Spiritual & Practical Alchemy

THE TRANSMODERN ALCHEMIST transmodernalchemy.iwarp.com

"There is a generic process in nature and consciousness which dissolves and regenerates all forms. The essence of this transformative, morphological process is chaotic -- purposeful yet inherently unpredictable holistic repatterning. The Great Work of the art of alchemy is the creation of the Philosopher's Stone, a symbol of wholeness and integration. The liquid form of the Stone, called the Universal Solvent, dissolves all old forms like a rushing stream, and is the self-organizing matrix for the rebirth of new forms. It is thus a metaphor or model for the dynamic process of transformation, ego death and re-creation." (Miller, 1992, "Chaos As the Universal Solvent")

Transmodern Alchemy & Chaos

Alchemy is a science-art and tradition of participatory wisdom. Medieval alchemy was couched in the archaic language of its time, but we are not limited to that, nor to theological, Hermetic, Masonic, Theosophical or New Age jargon. Philosophies and sciences evolve in articulation, theory and practice. New discoveries and statements of meaning inform our practice at all levels. In many cases, alchemy anticipated them.

Our worldview has evolved to include quantum physics and dynamics in our models of reality. In the 20th Century, Carl Jung described alchemy in terms of depth psychology and shed new light on an old science [see THE MODERN ALCHEMIST, Miller, 1994]. But that discipline continues to redefine itself. Jung's notions of a heroic, striving Self have been transcended with imaginal, nonlinear models of consciousness, archetypes as strange attractors and healing fictions. Can we expect any less from 21st century alchemy itself?

Transmodernity is the synthesis of modernity and postmodern philosophy, reflected in alchemical notions of transcendence, transformation and transmutation. So what might a chaos-informed Transmodern Alchemy look like? First and foremost our existential state space is in flux. Phenomena no longer correspond with old-paradigm frameworks.

Trans- is the prefix that guides the vision of reality as virtual and fluctuating. At the subquantal range of virtual photon flux, this is literally true and the metaphysical substrate of manifestation. At the virtual level, the fiction of ‘reality’ as substantive is revealed and the transparent veil is ripped away.

Self-organizing dynamic transactions combine the positive momentum of the modern philosophy with the emptiness of the Postmodern, the longing for unity of the former and the fragmentation of the latter. Our comprehension of the physical world has been transformed. We are wavefronts in local space, undergird by the vacuum fluctuation of absolute space. Material reality, as formation, atom, mass, power, space, time, etc. is an outworn concept that brought order to a Newtonian universe.

The Nature of Nature

Physics defines the nature of nature. There are two branches of physics: theoretical physics predicts and explains the physical behavior of nature, while experimental physics gathers data by observation of physical phenomena using controlled and natural experiments. Theory provides guidance to experiments. The results of either are not always so clear cut and are subject to scientific revolutions.

Concerned with different aspects of nature, theory and experiment have a symbiotic relationship as do the spiritual and practical branches of alchemy. Theoretical advances overturn old paradigms. Generally, theory proposes and experiment disposes. But spiritual alchemy is more than theoretical. It is a form of gnosis or direct knowing and observation through meditatio (meditation).

THE TRANSMODERN ALCHEMIST explores the theoretical usefulness of Dynamics for modeling processes in the alchemical art. Alchemy is a multidisciplinary pursuit focusing on mystic technologies, healing, life sciences, metallurgy, chemistry, dynamics and physics. In the absence of "solid" matter, we must take a revolutionary view of today's alchemy as dynamic process using Chaos Theory and its related sciences to inform our search.

Dynamics has successfully explained many natural phenomena and been heralded as a new scientific paradigm. The quintessence is now found in nonlinear dynamics, the holographic field and the virtual vacuum of absolute space. Only when we comprehend the groundstate of being can we fathom reality. It fundamentally changes our alchemical and scientific notions about transformations in ourselves, matter, systems, patterns and structure.

Psychology and neurology now recognize the psyche and brain as a dynamic dissipative system. Therapeutic techniques lead to reogranization of the individual at a higher level of order. Medicine realizes chaos is essential to health. The artworld recognizes the aesthetic appeal, rhythm and beauty of fractals. But the poetic science of alchemy made a workable theoretical and experimental system in which chaos was central centuries ago. Each era views nature from the paradigm of its time.

Chaos, Art & Transformation

Chaos theory has emerged as a transdisciplinary study. Chaos is the synergistic science of change with constrained randomness. It describes the relationship of order, disorder and self-renewal. There are analogies between contemporary practice of sacred psychology, chaos theory, quantum theory, scalar physics and alchemical processes. They are more than metaphorical and illuminate our Transmodern quest for the Stone. Chaos demands we open to new possibilities, to the unknown, to mystery.

Chaos Theory has been associated with every aspect of human behavior. Alchemy is an irreducible fusion of mysticism, science and art that also happens to be therapeutic or growth-promoting and tantalizingly hints at illumination. The process begins with doubts and lack of conviction but time spent on self-knowledge, experiments and spiritual exercises is amply rewarded. Chaos keeps the process fluid. Alchemy calls chaos the "universal solvent."

Alchemy is a nonlinear organizational framework, a model to make sense of our experience, and a means of facilitating transformation. The universe without and within is our alchemical laboratory. The fire is kindled and stoked in the ‘magic theatre’ of the mind and the retort vessel of the body. Alchemy plants virtual fractal seeds in the gaps or intervals of consciousness. You are the portal for the fractal seed to unfold its liberating potential.

The universe is our "parent fractal". Matter and consciousness share deep unity. The outer world we observe through our senses is nothing more than a consistent series of mental images that exists in our mind. Matter itself is an image in the mind, and mental images are the behavior of consciousness.

All conscious states are resonant states. Resonant states enable brains to learn about a changing world throughout life. Resonance arises when bottom-up and top-down feedback processes reach an attentive consensus between what is expected and what is in the world. Mining the soul, we disassemble ourselves to reorganize in more refined form, reintegrating at a holistic level.

Chaos Theory & Alchemy

Alchemy calls Chaos the prima and ultima materia. As we practice spiritual and practical alchemy, we come to understand the deep nature of chaos. In this chaosophical philosophy, all systems emerge from and eventually dissolve back into chaos. Chaos Theory allows us to follow the Hermetic Spirit deep into the heart of matter and beyond into the subquantal realm in our quest for Nature's secrets. The undecomposable domain of Chaos is not an emptiness, but a rich, generative source -- a bornless nothingness from which all form emerges.

The void of philosophy and the vacuum state of science is an unmanifest fundamental reality, a virtual field, which is an invisible flux not comprised of parts, but an inseparable interconnectedness. In this dynamic model, there are no "things", only energetic events. This holoflux includes the ultimately flowing nature of what is, and all that forms therein. This subquantal domain marks the limit of our ability to peer into the Mystery of nature at cosmic zero.

At the human scale, we are blinded to this primal creative field -- virtual photon flux. Chaos theory as holism without wholes allows us to describe both psyche and matter in terms congruent with physical reality. This is simply the way nature works, and the way our nature works, too. Chaos provides a comprehensive psychophysical metaphor for uniting physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual realities.

Because interconnectivity is more than metaphorical, realizations translate across disciplines. Metaphors reflect the interdependency of mind and body, and the embodied nature of metaphor holistically reflects the unity of individual and world. The events and experiences of our lives become embedded in our structure and metabolism. We might call this nonlocal entangled embodiment "metaphorms."

Physics deals with the energetic aspect of the world. Information theory deals with the communicational or patterning aspect. Fractals, nature's dynamic self-organizing pattern, exist in the paradoxical space between dimensions, levels and forces of existence. They arise at the interface between processes, at boundary zones where they serve both to connect and separate multiple levels. They translate information/energy, structuring dimensions by adding or recursively removing structure, embodying process.

Fractal dynamics escalate change from tiny to large scales. Self-organization is an emergent property of systems and organisms, from the cosmos to human beings. Chaotic dynamics governs the emergence of this new order from apparent randomness. The deep coherence of the overall process implies hidden or missing information for holistic patterning within the apparent "noise" or randomness of chaotic patterns.

Consciousness, like creativity, is an emergent phenomenon patterned by strange attractors which govern the complexity of information in dynamic flow. Our consciousness appears co-temporaneously with our embodiment, creating the imaginal flux of representational and nonrepresentational perception - the stream of consciousness. The cosmic trinity of chaos, matter, and attraction appears at the heart of modern chaos theory and alchemy.

The Vedas identify all creative intent and substance as a manifestation of primal consciousness, which is considered the basis of all manifestation. In this worldview, there is nothing but consciousness. Complex dynamics is implicated in the energetic translation of "waves of unborn nothingness". Healing is the biological equivalent of creativity. The more complex a system, the more stable and self-correcting it is.

The objective (Sol, Frater) and subjective (Luna, Soror Mystica) are not divorced from one another, anymore than the left and right hemispheres of the brain. They marry in the mystic, in entanglement with Cosmos. Science adapted the artist’s sense that the detail of nature is significant. Like yin and yang, they rely on one another in a dynamic meld that transcends the tension of opposites. Synthesizing and transcending opposites is the theme of alchemy.

The metaphors of science have increasing relevance in the artworld and transmodern mysticism. Art and science begin as imaginative speculation that guesses at a unity or gestalt. The same holds true for alchemy. Metaphors reflect universal or holistic references and processes, connecting concepts across disciplines. There is a dimension of reality that transcends mind and matter.

The creative act is one of uniting the unmanifest with the manifest world in a meaningful, often symbolic way. Such conception is relevant to consciousness, organization, structure, faith, subconsciousness, emotion, even spirituality. Above all, creativity means trusting the process. Investigation of the negentropic criterion helps us move toward a truly transdisciplinary doctrine for the artistic field of influence. Chaos Theory provides a metaphorical language for describing the flowing dynamics of the chaotic process of psychological transformation.

Myths are like collective dreams; ritual is an enactment of myth; art is its expression. We create new philosophical and scientific myths to satisfy our need to understand our environment and give us some sense of control and understanding of our place in it. In science we call them ‘models’. Like metaphors, they provide a reference point without defining a reality.

Alchemy is unbound. It evolves like any science or artform through revolutionary paradigm shifts that revision or reframe its philosophy of practice. Chaos theory is an organic model of creation. Chaos prevails from the infinitely small to cosmic levels. Dynamic processes are deterministic though unpredictable. All experience is subjective. Intuition is an informational source that is non-linear and therefore can create quantum leaps in consciousness. Using imagination, we can ‘see through’ to a deeper level of reality.

Alchemists seek understanding of the relationships between all the elements. Holistic vision is developed with experiments on matter and self, fantasy and meditation. In alchemy, meditation is an act of imagination fired by awareness and libido, "an inner colloquy with one's good angel." Creative insight, a new perspective on reality, emerges through transpersonal experience.

Alchemy is also a thought experiment that plunges one into the upwelling spring of Nature feeding the roots of matter and psyche. Ultimately, these cycles of experimentation and reflection are warming acts of love that keep the gentle fires of the alchemical transformation going. The formula "VITRIOL" encodes the various operations of the alchemical process.

Creativity is Healing

Alchemy, quantum mysticism and the holographic paradigm reveal the secrets of nature's subquantal realm. Metaphors are instructive. They are a Way of leaping the chasm between old and new knowledge, old and new ways of essential being. We can tap the source of creativity, healing and holistic restructuring through imagination and metaphor. They can be deeply transformative -- more than mere language. They are a technology for changing our behaviors, feelings, thoughts, and beliefs -- our spirit and soul.

Alchemists are contemplative researchers versed in the science of personal transformation and the art of inner magic. Alchemical insight ultimately short-circuits self-referential feedback loops, leading to breakthroughs in perception and quality of being. At the groundstate, mind is utterly emptied of all contents. Both physical and mental space dissolve in this exploration.

A dynamic vacuum state of consciousness opens paranormal states of awareness and healing. In much ado about Nothing, the bubble of illusion (all mental and physical phenomena) bursts in primordial awareness. In the highest potential energy state, space, time, mind and matter dissolve into their Source -- the "melted vacuum" of physics, the "clear water" of the alchemists.

Alchemy is a science-art, a tool to describe and mold reality using experimental and meditative techniques. As an art medium, alchemy helps us illustrate nature and our own nature in contemporary terms by creating new paradigms and environments.

Matter has lost its central role in physics to dynamics. Alchemy can be informed by this new physics. There is aesthetic pleasure in finding likenesses between things once thought unalike. It gives a sense of richness and understanding. The creative mind looks for unexpected likenesses, through engagement of the whole person. Organic metaphors of quantum physics, field theory, and chaos theory illuminate the alchemical art.

NEW! ALCHEMY JOURNAL Vol. 10 No. 1

www.alchemyjournal.com/
The Alchemy Journal is devoted to the Divine Art, Celestial Agriculture, the Mother of all Science and Wisdom, the ancient Art of Transformation: the Great Work as known by many names.

Since 2000 the Alchemy Journal has published an eclectic array of material, both scholarly and personal, logical and emotional, practical and spiritual, everyday and occult, including essays, articles, poetry, visual art, interviews, and summaries of operative alchemical processes, along with book and website reviews, sources and resources, and the latest conference, lecture and workshop announcements.

Contents:

The Modern Mystery School by Gudni Gudnason

The Influence of Women in Alchemy by Abigail McBride

The Mother-Space, the Ultimate Alchemical Feminine by Dr. Bruce Fisher

Anima Mundi, Soul-Filled World by Iona Miller

The Seed in Spring by Steve Kalec

The alchemical feminine in new works by Michael Pearce

The Salts of Life by Karen Bartlett

Shekhinah, the Feminine Presence of God by Dr. Theresa Ibis

Beyond Passions by Tamara Nikolic and Jay Hochberg

Mater Alchemæ by Rubaphilos Salfluĕre

To Pursue Their Full Measure of Happiness: Sex, Gender, Politics and Alchemy by Andrew Minkin

Twenty-First Century Turba Philosophorum: the 2008 International Alchemy Conference by Dennis William Hauck

Hymn to Kali by Ramdulal Nandi

Russell Burton House, plus Nicki Scully and Linda Star Wolf reviewed by Rubaphilos Salfluĕre;
Dr. Ross Mack reviewed by Iona Miller;
Alexander Roob reviewed by Jay Hochberg;
Paul Foster Case reviewed by Darcy Kuntz;
Russell Burton House reviewed by Mike Ridpath; and
Ruth Rusca and Dr. Christine R. Page reviewed by Alexander Price

Plus a profile of Modern Magister Jeannie Radcliffe

Transmodern Alchemy - Soma Sophia

SOMA SOPHIA: BODY WISDOM
Culture, Creativity, & Psychic Energy

By Iona Miller, 10-2005

“The tiny particles which form the vast universe are not tiny at all. Neither is the universe vast. These are notions of the mind, which is like a knife, always chipping away at the Tao, trying to render it graspable and manageable. But that which is beyond form is ungraspable, and that which is beyond knowing is unmanageable. There is, however, this consolation: She who lets go of the knife will find the Tao at her fingertips.”

~Brian Walker, Trans. Hua Hu Ching: The Unkown Teachings of Lao Tzu, Harper San Francisco.


We are waves whose stillness is non-being
We are alive because of this, that we have no rest.
~Abu-Talib Kalim

Abstract: The first aim of science is the description of our world. Science seeks a system of categories which will capture the essential aspects of the entitles under study. The second aim of science is the explanation of the origin of tile entities. Science seeks to know the causes of the entities under study. The third aim of science is the prediction of the future. Science searches for accurate methods of predicting future events and structures of interest. The fourth aim of science is a general understanding.

The mindbody is electronic. Living systems are very sensitive to tiny energy fields and resonance phenomena, both locally and at a distance. They allow the cells of the body to work together instantaneously and symphonically.

Our hearts are powerful electromagnetic organs whose influence extends far beyond our skin boundaries through field effects and nonlocal intentionality, emotions and thoughts. Also, each cell of the body has a 'mind' of its own, connected holistically through the living matrix, a communication system within the body.

The living matrix is as or more powerful than the nervous system, because it extends into each and every cell. It is another kind of consciousness. The body has a cellular memory which embodies our traumas and triumphs. Integrative medicine approaches this mind/body system with a holistic treatment philosophy toward the body's operating system.

Mythopoetically, SOMA SOPHIA is not only a Body of Wisdom, but the innate wisdom of our body for self-organization and assembly, and healing. Felt-sense is a primal form of perception, cueing us on the safety or danger of situations or people to our fundamental well-being. She is the panacea, the heal-all for our psychosomatic complaints.

All human cultures have a model of the universe. Primitive societies embody their models in mythology and modern societies define their models with science. Such models serve important psychological and social functions.

1) They define the origin and structure of the world.

2) They provide the basic framework for social relations.

3) They explain the stages of life which most people experience.

4) They reveal the relationship between normal consciousness and altered states of consciousness.

Models can be compared for complexity, coherence, processes, structures, and the social systems which result. Such models are essential to human society regardless of their exact content.

These cultural models have several common features. The universe is thought to have different levels. There may be only a few levels or there may be many. Distinction is often drawn between the realm of the living and the non-living. The world of everyday objects is often contrasted with another level where the ordinary distinctions of space, time, and identity dissolve. Another common feature is a set of key processes including creation, destruction and balance. Perhaps the most important simularity is the concept of unity in diversity. All the levels and all the processes are seen as parts of an integrated whole.


Introduction

"The only truly natural and real human unity is the spirit of the Earth. . . .The sense of Earth is the irresistable pressure which will come at the right moment to unite them (humankind) in a common passion." ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Ya Gotta Have Heart

We can connect intentionally with well-being through our hearts, returning the human dimension to our technocratic society through compassion and generosity of spirit. Cross-culturally throughout time, the heart has been associated with spiritual influx, wisdom, and compassion.

In Kabbalah, the heart center is associated with Beauty, with the transpersonal perspective of the Higher Self, and the Sun. It slowly dawns on us how intimately the universe supports us. In meditation we losen our identification with the limitations of ego, and associate with that transpersonal vantage point. We literally have a truly infinite body. Whatever universe is, we are That. The basic element of energy is the photon and we are photonic.

Heartfulness is a great healer demonstrated by the health and well-being of connected people with alterations in brain and immune function. Self-regulation with meditation modulates stress, restores body and spirit and synchronizes us with subtle geophysical rhythms.

The heart is more than a physiological or metaphorical partner in emotional response. The pacemaking electricity produced in the heart is not continuous but pulsating and rhythmic in action, synchronized with the contraction of the atrium and ventricle. This current is called electrical impulse. But it is also poetic, such as expressions of our excitement and engagement like, “Be still my beating heart”, “my heart overflows”, that imply a full heart, willing to “share” itself, to risk experience, to love unconditionally.

Such a heart is never a “lonely hunter” for it comprehends the immediacy of its engagement with self, others and cosmos. New discoveries of an integral vision of reality are putting the heart and subjectivity back in empirical science. This coherent vision of Cosmos echoes the earliest spiritual traditions, fusing man and universe. Every energetic event affects the system as a whole. Every beat of our hearts reflects the support of the whole universe for our lives, and can embody our reciprocation.

The ''vision'' developed in antiquity to implement a higher plane of thinking can be duplicated. We can reclaim that sacred oneness experienced by our ancestors who lived closer to nature. We can align ourselves by implimenting changes in our beliefs to improve the flow of physical and psychic energy, creativity, the wisdom and well-being of our holistic selves as well as our quality of life. But how?

Are we to take it on faith that we can evolve our species with vague acausal theories of so-called quantum mind, resonance and intentionality? Unless explanations involving mental effort and intention (degrees of freedom) can state clearly where *these* originate -- what their causal antecedents are -- then we really haven't explained anything when it comes to human choice and behavior.

The mind is variously described as consciousness, the observer, the subject's choices, intention, mental effort, "spiritual force", free will. Each level of consciousness operates as a whole at its own level, fitting personal and transpersonal together like the spectrum of a rainbow. What we do know from physics is that old notions of empiricism and objectivity have been forever replaced with relativity and subjectivity.

It is fashionable now, especially in energy medicine to talk of fields, and the field body in particular with a certain awe and reverence. It is true that quantum bioholography has demonstrated that the foundational basis of the body is photonic. Biosystems are conscious holograms.

Each of us is a nested hierarchy of field bodies - wavefronts in space. Modulations of Sound and Light waves at various scales are fundamental in the creation of our integral 3-D forms. There is a relationship between resonance and cymatics (optical and acoustic holography), eidetic imagery, and the living tissue matrix with its liquid crystal semi-conductors. Holography is an advanced application of cymatics, the conversion of energy from the invisible electromagnetic domain to physical form.

Biosystems are conscious holograms. Each of us is a nested hierarchy of field bodies - wavefronts in space. Modulations of Sound and Light waves at various scales are fundamental in the creation of our integral 3-D forms. There is a relationship between resonance and cymatics (optical and acoustic holography), eidetic imagery, and the living tissue matrix with its liquid crystal semi-conductors. Holography is an advanced application of cymatics, the conversion of energy from the invisible electromagnetic domain to physical form.

The fundamental and generative power is in the vibration which, with its periodicity, sustains phenomena with its two poles. One pole is form, the figurative pattern. The other is motion, the dynamic process. These three fields - vibration and periodicity as the ground field, and form and motion as the two poles - constitute an indivisible whole. There is a similarity between cymatic pictures and quantum particles. In both cases that which appears to be a solid form is also a wave. They are both created and simultaneously organized by the principle of PULSE.

Plasma is a source of all types of waves, which feed back on the plasma and display mutual correlation. The manifestations of life may be ultimately summarized in terms of plasma and radiation. The secret of life lies in process control through small energy and with minimal noise. Plasma can be controlled only through fields, in particular magnetic fields.

The plasma approach to life points out that life is electric, however, its control takes place magnetically. Plasma is revealed by the emission of an electromagnetic field and is obedient only to this field, even a very weak one. The electronic processes of metabolism may be treated as a plasma state within the solid state of organic compounds.

Practitioners of electromagnetic therapy believe that they can rebalance these energy fields by applying external electrical energy. "Energy medicine" proponents apply electrical, magnetic, microwave and infrared devices to treat illness. Our focus in the study and practice of energy medicine should center around how to restore biological coherence to the system so that the living matrix can function fully, bringing vitality and energy to our entire lives.

"Biochemical action and bioelectronic action meet at the quantum-junction. The keys to our physiology are also the keys to consciousness. Phenomena now considered esoteric may someday be explained in terms of bioelectronic interactions of energy and matter. What has been the realm of metaphysical healing may become a precise EM healing science." (Roffey)

Interactions between electromagnetic fields and living matter are pursued on three levels:

Prevention: the way electromagnetic fields influence the development of illnesses.

Diagnosis: the way endogenous bio-electric signals and weak electrical and magnetic fields of bio-molecules correlate with the state of health.

Treatment: the way biological structures and functions can be modulated by means of electromagnetic fields.

Heart coherence, brainwave entrainment with Schumann's Resonance, and relieving stress on the Cranio Sacral nerves freeing the Vagus nerve all contribute to recalibrating our well-being, even though we are continuously immersed in the electromagnetic "smog" of modern life. These can be managed with autohypnosis, top-down yoga, self-regulation or simple biofeedback computer programs, such as Wild Divine or CDs of binaural beat drivers like Holosynch.

Elysian Fields

Physicist Erwin Schrodinger first saw the body as a liquid crystal (Ho). Northrup & Burr, then Dr. Robert Becker showed how the body functions electrically. Crystals semi-conduct electric currents, with tremendous information storage and exchange. Liquid crystals in the body such as DNA, RNA, proteins, bone matrices (which are solid crystals), and cell membranes also semi-conduct important true electric currents. The brain and heart have their own fields, too. Still a conscious electromagnetic information field remains only an emotionally appealing theory, though many espouse it.

Fields are applied to the body for both diagnosis and treatment (Becker; Beck). Fields (electronic smog) can also cause disease propagation. Many alternative EM therapies have demonstrated disappointing lack of objective evidence to support claims for their effectiveness. Or, effectiveness may be placebo effect, the psychophysical effect of healing rituals or rapport, rather than the applications of fields.

This does not mean we don’t have fundamental and practical therapeutic uses of pulsed EMFs (PEMFs). They are used medically in bioelectrical growth and repair, non-union bone and amputation treatment. Weak magnetic fields generated by current flows all over the body can now be measured non-invasively with the extremely sensitive Super Quantum Interference Device (SQUID) magnetometer.

Living cells are electromagnetic units. Skin potential is the change of electromagnetic phenomenon in all cells of the body transmitted over the gap junction. The evidence is overwhelming that electro-dynamical fields and currents are involved in intercommunication within the body.

These fields and currents are connected to and correlated with the EEG and ECG that are a routine part of conventional biomedicine. The body uses electromagnetic signals of different frequencies and extents to intercommunicate. Hence it would be surprising if external electromagnetic fields did not have an effect.

When a subject is totally relaxed and has achieved a deep meditative state, a slow, rhythmic sine wave pattern can be registered by a cardiograph-type sensing device. What is being measured is a standing wave in the aorta. There is a heart-aorta resonating oscillator which affects other parts of the body, including the brain.

Resonance occurs when the natural vibration frequency of a body is greatly amplified by vibrations at the same frequency from another body. Oscillators alter the environment in a periodic manner. When in a deep meditative state the regular movement of the body indicates that a standing wave is set up in the vascular system, specifically in the aorta. This standing wave affects several other resonate systems in the body, all of which are driven by this large signal. (Miller & Miller)

There is a major resonate cavity oscillator located between the heart and the bifurcation, where the aorta divides. When the timing of the pressure pulses travelling down the aorta coincide (in phase) with the reflected pressure pulse, a standing wave is achieved.

When this frequency approaches 7Hz., a progressively amplified wave form is created by resonance, resulting in a large oscillation affecting every other circuit in the body tuned to this frequency. There is a resonance relationship to this frequency with the “pacemaker” of Earth that drives the biosphere -- Schumann’s Resonance (7.8 Hz). It is in the Alpha-Theta range of human brainwaves. Thus, a harmonic frequency corresponding to the pulsation of the electrical charge of the Earth is present in heart/aorta.

This electrostatic field around the Earth transmits waves like a stiff jelly. When our bodies move and vibrate, these movements are transmitted to the environment. These fields not only impinge on our body but they also affect the charges inside our body. When we are standing on the ground, under normal conditions, we are grounded. Our body then acts as a sink for the electrostatic field and we actually distort the force lines somewhat.

Our body also has its own electrostatic field about itself. These field-lines are the result of the various biochemical reactions in the body. This resultant bio-field couples us to the isoelectric field of the planet. The brain functions as a piezoelectric gel converting physical vibrations into electrical ones. Although the body movement from this heart/aorta resonance is relatively small, 0.003-0.009 mm., the head is a dense and tight structure.

By moving up and down, the skull accelerates the brain with mild impacts. These acoustical plane waves are reflected from the cranial vault and are focused upon the third and lateral ventricles. A hierarchy of frequencies couple this 7Hz. body movement to the higher frequencies in the ventricles.

Information is embodied in a field, rather than just being a field. A field is thus an abstract quantity of information; relationships between this point and that point in the universe.

Field of Dreams

The human organism has usually been regarded as a complex arrangement of chemical elements and compounds. The quantity and structure of these variables are our reference points for states of health. This is the area of biochemistry and biochemical analysis.

An equally valid approach is to regard the human organism as an aggregation of electromagnetic fields which are constantly interacting and changing as are their biological equivalents. It has been shown that the human system is an emitter of electromagnetic radiations, including the arterial stationary waves.

All biological processes are a function of electromagnetic field interactions. EM fields are the connecting link between the world of form and resonant patterns. EM fields embody or store gestalts, patterns of information.

Controversial physicists such as Thomas Bearden (2005, Oblivion) say thermodynamic and electromagnetic (EM) field theory and engineering theories are seriously flawed at their root, and in need of revisioning. Waves are central to Quantum Theory and thus to understanding the structure of Matter. Electromagnetics comes from the electric and magnetic properties of the wave. Energy is emitted by all materials above absolute zero in temperature. Low energy (cool objects) emit in the long wavelengths with high energy (hot objects) emit in increasingly shorter wavelengths.

Proponents of Zero-Point Energy (ZPE) contend that the source of electromagnetic energy emerges from the scalar potential, which marks the the limit of our observations of the microcosm. Even in the vacuum, where the energy-momentum tensor vanishes, localized ripples of curvature can propagate in the form of gravitational radiation. The discrete 'particle' properties of Matter and Light (quanta) are in fact caused by Standing Wave interactions.

Electromagnetic waves are carried by particles called quanta. By using particle theory electromagnetic radiation can be examined as if it were composed of small particles of energy called quanta. Finite bundles, quanta of light are called photons. Though they can demonstrate particulate properties they are believed to be massless. However, though photons do not have mass, they do have momentum

Where did all these photons in the vacuum originate from? They originated on all the other particles throughout the universe. All the charged particles in the cosmos are doing the same jitterbug dance that causes electrons to radiate and absorb photons like crazy.

Electromagnetic waves are a collection of synchronized photons of different frequency and amplitude. Radiation is constantly pouring in and flowing out, balancing on average. The electron goes forward and backward in a seemingly random pattern in space and time, in order to balance all the radiation coming in and flowing out.

This balanced radiation pattern is analogous to the interference pattern of a hologram. A 3-D pattern of energy created by regions of interference is what we see as an image. There is creative and destructive interference. An electron and every particle is a “hologram,” produced as the result of the actions of the electron to preserve the balance of energy (Miller, et al, 1973).

Zero-point energy is made up of photons created by all those electrons in distant stars. Virtual photons in space are created by the motions of other electrons, mainly by “distant matter.” Each zigzag of a local electron is actually a nonlocal communication between it and distant matter. Each quantum photon consists of many photon pulses, which are collectively the ZPE of the vacuum of space (Swanson).

This theory is arguable, but the observation is not. Still, it is highly unlikely that new meta-theories will originate from disciplines associated with the healing arts, social science, or humanities rather than hard sciences of physics and cosmology. The humanities tend to use science metaphors from the cutting edge to amplify, justify or elaborate pop theories. The “standard model” of physics is deeply flawed leaving the deep nature of Reality open to philosophical speculation.

Proponents of QM fall into essentially two groups:

Copenhagen-esque--"old school" explanations which dwell on quantum theory's non-intuitiveness and in fact seem to celebrate the "leap of logic" needed to accept the observer-based wave-function collapse postulate;

New Agey Utopian idealism--"quantum theory is strange, consciousness is strange, therefore, consciousness is explained by quantum theory", entanglement is proof that "all points in the universe are connected by some underlying ineffable thing, so can't we all just get along", etc.

This tendency toward pop trendiness also pervades alternative medicine, and metaphysics, as witnessed by the popularity of the quantum physics movie, “What the Bleep…”. Physics is the latest darling of the New Age circuit. Culture is everything that is going on (concepts, postures, attitudes), not just what we think should be going on, or “rational space”. Nor would we want to limit ourselves to that if we could.

A primary role of culture is to harness energy and information But often focus is on the figures of pop culture, rather than the ground from which it arises, on the powerful personalities, rather than the Source. Only the transdiciplinary field catches the sciences in the imaginal and philosophical act of creating and defining themselves.

Talk of the role of Consciousness in the journey of evolutionary wisdom is likewise popular, with many trends rising and falling within the global discussion. Fads in consciousness theory, based largely on conceptual implications of biophysics, come and go with their charismatic proponents. Most people respond emotionally to the self-referential metaphors of the model they embrace. Even in the research communnity, this induces a lot of emotional and spiritual dissonance, working off the flawed premises.

In 1987 Ervin Laszlo formulated a hypothesis about mathematical wave functions that assemble themselves into forms and nested patterns or psi-fields. Laszlo theorized that once patterns are made, they probably will occur again, as an expression of creativity in the universe, or cosmos. We speak in terms of fields, because that marks the boundary of our knowledge, the frontier of our observations and theories. But if there is a “consciousness field” science hasn’t discovered or recognized it.

As humans, we unceasingly pursue the manufacture of order out of chaos. It is not to be right, to prove ourselves right but just because we crave that understanding. We generate narratives, models, and myths. Most speakers are “true-believers” of their own platforms, each characterized by their own specialty, highlighting their own insights. But that doesn’t mean that energy, consciousness, healing, or creativity is limited to those pathways in any way.

The truth behind the curtain is that we simply don’t know, though most practitioners have their heartfelt models about how it all works. Many stake their credibility on it. However, life, art and science imitate and are an extension of the technologies they use. But human beings rarely realize this cultural fact that “the medium is the message” (McLuhan). We break up the message into its components. Spiritual teachers describe the ego as a field holding us in thrall to space and time; together they form the three great illusions.

Some progressive physics experts will invoke the plenum (Comings), others extoll the Void (Bearden); some see a universe of sticky strings and membranes (Greene), others of chaotic attractors at the cosmological level (quantum chaos), a quantum handshake (Cramer; King), a plasma universe (Thornhill), mini-black holes (Haramein), density-matrix (Progogine).

Others suggest information flow (Deutsch; Moles), topology/toroid (Tenen; Young), synergetics (Fuller), post-quantum physics (Sarfatti), complexity (Santa Fe; Gell-Mann), or an n-dimensional hologram (Miller; Gariaev). Then there is the postmodern philosophical (Derrida, Deleuze, DeLanda) and anthropological (Laughlin, McManus, d’Aquili) commentary on the nature and perception of Reality (Derrida, Deleuze, DeLanda).

Everyone chimes in on the chorus of mind/body buzzwords, and the nouveau version, Nonlocal Mind, with its resonance and entanglement/decoherence phenomena; neurophenomenology; biognosis. The main premise of quantum mind theories is that we can use our intentionality as a probability purturbation instrument, because we are one with subquantum potential. We can use mental focus to alternately concentrate and relax our attention. Neural processes and quantum events interpermeate in biophysics. Biophysics researchers are attempting to follow the signal back to its source.

Intent is suggested as a variable in transmission and reception in the exchange of extrasensory information, possibly within the range of ELF electromagnetic frequencies (Sidorov, 2002). Even those who can demonstrate psi in the laboratory on demand, cannot account for signal nonlocality or distant interaction.

The origins of the data are not revealed, only the conclusions with their level of resolution or accuracy. This is where the models of information theory and biophysics come into play. The structure of the multiverse (Deutsch) is determined by information flow. Laszlo (1996) suggests that the natural processes of complexity and chaos could amplify vacuum-level fluctuations into significant inputs to behavior, and that the brain, another chaotic system, could receive and amplify these signals which can penetrate into consciousness.

Some speakers confound mutually-exclusive theories with one another, as if selecting “all of the above” as the answer to the Reality question. I can recall one well-meaning energy medicine researcher seriously trying to detect the ever-elusive tachyon (magnetic monopole) using his Ficus Benjamina tree as an antenna! I was underwhelmed.

There are many dimensions of our consciousness, conditioning our experience also by how we think and believe. Observing our own selves in the mirror of the universe is a self-reflexive act. By definition, consciousness is always a scale-dependent collective event, whether conceived as an artifact of collective, cosmic, geomagnetic, biological, or quantum fields. Consciousness is not hierarchichal but appears in dynamics of all observable levels. But we are scientifically unsure it is a field phenomenon at all. We may need a new meta-theory to even begin to conceptualize further.

Consciousness studies have attracted the attention of mystics, philosophers, and scientists from many disciplines spanning new syntheses in physics, life sciences, neurology, psychology, energy medicine, social sciences, and more. This multidisciplinary inquiry raises questions ranging from cellular to organismic perception to the subjective quality of our ordinary conscious and unconscious experiences, in addition to the phenomenology of transformation and transcendence.

Consciousness is more than perceptual awareness or sense of self. There is a whole hierarchy of its dynamics at every level of observation. It is more than the flashlight beam of egoic or focal consciousness, or even the omnidirectional vision of the global (observer) Self. It is more than awareness or awareness of awareness.

Meditation masters speak of an inner Light that pervades the physical and energy bodies, and now science investigates it as biophotons, and through quantum physics we can watch that matter/energy/information devolve back into the unstructured void from which potential emanates.

Mystics have often equated this pervasive Light/Sound with primordial Consciousness and the source of life as well as matter. Quantum bioholography shows the DNA literally produces coherent light which transduces to sound that directs the formative processes of life. Radiant energy is radiant energy.

Professor Harold Saxton-Burr, working at Yale University in the 1930's, discovered that all organisms are surrounded with a measurable electromagnetic field. This field changes with physical or even emotional changes in the body. This primary field has a controlling nature; changes in the field are later followed by changes in the physical cells of the body. Actual physical changes follow the change in the electromagnetic field.

Even conception is an electromagnetic phenomenon. The egg changes polarity to allow itself to be penetrated by a particular sperm it deems chemically suitable. When the genetic material fuses, the process of quantum bioholography begins. DNA transduces biophotons (coherent light) into sound waves which direct the (cymatics or acoustic holography) process of embryonic development with DNA as the blueprint.

Shortly after the neural tube forms, while the spine of the embryo is still totally exposed and before brain formation, one single cell in the tube becomes electrically excited and begins to beat; it entrains surrounding cells to become the heart. This collective beat creates an (EM) field that is measurable at a distance from the body in a human child or adult. All the molecules in the body of the embryo move together in a correlated way, global coherence.

The Earth also has an electromagnetic field (magnetosphere), and we have evolved in it. The biosphere is linked to this field through the regular pulsation of Schumann's Resonance. Regulation of the body by the heartbeat is analogous to regulation of the biosphere and its organisms through Schumann’s Resonance, which is in the range of human brainwaves. Under the influence of heartbeat, the body acts as a conducting piezoelectric gel so the heart is holistically regulating each and every cell.

It seems there is more to our consciousness than simple cognition. Our insides are not discrete from the outside, immediate and far-flung. Should we use a capital C or small c when speaking of its dynamic? Does consciousness somehow relate to energy levels? The Chinese say the deeper the level of consciousness the higher the Qi energy it associates.

They say the Tao gives rise to all forms, but has no form of its own; likewise, the Diamond Sutra says there is no form without void and no void without form. In cosmology, even cold dark matter is said to have structure at all magnitudes. Recent string theories propose dimensions larger than the universe. But then string theory is deeply flawed.

Mystery and confusion enshroud our deepest experiences and observations, beginning with self-observation of our awareness. We don’t even know what ‘the self’ means much less the primal nature of the universe. We don’t clearly know how emotion differs from cognition, even when we perceive dissonance between them. Or we overlook the role of meta-emotion in choice, including worldview (meta-theory). Imagery plays a role in the models we create from our possibly hard-wired “love of truth.”

But it is a dramatic irony that point of view and emotion can also have distorting effects on cognition and reason, causing us to see what we want to believe (observer bias). Intentions and emotions arise together, but emotions compel us to pursue our goals even with colored perceptions.

Emotional investment can lead directly to episodes of goal obstruction rather than the emotional awareness of a comprehensive self in the world. Or, emotions, as perceptions of patterned changes in the body (William James), can help us toward greater understanding of self, others and world. When such perceptions are conscious, they qualify as emotions; unconscious unfelt emotions are feelings. Emotions condition our living experience of the present, the temporal stream of consciousness.

Every conscious state has an emotional quality; good or bad mood, energized or not. Existential feelings, (such as belonging, separation, power, control, being one with nature), can be bodily feelings and, at the same time, part of the structure of intentionality and the feeling of being.

Overt and concealed emotional experience permeates conscious life. Vigilance, emotional arousal, and attention mediate tensions associated with subjective states. They help us cope with dissonance, deploy intentional behavior, and stay motivated. Social bonds foster empathy, emotional/affective resonance with the internal distress of another individual and the intrinsic motivation to help relieve it. Empathic vision has to be part of the new paradigm that returns the human dimension to our plutocratic technocracy.

The more we learn, the clearer it becomes that we are clueless about the deep nature of reality. We might think or feel we do understand reality, either spiritually or scientifically, but it may be a conditioned illusion, a mirage of consensus. Why is it each new age or holistic health speaker or energy medicine practitioner has a pet theory of both physics and spirituality? Philosophically based, they can’t all be right. In the end, only a few will have accurately described the reality we inhabit.

Many traditions claim that when we experience pure consciousness that is the ground state of the universe. But there is nothing in the experience itself to substantiate evidence for anyting beyond this experience being a state, physiological anomaly, or artifact of the nervous system, according to neurotheology research. Separate sorts of evidence are needed to highlight the experience itself from theories about it.

Comprehending our consciousness raises the fundamental question of the primal nature of the cosmos as well as our own nature. We evolved in cosmic and local environmental fields (like geomagnetic Schumann’s Resonance) that definitely condition our being and consciousness. The environment has molded our form.

Three forms of EM fields- wavefront, photon, and coupling mediator field, are able to exchange energy and information within each other immediately, as if they were one unique existent, or living in complete symbioses. They exist as a resonant coupling, represented in the quantum world, for example, such as the Bose-Einstein condensate.

Complex information can be encoded in EM fields, as we all know from coding and decoding of television and radio signals. Even more complex information can be encoded in holographic images. DNA acts as a holographic projector of acoustic and EM information which contains the informational quintessence of the biohologram. Ordered water is another candidate for submatrix (Frost).

The philosopher, Karl Popper, proposed in 1993 that consciousness was a manifestation of some kind of force field in the brain, a wave phenomenon. CEMI theory (McFadden) argues for a conscious electromagnetic information field and neural synchrony generated by the brain. The brain generates its own EM field which binds the neuronal information into a single integrated whole.

Perhaps, information is encoded as an electromagnetic field, but does that mean it is “conscious” or consciousness? Can the brain’s (conscious) em field can itself influence neuronal firing? Does consciousness have any direct effect on the brain, and does this also bear on the notion of “intentionality” -- ability to fire motor neurons in oneself or even others as in nonlocal healing? Are the properties of mind and force related?

Is consciousness identical with certain spatiotemporal patterns in the electromagnetic field'? Pockett (2002) thinks the defining feature of conscious electromagnetic patterns is probably going to be some feature of their spatial constitution. She cites Walter Freeman’s classic experiments showing that information generated on the surface of a rabbit brain resided entirely in the spatial features of the patterns, not at all in their overall amplitude, frequency or phase properties.

Evoked Potentials

An event-related potential (ERP) in the brain is used to investigate the electrophysiological responses measured from the scalp by the electroencephalogram. E. Roy Johns researches this problem of evoked potentials: meaningful external or internal behavioral events and cortical network organization through ERPs, neural signals that reflects coordinated neural network activity.

ERP is a characteristic waveform that occurs in relation to the behaviorally significant discrete event. Cortical ERPs arise from synchronous interactions among large numbers of participating neurons. The principle use of Event Related Potentials (ERP) is to determine the time course of higher level processes in the human brain.

Multiple feedback loops involving both excitatory and inhibitory interactions typically cause ERPs to be oscillatory, meaning that they fluctuate within bounds around a central value. Depending on the types of interaction that occur in a specific behavioral condition, cortical networks may display different states of synchrony, causing their ERPs to oscillate in different frequency bands, designated delta (0 4 Hz), theta (5 8 Hz), alpha (9 12 Hz), beta (13 30 Hz), and gamma (31 100 Hz).

The physiological basis of the cortical ERP lies in fields of potential generated by interacting neurons (Lopes da Silva, 1991). The intracellular components of the same closed-loop currents that give rise to field potentials are responsible for the closely related magnetic fields, recorded extracranially as the magnetoencephalogram, or MEG. a primary task of all ERP studies is to extract the event-related portion of the recorded field potential. www.ccs.fau.edu/~bressler/pdf/HBTNN.html

Some argue for a field of pure consciousness, morphic or dynamic self-organizing fields guiding organisms including ourselves. Some (Laszlo; Goswami) argue for an “informed Universe”, a Conscious Universe. Prigogine argues for a Realist Approach. Yet others (Deutsch) argue the universe is obsolete, the fabric of reality being a Multiverse.

We need a paradigm shift to effectively study consciousness -- new concepts of matter, life and mind. Current theories of reality have gaps, and tend to overlap one another or treat existence at radically different scales. We can’t even reliably determine if Reality is smooth or lumpy.

Many naked assumptions are being made in science, which has become more like religion, a matter of faith and participant bias. Qualities emerge from the dichotomy of differentiating/integrating (which can be represented as I/O). When we look into the Abyss we find ourselves smiling back enigmatically.

We stand in Mystery, exemplified by the fact there is no consensus in physics, cosmology, consciousness studies, and certainly not metaphysics. Is information from the cosmic or subquantal realms really directly transducable? We don't even know what electricity is! Much less the definitive nature of a subquantal realm we cannot observe except by inferrence. That makes it meta-physical, by definition. We don’t know what energy is , except that it is "frozen mass and/or light" which another theory proves cannot 'exist', at least not objectively because all experience is subjective.

Too bad that for all our scientific pretentions to objectivity, we don’t have any viable understanding of either mass, light or time, either. This is compounded with notions of so-called dark matter and dark energy -- more ‘smoke and mirrors’ explanations. It seems the great Light casts a long shadow. In holographic theory, that ‘shadow’ is related to the scalar field of the vacuum potential. Dark matter and energy are also implicated in structure formation, as is fractal dynamics.

There are continual revolutions in concepts and paradigms in physics, which later permeate society and beliefs mostly in a rather (often misunderstood) way. Life can be understood from the perspective of contemporary physics, non-equilibrium thermodynamics and quantum theory or from metabolic domains like neurotransmitters (Pert), gene-expression (Rossi), liquid crystals (Ho), or dynamic cellular membranes (Lipton).

If we drop down another whole domain of observation from the juicy “wetware” described by chemistry and atomic structure, we enter the subatomic realm of quantum physics. At this level the behavior of matter, both organic and inorganic, is governed not by classical notions of cause and effect or even complex dynamics, but by those of quantum probability and the uncertainty principle, and perhaps quantum chaos.

Many theorists postulate quantum and subquantal imaginal fields for both the cosmos and ourselves. Some of these theories of interacting field bodies, (like Frolich’s quantum coherent photon fields), are more plausible than others. A model of the mind-body relationship is developed in which novel biophysical principles in genome function generate a dynamic possessing attributes consistent with both our psychophysical nature and consciousness.

One of the most promising coherent models (King, 2001) invokes a fractal link between neurodynamical chaos and quantum uncertainty. Transactional wave collapse (Cramer’s quantum handshake) allows this link to be utilized predictably by the excitable cell, in a way which bypasses and complements formal computation.

The formal unpredictability of the model allows mindbody to interact coherently with the brain, the predictability of consciousness in survival strategies being selected as a trait by organismic evolution. This theory may suggest quantum evolution is orchestrated by the information transduction of DNA. But soon even our own biological evolution may become obsolete throug our own technologies.

Vernor Vinge began speaking on the technological rapture in the 1980s, then he wrote a 1993 essay, called "Technological Singularity". He predicted, "Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly thereafter, the human era will be ended."

Vinge's singularity is commonly misunderstood to mean technological progress will rise to infinity, as happens in a mathematical singularity. Actually, the term was chosen as a metaphor from physics rather than mathematics: as one approaches the Singularity, models of the future become less reliable, just as conventional models of physics break down as one approaches a gravitational singularity.

Vinge writes that superhuman intelligences, whether created by cybernetically enhancing human minds or through artificial intelligence, will be even more able to enhance their own minds than the human intelligences that created them. "When greater-than-human intelligence drives progress," Vinge writes, "that progress will be much more rapid." This feedback loop of self-improving intelligence is expected to cause large amounts of technological progress within a short period of time. Kurzweil predicts a more gradual ascendence involving all of society.

But what a about our humanity? Will that return a human dimension to our already severely alienated technocracy? Are we heroically trying to transcend our meatbody in yet another spiritually misguided means of denying it, needing to improve upon and thereby supercede it in a posthumanism? We don’t even know how the body we’ve got works. Are we going to manufacture technology that makes us obsolete?

BIOGNOSIS: Mindbody Wisdom

Biognosis is more than the investigation of life -- it is the inherent wisdom of the holisitic bodymind, direct perception or klnowledge from life, a deeper understanding of the earth and natural processes. Deeper aspect of biophilia. The intimate interweaving of humanity with the rest of life throughout evolution means that the entire development of the human species as a distinct species cannot be separated from the landscapes in which it developed.

The heart is an organ of perception. James Hillman comments, the heart is the organ that "perceives the correspondences between the subtlties of consciousness and levels of being. . . it is concerned with the interpenetration of consciousness and world." Participatory awareness. We can gather knowledge directly from the ecosystem.

“Light and matter both behave like separate particles and also like waves. This . . . obliged us to abandon, on the plane of atomic magnitudes, a causal description of nature in the ordinary space-time system, and in its place to set up invisible fields of probability in multidimensional spaces.” ~ Wolfgang Pauli, Physicist

But, is consciousness a component of physics? Erwin Laszlo suggests that in an “informed universe”, everything that has ever happened is retained as holographic information in space and that it can be simultaneously downloaded from anywhere in the universe. So why aren’t we all “know it alls”? Because it exists enfolded or encoded or in potential? How can we embody that innate intelligence?

The problem of creativity is present in every field of science (Laszlo, 1995). He suggested that quantum-vacuum interactions play a significant role in the fields of cosmology, physics, biology and consciousness. Everyone wants to discuss the relationship of consciousness and cosmos at the scale or mode of their specialty.

When we drink the micro-clustered water, do we remember the spring?

Biologist Mae Wan Ho, Dr. James Oschmann, and cellular biologist Bruce Lipton speak of special energy relationships in the connective tissue (the skin, bones, tendons, ligaments, cartilage, various membranes covering major organs and linings of internal spaces), extracellular matrix, and cellular membranes of the body. Ordered water (Frost) is another popular theory.

Some speak of the heart and “belly brain” whose thoughts travel the Vagus highway (Porges). We have a dominant “talking” brain and a visceral brain. These are physical correlates of gut reactions, and perhaps psychism (Radin). Sentience, memory and intercommunication are distributed throughout the body; it may be our unconscious and holistic source of wisdom -- Soma Sophia -- for what can we know without our body and senses and their virtual analogs? We don’t have the metaphors to conceptualize otherwise.

This extracellular tissue acts like a dynamic liquid crystal, and is the basis of instantaneous (nonlocal) communication throughout the organism. Coherent energy is vital energy, arising from stored and mobilized coherent energy forms. Our systems are ultrasensitive to weak signals and can amplify them to global effects. Qi is called “coherent” energy. In addition to quantum vacuum interactions with the mind and cosmos, this ground substance of the body with ‘a mind of its own’ may be the basis of energy medicine and our well-being.

There is a dynamic, liquid crystalline continuum of connective tissues and extracellular matrix linking directly into the equally liquid crystalline cytoplasm in the interior of every single cell in the body (see Ho, 1997; Ho, 1998). Liquid crystallinity gives organisms their characteristic flexibility, exquisite sensitivity and responsiveness, thus optimizing the rapid, noiseless intercommunication that enables the organism to function as a coherent, coordinated whole.

In addition, the liquid crystalline continuum provides subtle electrical interconnections which are sensitive to changes in pressure, pH and other physicochemical conditions; in other words, it is also able to register ‘tissue memory’. Thus, the liquid crystalline continuum possesses all the qualities of a ‘body consciousness’ that may indeed be sensitive to all forms of subtle energy medicines including acupuncture. (Mae Wan Ho)

In the quantum world, everything is in flux, including the subquantal virtual photons popping in and out of existence. The foamy Zero Point fluctuation determines the behavior of quantum systems likely by radiant EM fields. Radiation is absorbed from the zero-point background. The stability of matter itself is mediated by the zero point fluctuation phenomena. This hidden energy pool is invoked by new age physicists as plenum physics (Comings). And EM fields that correlate with matter are claimed to act as morphogenetic fields (Sheldrake).

This image of bubbling spacetime doesn’t exist in Einstein’s classical theory of relativity where space is absolutely smooth. Matter and energy have an equatable, quantifiable identity. But at the scale of atoms and electrons particles have no definite velocity and location. Einstein’s picture of reality breaks down at this smallest scale.

Quantum principles therefore dictate that spacetime is a seething foam. If gravity obeys relativity but matter obeys QM, clearly a theory of quantum gravity and a new description of quantum spacetime is required to resolve the conundrum. Are hyperspace and spacetime two views of the same domain or is the solution a whole new perspective on the deepest level of reality?

David Bohm (1980) expressed a view that the groundstate of human consciousness isbeyond neural states representing results of only activity related to aware consciousness. He proposed it may be very fast and related to pre-space, the implicate order behind space-time, to a creative factor, from which the whole phenomena and the space-time structure enfolds. These fast mental processes have characteristics common to microphysical processes (Bohm, 1986). Ultimately, thinking is related to the deep unconscious, the entire embedded organism.

These magical fields have been conceptualized because they work in the mathematics and the real world, but that doesn’t mean they are identical with it, necessarily. There are mathematical solutions for worlds that do not exist -- imaginary realms. Likewise, string and M-theory have many solutions, most of which do not match our Reality.

They are a matter of faith, in some sense, whether we model them as EM fields, strong force fields, gravitational fields, strings, membranes, or subquantal scalar fields. The dogma of field theory has permeated the world of physics. Fields have taken on magical properties.

We can speak of a quantum vacuum “holographic information field”, but what is it; does it even exist as more than a mathematical abstraction? A recent Scientific American (Nov. 05), suggests solutions for holographic universes, but none of them match the observed flat, infinite nature of our own.

Fields or Holograms?

Maxwell is credited with establishing field theory. Maxwell combined a set of four field equations to describe electric and magnetic fields. These four simple and elegant equations describe behavior and provide means to calculate forces, but they shed no light on the actual physical mechanism of electric and magnetic fields and their interactions. As a result, we don't really know what is going on, and nobody seems to care.

Fields can materialize in empty space. Fields can bend and warp. Fields push and pull. Fields can change the speed of your clock. To help these magical fields we also have miraculous phantom particles and agents. We have photons for light and energy, gravitons for gravity, gluons for strong force, and super strings for string theory. They are all phantom because none of them were ever observed in nature or in any experiment. All but photons carry negative energy.

Yet, viable theories, such as the Holographic Concept of Reality don’t rely on field theory at all. In this concept, the 2-D holographic domain is one of information and resolution. The holographic domain conjures an extra dimension, projecting our apparently 3-D world. If the entire universe is a kind of hologram it may mean that even gravity is a persistent perceptual delusion operating only in higher dimensional spacetime.

The gist of the holographic paradigm is that there is a more fundamental reality. There is an invisible flux not comprised of parts, but an inseparable interconnectedness. The holographic paradigm is one of reciprocal enfolding and unfolding of patterns of information. All potential information about the universe is holographically encoded in the spectrum of frequency patterns constantly bombarding us.

In this dynamic model there are no “things”, just energetic events. This “holoflux” includes the ultimately flowing nature of what is, and all possible forms. All the objects of our world are three-dimensional images formed of standing and moving waves by electromagnetic and nuclear processes. This is the guiding matrix for self-assembly, and manipulating and organizing physical reality.

The holographic description is one of a frequency domain which doesn’t rely on fields to project itself. Each sample of that reality at any scale contains the information of the whole in greater or lesser resolution. The holographic model offers new options for resolution of profound mysteries such as quantum gravity and our hyperdimensional existence. We can speak of a self-organizing “holographic information field” but perhaps it is a misnomer. Does it even exist as more than a mathematical abstraction?

Criss-crossing patterns occur when two or more waves ripple through each other. In the transactional interpretation of quantum physics, waves of probability originate in the past, present, and future. Events manifest when waves from past and future interfere with each other in the present. That pattern creates matter and energy. The universe emerges from the rippling effects of immense numbers of criss-crossing interference waves. The geometry of the fields is more fundamental than the fields or emergent particles themselves.

Our brains mathematically construct ‘concrete’ reality by interpreting frequencies from another dimension. This information realm of meaningful, patterned primary reality transcends time and space. Thus, the brain is an embedded hologram, interpreting a holographic universe. All existence consists of embedded holograms within holograms and their interrelatedness somehow gives rise to our existence and sensory images.

Interference patterns of waves can be visualized interacting like ripples on a pond. At the quantum level they create matter and energy as we perceive them -- lifelike 3-dimenional effects. Consciousness and matter share the same essence, differing by degrees of subtlety or density. There is a strong correlation between modulations of the brain’s EM field and consciousness (Persinger,1987; McFadden, 2002). The universe is a continuously evolving, interactively dynamic hologram.

This “Holographic Concept of Reality” was first suggested by Miller, Webb, and Dickson in 1973, and later touted by David Bohm (1980), Ken Wilber (1982), Karl Pribram (1991), Michael Talbot (1991), and others. In this holistic theory, the Universe is considered as one dynamic holomovement -- a grand Unity.

Research in Quantum Bioholography (Miller & Miller) strongly suggests that DNA is a holographic projector which manifests our embodiment through projection of biophotons and sound, a cymatic process known as acoustic holography. Fields are just ways of tuning subsystems.

Whatever this irreducible immaterial essence is, it a creative force recognized as identical with or an agent of Source. In heartful communities it has been linked with the groundstate of being (negentropic zero-point energy) by both physicists and psychologists.

Consciousness is multilayered. Our soulful intentionality can be a healing force for ourselves and others, coupling us whether or not we comprehend intellectually how that “works”. This “interactive excitement” may or may not have anything to do with the fields we attribute it to. Still, we all have a sense of inner direction that helps us know when we are on or off course in our life journey, whether we heed it or not.

We have suggested how the ethereal current concepts of the body have become, and certain ways ‘spirit’ embodies itself in matter. Mostly, the explanations depend on our level of observation -- chemical, molecular, atomic, or subquantal. Because we lack a unified theory, clearly we have yet to observe the deepest levels of reality, which keep receding as our vision expands further toward the microscopic and macroscopic.

The Triple Union

“Unless bodies lose their corporeal state and unless bodies assume again their corporeal state, that which is desired will not be attained.”
~ Byzantine fragment, The Philosophical Egg

We are truly psychophysical beings, composed of bodymind and spirit, but even those who grasp the holistic concept often fail to live it from the heart. Arguably, Carl Jung (1911) was among the first to apply the recognized concepts of physical energy to show that libido, or psychic energy obeys the same laws and is not only analogous, but identical. Psychophysical and emotional energy is associated with instinctual biological drives.

Though psychic energy is neutral, it can be literalized, somatized, sexualized, emotionalized, socialized, mentalized, or spiritualized. Symptoms, thoughts, images, fantasies, beliefs, emotions, forms of expression or behaviour are all libidinal. Libido tends to flow inward or outward, a dynamic rhythm of introversion/extroversion. Jung attributed mana or personal power for a kind of shamanic or positive psychic contagion to those individuals who seem to have a charismatic influence on others.

Psychic energy tends to follow the same laws of physical conservation and entropy. Jung taught that within the psyche, libido: (1) creates entropy, (2) is generally conserved under the principle of equivalence, (3) flows through the psyche in channels that can be redirected, (4) can be either progressive or regressive, and (5) is transformed by symbols. In short, the psyche as, defined by Jung, is a complex system.

New physics, chaos theory, synergetics, and information theory describe our existence as complex dynamical systems. Entropy can only occur in system that is absolutely closed so no energy from outside can be fed into it. But the psyche is an open system, which exchanges energy and information with its environment and can be negentropic.

We can also have a negentropic influence on one another (Gladwell), perturbing, enlarging, creating new pathways and possibilities. Theoretically, behavior can ripple outward until a critical mass or "tipping point" is reached, changing the world. Gladwell's thesis that ideas, products, messages and behaviors "spread just like viruses do" remains a metaphor. Yet, highly sociable or connective people often become revolutionary leaders, bringing others together with a new perspective, a broadened worldview.

Life includes chaos and order, good and bad experiences, even catastrophes that require us to adapt or die. The important thing is how we meet and react to chaos, finding ways to replenish our depletion. Observation of the subquantal domain reveals an inexhaustible realm of negentropy from which we can draw our psychophysical sustenance. When healthy, our entire system is designed to reduce entropy, in different scales and domains.

The same is true for the superorganism of society. We are irreducibly entangled with one another and the environment. We are healthy only to the extent we resonate with our environment. We maintain our integrity and identity as a dissipative system only because we are open to flows of energy, matter, or information from our environment (Prigogine & Stengers, 1984).

We live in a persistent delusion of separateness. However, we are all nonlocally connected in an ill-defined yet tangible way at the subatomic, individual, group and global level, connecting and diverging Psychic energy or libido is a psychosomatic phenomenon analogous to the paradoxical nature of energy/matter or wave/particle. The human body is not an object in space, but seamlessly welded to spacetime. We are not merely a phenomenal body of flesh, but one of awareness, of consciousness, a living interface of inner and outer field phenomena.

We all experience visceral or gut reactions and know instinctively how our mental states affect our physical vitality, and vice versa. But often we loose the intimate relationship with our mindbody, with the source of our being, our aliveness, our passions. If we experience this flow at all, it ebbs and flows away. Our individual and collective creative potential remains largely unrealized.

How often do we pay attention to those vital signs, the innate wisdom of the body, inhabiting our minds rather than our flesh? We are increasingly not instinctual, but cultural, and we choose many of our behaviors for good or ill. We’re nearly all “sick and tired” of the way things are, but what do we do to change them?

We can learn simple techniques for self regulation, such as biofeedback, yoga, and meditation. Creativity, as an activity in several fields, brings many intrinsic health-promoting rewards. We can create new habits to help us cope with technocratic society that tone or recalibrate our systems and change our physical state. We all have to learn how to deal with personal and/or global catastrophe whether we want to or not.

The Golden Flesh

"The borders of our minds are ever shifting and many minds can flow into one another ... and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy" ~ William Butler Yeats

Do we actively value our psychic well being, our totality, psyche and substance? Are we living soulful, artful lives? Do we nourish our whole selves with self-love? Do we take the time to care for our body or deny it, drive it relentlessly like our servant, or treat it like a machine? Do we attend to our inner world of waking images and dreams? Can we come to our senses, deepening the quality and intensity of embodied experience?

Our felt-sense is our wise intuitive response if we but listen. It brings meaning and value to life. What is your body trying to tell you? The body has a mind of its own and speaks that mind in gut reactions, body language, psychosomatics, and literal symptoms.

When psychic energy is dammed up it manifests in unconscious or destructive ways, such as tension, withdrawl, alienation, anxiety, compulsions, depression, addictions, somatization, and suicidal tendencies. Some people learn early, even in the womb, that their world is not a safe place. Social patterns become maladaptive when an organism’s true needs are not met in a tangible, congruent way.

A confused person can react with pain, fear, hopelessness, cognitive dissonance, disturbed biorhythms, approach/avoidance, passive aggression, codependence, apathy, or self-defeating behavior patterns. Our biology and minds become confused. Fed enough negative self-talk the body will react with authentic symptoms, self-induced illness. This does not mean that all disease is self-inflicted nor that we are necessarily to blame for our ailments, in some version of “new age guilt”.

Both the alternative health fields and mindbody psychologies such as the humanistic, Jungian and transpersonal psychologies have sought the triple union of body, soul, and spirit much like the medieval alchemists. But only a fusion of those approaches can manifest the union of opposites in the golden flesh. We can learn to care for our mindbodies in new ways from the inside out, conceptually and experientially.

To truly nourish ourselves holistically we have to address the manifest needs of mental and physical well-being. Consciousness may have a direct effect on the subatomic particles of the body, especially those within the brain. A tiny change within the open system of the brain, for example, can result in a vast change to the overall health of the body because of amplification through feedback loops. Nonlinearity exists at many scales.

Soma Sophia

“To me it's very obvious that consciousness is not simply an epiphenomenon, not a byproduct of the brain; it's something that's pervading the whole universe. . . . Consciousness is not simply produced by a complex set of neurons. It's there, in the whole body, and in all of existence.” ~Ervin Laszlo, Philosopher

Sometimes we have to address the external realities of a situation and sometimes its spirit or essential nature. The same is true for our bodies and souls. Significance is extracted from the experiential responses of our whole being -- soma significance, the felt-sense wisdom of the bodymind, which we can personify as Soma Sophia.

We can use the wisdom of the bodymind to face stress, pain, loss, illness, even catastrophe. Creative transformation of our instinctive reactions produces the gold, whether we call that essence health, art, flow, or inspiration. Psychic sustenance is found within. Once the mindbody connects with Source, all of our self-expression becomes soulful. We truly embody spirit.

That Source is the source of psychic energy, our libido, which becomes available for negentropic or entropic expression. Its tangible root lies within our very energy/matter as the plenum that science calls the vacuum fluctuation or zero-point energy, the groundstate of existence. It is a bit of the cosmos, of the universe that lies within our bodies, which are composed of elements cooked within the stars.

The body itself is the Hermetic vessel for the transformation of instinctual drives. That creative process can take place through trance, art, or meditation, or any combination of them. There are many techniques, which help us process pain, stress, trauma, or depression. Often therapies address higher levels of organization, often at the conceptual level, rather than reordering the physical core of distress, which inhibits our well-being.

A dynamic combination of focus, concentration and flow undergirds our conscious existence and how we relate to others and the world. In meditations such as biofeedback, Tai Chi or Yoga, we intentionally create dynamic changes in our psychophysiology. We temporarily drop our identification with the body only to reinhabit it with even more awareness or mindfulness. This is the artful life; creative fulfillment of our collective destiny.

The Field Body

“The interaction of our mind and consciousness with the quantum vacuum links us with other minds around us, as well as with the biosphere of the planet. It "opens" our mind to society, nature, and the universe. This openness has been known to mystics and sensitives, prophets and meta-physicians through the ages. But it has been denied by modern scientists and by those who took modern science to be the only way of comprehending reality.” Laszlo

We can return to Nature and our nature, collectively preparing a paradigm shift for a new shared reality and trajectory -- physical, emotional, cognitive and spiritual coherence. The silent frictionless flow of living intelligence is beyond words and conceptual constructs. We are a process of recursive self-generation. This continuum, which is our groundstate or creative Source, is directly discoverable in the immediacy of the emergent embodied moment.

We are each a temple of living light. We arise from and are sustained by field phenomena, waves of biophotonic light and sound, which form our essential nature through acoustic holography (Miller & Miller), which is similar to the formation of matter via sound in cymatics. Cymatics is the science that describes how sound creates forms via resonance phenomena. Bioholography is thus a form of cymatics -- acoustic holography.

Holography is the artform of producing virtual 3-D spatial images of objects. Its artifact is an ephemera, though the holographic plate which records the interference pattern is not. Projections are most compelling when they converge on the viewer. Virtuality is the condition of pure potential, non-actualization. Virtual images are created from diffracting lightwaves and reading the interference patterns.

But virtual particles from the vacuum potential (ZPE) pop in and out of our reality perturbing, even creating actual particles. Cybernetic virtuality involves interaction with a computer system to render certain potentialities actual within certain rules. In holographic systems, a body of fiction can potentially trigger future facts, opening new windows of reality. For example, rituals of quantum biofeedback, can manifest as nonlocal healing, whether through tangible interaction or the power of suggestion and placebo effect.

Our bodies are created from the virtuality of scalar field interactions with our 4-D reality of this spacetime. The mechanism is by projection via our DNA by biophotons or coherent light produced within the body. This coherent light transduces itself into radio waves, which carry sound as information that decodes the 4-D form as a material object, such as ourselves.

The study of this phenomenon of light and sound forming an organism using DNA as a holographic projector is called quantum bioholography (Miller). This process is true not only of formation of the body but also extends into its maintenance, a continual process of creation and renewal.

Light and sound carry the information that shapes us and our environment. In a sense we are essentially “frozen” light. Universe congeals within us each moment in a unique way, never to be repeated. Science now tells us this is so, that each of us extends nonlocally far beyond the skin boundary through our embedded field body (Pribram/Bohm, Wan-Ho).

Nature works through self-organization at the creative edge of chaos (Gleick, Peat), and so do we. Complexity is the fine line between chaos and order, "a chaos of behaviors in which the components of the system never quite lock into place, yet never quite dissolve into turbulence either" (Waldrop, 1992, p. 293). The creative edge of chaos is a transition phase.

Self-reinforcing, autopoeitic morphogenesis creates specific forms. Yet a meta-theory eludes us. We still don’t know exactly how that works; there is currently no consensus in quantum physics at the level of the unified field, but we have many working theories, which help us grope our way toward understanding. Likewise, there is no generally accepted paradigm in consciousness studies. Ambiguity surrounding our psychophysical Mystery also shows up in the split between conventional allopathic and energy medicine.

Mystics suggest even more subtle connections of soul and spirit through time and space, evolutionary intelligence. Even without a mystical approach, we can rest and refresh ourselves by aligning our intentionality with the very fabric of spacetime. Consciously participating in this universal process helps heal and integrate our mindbodies, psyche and matter. We can learn to self-soothe cumulative daily irritations by practicing self-regulation.

Cosmos resonates within each of us, but we have lost touch with that due to electromagnetic pollution and the distracting demands of modern life. But we can rediscover this integral context in which we are embedded as a field of timeless, radiant abundance. It is plausible that spacetime is a plenum rather than an empty vacuum. It abides not just outside us in the depths of space but within the fabric of our being. We are pulsating dynamos of cells, organs, and dynamic systems.

We can learn to wrap our minds around this quantum reality that we are not separate from the ongoing process of creation, even if an energetic field of information defies detection. The source of creation always flows through rhythmic pulsation or waves of energy/matter, perhaps even dark matter. The manifestation of each so-called particle of our being is orchestrated through a self-organizing process (Penrose/Hameroff).

This dance is a harmonic continuum from the smallest to the largest scales, permeating all domains of assembly and observation -- subquantum, quantum, molecular, chemical, even cultural, global, and cosmological. The evolution of our dynamic system obeys universal laws. Likewise our behaviors flow into manifestation from our beliefs, thoughts and emotions, including our self-image.

By opening to system dynamics we can reorganize away from the entropic, reductionistic, destructive habit patterns that plague our species. We can make stress-reducing negentropic choices for structural and psychological adjustment, which improve our quality of life. Integration is a synergistic process rooted in primordial bodymind consciousness.

The brain is not confined to our skull, but permeates our whole being through the intracellular matrix and sensory system, as well as the strong EM fields generated by the beating heart. Research suggests activities in the brain may be pre-conditioned by the DC field of the organism (Oschmann; Becker). Our molecular system extends beyond the nervous system and is the bedrock of intuitive, subconscious and unconscious processes.

Hypnosis suggests the fabric of the body also helps store our memories, embodying our triumphs and traumas. Ideomotor signaling (Rossi) can elicit revelations about ourselves not available from our conscious minds. There is a reciprocal action between our inchoate perceptions, thoughts and the chemistry of our bodies, and therefore our current and future states.

Jung (1932) identified at least five kinds of drives: hunger, activity, sexuality, creativity, and reflection. But he gradually came to conceive of "libido as a psychic analogue of physical energy,” a more or less quantitative concept, which should not be defined in qualitative terms, though libido includes drives, love, desire, aspirations. The important point is that this energy is never destroyed, but flows throughout the psyche activating now this part and now another.

Psychology describes psychic contents, including the role of the body, with psychic means. Psyche -- the realm of soul -- is subject and object, medium and message, source and goal; there is no relative point of observation outside the human psyche. When we get down to it, we find only unprovable but assumed beliefs, which seem to work and therefore seem meaningful. We tend to have experiences that confirm our view or perspective of the world.

Physics, by contrast, pursues material reality both via and, to the greatest degree possible, beyond the human experience, but it also uses the mental medium in both its conceptions and inventions. All models of reality are “soft” technologies, but our beliefs and worldview condition the reality we experience. Just as matter is in a constant process of redefinition, so too must psyche and spirit be continuously redefined.

The psychic energy that directs and motivates the personality is called libido, which is simply a generic form of psychic energy which can be redirected or "canalized" into both sexual and non-sexual activities. Psychic energy balances the energy flowing between spirit and instinct. This non-specific energy can consciously be deployed and channeled for self-transformation.

Go with the Flow

Research has shown (Csikszentmihalyi) that self-teaching is strongly correlated with quality of life and the ability to experience refreshing concentration and flow in ordinary activities. Maslow called this quality self-actualization, first as an emergent property which can becomes a stabilized steady-state of personality. The “good life” is not only enjoyable and growth promoting, it reduces the sum total of entropy in the world.

Yet finding flow in our busy lives can be elusive. Flow is neutral, as a source of psychic energy, focusing attention and motivating action. It can be used for constructive or destructive experiences. The more we allocate to the negative, the less we have available for the positive. So we need to become jealous of our spare energy, spending it wisely as our psychophysical organism tells us through bodytalk and feelings.

The amount of energy available to our consciousness and will varies. We can respond to stress by being active rather than reactive. Self-regulation means scanning, listening to, and intentionally recalibrating the mindbody. It requires focusing and concentration our attention, then “letting go”, seemingly releasing all effort-- self-accepting, non-striving mindfulness.

Some suggest there is a Platonic field (Symposium) that restores our energy. It is compatible with the description of stages of pure consciousness described by the Yoga Sutras and other Eastern traditions (Buddhism, Taoism, etc.). The secret of the universe lies within “empty” space, which turns out to be a virtual plenum of potential. It is a nourishing essence, which feeds our psychophysical being.

Non-locality is regarded as accepted fact by physicists. They say that the twin photons are aware of each other instantaneously even if they are at opposite ends of the Universe. Laszlo says this new concept has primacy over matter. Puthoff says that matter is driven by this energy source (ZPE). And so is our matter. The interconnections among EM fields are not the external interactions described by Maxwell's four equations, the interconnection is "in the deep" inside those interacting fields, our own fields.

Inexhaustible psychic energy is the single most distinguishing trait of self-teaching individuals. Most creative people are self-taught, often achieving breakthroughs by investing surplus energy playing with the apparently trivial. No matter the subject, each of their new little discoveries parlays into excitement at the moment of discovery, in a self-reinforcing reward. These rewards build motivation to continue.

Have the “creatively gifted” learned a subtle secret for drawing on the essence of the cosmos by investing in their curiosity and delight? Some learn how to draw this surplus energy from the psychic well early in life and drink deeply through their attempts to understand, invent, express and solve problems. They manifest a determination to participate as fully as possible in life.

Self-actualizers pay more attention to what is going on around them with surplus energy to invest their attention in things or people for their own sake, rather than for strokes or gain. Most people hoard their attention in self-absorption, material or emotional advantage rather than growth, empathy and compassion.

Most guard their energy for immediate role or stress responses, or become bound by those factors, numb or apathetic. Those less concerned with themselves actually have more psychic energy to experience life. Everyday giving is an antidote for self-obsession and negativity.

It’s a free-floating type of attention pursued without recognition or support, easily captured temporarily by any subject or interest, rather than strictly tied to goals and ambitions. Wonder, novelty, surprise, awe, and transcendence are boundary breaking allowing us to move beyond ignorance, fear and prejudice. Often this experience becomes a valuable element of later full-blown realizations -- new synthesis.

We can cultivate this quality and it’s intrinsic reward by 1) doing whatever needs to be done, even the routine, with concentrated attention and skill, rather than inertia, and 2) approaching them with the care it takes to make a work of art.

Instead of using our leisure energy wastefully we can learn to direct it from passive activity toward new experiences, which only become interesting once we devote attention to them. Time management and husbanding of psychic energy can be directed to create increased enjoyment of life, here and now. In flow we forget ourselves, rather than wallowing in the apathy, worry and boredom of unmet personality needs. Life is too short to remain depressed or exhausted.

We need time and psychic energy to pursue our curiosity. So, we have to be alert for those issues and people who would negatively feed on us, draining, subverting, or sabotaging our creative flow. We can complain, reflect on our stuckness, or actively invest our psychic energy in harmonious relations and goals, creating positive feedback. Having clear goals helps us focus and concentrate, whether we achieve them, or not.

Owning our own actions helps us focus desires and priorities for an improved life.
The self-motivated individual can concentrate more or less at will. Interest leads to focus and focus leads to interest. We take over ownership of our lives by learning to direct psychic energy toward our intentions. There is more consistency between inner desires and outer experience. When we learn to love what we have to do, the vector or arc of our development shifts.

When we learn to control attention, we learn to control experience, and therefore the quality of our lives. We invest less psychic energy in painful events and draining resentments, and more in self-affirming and rewarding activities, enjoying them for the control we acquire over our own attention. This simple process can lead to great leaps in transformation, and is also the basis of mystical practice simply for its own sake.

If you learn to love your fate, it reduces entropy not only in your own consciousness but for those you contact. In contact with source, you don’t have to feed on their energies in a negative way. We feel even better when creatively connected to something greater or more permanent than ourselves; it gives us energy. We can even find joy fighting a losing battle for a good cause.

Being in THE ZONE

Folklore has it that artists and sportsmen such as Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, Larry Bird can enter a state of consciousness where they are actively entangled with their surroundings and perhaps even the future. In tennis, the body must be in motion somehow anticipating trajectories even before the serve in order to return the volley. Surfing or boarding are also good examples. Gamers report a similar flow for their virtual states.

Likewise, artists enter a flow state in both inspiration and artistic production or performance. Artists, too, are often accused of anticipating expressing a symbolic change in collective culture, whether they are consciously aware of it, or not. They seem to have an uncanny knack for symbolizing the zeitgeist of the time.

Musicians speak of their own kind of telepathy among one another, especially when jamming or improvising. Someone playing a spirited fast musical break knows the flow is rolling on and at the same time they are aware of the details, although they couldn’t consciously decide each action.

Sudden alarm experiments explore how dominant field dynamics can happen faster than consciousness can respond, using purely internal physical mechanisms. Part of the role of consciousness as an overseer is to allow the conscious periphery to have immediate access in the case of a threatening signal.

We all know we can react with lightning speed automatically while only dimly aware of it. We are aware of it sufficiently to anticipate and react to save our lives. The critical advantage of subjective conscious comes in, even if it is almost subliminal and not consciously thought through.

The BITZ experiments explore the existence of entanglements beyond the human body. Books have been written on 'Being In The Zone' (BITZ). Most of us cannot repeat these super-athletic experiments. But, then, how many of us can smash an atom? We must trust the honesty and ethics of atom-smashing scientists. We just need a measure of BITZ that is not too subjective.

All of these examples are, in some sense direct verification of entanglement on a conscious level. But in practical terms we can still learn what qualities and practices lead to the flow state. In this subjective sense, BITZ has already been experimentally verified; indeed, we are all entangled with our environment, some more actively than others, but only a few can intentionally exploit it, though many have experienced it by accident or intent.

What we need to learn is how to deploy this capacity for creativity and/or healing. Anyone can learn through practices that require concentration in one area to translate that capacity to other areas, such as creativity. Certain orientations and qualities are involved and most of these can be adopted or developed. Many of them include the body, through kinesthetic muscle memory or other physical expressions that take learned behavior and put it on “auto-pilot”, making it seem virtually effortless.

Many activities elsewhere described as BITZ are actually products of a light trance state, such as flow state people report while driving a car. Others, such as sports and music, explicitly require skill development to achieve fluency.

We can most easily apply ourselves to those things, which inspire a passion in us -- those things we cannot help but do because the drive is strong, so motive and opportunity are there. But if a person has no passion, creative flow will remain elusive.

With passion you can always learn the techniques to accomplish your creative goals. Still, many wrestle with the experience of trying to maintain vitality, passion, and inspiration while getting caught up in the daily grind of paying the bills and other mundane necessities

Reports of solutions include:

“It's a matter of intention. I try to make a conscious choice every day to do everything the best I can. For me, this has been a self sustaining and exponentailly growing energy sorce. The harder I work at doing things well, the better I do things, the better I feel about doing things, the more energy I have to work on doing things well, and so on, and so on.”

“For me, it's a matter of being Present, no matter what my external circumstances are. The loss of vitality comes not with the grinding work, but from the fact that we resist Life while doing that work. The only solution is to surrender to the moment, be present with what you are doing, and accept whatever comes as a result. Sometimes what comes won't be so pleasant, but as long as you accept that, then more and more often it will be pleasant things that come your way. “

“I feel like we can get through anything if we assert that it's only temporary. It's too easy to get dragged down by the slave paradigm, especially when you've got a higher mission you'd rather be tending to. We need to be that much stronger and clearer about our Great Work on this planet to get through the daily grind and seemingly endless servitude to the inane.”
There are two ways of looking at our predicament, one crippling, one liberating:

COGNITIVE DISSONANCE: psychospiritual reality and mundane patterns are at odds with each other, bringing stress and a feeling of self-betrayal. This splits intent and energy, divides and conquers by lack of wholeness. Thwarted by a feeling of not living in sincere harmony with your true self Power (psychic energy) leaks away.

METANARRATIVE: realize that mundane activities are a result of will or intentionality, and that you are manifesting the mundane patterns that you see before you, either by conscious will or by default. The life you've created can manifest as a song, a poem, an art project, a great disovery. When you chose to make it surface, your full power and as a manifestation engine emerges.

Flow in intellectual and spiritual processes emerges from removal of blocks to creativity (such as competing activities and focus; poor self-image; poor judgment, thinking and work habits; conventionality, mediocrity; numbness; intolerance of complexity or solitude) and certain positive attitudes and behavior patterns, such as commitment to vision.

The most often cited examples facilitating creativity include the following: fluency, flexibility, sensitivity to problems, problems, originality, curiosity, openness to feelings and the unconscious, motivation, persistence and concentration, ability to think in images, ability to toy with ideas, ability to analyze and synthesize, tolerance of ambiguity, discernment and selectivity, ability to tolerate isolation, creative memory, background of fundamental knowledge, incubation, anticipation of productive periods, ability to think in metaphors, aesthetic orientation, etc.

If your desire to be creative is strong enough, nothing will prevent you from applying yourself if you have passion. Can the flow state be far behind? It is a form of transcendence, whether it comes through the physical flow of the body, the conceptual high of the A-ha state, the absorption and aesthetic satisfaction of the artistic process, or any conditions, which promote emotional flow.

The latter might range from love, to the high encountered learning from one’s mentors, to the perception that Cosmos is facilitating your intention in a given direction, though the latter is a synchronicity -- flow with the environment.

In trance states the process is largely automatic and unconscious; no “learning” is required. Trance possession and ‘white line fever’ arise from the same level, while the former includes a transpersonal experience. In artistic fervor the doors of the subconscious swing wide and there is mixing of the inner subjective world with the object world of tangible expression.

In pure creativity, including nonlocal healing and the bliss of meditative states, focus and concentration are consciously applied directly with intent. Trance, art and creativity are all forms of transcendence of the ego and connection with deeper than conscious levels of existence.

Exercising one’s talents helps remove the blocks mundane life would like to introject. Fluency, a creative ritual, a workstation, and making time available help increase the drive needed to carry a project to completion.

Intentionality and a conducive environment increase the probability creativity will emerge.But the secret is that connections or open channels to primordial SOURCE tend to provide a degree of flow, self-realization, or illumination. So, the real key to creativity in all its forms seems to be an enhanced capacity to connect tangibly with source bringing back some material or immaterial boon from that inspiration.

In so many conversations with creative masters I've discovered their Truth in the creative details. It has been said that “God is in the details”. In these details--no matter how much trouble they take or how much one is to be paid for them--there arises the resolve to excel and to do the job better. I see this kind of resolve as a "glow" in people, a one-tracked sense of personal pride that results in focus and purpose.

Purpose-driven individuals tend to develop an advanced proficiency that makes them stand out. Purpose-driven people--while they may be laden with humility--are often also loaded up with a sense of righteousness about their work. Simply put, they believe in it. And purpose-driven people, healers, artists and scientists, have often taken a circuitous route to get that way. Each is Unique.

Conclusions

There are many plausible ways that quantum theory can help with these profound mysteries of the groundstate of energy/matter, consciousness, awareness and flow. It will likely be many decades before some understanding of the actual mechanisms are finalized. So, despite the pluses and minuses of existing quantum theories of mind, these kinds of theories should be encouraged. If consciousness is or is related to quantum effects then scientists will have to think in these directions to figure it out.

"Whether this vast homogeneous expanse of isotropic matter is fitted not only to be a medium of physical interaction between distant bodies, and to fulfill other physical functions of which, perhaps, we have as yet no conception, but also to constitute the material organism of beings exercising functions of life and mind as high or higher than ours are at present-is a question far transcending the limits of physical speculation.”, says Maxwell.

Most natural philosophers hold, and have held, that action at a distance across empty space is impossible. In other words, that matter cannot act where it is not, but only where it is. The question "where is it?" is a further question that may demand attention and require more than a superficial answer.

Arguably, every atom of matter has a universal though nearly infinitesimal prevalence, and extends everywhere; since there is no definite sharp boundary or limiting periphery to the region disturbed by its existence. The lines of force of an isolated electric charge extend throughout illimitable space.

No ordinary matter is capable of transmitting the undulations or tremors that we call light. The speed at which they go, the kind of undulation, and the facility with which they go through vacuum, forbid this. So clearly and universally has it been perceived that waves must be waves of something, something distinct from ordinary matter.

Faraday conjectured that the same medium, which is concerned in the propagation of light, might also be the agent in electromagnetic phenomena, and he called it “the ether”. Now we speak of it as the zero-point domain of virtual photon fluctuation. Romantically, we refer to it as the plenum, since it is infinitely full of potential.

Some philosophers have reason to suppose that mind can act directly on mind without intervening mechanism, and sometimes that has been spoken of as genuine action at a distance. But, in the first place, no proper conception or physical model can be made of such a process, much less how that deploys intentionality in distance healing.

Nor is it clear that space and distance have any particular meaning in the region of psychology. The links between mind and mind may be something quite other than physical proximity. Since we don’t know how it works, in denying action at a distance across empty space we are not denying telepathy or other activities of a non-physical kind. Brain disturbance or mindbody healing are plausible physical correlate of mental action, whether of the sending or receivin g variety.

There is no consensus in physics, nor in consciousness studies, though there is a correlating theory for nearly every one proposed in physics. Spontaneous healing may bypass all of these suggested metatheories. A field becomes a nearly innacurrate term in the subquantual domain or metaphysical level of observation.

According to Hameroff, “Everything (matter, energy, you, me) is part of the hidden geometry of spacetime, of which the Platonic is one aspect. Smells and colors and melodic tunes are complex assemblies of fundamental qualia embedded as configurations in fundamental spacetime geometry.

The qualia in spacetime geopmetry *out there* caused qualia *in here* within us because there is spacetime geometry within our mindbodies as well. Because spacetime geometry is inherently nonlocal it could be that *out there* and *in here* are connected, or actually the same. Only in the classical world is there a spacelike distinction. Pure consciousness is the experience of a total lack of phenomenal content while still awake and alert, and thus able to remember there was nothing.

[Some theories alledge] cognitive functions reflect consciousness which exists in the universe. I am saying that quantum processes in the brain (related to cognitive processes) are connected to protoconscious quantum information inherent in the universe. The connection results in OR which is a moment of consciousness (the protoconscious/unconscious quantum information becomes conscious) But remember the universe/spacetime geometry out there is also in our heads.” Hameroff

Several Vedic and Taoist texts (and perhaps other traditions as well) suggest that, with proper refinement of consciousness, the “outside” world can be cognized holographically, in a superposed, interpenetrating state where everything is experienced in everything else. If evidence can support such claims, perhaps the human mechanisms of perception have the capacity to directly experience an uncollapsed universe in which what is normally unconscious is merged into consciousness (or vice versa). Its like a dream.

But somehow consciousness is; somehow creativity emerges; somehow healing works; somehow we are, and are interrelated. Perhaps real meaning comes from our struggle to try to understand how these things work, to struggle toward wisdom in both the material and spiritual realms. There is meaning in the struggle to create, to heal, to know, to be.

Black Helicopters over Ashland

xxx Cattle mute practice, crop circle observational fly by, high weirdness?

tune up ur Outer Space Body

Outer Body Experience

An outer body experience is one of vastly expanded awareness. We aren't out of the body but recognize our vast potential connections as oceanic experience. We are wave upon interpenetrating waves of virtually infinite potential. Alchemy is all about enhancing psychophysical imaginal capacity. We can tap the holographic memories of our existential blueprint, becoming transparent to transcendence, rather than operating well below our optimal capacity at the plateau of consensus reality or 'normalcy.'

Felt-sense is our physical awareness of life processes. The body takes precedence in bottom-up processing. Felt-sense helps us know what is at the edge of our thinking. We learn to articulate our implicit knowing. Focusing attention inward in the body, we learn to sense fear, tensions or openness in centers in our energy body. There is no disowning, but a re-embracing and expansion of the body in amplified identification, including cosmic zero-point.

Old Millenium notions, (medieval, classical and Theosophical), of astral projection meant consciousness left the physical body in the subtle body of light and was free to roam the astral plane or travel to other places on Earth. It involved dissociation from the physical body to which the aspirant remained attached by a Silver Cord. It probably developed from Near-Death Experiences (NDE), the shutting down of certain brain processes in biological crisis, commonly including a tunnel of light.

New Millennium soul travel is a slightly different approach, requiring no disowning of the gross material body in order to incorporate subtle aspects of the universal. In this sense, it stays perhaps closer to the alchemical phase state, One World. Rather than entering a trance state, the aspirant remains lucid, engaging in breathing and visualization practices. To journey outward or inward is essentially the same. Transmodern "etheric travel" means folding space and time, travelling without moving about one's conceptually expanded Being. It has been called cosmic consciousness.

We can view ourselves as all parts of the gestalt, including the primordial ground as well as any systems within it. There is simply no sense of separation. It is a subtle but important shift in awareness. We can experience the whole spectrum of the taxonomy of altered or discreet states of consciousness (Tart), the "heavens and hells" or bardo states (Leary, et al) of other models. The field patterns of the finest organization of energy and matter also affect the evolution of the cosmos. You are a nonlocal quantum field entity in coherent connection with All.

The unfathomable ocean of our virtuality is a dynamic energetic infusion, an expanded sense of NowHere, a leap of faith into the Abyss. We are challenged to fully comprehend the truth of our existence. This is how we become more than we formerly thought we were. As William James said, "My experience is what I attend to." Negative time extracts massergy from the limitless ocean of roiling subspace making negentropic or syntropic transformation in a nanosecond a real potential.

The quantum vaccum is a highly anomlous universal energy realm of pure potential. We are that nondual dynamic "ocean of active information" in wave form. It is both the source and destination of all matter in the universe, and thus of any form of consciousness which may emerge through its autopoeitic process. The human brain, with its pronounced and constant state of chaos, could receive and amplify such signals, expressed both consciously and unconsciously in our biophsyical self and our ephemeral thoughts and intuitions.

We integrate through our immediate experience of paranormal potential. We can live as uncollapsing quantum superpositions in that bountiful ocean of soul and spirit. Distractions cease, replaced by the direct impact of oceanic expansion of the energetically superdense quantum vacuum -- purely informational scalar force.

We are modified physically in this way by breathing as the negentropic potential (bioplasma) of cosmos. Scalars are massless and vectorless -- neither ‘light’ nor ‘matter’, but longitudinally propagating fluctuations below the energy-threshold of particle pair-creation. This produces a self-generating cosmological feedback cycle which translates into interference patterns created by the motion of charged particles modifying the local topology of the vacuum. The modified vacuum field modifies in turn the motion of the particles and your being is transmuted.

In a system driven beyond equilibrium, the subtle interconnectedness beneath its surface emerges to reshape the system itself. Even visual images can be derived from non-visual sources. Metaphorms are ways of implying likeness between things, such as the macrocosm and microcosm, the cosmos and the weird world of the quantum and subspace domains. Alchemy tells us, "As Above, So Below." In this way it anticipated our discovery of scale-invariant fractals. What is true for subspace is true for superspace.

Our brain imposes its dynamics on everything we make--from concepts about the universe to techniques used to test or represent these concepts, from chaos to order. Process morphs connect us with everything we create and are influenced by. Metaphorming is a principal means of exploring the world, relating information from one discipline to another, connecting potentially all sources and forms of information. Metaphorms are expressions of nature's unity.

Science also uses metaphorms. In Bohm's causal interpretation of QM, we inhabit an ocean of "active information"--the ever-flowing, ever-changing pattern of the meaning of life itself. The entire inner and outer environment includes the whole field of electromagnetic information, which patterns our electronic bodies. But we also are subject to the patterning effects of the whole of existence, a global pool of information, a pool of being, which is paradoxically rooted in non-existence.

Physicists, artists and alchemists are metaphorming when tthey create words or images for describing novel relationships or creative visualization. Visual metaphorms, in particular, inspire hypotheses, and vice versa. Alchemists, scientists and artists take two facts or experiences that seem separated, and find a likeness in them, and create a unity by showing the likeness.

All science-art is the search for unity in hidden likenesses. Somtimes they reveal themselves in synchronicities. Synchronicity is a bubbling up of ever-fresh forms, patterns, and connections that transcend all boundaries between mind and matter, the physical and the spiritual.

nostaliga from Lake of the Woods, OR

how retro is that!

So. Oregon's "Mt. Fugi" - Mt. McLaughlin

yesterday from I-5 approaching Medford.

THE TRANSMODERN ALCHEMIST

Benchmarks in spiritual alchemy...

THE TRANSMODERN ALCHEMIST by Iona Miller, 2009

Find the book at THE TRANSMODERN ALCHEMIST
transmodernalchemy.iwarp.com/


Science-Art Mystics

"We expect artists as well as scientists to be forward-looking, to fly in the face of what is established, and to create not what is acceptable but what will become acceptable . . . a theory is the creation of unity in what is diverse by the discovery of unexpected likenesses. In all of them innovation is pictured as an act of imagination, a seeing of what others do not see . . . “creative observation.” (Bronowski, 1958).

“Scientists search for a ‘real’ and hidden, internal visibility (invisible to the naked eye) which will confirm the limits of identity. . .This is an act of limitation which inverts its own criteria by relying on a ‘depth’ model of identity, which is invisible, but gives visibility through microscopic magnification. Yet this search for an invisible core of identity remains open to a visible transgression via artists who are constantly exposing these new certainties as constructs.” (Sargeant, 1999).

"Any given state of consciousness is permeated by the clear light of primordial awareness. However solid ice may be, it never loses its true nature, which is water. In the same way, even very obvious concepts are such that their 'place', as it were, their final resting place, does not fall outside the expanse of primordial awareness. They arise within the expanse of primordial awareness and that is where they dissolve." (Dalai Lama)

"To summarize, I have spoken of seven major aspects of Solutio symbolism: (1) return to the womb or primal state; (2) dissolution, dispersal, dismemberment; (3) containment of a lesser thing by a greater; (4) rebirth, rejuvenation, immersion in the creative energy flow; (5) purification ordeal; (6) solution of problems; and (7) melting or softening process. These different aspects overlap. Several or all of them may make up different facets of a single experience. Basically it is the ego's confrontation with the unconscious that brings about Solutio." (Edinger, 1985, Anatomy of the Psyche)

"There is a generic process in nature and consciousness which dissolves and regenerates all forms. The essence of this transformative, morphological process is chaotic -- purposeful yet inherently unpredictable holistic repatterning. The Great Work of the art of alchemy is the creation of the Philosopher's Stone, a symbol of wholeness and integration. The liquid form of the Stone, called the Universal Solvent, dissolves all old forms like a rushing stream, and is the self-organizing matrix for the rebirth of new forms. It is thus a metaphor or model for the dynamic process of transformation, ego death and re-creation." (Miller, 1992, "Chaos As the Universal Solvent")

Emanation: Creative Source

Alchemy calls Chaos the prima and ultima materia. In this chaosophical philosophy, all systems emerge from and eventually dissolve back into chaos. The trancendent principle "emanation" is primordial. All derived or secondary things proceed or flow from the primal Source. It eliminates will from the theory of creation. There is no hand of a supreme artisan who finds matter at his or her disposal. All things, actually or only apparently material, emerge or flow from the primal principle.

Unlike evolution, the process of development, emanation declares the immutability of the first principle. Emanation involves a series of descending stages, a subjective gnosis, not a developmental evolution that goes from less to more perfect. Thus, chaotic excitability is a paradigm of emergence, transcendent yet immanent potential. The undecomposable domain of Chaos is not an emptiness, but a rich, generative source -- a bornless nothingness from which all form proceeded.

There is an unmanifest fundamental reality, a virtual field, which is an invisible flux not comprised of parts, but an inseparable interconnectedness. In this dynamic model, there are no "things", only energetic events. This holoflux includes the ultimately flowing nature of what is, and also of that which forms therein. This subquantal domain marks the limit of our ability to peer into the Mystery of nature at cosmic zero.

At the human scale, we are blinded to this primal creative field, virtual photon flux. Chaos theory as holism without wholes allows us to describe both psyche and matter in terms congruent with physical reality. This is simply the way nature works, and the way our nature works, too. Chaos provides a comprehensive psychophysical metaphor for uniting physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual realities.

Global recruitment is characteristic of chaotic patterning. It allows the best balance between random fluctuations, permitting discoveries and innovations. Changing the activity of just one element can unleash an avalanche of changes in the patterns that might have otherwise occurred (“butterfly effect”). A structural perturbation is a permanent transmutation for the functions of a network.

Because interconnectivity is more than metaphorical, realizations translate across disciplines. Metaphors reflect the interdependency of mind and body, and the embodied nature of metaphor holistically reflects the unity of individual and world. The events and experiences of our lives become embedded in our structure and metabolism. We might call this nonlocal entangled embodiment "metaphorms."

Physics deals with the energetic aspect of the world. Information theory deals with the communicational or patterning aspect. Fractals, nature's dynamic self-organizing pattern, exist in the paradoxical space between dimensions, levels and forces of existence. They arise at the interface between processes, at boundary zones where they serve both to connect and separate multiple levels. They translate information/energy, structuring dimensions by adding or recursively removing structure, embodying process.

Fractal dynamics escalate change from tiny to large scales. Self-organization is an emergent property of systems and organisms, from the cosmos to human beings. Chaotic dynamics governs the emergence of this new order from apparent randomness. The deep coherence of the overall process implies hidden or missing information for holistic patterning within the apparent "noise" or randomness of chaotic patterns.

Consciousness, like creativity, is an emergent phenomenon patterned by strange attractors which govern the complexity of information in dynamic flow. Our consciousness appears co-temporaneously with our embodiment, creating the imaginal flux of representational and nonrepresentational perception - the stream of consciousness. The cosmic trinity of chaos, matter, and attraction appears at the heart of modern chaos theory and alchemy.

The Vedas identify all creative intent and substance as a manifestation of primal consciousness, which is considered the basis of all manifestation. In this worldview, there is nothing but consciousness. Complex dynamics is implicated in the energetic translation of "waves of unborn nothingness". Healing is the biological equivalent of creativity. The more complex a system, the more stable and self-correcting it is.

Coniunctio

The objective (frater) and subjective mode (soror mystica) are not divorced from one another, anymore than the left and right hemispheres of the brain. They marry in the mystic, in entanglement with Cosmos. Science adapted the artist’s sense that the detail of nature is significant. Like yin and yang, they rely on one another in a dynamic meld that lies beyond the dialectic in the tension of opposites. Synthesizing and transcending opposites is the theme of alchemy.

The metaphors of science have gained increasing relevance in the artworld and transmodern mysticism. Art and science begin as imaginative speculation that guesses at a unity or gestalt. The same holds true for alchemy. Metaphors reflect universal or holistic references and processes, connecting concepts across disciplines. There is a dimension of reality that transcends mind and matter.

The creative act is one of uniting the unmanifest with the manifest world in a meaningful, often symbolic way. Such conception is relevant to consciousness, organization, structure, faith, subconsciousness, emotion, even spirituality. Above all, creativity means trusting the process. Investigation of the negentropic criterion helps us move toward a truly transdisciplinary doctrine for the artistic field of influence.
The alchemical operation Solutio, the Universal Solvent is called "the root of alchemy," corresponding with the element water. It implies a flowing state of consciousness, "liquification" of consciousness, a return to the womb for rebirth, a baptism or healing immersion in the vast ocean of deep consciousness.

It facilitates feedback via creative regression: de-structuring, or destratification by immersion in the flow of psychic imagery through identification with more and more primal forms or patterns--a psychedelic, expanded state. Chaos Theory provides a metaphorical language for describing the flowing dynamics of the chaotic process of psychological transformation.

The Hermetica included works on magic, alchemy, astrology, healing, gnosis, theurgy, ritual, and philosophy. These texts were based on sympathetic magic, that like substances sharing an essence could influence one another through resonance effects, synchronicities. Like cures like. As the god who presides over boundaries, Hermes is able to transcend them. He is therefore also the ruler of ceremonial magic, which transcends the limits of ordinary consciousness, communing with the divine. Identification with a given energy is accomplished by a three-fold ritual, which echoes the generic creative process:

1). Separation from the profane or ordinary state of consciousness. Dissolution of the ordinary state of conscious.

2). The transition stage, or twilight zone which lies between them. Creative or chaotic consciousness.

3). The new order or perception of reality which occurs in the sacred time of the soul. Identification with ehanced sense of self, greater well-being.

Hermes is The Magus, the magician, the lord of boundaries, or doorways, the threshold or liminal area. The inbetween, or twilight zone, enables a state of receptivity to become established. It allows an emptying process, a letting go. Ritual acts reawaken deep layers of the psyche. This brings the mythological or archetypal ideas back to memory.

Myths, according to d’Aquili, present themselves as systems of antinomies, or opposites: heaven/hell, good/evil, life/death. Because of a basic function of the brain he calls that ‘binary operator.’ This function abstracts qualities of things and arranges them as pairs of opposites, or dyads, whose meaning is intimately related to its partner. He conjectures that it is located on the inferior parietal lobe of the dominant side, and is one way the mind seeks to understand the world. Myths play on these antinomies and propose solutions to them.

Myths are like collective dreams; ritual is an enactment of myth. So, we create myths to satisfy our need to understand our environment and give us some sense of control over it, or an understanding of our place in it. A given myth has stability of structural relationship and meaning. In science we call them ‘models’. Like metaphors, they provide a reference point without defining a reality.

Meditatio, Imaginatio, Operatio

Alchemy is an irreducible fusion of mysticism, science and art that also happens to be therapeutic or growth-promoting and tantalizingly hints at illumination. The process begins with doubts and lack of conviction but time spent on self-knowledge and spiritual exercises is amply rewarded.

Alchemy is unbound. It evolves like any science or artform through revolutionary paradigm shifts that revision or reframe its philosophy of practice. Chaos theory is an organic model of creation. Chaos prevails from the infinitely small to cosmic levels. Dynamic processes are deterministic though unpredictable. All experience is subjective. Intuition is an informational source that is non-linear and therefore can create quantum leaps in consciousness. Using imagination, we can ‘see through’ to a deeper level of reality.

The Universe is a fractal manifestation of the interaction or interdependence of chaos and order. Nature and evolution are complimentary systems evolving at the edge of chaos the source of the genesis of new forms. Like a fractal, the individual embodies the whole, to a greater or lesser degree. We are neither exclusively biological nor psychospiritual beings we are both/and psychobiological.

Alchemists seek understanding of the relationships between all the elements. Holistic vision is developed with experiments on matter and self, fantasy and meditation. In alchemy, meditation is reflection, inner dialogue and an extended act of active imagination fired by awareness and libido, "an inner colloquy with one's good angel." Transpersonal experience creates a new interpretation, or perspective on reality. Systems arise from positive feedback and amplification. Thus, archetypes introduce erratic behavior that lead to the emergence of new situations, including creative insight.

Both perception and cognition can be modeled as a transition from a state of chaos representing the unrecognized condition, or the unresolved problem, to a state of order. Creativity or learning can emerge spontaneously, from exploring states of confusion, to the instantaneous insight of a “Eureka” moment, or knowing state through bifurcation to a new attractor, to chaotic resolution. The trick is experiencing "emptyness" as the initial condition of consciousness. The openness of empty awareness is the key.

At supercritical junctions we either breakdown (emergency) or increase adaptation (emergence) with more creative solutions. Creativity is an excited-exalted state of arousal with a characteristic increase in both informational content and the rate of information processing. Creative holistic repatterning is introduced into the human system through the psyche as nonmanifest yet phenomenological images, symbols, and patterning information.

Imagination is embodied, objectified, expressed in the creative process. It is knowing through living through, distinctionally different from knowing about. It carries a sense of immediacy. Imagination is the voice of creativity. It is the primary way we experience soul; imagination embodies it’s own reality. It is self-revelatory. Meaning dwells in the image like consciousness dwells in the body.

Alchemy is also a thought experiment that plunges one into the upwelling spring of Nature feeding the roots of matter and psyche. Ultimately, these cycles of experimentation and reflection are warming acts of love that keep the gentle fires of the alchemical transformation going. The formula "VITRIOL" encodes the various operations of the alchemical process.

In the Transmodern union of opposites, the real and the unreal are no longer opposed. The concept of reality emerges, no longer bound to the material world but turned into fiction because of it. Reality and existence are no longer synonymous – it is a type of reality that continues to “be” even when it may not “exist” and does not comply with the simple status of simulacrum -- virtuality. Thus alchemy shares much in common with quantum mysticism and the holographic paradigm which seek the secrets of nature's subquantal realm. Doing so creates a hyperreality, revealing a glimpse of the future.

The problem becomes not one of how to know something radically new, but how to learn something radically new. Thus metaphors are instructive. They are a central Way of leaping the epistemological chasm between old and new knowledge, old and new ways of essential being. Metaphors help us makes this leap, help us enter a problematic situation in order to solve it, to explore it, and explore the world restructured by this metaphor.

We can tap the source of creativity, healing and holistic restructuring through imagination and metaphor. The possibilities for concepts and thought are shaped in very special ways by both the body and the brain that evolved to control it, especially the sensory-motor system. Conceptual metaphors appear to be neural maps that link sensory-motor domains in the brain to regions where more abstract reasoning is done. This allows sensory-motors structures in the brain to play a role in abstract reasoning (Lakoff, 1999).

In fact, when metaphors are synchronistic, emergent, spontaneous, self-organizing expressions of our dynamic stream of consciousness, they are an imaginal encoding of information that bridges the domains of conscious and unconscious worlds, material and transpersonal realms. Such metaphors can be deeply transformative -- more than mere language. They are a technology for changing our behaviors, feelings, thoughts, and beliefs. Intentional contact and immersion in these metaphors can transform our spirit and soul.

The problem becomes not one of how to know something radically new, but how to learn something radically new. Thus metaphors are instructive. They are a central Way of leaping the epistemological chasm between old and new knowledge, old and new ways of essential being. Metaphors help us makes this leap, help us enter a problematic situation in order to solve it, to explore it, and explore the world restructured by this metaphor.

We can tap the source of creativity, healing and holistic restructuring through imagination and metaphor. The possibilities for concepts and thought are shaped in very special ways by both the body and the brain that evolved to control it, especially the sensory-motor system. Conceptual metaphors appear to be neural maps that link sensory-motor domains in the brain to regions where more abstract reasoning is done. This allows sensory-motors structures in the brain to play a role in abstract reasoning (Lakoff, 1999).

In fact, when metaphors are synchronistic, emergent, spontaneous, self-organizing expressions of our dynamic stream of consciousness, they are an imaginal encoding of information that bridges the domains of conscious and unconscious worlds, material and transpersonal realms. Such metaphors can be deeply transformative -- more than mere language. They are a technology for changing our behaviors, feelings, thoughts, and beliefs. Intentional contact and immersion in these metaphors can transform our spirit and soul.

Melting Point of Formation

Alchemists are contemplative researchers versed in the science of personal transformation and the art of inner magic. Alchemical insight ultimately short-circuits self-referential feedback loops, leading to breakthroughs in perception and quality of being. At the groundstate, mind is utterly emptied of all contents. Both physical and mental space dissolve in this exploration.

A dynamic vacuum state of consciousness opens paranormal states of awareness and healing. In much ado about Nothing, the bubble of illusion (all mental and physical phenomena) bursts in primordial awareness. In the highest potential energy state, space, time, mind and matter dissolve into their Source -- the "melted vacuum" of physics, the "clear water" (Cole, 2001) of the alchemists (Lambspring). This unencumbered non-dual state is innate radiant potential. The upwelling geyser of all internal and external phenomena emerge from this dynamic absolute space beyond all internal structure.

According to King, ‘If a series of small bifurcations occur resulting from successive [quantum] computational steps, we would say the conclusion was arrived at deductively, but if however a major global bifurcation is required to reach self-consistency, an intuitive leap of understanding may result.'

The transition from chaos models the sudden moment of insight -- the "a-ha" or "eureka", deductive cognition, sensory recognition and decision-making -- or the bursting bubble into primordial awareness. Computational predictivity is thus complemented by conscious anticipation enabled through quantum transaction and manifested in the transition from chaos.

The fear, danger, anxiety and stress produced during confrontation with the transpersonal psyche can create a personal catastrophe, a spiritual emergency. Catastrophic chaos usually leads to what is called a bifurcation or splitting of the energy in two different directions. The experience may be shattering. The interface of the conscious ego and the numinous must be effected with some care so the later doesn’t take over.

But sometimes regression serves the process of evolution and leads to creative transformation and renewal of the self on a higher level. Therefore, the potential benefits of the transformative path make the risks worthwhile. Rather than breakdown, it may lead to artistic, scientific, or spiritual breakthrough, creativity and expression.

Alchemy is a science-art, a tool to describe and mold reality using experimental and meditative techniques. As an art medium, alchemy helps us illustrate nature and our own nature in contemporary terms by creating new paradigms and environments. Alchemists manufactured and articulated theories of reality and healing fantasies of the body/soul/spirit, as well as dyes, paints, and medicines or improving the quality of metals and glass.

Alchemy is a tradition of particpatory wisdom. Medieval alchemy was couched in the archaic language of its time, but we are not limited to that, nor to theological, Hermetic, Masonic, Theosophical or New Age jargon. Philosophies and sciences evolve in articulation, theory and practice. New discoveries and statements of meaning inform our practice at all levels. In many cases, alchemy anticipated them.

Our worldview has evolved to include quantum physics and dynamics in our models of reality. In the 20th Century, Carl Jung described alchemy in terms of depth psychology and shed new light on an old science. But that discipline continues to redefine itself. Jung's notions of a heroic, striving Self have been transcended with imaginal, nonlinear models of consciousness, archetypes as strange attractors and healing fictions. Can we expect any less from 21st century alchemy itself?

Alchemy is a multidisciplinary pursuit focusing on mystic technologies, life sciences, metallurgy, chemistry, dynamics and physics. We can take a revolutionary view of today's alchemy as dynamic process in terms of Chaos Theory and its related sciences. There are analogies between contemporary practice of sacred psychology, chaos theory, quantum theory, scalar physics and alchemical processes, some of which are more than metaphorical.

Emergence

Metaphor is Nature’s language. Matter has lost its central role in physics. Mass/energy and light are interacting abstract oscillating excitations of the vacuum. Nothing actually oscillates. There is aesthetic pleasure in finding likenesses between things once thought unalike. It gives a sense of richness and understanding. The creative mind looks for unexpected likenesses, through engagement of the whole person.

We can draw from the organic metaphors of illumination, quantum physics, field theory, and chaos theory to illuminate the state of the arts. Physics describes the interrelationship of chaos and order as field relationships, while chaos theory describes nature’s own methods of creation and self-assembly. Entropy is the tendency for any closed part of the universe to expand at the expense of order. It is a measure of randomness and disorder -- chaos.

Negentropy is the generative force of the universe. The "melted vacuum" of absolute space, where quarks, electrons, gravity and electromagnetism are the same, is an infinite supply of radiant energy -- virtual photon flux. Negentropy (emergent order from chaos) is a nonlinear higher order system, a dynamically creative ordering information. Thinking, science, and art are therefore negentropic.

Negentropy, like art, is ‘in-form-ative.’ It is related to mutual information exchange. Information is embodied in the fractal nature of imagery and symbols, which compress the informational content of the whole. Creativity is an emergent phenomenon patterned by strange attractors, which govern the complexity of information in dynamic flow.

In the artistic process, collapse is consistent with focus; focus is consistent with selection; selection is consistent with the resonance or stimulus. The stimulus is consistent with the physical reality and reality is consistent with collapse. In quantum chaos, this collapse is a cascade leading to an entirely new organization – to emergent creativity.

The whole process is a flow or condensation of potential of consciousness. The gauge is the perspective of consciousness or imagination. We are free to choose our perspective. The essence of our time-bound experience is receptivity to experience, to flow within the vortex. When we experience our timeless nature – our unbound self -- there is no flow, only resonance. We have the freedom to choose our point of focus or resonance. We can be stimulated by probability or chance, by the chaotic creative process underlying all reality itself.

We cannot predict what will come of it, what will emerge from entering that creative vortex, nor should we even try. All we can do is let go and open ourselves to the morphing power of the transcendent imagination, to bring our awareness into resonance with it. As we transcend the vortex we narrow our freedom to select our perceptual view of the physical world.

Transmodern Spiritual Alchemy - Intro

ionamiller2009.iwarp.com/whats...8.html

CHAOS THEORY IN TRANSMODERN SPIRITUAL ALCHEMY

INTRODUCTION
By Iona Miller 5/2009


"Nonexistence is eagerly bubbling in the expectation of being given existence....For the mine and treasure-house of God's making is naught but nonexistence coming into manifestation." ~Rumi


Medieval alchemy was couched in the archaic language of its time, but we are not limited to that. Philosophies and sciences evolve in articulation, theory and practice. Our worldview has evolved to include quantum physics and dynamics in our models of reality. In the 20th Century, Carl Jung described alchemy in terms of depth psychology and shed new light on an old science. But in depth psychology, his notions of a heroic, striving Self have been replaced with imaginal, nonlinear models of consciousness and healing fictions.

Alchemy is a multidisciplinary pursuit focusing on life sciences, chemistry, dynamics and physics. We can take a revolutionary view of 21st Century alchemy as dynamic process in terms of Chaos Theory and its related sciences. There are analogies between contemporary practice of sacred psychology, chaos theory, quantum theory, scalar physics and alchemical processes, some of which are more than metaphorical.

Chaos is integrated in the new paradigm, whether one pursues it in the alchemical laboratory or in the psychophysical retort of the human energy body. It leads to new understanding of the process of trans-mutation and trans-formation. Chaos is the prima materia and ultima materia, the beginning and end of the Great Work. Chaos is the universal solvent, the catalyst and healing balm. We can now describe in contemporary language what these analogies mean.

In the Transmodern union of opposites, the real and the unreal are no longer opposed. The concept of reality emerges, no longer bound to the material world but turned into fiction because of it. Reality and existence are no longer synonymous – it is a type of reality that continues to “be” even when it may not “exist” and does not comply with the simple status of simulacrum, i.e., the virtual is the true reality.

Time is no longer a flow, projection or hope. It accelerates at overwhelming speed, becomes compressed and plays itself out. Instantaneously, everything takes place before us simultaneously, including retrievals of the past and projections of multiple futures.

The transmodern world is not in progress nor beyond history. This instantaneous world means time quickens to the breathtaking speed of an eternally updated present. Beyond the hierarchy which has lost divine legitimacy and beyond anarchy, integrated chaos represents our very own dynamic momentum of innovation.

Alchemical transmutation is likewise virtually instantaneous, because its potential exists in each and every nanosecond, at the bottom of each breath. Creative solutions arise from chaotic circumstances by more openly receptive awareness of potential. Alchemy’s protocols, in the context of art instigate some imbalance to facilitate discovery of enriching solutions to this chaos. Were we wiser in the past? What if we collapse the notion of past, present, future in the ever-present NOW?

Transmodern Alchemy

Transmodernity is the synthesis of modernity and postmodern philosophy. So what might a chaos-informed Transmodern Alchemy look like? First and foremost our existential state space is in flux. The nation-state no longer dominates space in globalist society. Phenomena no longer correspond with old-paradigm frameworks.

Trans- is the prefix that guides the vision of reality as virtual and fluctuating. At the subquantal range of virtual photon flux, this is literally true and the metaphysical substrate of manifestation. At the virtual level, the fiction of ‘reality’ as substantive is revealed and the transparet veil is ripped away. Self-organizing dynamic transactions combine the positive momentum of the modern philosophy with the emptiness of the Postmodern, the longing for unity of the former and the fragmentation of the latter.

Our comprehension of the physical world has been transformed. We are wavefronts in local space, undergird by the vacuum fluctuation of absolute space. Material reality, as formation, atom, mass, power, space, time, etc. is an outworn concept that brought order to a Newtonian universe.

The theory of relativity and quantum mechanics , waves, chords, uncertainty, gravitational lines, the temporalization of space, etc., an entire fuzzy logic brought physics to the edge of metaphysics. We have alchemically synthesized the actual and ethereal in our transmodern cultural worldview.

Reality is no longer limited to the movement of aggregates of atoms (objects), but also quanta of information transmitted in real time. Space is no longer the site of transformation, nor the alleged place of secularization multiplied in n dimensions. It becomes irrelevant and ceases to exist, as a limit never reached before. The speed of light, takes on the form of everyday instantaneity.

The spirit, soul, reason, the subjective, objective and absolute was the main protagonist of modernity, although progressively undermined by scientific materialism, it became a mere metaphor of itself as a dynamic driving force and shared form of rationality.

Behind it all we are left with the body, fragmented, joyful, lustful, a form of moral subversion and doomed flesh. Nowadays the remaining organic matter seems more like a primitive burden, the mind plays with its transformation and turns it into a guinea pig for genetic engineering or expands it with technological prostheses. We are already mutants connected to the net, cyborgs that proclaim the era of the postcorporal and the transhuman.

The ultimate alchemy is performed on ourselves and we are headed into a vast epochal shift -- the dawn of a transgenic age fills us with both hopes and fears. Even the body reaches out, externalizing its nervous system, to unite the biological and mechanical: chips, implants, assisted reproduction, cloning, technological gadgets developed to extend our senses. The cyborg model embraces the metaphor of a mutating transhuman body, just as transsexuality has dislodged and paved the way for a vast array of possible genders, desires and identity beyond the dichotomy of masculine and feminine.

“Reality becomes constant transformation. Its actual conditions are transcended to become part of an interconnected whole that is infinitely readjusted on a global level. In the end, the Total does not bring us back to a religious or supernatural power, nor to the noumenal kingdom of Metaphysics or Absolute Logic. The transcendental that used to be beyond and yet close to empirical reality has now become the hyperreal empirical reality itself, i.e., virtual transcendency.”

The contemporary area that is criss-crossed by all trends, memories, possibilities. It is both transcendental and apparential, and is voluntarily syncretic in its ‘multichrony’. Transmodernity is a fiction: our reality, the copy that supplants the model, eclecticism both mean and angelical.

Transmodernity is postmodernity without its innocent rupturism, the museum display of reason, not forgetting history which has died to avoid ending up in barbaric cybernetic or mass media domestication. It is proposing values as stops or as fables, but without forgetting, because we are wise, because our past was wise.

Transmodernity takes up and recovers the vanguards, copying and selling them, but meanwhile it remembers that art has had, and has, an effect of denunciation and experimentalism, that is, not everything goes. It breaks down the distance between elitism and mass culture and reveals the connections between them. Transmodernity is image, series, baroque fugue and self-reference, catastrophe, loop, fractal and inane reiteration, the entropy of what is obese, the clumsy inflation of data, the aesthetic of what is full and of what has disappeared, entropic, fatal.

The key to it is not what comes after, the rupture, but the trans-substantiation and overlapping of paradigms. The worlds that penetrate each other and end up as soap bubbles or as images on a screen. Transmodernity is not a desire or a goal. It is just there, like a complex, random, imposed strategic situation. It is neither good nor bad, beneficial nor unbearable… and it is all of these things together… It is the abandonment of representation, it is the reign of simulation, of simulation that knows it is real.

Transmodernity, as an open stage and the designation of our present, goes beyond a random denomination and aims to cover the inheritance of the challenges of Modernity after the collapse of the illustrated project. If we do not renounce Theory, History, Social Justice and the autonomy of the Subject, accepting post-modern criticism, we are limiting the possible horizon for reflection getting away from nihilism without committing ourselves to outdated projects but not forgetting them.

Accepting pragmatism as a basis does not mean we have to deny that human action is guided by regulatory ideals that are the basis for argument and rationality. But these regulatory ideals which, after modernity, refused to be based on theology or metaphysics, can still not, after post-modern criticism, be legitimised by the illustrated project. We have weakened their gnoseological vigour but not the logical and social need for them, and this gives us the notion of pragmatism.

Such regulatory ideals represent operational simulations legitimised by rational perfectibility, which criticism and consensus constantly renew, non-universal but universalisable public values which find their sphere not in intuition, common sense or tradition but in the theoretical effort to create conceptual paradigms that will help increase social and individual wellbeing.

We are therefore talking about social transformation, the transcendence of mere practical management, of compromise, of lines of questioning that cross through rational enquiry, changing and being changed. (Rosa María Rodríguez Magda)

Creativity

Whether alchemy can perform a causal transformation of metals to gold or not, it certainly has the capacity for creatively stimulating the imagination and the kind of divergent thinking that leads to discovery about oneself, the world, and the primal nature of reality.

Alchemy recognizes its own creative role as an art based on the life of the soul (Anima Mundi) in relation to Spirit and Body, and as a healing fiction, using certain symbols and images. Spontaneous healing is a stated goal of alchemical process. It supercharges natural healing factors.

Healing occurs on many levels, including radical holistic self-organization from the deepest chaotic level. Psychology works through fictions which contribute to the healing of the psyche and heal our ideas about fiction being false. Healing fictions are fundamental to creative imagination and thereby thinking itself. It is a self-correcting process, like science.

Alchemy is a form of magic facilitating acausal qualitative change of substance – transmutation, including that of the soul. In this aspect, it is a spiritual technology based in the metaphysics of a primordial chaos or the void. Seeming ‘miracles’ happen in the gaps in consciousness. For example, art has a way of wordlessly heralding the future, in general terms, symbolism and sometimes in specifics. We are momentarily freed of enslaving ideologies.

Alchemy, like the Philsopher’s Stone, can take on the projections of modern science theories from psychology to life sciences to physics. Complex systems emerge from simple systems whose parts do not predict such transformations. Yet things can and do transform into other things. We are left holding our breath in suspended animation at the paradox, the moment of despair or bliss when we are engulfed in unsolvable Mystery — riddles wrapped in enigmas, half-truths disguising lies, faulty theories explaining nothing.

Soul is a perspective not a substance. Differentiating this middle ground, we find ourselves in Chapel Perilous, a way of being in the world between thinking and perceiving, a conspiracy (seeing with) of Eros and its laws of attraction that reason alone cannot nourish. The word ‘resolve’ echoes the alchemical maxim of “Solve et Coagula,” the liquification and reintegration of essentially frozen psychic energy.

We dream into the world while we are awake - coincidence theories, perceptual theories, alchemical theories. Confusion arises when your rational view is irreparably broken. Paradoxically, as “the poison is the cure.” It might lead to breakthrough, insight or spiritual healing. We make soul by pro-actively living life not by retreating into spiritual discipline. Emphasizing the inner soul at the expense of the outer soul fosters the decline of the actual world – alchemy’s One World. We can be that hyperdimensional crossroads, that strange attractor, that archetypal probability cloud.

Unseen Order

We struggle to connect the dots. In relentless speculation multiple mind-blowing streams of thought completely shatter preconceived notions of perception, time and space. It is as true in physics as cultural engineering. It is difficult to grasp without solipsism that everything we experience is a virtuality.

It is difficult for any of us to free ourselves from our enculturated, a priori beliefs about existence. When we firmly believe what we say, we sell others a confabulation of our own truths and lies. It is hard to view anything from outside of our own fundamental philosophical, spiritual, and psychological perspectives.

But it is possible to persuade others and many speakers have staked their careers on it. These theories, dogmas, and experiences condition how we perceive reality. Their influence may be so subtle we fail to notice where our position originated, when the shift occurred. Our viewpoint is relative to our position.

When old defenses no longer work, you must develop new coping skills for developmental challenges. But this initiatory way includes many “deaths” and rebirths. Nigredo, the blackening, isn’t always the first stage, but may be one of relapse, eclipse or another incubation stage.

Nigredo is a recurrent cycle of desire and frustration with no real beginning. Your energies are sucked from the outer world and turned in on themselves. Normal life is radically disrupted. When you are paralyzed by life there is nothing to do but let go of your control fantasies. An eclipse of the ego offers a way into the deeper energies of the unconscious.

The Art of Alchemy

Alchemy begins and ends in the quest for eternal life. It is a spiritual technology of rebirth using natural methods that in their effect transcend nature by amplifying that which is immortal within us. It does not exist in nature but must be prepared by Art. Art is a form of manifesting, making and objectifying the world - spiritual physics.

Artists and mystics are aware of their own internal space and thus able to enter it, playing the mindbody like a musical instrument. Looking inside, they see the true nature of reality and can express that literally and symbolically. We all possess the creative potential. All creative acts are a marriage of spirit and matter, reaching down into the body as the source of our essential being and becoming.

Today, we might describe this resonance as accessing energy that regenerates the mindbody. Healing is an aspect of creativity; nature is within and without us. The Magus does not dominate reality but develops embodied psychophysical equilibrium, clarity, wisdom and compassion.

Creative work originates in the body and is projected out into the world. The projections are then internalized into awareness. The bodymind of the artist is an alchemical vessel containing the creative flux during the process of transformation. Awareness and consciousness form a continuous alchemical movement. The creative gold is generated and embodied in the alembic of the mindbody. The mindbody is the same substance as the Cosmos and contains and reveals its mysteries.

Metaphysical Basis of Life

Formerly secret forces in the universe have been revealed by modern research. Alchemy reduces all to the first state, the ground state of being -- original experience that is timeless, infinite. The classical Void, the quantum vacuum is a carrier of information.

The energy body or the quantum field body connects us with the negentropic potential of the zero-point field. Radiant light literally emerges from this mystic void. Primordial structuring processes are common to both psyche and matter, working in the gap or empty interval between intention and action.

Light is a universal system and a general property of all plant and animal life. We are photon-emission systems of low-level luminescence which differs from bioluminescence which is a chemical reaction. Even rocks, liquid and solid crystals, diamonds and inorganic materials emit photons or plasma discharge. Decay of these emissions, which are quantum events, function as clocks revealing their age. Gamma rays are electromagnetic radiation from photon emission.

Quantum optics (quantum optical coherence) is the basis of life. Endogenous light produced by living systems is called biophotons. Light is produced by our own cells and connects us non-materially to the environment. We are self-tuning resonating systems of oscillating field, coupled nonlocally, tunable to a broad range of frequencies and polarizations.

We are electromagnetic, essentially human antennas. Ultraweak photon emission is the quintessence of our being. A coherent radiation field which permeates and envelops the solid body is emitted by the organism as a whole. Tranmitting at the speed of light, it regulates and controls all life. Material structures function as antennae for absorption and emission.

Emitting matter forms a biological laser. DNA in each cell nucleus stores and modulates light emission (non-classical light, non-monochromatic, squeezed states). DNA/RNA projects its code into 3-d manifestation via highly coherent biological laser light and sound vibrations. Below the chaotic threshold, between coherent and incoherent oscillation, light sources decouple and function separately, dominated by the overall absorption of light.

The field/solid body is a holographic field of standing waves. These ultra-stable waves can superimpose to order living tissue, coupled by a coherent radiation field. DNA uses frequencies to transmit and coordinate coded information and feedback through waves. Rogue frequencies can be retuned to normal oscillations.

DNA stores light and emits it when unzipped. In our brains, neuronal activity of light information bits creates a feedback system of holographic thoughtforms. Biophotons are related to both metabolism and pathologies. During death emissions increase up to a thousand-fold and fall to zero upon death of the organism. (Bischoff)

Health is a measure of subatomic communications. We are light-sensitive at the levelof single photons. We suck up light from our environment and re-emit it, according to our functional state. Wave resonance or entrainment is the mechanism that allows us to exchange photons and even potentially influence one another, psychophysically, even at a distance.

“Biophoton emission reflects, (i) the left-right symmetry of the human body; (ii) biological rhythms such as 14 days, 1 month, 3 months and 9 months; (iii) disease in terms of broken symmetry between left and right side; and (iv) light channels in the body, which regulate energy and information transfer between different parts. The results show that besides a deeper understanding of health, disease and body field, this method provides a new powerful tool of non-invasive medical diagnosis in terms of basic regulatory functions of the body.” (Cohen, Popp, 2003)

Spontaneous ultra-weak photon emission from human subjects can be measured. The biophoton field is almost fully coherent and strongly linked to all physiological functions, cell division, morphogenesis, growth and differentiation, and regulatory activity. Information of local influences on the body is transferred by a biophotonic communication channel to other places of the body. Biophotonic emission also correlates with electrical parameters of the skin.

Biophotons are the ideal communication system for any organism. Complex organisms emit fewer photons than less complex ones. Related to nonlocal effects, holistic function, bliological rhythms, stress, adaptogens, health and disease, biophoton emission is the spontaneous emission of ultraweak light emanating from all living systems, including humans.

Regulatory activities of the body are not stable functions of the electromagnetic fields within the body, but subjects of permanent rhythmical, oscillatory and coherent field amplitudes. Cancer causing substances are light scramblers. Light is going out of sick or stressed individuals in an attempt to restore homeostasis. (Popp)

Emission is linked to mental states, blood flow and the endogenous production of excited states within the living system. The detection and characterisation of human biophoton emission has led to suggestions that it has potential future applications in medicine. Meditation may conserve biophotonic reserves by slowing free-radical activity (Van Wijk)

Dark Biology

So, alchemy refines the way the mindbody generates and processes inherent light as medicine. It refines the aspirant's ability for tapping and amplifying Medicine Light. This primordial state is the luminous ground of our being, hidden deep in the heart of things.

It remains undemonstrated, but we may also have dark biology counterparts, an invisible self coupled to the visible human body, of massless, zero-charge dark matter and dark energy. There are some theoreticalindications that biophoton emission may be the result of interactions of Dark Matter particles with the visible particles.

In alchemy, ll other goals are subordinate to the transformative prime directive which includes meditative techniques for continuing consciousness after death. This Philosopher's Stone is also the Universal Medicine (meta-syn), the regenerative Elixir of Life. The greatest mystery is the LIFE IN DEATH: we don't die but continue in transcendent form. This is the virtual secret of man and nature.

“I suddenly realized that in the language, or at any rate in the spirit of the Glass Bead Game, everything actually was all-meaningful, that every symbol and combination of symbol led not hither and yon, not to single examples, experiments, and proofs, but into the center, the mystery and innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge. Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical or artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment, if seen with truly a meditative mind, nothing but a direct route into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth, between Yin and Yang holiness is forever being created.” (Hesse, Magister Ludi)

Process Arts

In chaos, science and art draw closer to one another. Alchemical art is full of fractal-like “reflectaphors” that speak to the human condition throughout the ages. Art can be meta-syn -- therapeutic, both in the process of creation and for the viewer who reacts from personal associations. the future ceased to function as the predominant sphere of reference, and the past turned into a storehouse of images, lifestyles and ideas for us to recycle.

Alchemy is not a religious, metaphysical. nor ethical pursuit. It looks on the play of the powers of the Soul from a purely cosmological point of view, treating the soul as a ‘substance' to be purified, dissolved and crystallized anew. Each alchemist, with a will to be interconnected, is an intellectual and spiritual pioneer who enters unknown territory realizing the groundstate is non-substantial.

Only the frame distinguishes an empty set.. From pre-history onward, humans have tried to make sense of their observations by framing of the natural world even while experiencing the world as essentially chaotic. We like our doses of reality in bite-sized chunks. We chunk science into domains according to the scaleof phenomena. There is a strong relationship between chaos and fractals, which describe the edge of chaos where patterns repeat regardless of scale.

Good art also strives to incorporate the elements of self-similarity although this is generally done subtly. In a great work of art each image must related to the others in terms of its geometry and metaphorical themes. Artists and sculptors have always been inspired by the complex forms of nature, seeking to imitate, outdo them, distort or recontextualize them.

Cymatics, wave patterns produced by vibrations, visibly demonstrates how form is related to process. Poetic ideas and metaphoric notions have reflections in all fields from the wave/particle duality of quantum physics, to oscillations within the nervous system to the oscillations and distinctions that we make at every moment of our lives. Complexity and self-organization emerge from disorder as the result of simple processes and intersecting dynamic networks.

A fiercely lived life is an artform -- illumination in action, based on discipline, practice and service. Symbolism resonates between the visionary and social spheres. The specific "Art" is alchemical, a merger of inner and outer reality in One World. Art bares the soul, and provides a container for unbridled self-expression. Lack of causal specificity is no argument against the process when the proofs are in the result.

For example, science has revealed a mathematical chaos present in the chaos of the drip paintings of Jackson Pollack. Such intuitive works emerged in the context of his struggle for salvation in the retort bottles of alcoholism. Who can say how his random process managed to embody such an intrinsic aspect of nature, which is far more than chance or training could predict.

Was this the gift that the ‘fire-water’ [displacement of the Elixir] gave him which was more than metaphorical? His sense of aesthetics guided his apparent freeform motion toward ineffable Truth which took decades more for science to find. His works didn’t require any metaphysical commitment prior to execution. They simply flowed forth from his essential, yet trained being. He mined his subconscious for creative potential. This potential of emptiness is the hidden ground of our experience of the stream of consciousness.

“Pollock denied "the accident"; he usually had an idea of how he wanted a particular piece to appear. His technique combined the movement of his body, over which he had control, the viscous flow of paint, the force of gravity, and the absorption of paint into the canvas. It was a mixture of controllable and uncontrollable factors. Flinging, dripping, pouring, and spattering, he would move energetically around the canvas, almost as if in a dance, and would not stop until he saw what he wanted to see.” [Pollack wikipedia]

“When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It is only after a sort of 'get acquainted' period that I see what I have been about. I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.”

High synergy is a differentiating characteristic of the nonagressive and secure. Beyond synergy is negentropy, the flow of creative connection with Source. Non-objective art is about flow and the feedback process between artist and creation. When the constructed forms which hold personality together are voluntarily relinquished, consciousness "liquifies" and rapidly moves toward the unconditioned state.

Chaos is the universal solvent. Though easy to say, it is sometimes difficult to achieve such liberation from the mental-conceptual activity of the nervous system. When we do, the quiescent nervous system is open and receptive to the conscious recognition of pure energy transforms with no interpretations. Solutio implies the liquification of consciousness through the dissolution of rigidities which inhibit free flow.

In reducing all to pure water, the prima materia and the ultima materia become synonymous. That primal consciousness state, that creative and chaotic consciousness is the beginning of the operation of "water", and its ultimate realization. It becomes easy to see why the operation of water is the "root of alchemy." Through consciousness journeys which liquify our rigid notions of self and world, we re-create the adventures of the hero or heroine. The theme is the loss and recovery of identity.

Symbolic art has both an emotional and cognitive content. Metaphysical art draws on the multicultural iconography, not only of the globe, but of the Beyond. At its best it embodies and reveal the indomitable human Spirit.

We need a new cultural proving ground, a new paradigm for the potential of the bodymind and the culture for which it is the ground. In our culture, the body and our fantasies about it, have come to represent the lost Feminine element. We have lost touch with our primal femininity, the animating principle (nature, body, instinct). We have become estranged from the body through the Cartesian mind/body split, which is also non-relativistic. We talk a good game about ‘wholeness’ but don’t really connect as much as nostalgically yearn for it.

There is a way that joins spirit and body through the spontaneous imagery of soul. It seeks neither to solve our troubles (pathologies) nor “save” our souls. It suggests direct engagement with images for soul-making or deepening through personal experience. We can see through the nature of apparent reality for ourselves, if we but try. Then we develop our own philosophy, apart from consensus. When it comes to questions of speculation on the unknown, we can either accept what others have said, or look for ourselves.

We seek the lost soul primarily because of the intense degree of wounding in our modern consciousness. This wounding has “opened” us to transformation. We can embody soul by seeing-through appearances to an acute awareness of the archetypal, subjective perception of our experience.

Upwelling

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