenon of Man. New York: Harper, 1975.
Information theory and entropy -- Roger Penrose. The Emperor's New Mind. Oxford: Oxford U Press, 1989; and information articles in Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th Edition. In information theory, zero entropy corresponds to perfect transmission of messages; in thermodynamics, zero entropy corresponds to perfect conversion of energy to work; the mathematical formula is the same in both cases. Thus, I have spoken of "the information principle" as that elan vital (or whatever else we call it) which "pulls" cosmos toward more life complexity, i.e. towards greater information storage in defiance of the entropy principle.
writings of Whitley Strieber -- e.g. Communion and Transformation. For Jung's analysis of UFO phenomena, see Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies. Princeton U. Press, 1991 (from CW 10, 18).
"If we are to convert the earth" -- Teilhard: Christianity and Evolution p 66.
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