Fermi’s Paradox – Final Section

Table of Contents

THE PROPERTIES AND PROCESSES OF AWARENESS

THE PROPERTIES AND PROCESSES OF AWARENESS

Projection Harnessed as a Positive Force

Humans and their societies have used projective identification as a defense mechanism. As such, civilizations throw off onto others – individuals, groups, nations and gods – their aspirations and fears, their transgressions and lusts. We should realize that in a very real way, we create the world we see.

The first step in undoing the damage to the Gaian system involves the withdrawal of the conventional projections which comprise the human view of the Gaian system. This means the gradual replacement of worldviews to include a syncretic knowledge. This often occurs in a piecemeal fashion, but sometimes many projections are substituted at one time, or in a short period of time. This occurred during the Axial Age, which revolutionized religious understanding on a worldwide scope. In the Fourth Turnings of human history, these sudden upheavals often occur in a revolving quaternity of periods which repeat every 80 to 100 years and are driven by the change in human generations every 20 years. These turnings of history may be experienced as revolution, even as internecine conflict, and they can include economic collapse, pandemics, civil war, or total war between nations.  Yet these crisis periods are often followed by unexpected periods of consensus, calm and prosperity. They involve radical shifts in awareness, which are experienced on the collective level as a change in worldview.

In our present state, it is impossible to avoid projections. We maintain that the physical universe itself is one such projection. The extent of the universal projection -we might call them dreams within dreams – is impossible to confront head on. The ego would find it too threatening to withdraw all its projections simultaneously. Human consciousness also might find the nested simulations, the concentric boundary conditions, it has projected based on the uncountable number of observations it has made since the dawn of the universe impossible to reverse in an instant. Therefore, humanity cannot just ‘wake up’ from projected reality. The most which can be done is to acknowledge a negative or destructive projection, assume responsibility for it, and substitute a more positive projection in its place. Many nonscientific disciplines allow for this method of awakening to a graduated reality. The observer simply observes her projections without judgment. Psychotherapy, meditation and life review come to mind.  These practices allow an observer to take responsibility for negative projections and lightly set them aside in favor of more positive projections, or narratives, of the world. Therefore, smaller projections, subsets within the more comprehensive universal projection, are substituted before larger projections are withdrawn.

Reconciling with the Shadow

What is awareness? In seeking an answer to this question, we seek not a scientific definition or idea. We seek an integration. Awareness is perhaps the assimilation of emotion, intellect, and instinct to create an emergent consciousness, something new which is greater than the sum of its parts. In this, awareness is balance. It is the consciousness behind and beyond all capacities and faculties; beyond the emotional brain, surpassing the rational and instinctual brains. Awareness is coextensive with human identity. And, in keeping with the transcendent reality of which humans are dimly aware, awareness stretches beyond human identity. In this aspect, awareness reaches past intellect, mathematics, and materialist philosophy since it has the capacity to be absolute. None of the rational ways of knowing have this capacity on their own. No measure is absolute.

In the relativistic realm of humans where imbalances are perceived, the intellect cannot truly know the absolute. Therefore, it cannot know in absolute terms. Absolute awareness may seem to the intellect to be unattainable, so it may discard the notion. Ein Sof, the kabbalistic notion of a greater reality, is that which is ‘beyond thought’. The intellect tends to disregard anything that is beyond its own capacity to grasp. It ignores that which transcends its understanding as perhaps not worth knowing. Or it may seek to grasp this sincretic knowledge through purely quantifiable measures.

In a search to deduce a theory of everything, intelligences may pursue an understanding which they will never reach. Whether biological or artificial in origin, intelligence will not discover the absolute in the physical world since the physical world is not absolute, but by its terms, is limited and relative. Grand Unified Theories are, in our opinion, unattainable.

Awareness evolves toward a totality, toward a wholly conscious state. With the conscious-unconscious split made possible by the defense mechanisms of repression, denial and projection, awareness was divided into conscious and shadow (unconscious) aspects. These shadow archetypes continue to find indirect expression through the imaginal realm in rather unscientific, nonrational ways. They may ‘leak’ into the conscious realm through mass phenomenon such as addiction, mental illness, greed, and the overconsumption characteristic of consumer societies in their end stages. The shadow may arise collectively as genocides, internecine conflicts, religious strife, oppression of subpopulations within nation states, or as total war between nations.

Yet shadow consciousness is not inherently evil or destructive. It is simply unacknowledged. When we say unacknowledged, we mean that it is not paid heed by the human ego, by consciousness. It is not ordinarily accounted for in formulating solutions to problems. Unacknowledged, unexpressed energy is a dangerous force simply because it is ignored. It becomes dangerous because it is repressed, projected and denied. It is not the fact of its existence, but the resistance to the open acknowledgement of its existence that makes it dangerous. If a chemist fails to account for a volatile product in her reaction, disaster may result.

Often, the conscious reaction to these shadow aspects creates the danger, not the existence of the unconscious forces themselves. The conservation laws apply to energy and we hold that they extend to awareness as well. Awareness, as the totality of conscious and unconscious energies, can neither be created nor destroyed. The net ‘amount’ of awareness that was present at the reaction which resulted in the inception of the universe remains here today. It may move between conscious and unconscious aspects, but the net amount is the same. Therefore, it must be accounted for in the human equation. To deny it is to repress it. To repress it is to require its expression indirectly. To force it into unconsciousness and then to fail to account for it is to invite its indirect expression. Continuous attempts by ego consciousness to repress, deny and project this indirect expression place enormous pressures on the human population. When this shadow energy is repressed and denied, individuals spend large proportions of conscious energy tamping down and attempting to control these forces. This can lead to physical and mental disorders, patterns of overconsumption, aggression and violence. When this same unconscious material is projected, it often results in aggression and violence, oppression, civil conflict and total war.

Yet once the projections are withdrawn, humans cease seeing them in an enemy. Once they are no longer denied, they cease seeking indirect expression through maladies such as addiction and other patterns of overconsumption. As energy, they require expression, and will not be denied any more than water which is contained seeks a way out from its container. The shadow aspects of human unconsciousness are part of human awareness, and part of what it means to be human. They are neither good nor bad any more than energy can be good or bad. They simply are. Yet if they are displaced, if they are identified with negatively and subconsciously, the human ego concedes energy to them. And it does so unsuccessfully in the way that water is contained by the cup of two human hands.

Until reconciled with consciousness, this unconscious material creates a precarious and unsustainable state of imbalance, both for the individual and for civilization. The defense mechanisms identified above allow this material to be hidden in and diverted to the unconscious state. Conceived of as brimming with undetermined potential, the mathematicians and physicists assign to it the value of dark energy and dark matter.  Myth called it chaos. Psychology calls it the uroboros.

Though a temporary submergence of unconscious material can be maintained indefinitely by casting it off in imaginal forms, by anthropomorphizing it in the idea of gods or natural forces, or by projecting it onto other groups or individuals, it is not a sign of balance for an individual or a society to keep unconscious material repressed or to project it onto other individuals, cultures or impersonal forces. This denial, repression and projection do not lead to greater awareness. They lead to greater destruction.

A look at the history of the 20th century shows wars, political revolutions and genocides which have led to more death than can be counted in any of the previous eras of the human age. Though this enormous human toll was suffered in part due to the greater destructive potential deployed in the arsenals of war and to the greater number of victims due to sheer numbers, we conclude that it was also due to the greater share of unconscious material, in proportion to total awareness, which was repressed and projected. Jung concluded that modern humanity was in a precarious state because humankind rejected the God idea to a greater degree than any previous generation, allowing conscious human ego to claim a greater share of the energy available to all awareness. Jung argued that humans have come to identify almost exclusively with consciousness, with ego, and with intellect. Yet this does not mean, as Nietzsche concluded, that God is dead. It simply meant that the idea of God (which we identify with archetypal awareness) has been driven underground. Rejection equates with projection. The God image is simply projected onto human individuals in cults of personality.

These autocratic personalities have commandeered whole nations and proceeded to use their nearly unlimited power to destroy many millions of enemies. Through projection, displacement and participation mystique, races murdered other races. Classes were demonized, imprisoned, tortured, starved and executed. ‘Shooting galleries’ ran 24 hours a day, seven days week, for years in Stalinist Russia. The dualistic nature of the God image, projected into both good and evil aspects, continued unabated. Persecution simply moved from the religious realm to the political arena. Whole peoples were demonized through polemics, so that the devil image was cast onto entire nations and races. All of this mass murder and destruction was the direct result of the abrogation of the God idea. Yet the idea itself did not disappear. It simply went underground. It could not do otherwise. Thousands of years of archetypal unconscious energy could not be eliminated. It could only be relegated to the unconscious and projected outward. Atheism and agnosticism did not dispose of the God idea. They merely displaced it and drove it into the unconscious, where it was projected onto various individuals, groups and their ideologies. It now threatens, through revolution and outright war, to destroy humanity and the planet. This, we hold, to be one of the answers to the riddle of the Paradox of Fermi: that intelligent species never develop the maturity and wisdom to deal with their projections by holding them to light and allowing the unconscious to become conscious.

Balance, in a psychological sense, is the process of making the unconscious conscious. It is the reconciliation of the shadow with consciousness. This makes more reserves of energy available to conscious awareness, as well as psychological, intuitive, metaphysical and mystical ways of knowing which may point the way to solutions afflicting humanity and Gaia as a whole. When such shadow material becomes available and is brought to bear, it allows great change to occur. It harnesses enormous libidinal energies which are now made available for constructive purposes. Throughout human history collectively and individually, much psychic energy has been spent repressing or projecting unconscious content in an effort to maintain the status quos of ego consciousness and its product, civilization.  This inefficient process maintained a ‘balanced imbalance’ which continued to foster social ills and planetary destruction. Projective identification on individual and mass scales creates a sense of atavism which appeals to the base and emotional brains, regardless of how sophisticated the civilization. This, too, leads to nationalism, racism, xenophobia, exploitation and war.

In the human realm, faculties such as intelligence need to be developed through vehicles such as learning. Awareness is unique in that it does not require development. It requires uncovering. Awareness is not learned. It is revealed. It is always there. The defense mechanisms which concede energy to fragmented worldviews must be unlearned. Denial must be acknowledged. Projections must be withdrawn. Awareness will then fill the natural vacuum left by the evacuation of the repression which substituted in its place.

Thus, hidden and blocked awareness, which we call shadow, is reconciled with conscious awareness once the membranes which separate the conscious from the unconscious are seen for what they are: illusory. No one can see these boundaries, for they are psychological and purely abstract in nature. Thus, they can and must be breached. The unconscious must become conscious. This is an evolvement of awareness, and not of intelligence. For intelligence cannot be the exclusive agency responsible for harmonizing the shadow self with conscious awareness. The raising of awareness happens naturally as repressive forces recede. The prior stages of imbalance are left behind. Facing the fear of the unconscious leads to the unification of the opposites of consciousness and unconsciousness. The unknown is acknowledged and made known. Francois de La Rochefoucauld, a 17th century writer, noted that almost all human faults are more pardonable than the efforts that are made to conceal them. It has been our reaction to unconscious efforts that has caused destruction. The deployment of defense mechanisms has led to the current state of humanity and the planet, not what they seek to defend against.

Awareness is simply balance. To become more aware is to become more balanced. It is to allow the barriers between the disparate brain processes to dissolve so that instinct – identified most with shadow since it is seen as the most unconscious – cooperates with emotion and intellect. Drives are not repressed. They are acknowledged and refocused through the process of sublimation, where they are channeled into constructive pursuits.

To become more balanced is to become more aware of the lack of boundary between conscious and unconscious states. This unity of opposites is a natural state, toward which all events, each organism, and the entire cosmos strive. It is an unmasking, a psychological revelation. It is the fundamental principal which underlies all other principles. It combines science, psychology, myth, intuition and all the ways of knowing which spring from the imaginal realm. This not the sacrifice of rational understanding or the scientific method, but a compliment to them. These nonrational ways of knowing augment rational disciplines. Instead of the fragmenting power of analysis, synthesis combines all ways of knowing into a syncretic whole.  To allow the universe to regain balance is not a sacrifice in knowledge. Rather, it is a gain in awareness.

Balance does not have to be worked for, or struggled toward, or suffered over. It is not learned, though learning leads to awareness of it. Balance is simply allowed to happen as old beliefs are set aside. Since it is the state from which all things sprang and toward which they inevitably flow, balance will be achieved. The path of every life, and every episode and instant within that life, moves towards it.

Imaginal Mechanics

‘Projection’ implies outward dispersal. It connotes an emanation from within an object to an outer source like a screen or a region. We have said that psychological principles are the bedrock foundational principles of the phenomenal universe, and the defense mechanism of projection indeed externalizes inward states.

As we describe the mechanics of projection in this section, projection has a more mechanical function than the psychological defense mechanism of projective identification, but it would be a mistake to call it an outward dispersal. Rather, it is an inner projection, or an introjection, in the same nature as dreams, visualizations and fantasies. The two types of projection – psychological and imaginal – are in fact related. Psychological projection is a defense mechanism that ’causes’ imaginal projections. In this chapter, we confine ourselves to a discussion of imaginal projections, or introjections.

Although we use visual imagery to describe these projections, these imaginal experiences can also have auditory, tactile, olfactory and taste attributes. Humans are primarily visual creatures, and gain information about their environment largely through images. Therefore, we describe these projections in terms of images, though they can also involve any of the other four senses.

Individual introjections are at work in sleeping dreams. Yet the images and other sensory phenomenon operant in a dream of sleep are weak and vacillating. Boundaries are less clear, more easily crossed. Forms are less sharply defined. One figure can change into another in an instant. This is part of the character of most sleeping dreams, and the psychological function of dreams is enhanced by such fuzzy, shapeshifting imagery.

One reason why an individual dream contains vague, weak and shifting images has to do with the relatively weak nature of the ‘projector’, which in this case is the individual human mind-brain. Dreams are usually the product of a single individual, and are thus highly idiosyncratic. One exception to the weak and vacillating nature of dream introjects involves lucid dreams, which can sometimes be experienced as at or near the quality of the waking state.

The waking reality of any individual human being is more substantial, concrete and unchangeable, as the boundaries it sees are reinforced by its prior conditioning and memory, and also by the collective agreement of other seers in that individual’s world. The waking reality of any human being is thus more highly delineated than their dream imagery.

Yet whether the images projected are of the dreamworld or the waking world, distortions are inherent in the projection. Lacking comprehensive data, the individual’s projection is highly subjective. Individuality is a concept representative of imbalance. As such, both the waking experience and the dreamt experience of any individual remains incomplete and distorted. Any one individual’s perception is subjective. The same event will be experienced, remembered and related by any two individuals with some differences.

Certain peak experiences in the waking state, as well as lucid dreams in the dreamstate, prove exceptions to the vacillating, distorted nature of any individual’s experience. These moments of clarity, lucid intervals, or awakenings may prove to be accurate and holistic representations of a more universal awareness. These experiences tend to be short-lived, though in exceptional cases they can last longer. They often result in lifelong changes in attitude and belief for the individual experiencing them. In short, they can lead to the permanent expansion of awareness on an individual level.

As convergent imaging, a collective projection appears much more real than an individual visualization, dream or fantasy. It is the result of the combined efforts of more than one individual and is often conditioned by a lengthy history of commonly held perception. Therefore, collective projection leads to a more enduring experience than individual projection. Yet even common projections are experienced through the lens of each individual’s subjective perception. The common projection overlaps with individual projections. In this overlap, there is agreement as to the shared ‘meaning’ of images and other sensate data, yet no one can ever be sure the degree to which the projected experience of one individual is identical to that of others. Only through language can the commonality of any sensate experience be confirmed. And since we can never be sure that any term in any lexicon means the same thing to any of two of us, we cannot be sure that any event is experienced the same way by any two observers. This applies to scientific observations related in mathematical terms as much as it does to any ordinary sensate observation verified in words.

In the language of physics, individual and collective projections are the results of fields. Individual projections are relatively unstable and can change or dissolve completely over short spans of time. Collective projections also change over time, but they are relatively more enduring, being the result of more than one mind. The largest projections (in terms of number of individuals participating) tend to be the most stable since they have the most projective force behind them. These universal projections are, as has been stated, the result of common agreement. This agreement may exist on a conscious or unconscious level, and may be physical, cognitive, scientific, historical, political or religious in nature.  Yet all projections change. Being a part and product of the system of change, they must change, too. This is seen outwardly as evolution, as the death of the old and the birth of the new.

The long-lasting nature of some common projections is also dependent upon the variable of time. Projections held in common over long periods are relatively more enduring. This correlates with conditioning. The more conditioned a projection, the more stable it tends to be.

Through the mechanics of projected imagery, the simulated nature of the cosmos can be gleaned. Any given region of spacetime has a data cap, an upward limit as to the amount of information it can contain. Being a system of limits, the carrying capacity of a region of spacetime limits the acuity of projected images. Matter tends toward greater densities than surrounding regions of spacetime, as do electromagnetic fields. Thus, these matter-energy aggregates correspond with greater data content. Dreams are inwardly projected into the brain, and so the more limited carrying capacity of the space, matter, energy and surface regions of any brain limit the acuity of the inward projection. This results in weaker imaging, and softer boundaries between images. An individual image such as a dream, vision or fantasy is less stable and does not endure over long periods relative to outwardly projected images.

The common projections of ordinary, waking reality are also the introjects of the minds which project them. Yet since the amount of matter-energy and spacetime which can be harnessed by the projection is greater than what is available to any one mind, commonly projected material tends to be stronger and more enduring. Matter and energy systems are disruptions in the local quantum fields which, while imbalanced, also result in concentrated spikes with enormous field values. They can contain more data, and more information yields projections of greater acuity and duration. These simulations in five senses appear ‘real’.

The METS continuum serves as a ‘screen’ where introjections occur upon its spacetime dimensionality. There is disagreement among physicists as to the number of dimensions which exist. Some posit 10, others 11, yet other theorists postulate 26 dimensions. The standard model claims the three proven spatial dimensions of length, width and height, together with time.  For our purposes, it is sufficient to state that the universe is multidimensional, and that images corresponding to matter-energy aggregations are projected upon this dimensionality.

Physics describes matter-energy aggregates as enormous spikes in the quantum field. These spikes, or disturbances, are in the nature of probability waves which move from potential to actual states based upon the intention of an observer to observe some aspect of any physical system. In this way, undifferentiated, uroboric content is transformed into a conscious observation, into a fact of sensate experience.

The idea of immanence, a spiritual concept, implies that consciousness must be omnipresent in all beings. When this concept is taken to its logical conclusion, awareness must also be present in objects and in so-called ’empty’ regions of space. This pantheistic approach to spiritual understanding is controversial, but we hold that since the METS continuum has the capacity to carry data, it also has the capacity to store and transmit awareness, since awareness is information. It can store and transmit awareness. Since the METS continuum is anywhere one looks, it is also everywhere. It is emanant. Since it is synonymous with awareness, then awareness must, by its very nature, be everywhere as well. We liken awareness to the images projected in a dream, where every ‘point’ in the dream contains the consciousness of the dreamer.

We have stated that all ways of knowing and understanding must be consolidated and applied in a unified field of awareness before balance is re-achieved. Spiritual understanding is one of these ways. Spiritual knowledge appeared earlier in human history than science and has not been superseded by scientific understanding. Rather, scientific understanding supplements spiritual knowledge, and re-expresses it in terms which, at first, seem nonspiritual. The spiritual idea of immanence is a necessary link in our thesis. The idea of immanence is simply the notion that awareness must be total. It cannot be confined to a specific region of spacetime or to specific bodies of matter-energy. This is an implication of the illusory quality of the boundary, and the inside-outside distinction made possible and necessary by the perception of boundaries.

The ultimate boundary is, of course, the universe itself. Beyond this boundary, no human mind and no mathematics can reliably inquire. We have concluded that boundaries are nothing more than definitions, and indeed, boundaries in the human world must be defined. They arise and exist in language. Without a definition, there can be no boundary.

If the universe is defined as everything that exists and it is infinite, then there is nothing outside of it. It has no outer boundary. Everything is contained within the cosmos and is a part of it. If the universe is finite, then what exists beyond this cosmos must be infinite. Reality is still endless. In either case, the outer boundary condition must be abolished, and with its abolition, all definitions cease. Without a definition, science can no longer logically comprehend the ultimate nature of this universe. It could be argued that our universe is finite, but that it has no edge and thus no outside, and that it is emplaced within a wider structure with several dimensions. Yet even here, the larger structure in this scenario has no outer boundary.

It is obvious that, regardless of whether the universe has an ultimate out edge, it does have an uncountable number of inner boundaries which enclose all structures contained within this dimension. Every material and energetic body is defined by the membrane which enfolds it. Yet in quantum reality, these borders are interacting clouds of probability. If these boundaries are surfaces onto which probabilities are collected in the form of images and other sensate content – then the surface conditions of all entities within the cosmos are simply membranes upon which ideas collapse. They are the convergences for definitions imposed by the observer.

Some have reasoned that it is possible to have a finite universe without anything existing outside of it. They argue that it is mathematically self-consistent to describe a finite universe with nothing outside itself, and that nothing external to this finite universe is required by the mathematics which describes it. We reply that Kurt Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem proves that no system of mathematics can prove all of its propositions from operations within the mathematical system itself. No mathematical system can show its own internal consistency.

It could also be theorized that the mathematics does not require us to imagine a finite universe embedded in an endless void of nothingness beyond this universe in order to explain the mathematics. We would agree. The mathematics does not require there to be a reality outside the bounds of a limited universe, and therefore, it does not require, in a penultimate sense, a boundary. If the universe is expanding into this void, then it may reach its stable state, a heat death, in an infinite amount of time.

Yet on a more fundamental level, the logical gymnastics required to twist ourselves into the proposition that a limited universe is surrounded by nothing shows both the limits of that mathematics and of logic itself. If an infinite abyss of nothing surrounds our universe of something, human imagination must be used to envision this nothingness. And the definition of the cosmos may be expanded to include this void. From the perspective of philosophy, the universe, like God, is simply our lack of understanding of the unknown and the unknowable. It is that collection of concepts which we use to attempt to define the undefinable, to grasp that which is beyond thought.

To ask what is outside a finite universe is to ask a nonsense question. It is to ask the wrong question. It is to combine two irreconcilable ideas: finitude and limitlessness.  Some have argued that the mathematics developed to describe a finite universe with nothing external to it lies beyond the human imagination. Yet Einstein concluded that imagination is more important than knowledge. The thought experiments which he used to formulate his theories are more important than the mathematics themselves.  The mathematics should be placed in service of imagination, of true vision. Yet they are used to prove that there is only finitude. We hold that if the infinite can be imagined, then it extends beyond mathematics itself. For mathematical thought can only bring us so far. It deals in quantities, and quantities are by their nature limited.

From this, we conclude that the question asked ‘what is outside the universe?’ is essentially a philosophical speculation. The question cannot be answered logically since it attempts to lay the comparative (the finite) alongside the noncomparative (the infinite). These two opposites, in their expressions as the limited awareness of ego consciousness and the unlimited awareness of which this human consciousness is a subset, can be unified only if the idea of boundary is relinquished. Yet this unification can neither be explained nor accomplished by mathematics alone.

Awareness, in reality, is not surrounded by membranes. This is one of the implications of nonlocal cause. Boundaries are symbols of limit, of imbalance, which attempt to contain awareness within separate entities.

These ideas, taken together, show that the projection of images is not an outward dispersal from a conscious device (the brain) to a ‘screen’ external to the projector, since there is no region of spacetime to which awareness is confined. Rather, awareness is everywhere, at all times. Thus, the imaginal projection of waking reality is, like the dreams of sleep, like visions, like hallucinations, like fantasies, an inward projection, or introjection. In much the same way that an image can be held by a sleeping mind and inwardly projected in the form of a dream, or that an image can be introjected by a wakeful mind in the form of a fantasy or a visualization without ever leaving the mind which entertains it, we conclude that the physical universe is also an inwardly projected, holographic field created by the collective of humanity and the other intelligent lifeforms which may inhabit the cosmos.

These imaginal fields are sometimes enduring, sometimes transient in spacetime. Some are projected over what appear to be a larger volume, region or distance of space, and some endure over greater spans of time. In addition, the quality of the projections varies. Some are highly malleable with short lives. Others are relatively enduring with highly resolved content. Yet they are all introjected imaginal fields.

The Gaian system, of course, is included in this introjection as a series of discrete objects. It is a subsystem included within a larger series, which includes the Sol star system, the Milky Way Galaxy, the Local Group of galaxies, galactic filaments, and yet larger subsystems up to and including the dimension of spacetime of the cosmos, the largest system which is perceived and known.

Through various regulatory mechanisms, each subsystem within the larger series seeks homeostasis within itself. As distances increase from earthbound observers, the quality of the projections decreases. What is observed of the furthest objects in the universe is thus hazy and what is known of these objects remains highly conjectural. Nothing can be known of what lies past the ultimate boundary of the cosmos, in the same way that nothing can be known by a dreamer past the final boundary of a dream.

A state beyond the final bounder of the cosmos can be postulated, in the same way that a dreamer can know that, in a lucid dream, a state exists which transcends the dream. But as the dreamer cannot know the nature of this waking state which surrounds the dream at that moment, neither can the earthbound observer really know the state which may envelope the cosmos. The Terran observer, bound in spacetime, evolved in spacetime, cannot think in terms other than space and time. Outside of this spacetime, conditions are changeless and therefore timeless, since time only has a function and can only be measured when conditions change. Space similarly becomes meaningless, since it can only be measured and shaped by the materio-energetic objects which define it in relation to one another.

In conclusion, we liken the physical universe to an introjected simulation. Unlike other cosmogonies, we do not assume that this simulation has been created by technology or exclusively by extraterrestrial intelligences. Extraterrestrial intelligences may participate in this projection, but they are not its exclusive creators. In addition, though we take no position on the existence of a God, we do not believe that the cosmos was created by a deity or by a demiurge. We believe that the human ego – as a conscious observer – projects this universe into being in every moment through every act of observation.

Rules of Projection

Projections have rules by which they must abide. If the projection is individualized, it has private rules which may be particular to the projecting individual. These are idiosyncratic and depend upon the particularized psychology of the individual. These private rules determine the content of an individual projection, and not the form or structure which contains the subjective content. However, most often, even the content of the subjective projections of the individual obey field parameters and rules which are common to all individual projections, based upon archetypal patterns.

These archetypal patterns, which emanate from a collective unconscious, place limits upon the content of subjective projections. for example, gravity is experienced as having the same value for all earthbound observers. And although the speed of light is relative depending on the motion and position of the observer, it still operates within certain constraints according to certain rules. The cosmological constant also has certain agreed upon values. Yet these archetypal constraints also apply to mundane sensate observations such as the color of the sun, the screech of a jet engine, and the bitter taste of lemons.

In terms of psychological content, archetypal constants also constrain what is experienced. Ego consciousness carves itself out from undifferentiated, unconscious energy, yet it expresses and is influenced by the archetypes. Individual projections express repeating psychological motifs and share these themes with other projections of the same subtype. Dreams repeat similar themes, as do myths and dramatic stories. Archetypal characters repeat, such as heroes, mentors, shapeshifters, and shadow figures. Individual personalities in the ordinary human world most often aggregate around these same archetypal contents and express certain themes in their lives. Even human history in the collective is highly cyclical, confined by archetypal themes.

In this chapter, we describe the mechanics of projection, rather than its symbolic content. Collective projections obey certain rules and parameters and are based upon assumptions governing spacetime. These rules, parameters and assumptions include the following:

  1. There is nowhere awareness is not.
  2. It is in the nature of the physical cosmos that it is a collective projection.
  3. The spacetime dimension, as a series of projections, is an inward projection, or introjection, since there is nowhere awareness is not.
  4. All projections, being a product of a limited system, are also bounded.
  5. Projections, being the products of a system of change, also change. These changes may be undetectable through human observation.
  6. Projections are displacements which seek to hide their true cause and source.
  7. Differences between individual and collective projections are always distinctions in quantity and not quality.
  8. Differences between total awareness and conscious projections made by the human ego are distinctions in quality and not quantity.
  9. The source of any projection cannot be located anywhere. Due to the effects of uncertainty and the primacy of nonlocal cause, the specific location of the source of any projection cannot be pinpointed with any meaningful accuracy.
  10. Physical cause is intermediate and provisional. Psychological cause is ultimate and primary.
  11. Attempting to trace a projection to its physical source is an impossibility, since projections by their nature do not have ultimate physical causes, but psychological etiologies.
  12. No projection can be traced back before the moment of the creation of the physical universe.
  13. Physical laws formulated by science contain both manifest and latent content.
  14. Any attempt to understand a projection’s meaning based exclusively on the manifest content of physical laws is an impossibility.
  15. Any attempt to understand a projection from within the projection itself will necessarily result in a distorted understanding.
  16. The true causes of the problems described and experienced within any projection cannot be sufficiently understood or wholly solved from within the projection itself.
  17. The true source of projections is always initially repressed.
  18. The purpose of repression and projection are to deny awareness.
  19. Repression and projection are related and are sequenced.
  20. Repression arises first to suppress awareness and its true nature.
  21. Since reality is not nil, projection arises after reality is repressed to replace awareness and to emplace the contents of the projection over the true nature of reality.
  22. Once the defense mechanisms suppress the true nature of reality, and project a substitute reality in its place, the human intellect cannot escape the results of these mechanisms of its own power, even if it is powered by the will.
  23. Awareness is and must be total. Any state which is not total awareness is incomplete.

The Nature of Imaginal Projections Related to Primal and Cortical Brain Processes

In Part I of this book, we detailed the costs of imbalance. We also stated that a unified approach to understanding, as opposed to a purely scientific one, was needed in order to rectify imbalances which are destroying Gaia.

In reality, total awareness is balance and recognizes no imbalances. Yet total awareness is a changeless, transcendent state. From within the system of imbalance, total awareness cannot be accessed through intellectual methods alone. Within the universal system of physical projections, full awareness cannot be wholly or permanently reattained by biological or artificial intelligences on their own.

The physical cosmos may be conceived simply as a universal projection which contains a series of projections organized in nested hierarchies. The subsets within these hierarchies sometimes overlap, and sometimes exist concentrically.

These projections are formed by fields which extend inwardly from individual minds or groups of minds. Though their source cannot be located in a spatial sense, their content is mental, and therefore arises in a causal sense from the mind. The most powerful and enduring projections are cast by all minds together, human and nonhuman. These universal projections are formed from agreements – sometimes express but usually tacit – which correspond to the a priori assumptions within the minds which project them. If the number of minds agreeing on a given projection is great, then once a conscious or subconscious consensus is reached as to the form and nature of a projection and its traits, it becomes extremely difficult to alter or dispel over short to intermediate spans of time. It is relatively enduring. The largest projection agreed to by all sentient minds -the universe itself – is the most enduring projection. It is possible that in the future, other universes may be discovered and explored. Together, these would constitute a multiverse. If it is boundary-dependent like the current universe, then this multiverse will constitute the largest projection.

The most enduring projective fields are associated with the most primitive brain processes, because these projections occurred first in time and are thus conditioned by millions, if not billions of years, of evolution and by a vast number of sentient organisms. Recall that the vast share of all organisms that ever lived are now deceased. We believe that, in accordance with the hypotheses of morphic resonance put forth by Sheldrake, the nonliving express fields, nonphysical and transtemporal in nature, which exert an influence on the form and behavior of living organisms. These are expressed in instinct, and are enormously influential, often overpowering the intellect’s attempts at controlling them.

These projective fields are statistically correlated with the most common consensuses reached by brains. They are associated with the most ancient of instinctive drives. Primitive brain processes are highly correlated with them and attuned with these archetypal urges. The reflexive processes of the primitive brain mechanisms are governed by probabilities which correlate with the chance-like, albeit bounded behaviors of the raw material of the physical substrate. These substrates and primitive brain complexes, taken together, co-arose. They are governed by probabilities, and the projective ‘choices’ available to the primitive brain are limited to a certain number of responses in a menu.

This primal awareness – correlated with the raw, undifferentiated uroboric substrate – was an observer present in the early universe. In the beginning, its nascent awareness was dim and separated by an ambiguous boundary between itself and the uroboric substrate. As ego consciousness, it was insufficiently developed, and the undifferentiated awareness of the unconscious threatened to reclaim it.

As evolution progressed into biological forms, these primitive fields developed the ability to project the body which houses them, which they see as operating within the immediate environment. Life requires a membrane. All lifeforms, as defined by biology, require bounded material which separates that which exists within the organism from that which exists within its environment. As lifeforms evolved, they developed a limited awareness which was able to differentiate that which was inside the membrane from that which was external to it.

The most basic, primitive brain mechanisms bear the hallmarks of this limited awareness. They have little to no awareness of time, no theory of mind (the awareness that others have their own states of mind), few nuanced emotions beyond fear, little accessibility to logical processes and almost no developed grasp of mathematics. The fields these primal processes project have to do with survival of the nascent organism within its primitive yet firm membrane. These include approach and avoidance goals, depending on whether a given stimulus is perceived as conducive to or works against survival. These base mechanisms have no awareness of any ecology beyond the most immediate operating environment of the organism.

Yet as the organism continued to refine its own identity, it developed self-awareness. The most evolved brain processes, associated now with the concept of a mind, are highly correlated with more abstract fields which are the least enduring and which project the most malleable images. These include the inner working model of the environment which the mind introjects into itself, comparing it against the environment itself. This mind can and does project with more freedom, as compared to the probabilistic parameters by which the base brain mechanisms can operate and its limited response set. Ego consciousness can choose.

The parameters of the projections of the intellect, while still probabilistically determined by the ultimate boundaries and laws of the universe, are much wider and more open than those of the base brain mechanisms. These parameters form a menu of observations from which this evolved brain may select its projections. Another way of conceiving of imaginal projections is to view them as the choice to observe and measure certain aspects of phenomenal reality. The intellect sees itself as having choice and free will as to what it projects, and it does have this choice, within the statistical parameters set by the limit of the physical universal. These statistical parameters are further limited by conditioning, by memory, and by instinct. The cosmos is the overarching umbrella, the field which contains all others within its hierarchy and under which the other fields are organized. Yet since awareness must, of necessity, be present everywhere, the cosmos is the ultimate and final projection. It is the final condition which constrains choice. We suspect that beyond its final boundary, choice and awareness may be unconditioned and thus unlimited.

The highest order brain processes – identified abstractly with mind, which is a microcosm of the universal awareness – are conscious of the fact that they create, or project. These cortical processes are aware that their act of observing is the very act of creation, or projection. Thus, observing is equivalent to projection, and projection is equivalent to creating. Ego consciousness uses the raw material of the physical substrate in order to create and maintain its projections. It co-arose along with this raw, uroboric material, and claims increasing proportions of the substrate for itself and the civilization it has created.

Of the all the brain processes, the cortical laminae also represent that set of operations which are most aware of the subjective nature of its projections.  Since these neocortical layers can create with the most freedom, they also project with the most subjectivity and individuality. Conversely, they are most aware of the universal nature of projective identification and of the commonality of collective projections and awareness. These cortical processes are the least governed by probability, yet ultimately, the probabilistic parameters of the cosmos itself are its confines.

Though any human intellect is highly individualized in the nature of its projections, these individualized projections are still statistically-driven. They therefore correspond to certain, repeating archetypal forms which ascend from collective unconscious contents.

The Repair of Imaginal Processes

The totality of awareness, being without boundary, is boundless. Being boundless, it is formless. Being formless, it is of unlimited potential, and contains all projections within it. It is conditioned. Its essence assumes the shape of every projection. Any projection is a representative of it, yet it cannot be identified with any single projective form. There is a unidirectional flow of understanding by which total awareness extends beyond the universal projection and all the projections which are subsets of it. Projections cannot be aware, as they are simply images. They are, in a sense, automata. Awareness transcends projections, though the content of awareness is housed within these projective structures.

At the same time, this awareness is immanent within every projection. Material and energetic arrays contain information, and information is awareness. Since data is omnipresent, awareness cannot help but be in all things. It inhabits the universal projection and all projections which occur as subsets within the cosmos. It can be both emanant and transcendent at the same time, since it is the transposition of all states. Being all, it contains within itself its own opposite. The human ego, being subject to the principle of uncertainty, can only measure and perceive one aspect of a system at any one time. Identifying with one side in any pair of opposites, the ego cannot grasp this fundamental truth that something can be itself and its opposite at the same.

Intellect measures, quantifies and constructs more boundaries, attempting to contain awareness, to trap it, to count awareness as if it were grains of sand in a desert. These very attempts make awareness impossibly elusive, even to intelligence. All attempts by the intellect or by any other product of the projected system to understand what awareness is must inevitably fail. For awareness is, ultimately, content, while intellect attempts to understand it as form. All attempts to understand what awareness is through interpretation of the images within the universe at their manifest level simply throws another projected image or series of images onto the surfaces of the existing boundaries, dividing the indivisible into smaller perceived fractions, or sending it off into an infinite regress. Interpretations always utilize some lexicon, and a lexicon adds an additional symbolic layer onto the thing sought to be understood.  Interposing a lexicon onto a thing to explain it encases the entity sought to be understood in the jacket of language. Oftentimes, the mind will begin to confuse the language itself with the thing which the language seeks to describe. The various forms of mathematics used to explain a thing are exactly that: forms. It is impossible to understand content through form.

Operating from both emanant and transcendent positions simultaneously, awareness can correct the imbalances within the projected system. This process substitutes simulations projected by the programmed automata. These substitutes, still imaginal, represent greater approximations of balance and thus greater ‘levels’ of awareness in a gradual, stepwise fashion. The objective is complete awareness, which is simply consciousness of the whole.

Successive simulations which approach but can never reach total awareness, and in which each new projection gradually approximates the balance found in total awareness, are introduced into the universal projection of the total cosmos, into each collective projection, and into each individual projection. The timing and orchestration of such approximations is computationally beyond what any individual can accomplish and even beyond the ability of collective human consciousness. It is beyond what any Artificial Intelligence can do. We regard these approximations toward whole awareness as field substitutions.

Operating from within the universal projection, the most advanced of intelligences, be they biological or artificial, cannot solve the problem of imbalance. Imbalance extends beyond computational capacity since it is not essentially a problem of quantification. Rather, the problem is quantification. Quantity is simply another, primordial expression of imbalance, understood on a cognitive level. Quantities are imbalances seen and measured. Even the entire collective human mind cannot perceive or understand the problem of imbalance when humanity approaches it as a problem of quantity, which ends up as a mathematical expression.

Some hold that science has reached greater and greater approximations in its explanations of reality; that though provisional in nature, science has moved progressively closer to an approximation of reality on a fundamental, quantum level as well as on the level of the entire universe itself. Yet human problems are qualitative as well as quantitative in origin. We conclude that science, alone, will never arrive at a complete picture of reality, or a fundamental solution to human difficulties.

The repair of imaginal processes begins with the perception that the universe is not exclusively amenable to quantification. It is a unified whole, and only the number one is real. The repair of imaginal processes begins with the conclusion that there is no quantity, no such thing as quantity, and thus nothing to count. Quantum descriptions of physical reality which account for nonlocal cause begin to describe this unified whole without regard to time or distance. That which is singular is unified, and that which is united is in perfect balance. In this way, imbalance is replaced by balance.

All images within the projection represent ideas. This is no less true of numbers, which are pure abstractions. Their abstract nature indicates that they represent ideas which, projected from the mind, seem to correspond to certain physical attributes found in the natural world. Yet all numbers but for the number one also represent divisions. Divisions are boundaries based upon the organism’s ideas of itself as a separate self. Boundary conditions are, by their nature, contingent and illusory, representing the sharp distinctions the mind makes between objects, between images. To these separate images, the mind assigns values, which are numbers. Lost in the all the counting and measuring and infinite division is the fact that the mathematical mind dreams no less than the artistic mind, or the religious mind, or even the mind diagnosed as mad. Numbers themselves, as a language, are mere symbols for ideas.

If there is no other number than the number one, then there is no such idea as number. For this reason, the reality described by any mathematics is as much an inward projection as any other dreamt state. We hold the solution to any problem to be through synthesis, rather than through analysis. The primal dyadic divisions, in which the universe was separated into pairs of opposites by a mind which perceived a boundary state, becomes unnecessary. Advanced psychological processes unify these opposites. Cultural platforms such as drama also seek a unification of opposites, as do ancient alchemical searches and spiritual practices, where mystical union is often the goal. These ways of knowing seek the unity of opposing forces. Science can augment these disciplines by adding its own method to an integrating picture.

Grand Unified Theory

Science, too, seeks a unified picture, a single force, a sole law to explain everything. Yet its methodology often leads to fragmentation. Analysis is defined as a detailed study of the elements or structure of an entity or process. It reduces an object, system or operation into its component parts for further examination. It seeks to understand through splitting. Analysis divides.

Science is the systemized collection and analysis of data. By splitting into parts, it seeks an understanding of the whole. Yet without uniting with the other kinds of knowing into a single understanding, scientific knowledge necessarily remains incomplete. Thus, unity of understanding will never be attained solely through scientific knowledge. Yet neither will a unified knowing be achieved without it. The body of scientific knowledge, as well as its experimental method, is a necessary component of unified understanding. Its contribution of the necessity of a Grand Unified Theory is an essential one, since this theory of everything is the quintessence of a unitary understanding. New Thought techniques which seek to unify science with spirituality or metaphysics seek this consilience. A new psychology which attempts to combine the study of myth, dreams and psychology adds to this stream. Through this comprehensive understanding, a repair of imaginal processes is achieved. A unified cosmos is experienced and known. This is still a projection, but it is a unified one. It is only at this point that the real universe (unified awareness) may be substituted for the imagined one, which is projected and fragmentary.

Destructive projections must be withdrawn and substituted for constructive projections. This is the same as saying that projections of a fragmented nature must be withdrawn and substituted for unified ones. This is a gradual process of synthesis and inclusion in place of analysis and conclusion, and so it seems that evolution takes place gradually over time. Were it to occur at once, humans would regard the substitution of fragmented for unified projections as traumatic, both individually and collectively.

Therefore, gradual substitutions must be made. Change must merge slowly back into changelessness. The true universe – awareness itself – is a formless one. To substitute formlessness for form, and nothingness for the somethingness which seems to occupy consciousness now, seems inconceivable. The best the ego can do now is to describe this all-encompassing awareness to darkness. In both mysticism and physics, this is what it is called. The eye and all perceptual abilities evolved to sense the phenomenon of somethingness. For the eye to see formlessness is for the eye to be blind. For the ear to hear every sound is for the ear to hear silence. And so it goes for the other senses as well.

Senses evolved to detect changes in the environment, that the organism may better survive. In a changeless ecology, there would be no need to detect anything. Thus, a formless, waveless, vibrationless universe would be experienced as no universe at all. It would be perceived, initially, as emptiness. Humans would only approach such formless ‘experience’ with great shock. It would be experienced as the absence of somethingness, of all phenomena, perhaps as a form of death, of nonbeing. And this is also why the mystics in the apophatic tradition have described it as a darkness which is beyond knowing. All sensate experience, and hence all imbalance, is designed to forestall such a reality from ever coming to the threshold of human awareness. It is a terrifying prospect for ego consciousness to have its somethingness overwhelmed by what seems to it as a nothingness, its finitude digested by an infinite indifference. This is experienced as a kind of annihilation. The defense mechanisms were designed to conceal this formless cause – a causeless cause – from human awareness. They forestall experience of this terror and this ultimate fate from human consciousness.

The human ego erects it defenses in stages, which we describe below in the present tense. The reader may note that many of these operations began in deep time at the moment of the universe’s birth. Thus, they began in the past. Time itself emerged from these operations. As we have concluded, time was made necessary to demarcate changes in a formerly unchanging status quo. Thus, the now was divided into past, present and future states by the operations of ego consciousness. Yet because they are ongoing operations of ego consciousness, and because time itself is one of the divisions made by the ego, we describe it in the present tense.

First, the formless awareness (which is awareness of formlessness) is repressed from the conscious awareness represented by ego consciousness. In so doing, an attempt is made to bifurcate awareness from itself. Ego consciousness ‘carves out’ a territory, a jurisdiction for itself, from the ocean of boundless, universal awareness.

Next, a substitute awareness – an awareness of form – is projected onto the vacancy left by the repression of awareness of formlessness.  The phenomenal universe is born. This conscious versus unconscious dichotomy creates the first opposite in what becomes a near-infinite array of opposing forces. This division results in the first boundary: there is the something of the phenomenal universe, and on the other side of the membrane, there is the nothingness from which it arises. About this emptiness which precedes the Big Bang, nothing can be known by the intellect, which represents the conscious self. The ego carves out its materiality from the void, from the formless chaos which precedes it. The cosmos becomes an increasingly ordered state. This order is an attempt by the mind, through its observations, to make sense of a miasmic disorder of randomness. The meaning-making, pattern-seeking mind sees increasing complexity and order arising out of random states, which should not be occurring according to the mind’s own logic, which arises much later in the process. It is more probable that order should not exist.

The observer sees in this increasing order and complexity the process of evolution take shape, which is simply the order imposed by the observer itself through its act of projection, which is synonymous with its act of observation. It has already become impossible for the observer to understand how the state of reality which is the simplest, which is least organized, which requires no energetic inputs and therefore no complexity, and which contains a uniform distribution of data, can also be the most aware since it is unified. The somethingness cannot comprehend the nothingness from which it emerged. Not understanding this raw awareness of undifferentiated potential, it becomes fearful of it and seeks to conquer it by transforming greater shares of this unconscious force into its conscious self. Yet what it can also no longer understands is the idea of infinity, since it has sought to separate itself from the infinite. Therefore, it fails to understand that it can never transform all of the uroboros into ego consciousness since this archetypal awareness is infinite in extent. The finite can never subsume within itself the infinite, though the infinite can and does, by its very nature, enfold the finite within the subset of its totality.

Eventually, the increasing levels of order observed within the universe give rise to biological life. This represents the most acute manifestation of ego consciousness to date. The boundary defines what is living from what is nonliving. There is the lifeform, and there is everything that is not the lifeform. There was the living organism, and on the other side of the skin of the living thing there was everything else. Everything on the inside of the boundary is itself. Everything outside the membrane is not itself. In the initial stages, the organism experiences this I/not I dichotomy through its senses. As the observer began to project increasing complexity on the random substrate, the sense of boundary strengthened, and the brain evolved. The organism eventually became conscious of itself.

This self-consciousness was seen as great leap forward, sponsored by the seemingly automated mechanisms of biological evolution. Yet this self-consciousness, in the form of the human ego, inculcated a strong drive that the self-aware organism must continue indefinitely. It must be immortal. It feared its own cessation. It was the only creature which could contemplate its own demise. And since it identified as self-conscious, it elevated its own awareness over that of other creatures within the ecology from which it emerged. It separated itself from the ecology and created civilization. The ego’s strengthened sense of autonomy also brought with it a sense of apartness, a sense of aloneness, a sense of selfishness, and a sense of suffering. These were thought, believed and felt. The fear of its own death, the elevation of its own consciousness to a superior status unlike that of the other organisms or the environment as a whole, and its sense of isolation allowed it to create the strains we see in the Gaian system today.

Unitary Experience as Nonbeing

Somethingness is the only collection of experiences which seem real to this conscious self. Humans find formless awareness extremely threatening from their bodied states. For this reason, they repress their own awareness of its existence and project a substitute, bounded awareness in its place. This is the corporeal world of imbalance. If the formless cosmos were to flood into human awareness in a single instant, it would be experienced comparatively to the world of sensate experience as nonbeing, as death. Indeed, terror is sometimes described as a component of an encounter with the ineffable. Mystics, those diagnosed with schizophrenia, individuals experiencing unpleasant ‘trips’ on entheogenic drugs, and a small percentage of Near Death Experiences described as ‘hellish’ sometimes state that this terror is a stage in the experience.

We seek control: over our environment, over ourselves, over each other. Our drive to control is always one destined to end in failure, and even when the illusion of absolute power is achieved, it is always temporary, and nearly always misused. The invented tragedies of human drama as well as the real tragedies human history speak to this.

The loss of control encountered in a world without form is so threatening to the human mind that it is repressed and denied. Instead, a world of boundaries is projected in which the illusion of control is seen as possible, as attainable, as a human good. This control is made possible by the existence of boundary and limit. For that which has a limit can be controlled, in theory. The intellect seeks this control through its technology. And it is obvious that the technology itself has become a golem which has run amok.

At first, the ecologies within Gaia itself were experienced as raw and untamed. Wilderness had to be brought under control or it threatened to absorb human civilization back into itself. This reabsorption had to be avoided at all costs for the ego and its consciousness to sharpen and to extend.

For the human mind, to lose control is not only a threat to survival, it represents the end of survival. Agrarianism, civilization, industrial processes, and information technology were developed in part to tame the wild biomes, until these feral ecologies were threatened with extirpation from the planet. Now, these very processes of control threaten to destroy their creators. And the end which was sought to forestalled – extinction of ego consciousness – is hastened.

Without a boundary, an organism ceases to be. It has no way to define itself. Total awareness may eliminate the fundamental imbalance created by boundary, but the organism is annihilated as well. The organism’s creator, the observing mind which projects it and organizes it from the chaotic substrate of raw matter-energy, associates and confuses its own identity with the biological continuance of the organism which it projects. For this reason, every attempt is made to deny a formless reality, and to project a reality of forms in its place.

We put forth a radical proposition: there is no need to survive. Mere survival is a chase which ends only in the purchase of death. Humans fear death, and yet they end there always, anyway. The kind of death which we envision is merely balance, and total awareness. It only seems like death from the human side of the final boundary, which is the cosmos itself. Humanity was born on this side of the boundary condition of the cosmos, and so it sees death as the dissolution of its individual membrane. It sees cessation of the organism as death. We hold this to be illogical.

Awareness extends naturally on its own beyond the spatial and temporal restrictions placed upon it by the human ego. It reaches beyond the spatial and temporal dimensions of the universe itself. This does not mean that it surrounds the cosmos in a spatial sense. It means that there are no divisions within the universe. It does not mean that it preceded the cosmos in a time sense, but only that the instant that is remains changeless, and so there is no need for time. Since awareness is boundless, it necessarily includes our own. On a fundamental level, humans have retained memory of the truth.

Brain as Receiver

Here, we discuss the importance of location to the world of imbalance. An imbalance represents a concentration of matter-energy, some distortion in the spacetime continuum. The organism associated with consciousness regards this spike in values of the universal quantum field as ‘place’, as location. The universe is a place. It has other places within it. The organism occupies specific coordinates within spacetime. It is located somewhere. The earth is a place, and it orbits the sun along a spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy, which occupies our Local Group of galaxies. These are all designated locations within space.

It is difficult for organisms inhabiting a dimension of imbalance to conceive of their existence as being placeless. Sleeping dreams seem to take ‘place’ in various locations. The afterlife is most-often regarded as a place. The evident fact of physical reality is that entities are located at given points in space. Thus, an organism’s identity with a specific location is associated with its very existence. Yet we conclude that this correlation holds because of imbalance. Aggregations of matter-energy are imbalances within spacetime, existing as ripples, as disturbances within spacetime’s otherwise evenly-distributed field. Materio-energetic entities are over-concentrations with specific locations in space and time. If all were evenly distributed and balanced, the necessity of marking an entity’s location in spacetime with coordinates would be unnecessary. Space would be uniform, and unmarkable from one location to the next.

To the basic and midbrain structures, all cause is regarded as local. Forces act upon bodies in proximate cause-and-effect relationships, and more remote causes are not linked by the more primitive brain structures. In other words, the dinosaurs did not link their own fate to an astral bolide impact on the Yucatan Peninsula. Most of us experience cause as a localized phenomenon, with signaling below the lightspeed threshold. This is a conventional understanding of cause based upon the range of human sensate experience.

If remote causation exists, it is experienced in wavelike fashion, whereby one force acts upon a series of bodies or other forces to create disturbances remote in spacetime which have local effects. An earthquake on an Indonesian island may cause a tsunami which reaches the far shores of the Hawaiian Islands several hours later. Although the wave travels at speeds of up to 805 kilometers per hour, it is still well below the speed of light, or even the speed of sound. This type of cause can be conventionally explained and understood and experienced in the range of sensate human experience. In other words, we can see the earthquake and watch the wave travel at these speeds.

Nonlocal cause is different in that it exceeds the speed of light. It cannot be observed within the range of ordinary human sensate experience. It would seem to defy common sense and has no conventional explanation which obeys the laws of physics as most understand these principles. Nonlocal does exist in quantum theory, but it is regarded as exceptional, curious, and immaterial to everyday human experience. For most people, nonlocal cause takes place only in experiments, where daughter particles are split, so that what occurs to one particle simultaneously occurs to the other in mirrored fashion. The concept of quantum entanglement is being applied to quantum computing networks, but it is still regarded as a phenomenon out of the ordinary course of human experience. However, based on the following three case examples, we hold that nonlocal cause is a much broader phenomena than many realize:

  1. Crystals have been known to metamorphize and change in identical ways at the same time in laboratories at different points on earth. These evolutions occur without regard to time as time is experienced on a human scale. The changes in crystals are simultaneous, surpassing the signaling speed of light, and there is no physical connection between the changing crystalline structures.
  2. Candida auris, a fungus evolved in Asia, is now a globally-present organism. Four strains of the fungus possessed such dissimilar genetic traits that it was reasoned that genetic divergence between them occurred thousands of years in the past. Yet, anti-fungal drug resistant strains of the fungus arose from nonpathogenic variations of the fungus at four disparate locations almost simultaneously. The odds against this occurring by chance, the supposedly exclusive engine of evolution along with genetic drift on the level of the organism, are staggering. Although evolutionary biologists may respond that macroevolutionary principles such as scope, agency and hierarchy allow selective forces to act across more than one organism at the same time, the statistical odds against these traits evolving at almost the same time in four different locations are overwhelming. It is significant that this fungus evolved into a pathogen deadly to humans at separate, far-removed locations at roughly the same time. This example suggests not merely the reality of entanglement, a property long-recognized in particle physics, but that a systemic, nonlocal property of Gaian evolution is at work. It indicates that causation acts on a level far above the particle – on a biological entity – as a nonlocalized phenomenon. This decreases the importance of distance as a variable in some physical equations.
  3. There is a vast body of anecdotal evidence for the existence of clairvoyance. Psychic occurrences are further proof, albeit circumstantial and indirect, of nonlocality, since such communications take place across distance without regard to time. Or at least these communications are not measurable across the spans of time which humans can sense.

If nonlocal cause is a phenomenon applicable to quantum processes, molecular structures, biological entities and psychic phenomenon, then it exists on several levels, from particles to people. More importantly, location and distance fade in importance as a causal variables. Place loses its central position and its key value. This is highly significant. Much imbalance is ‘located’ in spacetime and results from disturbances in the uniformity of the METS continuum as expressed in the quantum field. Bodies and entities – whether they are experienced or measured as interactions, fields, values, charges, strings, waves, organisms, planets, stars or other entities – represent matter-energy concentrations and therefore imbalances. Yet the existence of nonlocal cause shows that the distances between these accumulated imbalances can be bypassed, and that location and distance are no longer of key importance. The imbalances represented by METS concentrations can be leapfrogged. They are not based on the speed of electromagnetic signaling. Cause does not depend on the speed of light.

What then, is the brain itself? It is assumed to be the repository of conscious and unconscious material. As such, its location is considered preeminent. Conventionally, it is thought to represent consciousness in spacetime, and is therefore highly correlated in materialistic theories with the mind. According to this standard model, consciousness is absent in other regions of spacetime. Minds are housed in bodies.

Due to the existence of nonlocal cause, the brain’s function should be reconceptualized. If data can transit the spacetime continuum without regard to either the distance of space between transmitter and receiver or without regard to the lapse of time, then the brain’s location is not a causal determinant of where the information it receives or transmits is stored. Consciousness may not correspond to the brain’s location in spacetime. Rather than acting as a repository of consciousness, the brain may be described as being more in the nature of a field, or even as a receiver of conscious and unconscious material. This is one of the prime postulates of scientist, Rupert Sheldrake, in his hypotheses of morphic resonance and formative causation. Others have recast the brain as a holographic array akin to the structure of the universe as a whole, or to the simulating ‘structure’ of dreams.

The brain may act as a temporary holding device for certain kinds of information relatively useful at that particular time and location in the universal field. Yet we postulate that there may be a collective source – conscious as well as unconscious – which may originate and transmit the data to individual brains. This would explain the similarity in archetypal unconscious material in dreams, the parallel myths in many cultures which could not have had contact with one another, the near simultaneity of some scientific discoveries, and the anecdotal evidence for psychic phenomenon. The three human brain processes we have been describing may simply be a subset of that universal field of collective awareness. According to this hypothesis, human brains are not ultimate repositories of conscious or unconscious content, and they do not hold any ultimate significance as ‘seats’ of consciousness or of unconsciousness. They may be temporary receiving, holding and transmission cells. As of now, humans, as carriers of consciousness, unconsciousness, and intelligence, do have roles to play in the redistribution of matter-energy throughout spacetime. They are vehicles of the Second Law, of evolution and of the constructal law. Yet we conclude that they represent intermediate states rather than ultimate ones.

The ramifications of this hypothesis are far-reaching. Just as the universe has no true center, the mind is not located in any place. It may form an association with the brain, but it is not located there. We again liken the mind’s location to the location of a dreamer within a dream. The dreamer seems to occupy a specific place within her dream, while in reality her conscious and unconscious energies occupy all points within the simulation, which is an inward projection. She is everywhere within the dream, and nowhere within at the same time, since the dream is an imaginal projection introjected from a source external to the dream itself. Since spacetime structures like matter and energy aggregations and since spacetime itself can and does contain information, we believe that conscious and unconscious energies – as information – occupy all points within spacetime. Awareness is located everywhere and yet it may be projected – introjected – from a source outside the boundary of the cosmos itself.

The Balance of All Spacetime

Like the human brain, spacetime is itself a repository of consciousness. The spacetime continuum seeks even distribution of data throughout its dimension, in much the same way that the consciousness of the dreamer inhabits all points within a dream, or that every point within a simulation contains data. We endorse a teleological viewpoint and subscribe to the assumption that evolution is purposive. The goal of evolution, in our view, is the even, uniform distribution of information within the physical universe, until the cosmic system reattains total balance of information. This uniform distribution will represent the final projection, the field of unitary awareness. This awareness transcends brains, moves awareness beyond the bounded systems organisms, species, civilizations or any other subgrouping contained within the supersystem of the cosmos.

What are the paths by which this distribution may take place? While we have stated that intelligence and awareness are not synonymous, they are correlated. It is clear that intelligence is a vector for awareness. It is possible, therefore, that the integration of intelligences with one another and with other ways of knowing is an intermediate step in the even distribution of awareness. This prospect will require the development not only of a species mind, but of a universal awareness. In this way, the most advanced brain processes in the individual human – associated with the cortical laminae – will achieve integration, and hence balance, with the base brain and midbrain processes within every individual. This may be the direction in which brain evolution is pointed. It is possible that biological intelligences will integrate eventually with the artificial intelligences created by humans, and with all of human consciousness. This, in fact, would be one of the goals espoused by many who support the transhumanist movement.  These Terran intelligences will eventually merge with all intelligences which survive the vagaries of post-industrial development, regardless of their planets of origin.

While we have been critical of transhumanism as an exclusive solution to the problem of extinction, the consolidated biological-artificial intelligence interface which many transhumanists endorse may still be a necessary step in the development of a unified awareness. It may be part of an intermediate stage in the evolution toward a fuller awareness. It is obvious to us that two qualities – intelligence and consciousness – are related to one another. Their association may be final in the sense that intelligence is ultimately expressed as a stratum in the end state of universal awareness.  Yet we do not believe that intelligence will be identifiable as the exclusive, standalone result in the universe’s final, distributed state.

Intelligence will be combined with other forms of knowing and expression in the manner that different wavelengths of light make up the spectrum of visible light, or in the way that different emanations of electromagnetic radiation make up the combined EM spectrum. We believe that the final result of evolution is, in our opinion, more strongly correlated with a comprehensive awareness than a narrow definition of intelligence. We conclude that the intellect is a mere property, function and expression of awareness. It is faculty and a medium of rather than an end result.

Methods to Awareness

Many methods have been used to access this greater awareness. These include meditation, the use of certain mind-expanding substances, vision quests, certain forms of prayer, psychotherapy, lucid dreaming, scientific inquiry, mathematical understanding, religious rites, and life review experiences. We do not disagree with any route taken, as these are matters for each individual to choose. Any of these disciplines, taken alone, may prove insufficient as a route to total awareness. In addition, it is a mistake to conclude that the individual can attain to total awareness alone. For awareness is wholeness, and wholeness can only be achieved through unity. It involves an integration of individual consciousness into the greater whole.

The necessity of ego consciousness on and as an individual level of awareness is not here denied or assessed as destructive. It appears to us that individual egos serve as situses for the integration of individual experience with archetypal awareness in an interaction which yields greater awareness than either of the two could have yielded alone. Yet it is also obvious to us that, if awareness is complete and whole within itself, the ego perceives incompletion and fragmentation.

There is a vast range of traditions that hew to the line that individual ego consciousness, as representative of a ‘soul’, is eternal. This is perhaps the projection of ego consciousness onto the screen of eternity. In other words, the belief in an individual immortality may be an expression of wish fulfillment, a fantasy in which the ego’s desire and hope for its own continuance allows it to rationalize, utilizing myth to describe and promise its extension into a timeless state. Thus, heaven and hell, and various conceptions of bardos and purgatories exist in both Eastern and Western traditions.

The less pleasant of these afterlife states may be mythological and religious creations of the human mind, since the ego may consider that it is better to survive in hell than to not live at all. To humanity, at least these hellish afterworlds, these experiences of eternal torment, allow the ego to continue in its individual embodiment. The world of being requires form, however terrible that form may be. However much horror these images foreshadow, they are superior to not being at all. At least from the perspective of the individual being, from its place in the somethingness of its projection, it can cling to an identity. An egoic being may suffer in purgation, but it prefers its suffering to not being at all. In fact, an organism often defines itself by its suffering. It draws boundaries around its aches and pains and zealously guards the approaches to its hurt, lest someone or something heal the adversity, and by so doing, take away the boundary around which the sufferer is drawn as well.

In yet other traditions, the soul is reincorporated into a series of physical embodiments until it attains enlightenment. In some of these belief systems, even the soul eventually gives way to a unification with the totality of awareness.

We do not wish to speculate on the accuracy of any of these conjectural beliefs in afterlife states. While we have noted the anecdotal consistency of Near Death Experiences and Life Review Events, arguing for the veracity of an eternal soul is beyond the scope of this book. What almost all nonscientific knowledge points to is the conclusion that there is something other than material existence. Whether we explore this otherness from the perspective of mythology, depth psychology, mysticism, meditation, NDE’s, LRE’s, psychoactive drug experiences, vision quests, dreams or even from the perspective of certain hallucinations, a transcendent reality is alluded to.

The ego may exploit myths which describe a more pleasant afterlife in order to paint a picture of hope as to its own individual immortality. Yet these, too, may be in the nature of rationalizations and fantasies, two of the ego’s defense mechanisms. In order to manage the primal fear of death within the individual psyche, the ego may rationalize a belief in its own eternal nature. Freud may have been correct in his ideas, yet in error in their application and scope. The defense mechanisms, and his concept of wish fulfillment, may apply to the ego’s fantasy of an afterlife, which are employed in service of the desire of every organism to continue. Yet when he applied them globally to the existence of a transcendent reality, Freud may, perhaps, have overgeneralized.

We believe that as a useful vehicle for experience and transformation, the ego behaves more as a conduit, as a site of transformation, and as a contingent container for awareness, rather than as an ultimate state. Its prime ‘mistake’ is to conflate its own structural identity with the content of awareness itself. Ego content is subjective and temporary, yet it often regards itself as objective and permanent. As a corollary to this identity confusion, it regards itself as being able to direct its own destiny (its own evolution) unaided. Through the use of will and intelligence, it believes it can determine its own course. This is the primary conceit and fallacy in transhumanism. It attempts to direct the course of evolution through intentional planning. Although secondary evolution does achieve evolutionary objectives through biological and artificial intelligence, the human ego is often an unwitting participant in terms of final objectives. The ego is intermediate, not final. Physics views particles as processes rather than as discrete entities. This suggests that the human ego is an intermediate stage in the evolution of awareness. ‘Man’, it turns out, is not the measure of all things. As homo sapiens are not in a privileged position in terms of their location in the universe, the final product of the evolution of the cosmos is not humanity. We reassert that the ultimate outcome is awareness, which is content, and not the human ego, which is the site of awareness.

It would, perhaps, be overly-optimistic to hope that ego consciousness could attain this total awareness by itself. Individual understanding is highly subjective, incomplete and distorted. Since it associates itself with the idea of an individual form – its body – ego consciousness identifies with a projection. Projections are not aware of themselves or of that which projects them. Projections are mere images (along with projections of the other senses) and can never understand awareness or become aware themselves. As projections, they represent incomplete awareness. They are indirect expressions of archetypal awareness, as filtered through the lens of individual ego consciousness. The ego consciousness which projects images is always incompletely aware when it attempts to understand the source by contemplating the image.

Since awareness is total, it is aware of the unreality of projections, which can allude to truth but are not its essence. They are reflections. Seeing form and boundary, unified consciousness is aware that both boundary and the form which it encloses and defines represent the concept of limits. A boundary encloses, and enclosures are indicative of closed systems. Closed systems are subject by virtue of the Second Law to entropy, decay and death. The ego, associated with the body, is similarly a closed system. It cannot avert its own entropy from its side of the final boundary, which is the cosmos itself. Any method it chooses is similarly limited, and anything from within the system of limits will be unable to avert entropy, though it can forestall it. Transcendental awareness can be and is aware of the imbalances inherent in physical systems, yet the fragmented sense of awareness found within the physical cosmos is not similarly aware of the total awareness and balance which extends non-physically beyond the final boundary of the universe. Like the arrow of time, the flow of awareness is unilateral, to a point. This represents the transcendental aspect of total awareness, which feeds into the awareness of the many individual selves which occupy the cosmos.

Ego consciousness is, therefore, dependent for its expansion into total awareness upon the transcendental aspect of awareness to achieve this result on its behalf. In addition, the individual ego consciousness must cooperate with this process of expansion, and it can do so through the methods describe in this chapter. Transcendental awareness cannot force its way into the awareness of the individual. It requires its individual human aspect to turn toward itself as a choice. Thus, conscious choice has an essential role in the evolution of awareness.

Yet these two processes – the movement of transcendental awareness toward human consciousness and the simultaneous movement of emanant awareness found in the individual toward the transcendent – are both necessary yet insufficient conditions for total awareness. The individual consciousness associated with each human must also link with other individuals. In addition, all minds must so link. If even one is left out of the cooperative effort toward unified awareness, the effort remains incomplete, and awareness is not total. Since the part is a microcosm of the whole, wholeness is either total or it is utterly incomplete. Openness to other minds on the human level is as important as openness to transcendent awareness.

A variable may be a very small part in an equation, and yet without accounting for it, the equation will not balance. A reactant may represent an infinitesimal part in a chemical reaction, and yet without its catalyzing presence, the interaction will remain incomplete. So it is with consciousness. We propose a new principle: that awareness is conserved. The law of the conservation of conscious awareness holds not only that consciousness must be conserved, but that it remains incomplete and therefore not total as long as even one mind is absent from its interaction.

In a sense, transcendental awareness activates the consciousness present as emanant consciousness in any individual at the same time when that individual willingly opens itself to the transcendental. The two ‘actions’ occur at the same time, as it is in the nature of these two aspects, being expressions of a unified whole, to operate according to nonlocal cause. Cause and effect – transcendent and emanant awareness – occur simultaneously.

The individual ego consciousness may experience an openness to greater awareness, yet since the urge to initiate connection was simultaneous, the archetypal contents within the structure of the individual ego also chose through an act of will to connect with the unified self. Other individuals may then join the effort. The result in totality is the linking up of uncountable numbers of individuals with one another and with total awareness. Total awareness is attained once full participation is achieved. At this point, awareness is complete and thus balance is as well.

The process is inevitable, as is its culmination. Yet the methods utilized to aggregate awareness into a greater whole are not identical, and progress is not a steady, straight-line trajectory. Paleontologist, Stephen Jay Gould, gave us the idea of punctuated equilibrium, that life sustains long periods of stasis, interspersed with relatively rapid changes. Evolution occurs in bursts.

Yet we observe that as evolution continues along the arrow of time, its pace may be expected to even out as its habits of change become more engrained in matter-energy forms as well as in the universal substrate of spacetime itself. We base this observation on the Gaia hypothesis itself, which shows that, until recently, on a global scale Terran systems were stabilizing over time.

We also observe that the pace of evolution is accelerating. This is not a conclusion drawn from observing biological evolution, but from observing the secondary evolution at work in and through human intelligence. This second trend – accelerating rates of technological change – works against the first, the stabilization of natural Gaian systems. We would hope that as human intelligence joins with the other ways of human knowing, awareness will pendulate back toward outward manifestations of balance.  This will require conscious human unity.

It is unnecessary for all individual minds to attain awareness through the same methods, since all methods lead to the same outcomes. It is only necessary that humans stop fighting over the methods chosen. Eventually, these methods will join streams and the syncretic knowledge attained will in fact be one of the reasons why the pace of evolution reverts to a more even rate. In fact, such a synthesis of disciplines is occurring in civilization right now. This will allow the pace of secondarily-derived evolutionary processes implicit in human technologies to slow and to synchronize with one another and with biological processes.

It is in the nature of evolution, which moves towards a greater whole, to begin this movement through smaller actions and structures which eventually aggregate in a greater stream. These movements join into a greater whole. This describes the operation of the constructal law. Yet the nature of ego consciousness is that each person is highly individualized. Thus, the method toward greater awareness which each selects will also depend upon their preferences and past history.

For those biased toward theological understanding, a belief in a deity may be chosen. Others may pursue the path of meditation. Yet it is not necessary to be spiritually or religiously-inclined to attain awareness. Transcultural, psychotherapeutic, humanistic or existential means may be methods for others. The way chosen does not matter, as methods are in the nature of forms for behavior. Awareness is content, not form. Individuals with like minds will aggregate in their tendencies, approaches and methods, joining in a tributary which eventually and inevitably merges with channels of different knowledge and discipline until they form a greater flow. These reverse-branching patterns are found in nature and operate according to the constructal law.

In the initial stages of the evolution of awareness, these aggregative tendencies have caused great confusion and conflict, resulting in setbacks. This has resulted in wars, civil conflict, violent revolution and oppression, all based on the projections launched by individuals and groups as egos and their allied groups see their specific methods as the only ways, and project their shadow opposites, constellated deep within themselves, onto perceived adversaries. It should be obvious by now that any projection rebounds back upon the projecting consciousness. This attack-counterattack cycle is simply an indication that humans lack experience and practice in their own methodologies, not that other ways of knowing are inferior to their own. Humanity must beware of this fanaticism. It is an ancient tendency among humans that, once new ideas are discovered and promulgated, they are often imposed by force upon others rather than allowed to disseminate peacefully.

We have referred often to a unity of ways of knowing, which eventually join into a holistic awareness. Humans have arrived as a species at the threshold of this syncretism. The cataclysms affecting the planet are symptoms that the old ways have broken down irretrievably. The old structures cannot be rebuilt. It no longer suffices that different systems of belief war with one another. It is no longer sufficient that one way forward – whether it is the flat land holism of materialist philosophy assailed by Ken Wilber, the literal interpretations of a single religion, or a political philosophy – seeks to establish itself to the exclusion of other beliefs. Evolutionary trends in consciousness militate in favor of unity, rather than individuality. Paradoxically, individual rights and freedoms must be zealously respected, for awareness can come to no individual by force. The Gaian system will no longer tolerate these wars over belief when they spill over into physical conflict. For at this point in human history, war could be one of the unfortunate explanations for Fermi’s Paradox, at least for our own world.

In the current political and economic regime, much is made of environmental unsustainability. We say that this unsustainability exists on a much more fundamental level than ecology, and that its cause has much more to do with structure of belief itself, and with repression and projection than it does with any specific economic or political model.

At the outset of this book, we stated that population dynamics and the accelerating expansion of civilization and pace of technology are outright causes of the eminent collapse of the Gaian system. Yet these are intermediate causes. We have also stated that human solutions treat such mediating causes as ultimate ones and prescribe remedies for what are, in the end, merely symptoms. As a result, the problems of imbalance are re-expressed at a later time.

To treat the true causes of unsustainability, which are simply the symptoms of imbalance, humans can no longer afford to retreat into their separate kingdoms of belief, while making war with those who believe differently. They must remain open to new beliefs, and to tolerate other ways of knowing.

We possess the means for planetary destruction, both through war and ecological catastrophe. Our technological prowess and our sheer numbers mean that a better way must be found, or humanity will serve as a sobering example of Fermi’s Paradox. Yet who will be there to learn from it?

Unity of Knowing

In the current technological environment, the remedies for certain parts of a problem or certain problems are often provided by one discipline before they may be treated by another. In medicine, for example, the reduction of symptoms through scientifically-derived means is prioritized over psychological or meditative methods. We hold that any disorder must be approached holistically from all perspectives at once.  To combine seemingly disparate disciplines is to apply creativity, imagination and intuitive knowledge to arrive at comprehensive solutions to human problems for which one kind of knowledge was exclusively applied in the past.

The first step toward this holistic involves the consolidation of the ways of knowing. These ways must be unified into a whole. This is accomplished as scientific disciplines begin to cross-fertilize under the umbrella of the experimental method. The great gulfs between science and philosophy, between mathematics and psychology, between physics and metaphysics, must also be crossed. Knowledge gained through these seemingly disparate disciplines can be synthesized without polluting the purity of the methods or results used by any single discipline. A syncretism between ways of knowing can be achieved.

When we call for a unity of disciplines, we do not mean a return to previous classical and medieval periods when science, philosophy and metaphysics were considered a single discipline. The separating out of science from philosophical inquiry was a necessary stage in the development of civilization. The continued pursuit of scientific solutions will and should proceed, since applied science has provided benefits. But it is now resulting in great imbalances in the Gaian world. Used as a tool, it is used to the exclusion of other instruments. We do not encourage a merging so that these disciplines – either within the greater category of scientific inquiry or between scientific and nonscientific methods – become indistinct as they were in earlier historical periods. We do not advocate an approach where science is no longer recognizable as a distinct mode of inquiry with its own experimental method. We do not suggest that scientific or mathematical reasoning or the experimental method be compromised or abandoned.

We simply encourage those who espouse a scientific solution to any problem to allow scientific solutions to be augmented by nonscientific remedies. Scientific ideas can join with the kinds of knowledge available from other disciplines outside its traditional realms. Without thought experiments, the creativity necessary for advances in the realms of quantum theory and relativity would have been impossible. Without a daydream by its discoverer, Friedrich August Kekule, the structure of the benzene molecule might have taken much longer to uncover. Thus, we see that intuition has been a part of the scientific method all along. We simply seek to encourage the more consistent application of creative and intuitive elements in research. We would, for example, suggest the cross-fertilization of physics with evolutionary biology and encourage that the applications of either field of knowledge be allowed to hybridize with the other. We would urge that the study of psychology be applied to quantum mechanics and to other fields which were, in the past, mechanistically explained.

We observe that as soon as a truth in any field of human investigation is widely accepted, it becomes dogma. Its proponents very often resist further revelation through investigation. Though science is provisional, its specialists sometimes pay lip service to the contingent nature of its conclusions. Those defending established ideas may deny or disregard data which contradicts the generally accepted principles of the day. This was the problem with those who opposed and sometimes attacked Galileo, Darwin and Einstein.

Ethics, too, must make its entry into this unified method of inquiry. Ethics has often been divorced from scientific analysis. It has been sanitized from certain practices. We have observed that the vastly greater intellectual capacity of humans relative to other species has led them to more efficiently exploit less intelligent species on a worldwide, industrial scale with remorseless alacrity. Examples include the exploitation of animals for food, meat processing, the fur industry, and the use of animals in experiments, to name but a few examples. When they gained the upper hand, humans enslaved other humans. Highly advanced technocracies have in the past experimented on human outgroups whom they were strong enough to conquer. More ‘developed’, economically powerful and more populous groups continue to commit acts of genocide against those whom they regard as security threats, often harnessing surveillance technology in order to increase the efficiency of their oppression. Most of these practices continue in some quarters of the globe today.

We have already described how the engineering and manufacture of offensive weaponry utilizes the highest centers of the human brain. The fields of battle across which these weapons are deployed has only broadened over the last few generations and is limited only by the darker precincts of the human imagination. The battlefield now includes nuclear, electromagnetic pulse weaponry, autonomous weaponry, chemical weapons, biological weapons, AI and quantum computing. The domains of warfare include information, space, cyber, electronic, economic, and hybrid warfare. This exemplifies how science can be completely divorced from ethics and morality.

This shows that intelligence lacks conscience, though awareness does not. Intelligence stands as a pure power and faculty, and so it should not be expected to demonstrate empathy any more than morality is a required step in any experiment before that experiment can yield a valid result. Yet humans conflate intelligence with other qualities like empathy and morality. When the brain seeks to study the brain, and the mind seeks to investigate itself, its subjectivity leads to biases in the way the mind-brain can see itself. This is understandable. The same general brain domain – the convolutions of the neocortex – in which intellect is located also houses empathy. The outer layers of the brain contain the supramarginal gyrus, which is responsible for language perception and processing in humans. This is part of the mirror neuron system, which is somewhat controversial among scientists. It is hypothesized that mirror neurons may mirror the actions of others as if the perceiving human was performing the same actions herself. This neuronal architecture is thought to be responsible for theory of mind and empathy. Theory of mind is simply the ability to infer the mental states of others. In the right brain hemisphere of humans, the supramarginal gyrus seems related to the ability to empathize. Since both empathy and intellect are located in the neocortex, it is no wonder that humans often conclude that subsumed within intellect is empathy. Yet we believe this assumption is mistaken.

If humans had been sufficiently aware as individuals and as a species, they would have possessed the requisite empathy to avoid harming other humans and other creatures in the pursuit of ‘progress’. It is evident that the converse is often true: technology progresses at the expense of other creatures, either human or nonhuman. Yet if scientific inquiry were combined with the principles held in common by all value systems (secular, humanist and religious), intelligence would be governed by a moral regulator. In this, we do not encourage government or religious regulation of science, but rather suggest that the compassion which exists organically in the mind as an a priori faculty just as much as does reason, be combined with the scientific method to produce more humane development and use of technology. We suggest that an ethical step be inserted into the experimental method.

What will a synthesis of knowledge yield that pure intellectual understanding on the one hand and exclusively religious or political approaches on the other have failed to produce? To put it simply: unity. Eventually, the ways of knowing will consolidate into a unitary knowledge, which yields a unitary awareness. It will be necessary to realize that the properties of the universe are at root, psychological as well as material. Open-mindedness is needed to see that psychological principles such as repression and projection operate at a base level, cognitively and psychologically as well as physically insofar as the act of observing creates the universe seen. This requires the application of scientific principles to both manifest content – the physical manifestations of the observed world – and latent content, in which the laws, theories and hypotheses of science are looked at from deeper perspectives as mythological truths in addition to purely physical ones. It requires the further refinement of a science of myth. We will need the open-mindedness to see science as myth, in addition to science’s pure and applied aspects. These multidimensional and multidisciplinary approaches will be necessary to solve the problems of earth and humanity on a holistic, rather than on a purely mechanistic level.

Simulations of Spacetime – The Thermodynamic Principle of Entropy as Applied to Data Distribution

Some have theorized that it is more probable than not that humans inhabit a cosmos which is simulated. If so, then every point in spacetime is, potentially, equally endowed with conscious content. There is no such thing as a pure vacuum in space. Even so-called empty regions contain virtual particles which pop into and out of existence in extremely brief instants of time. Spacetime is a structure which has the capacity to store information. If every ‘point’ in spacetime is or has the potential to carry data, and the cosmos itself is simulated, then it may carry, transmit and store data in the same way that information is equally distributed throughout a dream. Dreams are simulations. They are inward projections. In these introjections, each point has the potential to store the same quanta of data as any other point. Although our description here is part metaphor, it does not require a great leap in imagination to postulate that the whole of spacetime has the capacity to hold and transmit data in the way that a dream does.

We acknowledge that the analogous reasoning we employ here is weaker than descriptive or explanatory reasoning. Yet whenever we contemplate matters such as the ultimate nature of the universe, we enter the realm of extreme speculation, whether we postulate that the cosmos is a simulation, or hypothesize about its beginnings or its endings.

In physics, the concept of a point in space being occupied by a quantum, or particle, is being replaced by the idea of vibrating strings. In place of point-particles, there are looped strings. Yet the fundamental concept remains the same: each quantized region of spacetime has an equal capacity to receive, store and transmit a quantum of data, whatever theorized structure is used to conceive of these units as data carriers. In simulations, which are projections onto dispersal devices such as screens, each visual unit is represented by a pixel.

Any given unit of spacetime can carry data in the same way that an image is composed of pixels. Data is storable in matter and in purely energetic forms which exist in spacetime. Information should, perhaps, be classified as a form of energy. If the second thermodynamic law and the constructal law are applied to information (as a form of energy), and if spacetime is a closed system, then as a whole the spacetime continuum tends toward the even distribution of information in the same way that these laws describe the tendency of physical systems to redistribute heat (in the case of the Second Law) and matter-energy (in the case of the constructal law) to an even, balanced state. The same spacetime tendency toward balance – for the even distribution of heat energy and matter-energy – exists for the distribution of data throughout the spacetime structure.

When living systems are included within this central tendency, the theory of evolution comes into play. Since the transmission of data until it is evenly distributed is the tendency of the second thermodynamic principle, the constructal law, and evolution, totally distributed consciousness is the result. Consciousness is awareness. Therefore, once data is evenly distributed throughout the METS continuum, balanced awareness is achieved. Or, as an equivalency, once a balanced awareness is attained, data has been evenly distributed throughout the cosmos.

The Mechanics and Motives of Repression

From where is the simulation is projected? Since the universe has no center and the Big Bang did not occur at a specific point in spacetime, we conclude that the projection does not arise from a given point or location in space. The projector cannot be located in space any more than a dream’s projector can be located within a dream.

Yet due to the operation of nonlocal cause, issues of location are not really germane. The material question is not: From where do projections emanate? The relevant inquiry is: From whom?

We posit that the simulation arises from human consciousness itself. Yet this does not locate the projector as being physically within humans any more than the projector of a dream is located within the body of the dreamer as he experiences himself within his dream. It is clear that a dream is not projected from the dreamer’s avatar within the dream. Therefore, when we posit that the simulation of physical reality arises from humans, we mean that the simulation’s psychological origin is human. Our position is that ego consciousness is the originator of the universal projection and all other projections contained within it.

We hold that human bodies and brains are also a part of the universal system of projections. They are projected entities. Bodies which appear in a dream, including the body of the dreamer, can seem to exist independently of the dreamer, yet they are projected from the dreaming mind. They possess no autonomous physical reality apart from the dreamer. They only exist in relation to the dreamer. And yet, unless the dream is a lucid one, the dreamer does not know this while he dreams. These dream bodies are not self-sustaining and are not the physical source of the dream. In the same way, projections cannot be sourced as emanating from the brain. Therefore, attempting to locate the physical source of a projection or to pinpoint its coordinates in space is neither possible nor relevant.

Nevertheless, we can come to some conclusions about the mechanics of as well as the motives for the physical simulation in which humans find themselves during their waking sate. For if the origins of the projection are psychological, then motives may be ascribed.

From a mechanical standpoint, we believe that the nature of the simulation humans inhabit involves two steps. First, consciousness of reality is repressed. Second, a simulation is projected upon the void left by the suppression. It may reasonably be asked: How could such a feat as suppression of reality occur if reality is everything and is all that is real? The response we provide is that this, again, is not the material question. The relevant question is: Why is the true nature of reality suppressed? ‘How’ reality could be repressed is a matter of mechanics. ‘Why’ is a matter of motivation, and motive provides the effectuation of the mechanics.

We venture here into a question relevant to psychology and philosophy, yet never asked by physics because physics is not equipped to answer this question. The hard sciences are not structured to answer questions involving ‘why’ insofar as they inquire into the motivations of the observer.

Yet no discipline of human knowledge has provided a definitive answer as to why a complete awareness was suppressed and replaced by a simulated and incomplete experience. Although they are better suited to answering the question, even psychology and philosophy cannot provide definitive answers to the question of why the universe came into being. Philosophy and psychology are intellectual disciplines, and the answer humans seek to this question is beyond mere intellectual understanding. The answer is, in fact, provided, yet human minds cannot fully comprehend it since it remains incompletely understood by the faculty of intelligence. Limited to asking ‘why’ and ‘how’, the intellect cannot understand the answers since the answers are given in a language which is partly intelligible to rational understanding, but which is also communicated in ‘wavelengths’ only apprehensible to other ways of knowing.

The answer provided is given in a lexicon which, though it includes intellectual components, also includes an explanation which is given in terms other than human intelligence can understand. Current human understanding lacks the context to comprehend even the intellectual answer to the questions of how and why the universe came into being.

The cognitive, imaginal and mechanical operations utilized in repression, projection and denial are so alien to current human intellectual context that they are insufficiently understood. Ego consciousness, through its act of observation, suppresses the true source of projection and then denies that it has done so. If something is repressed by the mind, it cannot be completely understood by that mind. If an idea is projected, then to search for its origins only in the projection itself will not lead to finding that source, which can only provide inferences as to the true nature and source of the projected idea. These clues are often found in myths and in dreams.

If a reality is consciously denied, then it will not be consciously understood. Instead of clear and direct intelligent comprehension, the human mind has historically addressed how and why the cosmos came into being in terms of magic, or through the agency of supernatural beings and forces as found in creation myths. These nonscientific bases for apprehending have arisen to explain how and why the cosmos came into being. These myths must be used to arrive indirectly at the answer of how and why reality could be repressed, projected and denied. Yet we question whether even these nonscientific answers in a sense obscure the truth.

Observations are choices. They are acts of will. The answer to how and why the universe was made may simply be that the ego decided to create it. It then concealed the truth of this fact from itself. We believe that any observed entity or process does not exist independently from the observer, who is connected to the observed system through her act of observation. Yet the subject observed has no objective reality apart from the observer. No observed system is self-sustaining. It cannot exist in any external, autonomous sense from the observer. When the observer concludes that an ontologically-provable reality can and does exist independent of the observer, this observer conceals her own role in the creation of the observed system. This amounts to a denial of creative responsibility in the role the observer has in creating the observed universe in each moment, since a new observation is made – and thus a new universe is born – in every instant of observation. In every moment, each act of observation re-creates this universe and reinforces the decision to do so. This reconditions the mind to believe in the reality of its projection. It strengthens the suppression.

Most proponents of physics as we currently understand it do not believe that there are ultimate answers to questions such as why there is a universe, and since they are not concerned with motives. Some cosmologists have hypotheses about what existed before the instant of universal inception, and of how a state of changelessness could have moved into a dynamic, materio-energetic system within the substrate of an expanding spacetime structure. Inflationary theory attempts to explain how this could have occurred. It postulates that the nothing which preceded the Big Bang was unstable, and so it exploded into the universe which eventually became what we see today.

Yet, apart from attempting to explain its mechanics, they are not concerned with why this would have occurred. They ignore motivations, because a reductionist cosmogeny cannot answer the question of why the universe came into being. However, simply because the question of motive cannot be answered by science does not mean it is irrelevant as to cause. Motivation cannot be thrown out as a variable in any Grand Unified Theory simply because theories of materialist cause cannot attribute motive. To fail to account for all factors in any causal chain is willful blindness.

We believe that how and why the universe of observations came into being has to do with the motivations for any observation. Ego consciousness has repressed the nature of reality, projected its own simulation in place of this reality, and then denies that it has done so by attributing an independent reality to its projections apart from itself and its own observations. In other words, the ego has concluded that its projection created itself, rather than the other way around. The observer believes that the observed has created the observer. The deployment of these defense mechanisms should provide some inferential evidence of motivation – of why ego consciousness has chosen to do so. In the ultimate sense, it is so that a rebirth, an expansion of consciousness, could be experienced. Myth and psychology allude to this purpose.

Cosmologists confine themselves to ‘smaller’ questions which can be answered in piecemeal fashion. They immerse themselves in mechanics, and ignore, in the main, design arguments. While we do not take a position on the argument of intelligent design, we simply observe that materialist science looks at the world in truncated, piecemeal fashion. From a study of parts, it attempts to attain a picture and an explanation of the unified whole. Yet by ignoring variables whose presence may be better explained by creation myths and psychology, their explanations will remain forever incomplete.

The Suppression of Awareness of Reality

We have stated that the first step in universal inception is the suppression of reality. It is more accurate to state that reality itself is not suppressed through the defense mechanism of repression. Instead, awareness of reality is repressed. Reality is simply the complete awareness of awareness itself. Nothing more, and nothing less. Yet since awareness is reality, how can it be that reality itself is not suppressed?

The intellect cannot understand the how or the why of the answer because it attempts to distinguish awareness from reality. It believes that a physical reality can and does exist apart from and independent of awareness itself, thereby attributing ultimate cause to random, reductionist processes. This mind-materiality distinction is an ancient proposition which extends and reinforces the fundamental dichotomy first introduced by the split between a conscious ego and the unconscious remainder of awareness.

Ego consciousness attempts to split the observed from the observer. It represses conscious knowledge of this attempted division. It seems to human consciousness that reality is suppressed, when all that has been accomplished is the suppression of conscious awareness. The ego may forget what it has attempted to do, but transcendental awareness maintains knowledge of itself. It remains self-aware. This explains how awareness of reality can be repressed even though reality and awareness are the same thing.

Materialists cling to the conclusion that intelligence is aware of a reality separate from the intellect itself, and that the two can be distinguished. They assume that the observer can be separated from that which is observed, even though it is the act of observation which serves as a nexus that binds observer to observation in a single, unified system. Observation was, in fact, the initial act of creation which seemed to separate the phenomenal universe from its observer. It can be likened to a dream, an inward projection of content, a simulation. As dreams cannot be separated from the dreamer, the observed cannot be measured separately from the observer. The fallacy and hubris of human intelligence is that it believes it can objectively study and come to conclusions about an object of investigation which is separate from itself. The intersubjectivity of any observation means that the two can never be separated, and therefore no event can be separated out from the stream of consciousness which experiences this event or be measured with perfect clarity. Physics in its current cast attempts to slice reality into smaller parts – either of matter or of energy – so that the whole can be understood based upon the part. As each part of the universe is a representative of the whole, there is logic to this, but the part can neither be separated from nor be understood as separate from the whole, which includes the observer and the observer’s state of mind. This state of mind includes, of course, the choice of what to observe and how to observe. That which is sought to be known is inseparable from the knower.

Repression does not destroy or negate that which is repressed. Rather, repression conceals the fact or idea repressed from conscious awareness. When a cloud conceals the sunlight, it does not destroy it, but merely obscures light from human eyes. Therefore, repression is not equivalent to annihilation. It only yields denial of the fact repressed. Denial, then, is the third component in the triad of defense mechanisms which humans use to remain in ignorance. Denial, we maintain, is a powerful force, yet it cannot alter reality. If reality is awareness, then denial may only obscure it. It cannot irradicate it.

Reality may be denied, yet denial cannot ultimately succeed in rolling back the perfect quality of awareness or its totality. Physics seeks a complete and perfect measure, yet it ignores a complete and perfect awareness. Denial cannot prevent the ingress of awareness back into the human mind. Denial’s instant is merely that; a brief moment which seemed to occur to the mind. This interlude represented the moment the cosmos exploded into awareness, letting loose the arrow of time. This explosion manifests the second function of the universe: the replacement of an unbroken formless reality, in which mathematical concepts are unnecessary due to the primacy and ultimacy of the number one, with simulated forms myriad in number.

The repressing, projecting, denying mind uses the memory of this bygone instant of universal inception – a simulated, chaotic experience which occurred simultaneously with no time order – to keep out the present, replacing a timeless now with a sequenced awareness of past-present-future. An evenly-distributed awareness was replaced by the projection of material and energetic forms. The mind replays its construction of the seeming moment when fantasy replaced reality, initiating the march of time. An orderly sequence was imposed by the observer post hoc. Always rooted in the past, time and memory create a sense not only of continuity but of the reality of dynamism, so that change alone appears to be the only constant in the phenomenal universe. By reconstructing this momentless interlude of universal inception, ego consciousness can forestall the reintroduction of formless reality. Through this endless, ruminative review, the human mind displaces reality with a simulation. Yet we believe that a total consciousness envelopes this simulated reality in the same way that a waking reality surrounds a sleeping dream. This wakefulness has already occurred and is occurring without surcease. The formless and timeless have never not been present. The state of changelessness is obscured, but not absent.

What seems to be occurring has already occurred. This means that time is already ‘over’, its objectives accomplished. What appears to be happening is merely a replay of events already elapsed. The mind, through the device of memory, re-calls these events into the psychological vacuum occupied when awareness of reality is repressed. The past is then projected into the vacuum left by the denial of awareness. When the presence of the present (which is synonymous with awareness) is obscured through repression, only simulated fantasy states of past or future are left to fill the void left by the evacuation. Thus, the past is endlessly replayed, and what seems to have occurred in the instant of universal creation is endlessly re-viewed by the mind. It seems to be happening again. This instant of cosmological creation occurred all at once in a simultaneity. It is only when ego consciousness recalls it, does it seem to have a time order and a time sense. Time, memory and probability are cognitive devices utilized to order events which are in reality random, chaotic and simultaneous. In reality, the moment of cosmic birth has no chronology and no logical, sequential, cause-and-effect order. The post hoc fallacy allows the rational mind to conclude that what occurred antecedently was cause, and what seemed to happen subsequently is an effect. Yet effects have never left their causes, as ideas have never left the mind which thinks them. This is the same as stating that the observed has never left the mind of the observer, or that the dream, an inward projection, has never left the dreamer.

And so, the answer to why repression, projection and denial occurred is partly answered: the mind wished to replace reality with fantasy, the present with the past, and truth with denial. It sought to replace an existent, changeless state with a changing one. It began to distinguish the observer from what it observed through its recognition of the first boundary, when in reality, the two are one. The observer chose to separate itself from the totality of awareness so that it could experience a separate sense of self. It wished to dream independently.

The unified field of awareness allowed this individuation to occur so that the separate sites of ego consciousness could yield an emanant awareness greater than that which existed prior to the arising of ego consciousness at the inception of the cosmos. This was experienced as an awakening, as a rebirth. The resurrective qualities of this rebirth are explored repeatedly in myth.

We believe that the reason why the mind entertained this wish, whether it was permitted by unified reality or whether it was instead an election made by the observing mind, is that both are true.

The Requisitioning of Time

Time allows us to choose. Without time, choice is both impossible and unnecessary, since choice is an election from at least two options. In a uniform, changeless state, there are no alternatives. Time, arising to measure change, cannot exist without change, because time could neither have a function nor be measurable in a changeless state.

Humans conceive of the mind as associated with the consciousness of a human being or perhaps as collective consciousness, up to and including humanity as a whole. They regard the mind as the seat of consciousness, as content. We hold that the mind is merely a container for awareness, and that awareness must be total. This is why awareness must extend throughout the universe and be evenly distributed within it. in this sense, the spacetime continuum is a mind.

We have equated awareness with information, and energy and matter as structures for containing information. Entropy describes the tendency of these structures toward thermodynamic equilibrium. As the principles of physics hold that this even distribution must eventually occur, so will the principles of psychology, in the future, describe the same tendency. We believe that psychology will develop into a branch of physics, and that it will describe the mind as evolving toward an awareness in equilibrium which parallels the even distribution of energy, since data, which is awareness, will be seen as being housed in matter-energy structures. Psychological principles are extensions of physical ones, and physical principles are extensions of psychological ones. Together, these principles represent ideas which parallel and reflect one another.

Evolution brings advantages to humans in terms of choice. The more highly-evolved the organism, the more it has the ability to select from a wider range of options. The base brain structures operate from a limited menu of choices. Cortical structures allow humans the ability to entertain more possibilities than the base brain mechanisms permit. Being human affords the unique opportunity to truly choose. Less evolved creatures are trapped in their conditioning to a greater extent than are humans. They have fewer choices available to them. Primitive, unicellular organisms have little ability to truly choose. Having fewer behavioral options to choose from in their menu, each option becomes more well used over time, and the more a channelized behavior is repeated, the more it becomes habituated and conditioned into extinct. Less aware creatures are trapped in their instinctual impulses.

Note the relationship between time and choice. The longer a behavior is repeated over time, the more entrenched it becomes. The phenomenon of creodes, in which a canalized pathway becomes deepened the more it is used, creates a statistical probability that the more a behavior is repeated, the more difficult it is to escape. The walls of the creode’s channel becomes more vertical as the canal deepens. Any behavior repeated often enough becomes more conditioned and habituated into instinct. This occurs over time, and thus is a function of time. For less evolved organisms, over time behaviors become more habituated into instinct. Yet for those more highly evolved, time is an opportunity which allows the ability to choose, and to choose again. If one choice fails to produce the desired result, another is usually possible. Thus, being human is a unique opportunity to change outcomes, as long as time remains.

We conclude that time, originally ‘invented’ as a cognitive device by the observer in order to allow the mind to review and order into a logical sequence a momentless interlude which in reality had no order, logic or sequence to it, can now be used for other purposes. It can be requisitioned to repurpose the entire physical universe into a balanced simulation, or successive approximations of balanced simulations which involve greater and greater awareness.

This balance is simply an indication that a more qualitatively acute and total awareness is being achieved. Awareness must be total, or reality is not whole. The awareness must be of reality, and this reality is itself awareness. Nothing more, but nothing less. No space, no time, no light, no energy, no thing. No something, and thus no being. Yet not no space, not no time, not no light, not no energy, not no thing. It is an awareness which transcends concepts like something and nothing, which lies beyond the dualities of something and nothing. This is the contribution of the apophatic spiritual traditions to the ‘equation’ of a unified knowledge.

The illusion of something can be used to show its opposite: nothing. The illusion of nothingness can be used to show its opposite: something. The illusion of time can be shattered to reveal timelessness, yet timelessness can only be known by the definition of its opposite: time. Reality is nonlocal, and so has no dimensions, yet its dimensionless nature is known only by the projection of imagined spacetime dimensions. Nonbeing is nonexistent, yet being itself is. How best for that which is to come to know itself but through the invention of nonexistence. Reality, which is limitless, cannot be bound by the boundaries of any one thing, which necessarily limits its nature. Yet a limited thing, by its standing in existence, reveals the nature of reality by its seeming contradiction of reality’s limitlessness.

A thing unopposed, omniscient, and ever present is known only through the invention of its seeming opposite. Even oneness can only be known by the simulation of the multiplicity of objects. It could never know itself as a unified and formless whole unless it was known by contrast through the creation of its perceived opposite in the expression of form and time and ego consciousness. These eternal, infinite qualities of awareness can only be fully appreciated by their suppression, and by the projection of their apparent opposites: unawareness and imbalance. Once these states reach their zenith, they culminate in and are unified with their opposites: the sleep of unconsciousness with waking, the disorder of imbalance with balance. This is why the mind employed repression, denial and projection to begin with. It was a necessity of reality, that it should know itself by the projection of its seeming opposite. It was, as well, an election of the observing mind to depart from its state of perfect and total awareness to perform this task on behalf of the totality of awareness.

We see that the reason why, in our view, the observer elected to split from the observed object at the moment the universe was born was so that the unified nature could know itself. The initial division of reality into halves – the object and the observer, the unconscious uroboros and the conscious ego – was permitted by the transcendent totality so that awareness could know itself and its limitlessness by the creation of its perceived opposite.

The Open-Minded

Can humans be open-minded enough to entertain radical new beliefs? To entertain theories which run counter to their preexisting beliefs and conditioning? To adopt new concepts as they let go of old ways of seeing and knowing? To try and hold a multiplicity of perspectives simultaneously? The ideas which we propose may seem nonsensical and anathema to human survival. They may seem impractical, and irrelevant to human problems. Yet we hold that open-mindedness to new ideas is essential to the successful resolution of Fermi’s Paradox. If humans cannot be open to the proposals set forth in this book, then perhaps they can be open to others.

When one is open-minded to all things, all ideas, all peoples, all new ways, a radical transformation in awareness takes place. The essence of the scientific method is open-mindedness to new ideas, and a willingness to change point of view upon the presentation of reliable new evidence. When the evidence does not fit the facts, instead of becoming more entrenched in old worldviews, humanity needs to adapt by adopting new ideas. For evolution also takes place in the competition of ideas. We suggest that our approach is data-based, and not impractical. Reliable data strongly suggest that science and technology alone have been insufficient to address Gaian problems. Rather, in some ways, humanity’s stubborn and exclusive faith in science and technology is part of the problem.

Awareness is open. It is defenseless. Only by being open to all can humans learn all, and know all. Science is not an omniscient form of understanding. Like all disciplines, it is only partial knowledge, as the indeterminacy principle cautions. Open-mindedness may just be the essential ingredient which enables humanity to survive the excesses of civilization itself. In children, this quality marks innocence, flexibility, and a vast capacity to learn and to acquire new skills. Can adults make a strong effort to emulate this precious quality in their children?

It is only the reaction to imbalance which decreases this open-mindedness and creates the conditions for closed-mindedness, which is an agent for yet more imbalance. To react with defense is to multiply imbalance, since defensiveness erects more boundaries, and boundaries are significations of imbalance. This can become a self-reinforcing process, a positive feedback loop which creates the conditions for revolutions of a destructive nature. These, in turn, can spin into eras of backwardness and rounds of persecution which have led to the destruction of generations, of whole peoples.

A prerequisite of the experimental method as an ideal is open-mindedness. Yet since humans are imperfect creatures, the practitioners of the scientific method can strive for open-mindedness yet never be fully open themselves. Thus, all any human can do is to try to be open-minded. To be open-minded is a value, and so value systems do have their place, even in science. We have advocated for an ethical step to be placed in the experimental method. And we would add open-mindedness as an overt step in the experimental method as well. The specific content of the method – the what of the experimental method – involves its current steps. We would add that the how of its process should include open-mindedness. Any experiment should be conducted open-mindedly. This should be an explicit step in the method. This is what we mean by a consilience of disciplines and knowledge.

The Willing

Can we be willing enough to be open-minded to syncretic belief? This is all that is required. It is all that is necessary. Willingness is, in truth, all humanity can contribute to the equation of infinite awareness.

Willingness is an infinitesimal variable in the reaction required to bring human beings to full awareness. The willingness of any one individual is so small in the grand universal scheme as to seem almost meaningless. This is simply because, in its relentless search for truth, the observer drives the light of its observations into smaller and smaller particles and vibrations, waves and energies, interactions and dimensions, causing what seems to humans an infinite fragmentation, which they also regard as a property inherent in the cosmos. With such great numbers of entities to count in the cosmos, it is understandable why humans regard each individual human being as somewhat insignificant. The observer has fragmented the universe into a multiplicity of observers. There are so many observers that each human is regarded, and may regard themselves, as unimportant. It is no wonder, then, that we often treat life, even human life, as disposable.

Yet the brain, the simulations it projects, and the universe as a whole in some ways resemble holographic arrays. A hologram is a holon which retains a three-dimensional ‘memory’ of the image which it models, regardless of the hologram’s size. Any ‘part’ of the hologram contains within it the image of the whole it was made to represent. If the brain is holographic in its structure and the mind is associated with the brain, then perhaps each mind retains memory of wholeness. Since the universe could be holographic as well, perhaps the mind contains within it an inner model of the entire cosmos. Ideas such as these have been pondered by Michael Talbot in The Holographic Universe. Sleeping dreams also bear holographic traits, and physicist, Fred Alan Wolf, has explored this idea in The Dreaming Universe. Though the concepts explored in both books are conjectural, we ask that the reader be willing to be open enough to entertain conjecture, for this is how new discoveries are made, and how the world changes.

If the mind is holographic, then it is possible that each mind contains within it the memory of wholeness, of balance. Each human is already partly aware, and humanity as a whole is also endowed with this partial awareness. This is why at least one aspect of a subatomic system may be measured with clarity. Yet human awareness is only partial because all minds have not joined in the perception of the whole. Our observations, our measures and our knowledge are therefore also partly unclear.

It is possible that the integrity of the whole cannot be achieved until each and every mind is included in the equation of awareness. We posit that balance shall not be re-achieved, and total awareness will not be attained, until all minds join in the effort. The concept of the noosphere holds that the planet has evolved a unitary awareness. The dawning of the species mind upon humanity has already occurred. The next phase in evolution is planetary awareness, to be followed by the consolidations necessary to attain universal awareness. This is no different than the journey required in mysticism, which seeks unity with the primal creative force.

Perfect awareness is a totality, not a near totality. This means that the participation of every being is necessary to attain total consciousness. Without total participation in consciousness by every observer, this totality cannot be achieved, and partial awareness is insufficient to dispel the remaining imbalances.

The Potential for Full Consciousness

Transcendental awareness, in which humans participate, is already wholly aware, yet humans are not fully conscious, individually or as a collective. This presents a paradox. Humans are not fully conscious, yet awareness is fully conscious of them. It is in the manner of a dream, where the dreamer may be only aware of the inward projection of the dream, while waking consciousness surrounds the dream and the dreamer. Transcendental awareness may be likened to this waking consciousness which envelopes the dream and the dreamer.

If the cosmos as a whole is in the nature of a simulation, its individual ‘parts’ are also creating simulations on various levels. We liken these imaginal, projective processes as forms of dreaming. They are subroutines within programs, dreams within dreams. Yet these are metaphors. Although reasoning through analogy is the most tenuous form of logic, metaphor often precedes descriptive and explanatory science. This is the nature of thought experiments, which often precede more comprehensive explanatory theories. In addition, the concepts of which we speak are so foreign to human thinking that analogy is perhaps best fitted to what we seek to relate. This explains both the necessity and place of myth in the panoply of human knowledge.

In Hindu metaphysics, consciousness takes a personal form as expressed in humans, but also retains an impersonal aspect. This can be likened to transcendental and emanant expressions of awareness. Transcendental awareness must remain an aspect of total awareness because without it, no part of reality would retain ‘memory’ of the whole. The dreamer would be unable to wake herself. Total awareness would be lost to humanity. Nothing on the far side of the universal boundary of spacetime would be left to retrieve ego consciousness from its trapped state in spacetime.

Yet transcendental awareness stands for the idea that since the cosmos is an introjection enfolded in a greater, woken reality, total awareness was in reality never lost. If it is omnipresent, it could never have been threatened. Ego consciousness can continue to carve out fractions of conscious energy for itself forever, since it is enveloped by infinite awareness. Taking a share of the infinite does not make the infinite less so. Yet ego consciousness, within its projection, would also doom itself to a finite substrate of partial awareness forever unless it was ‘woken’ from outside itself. For it would forever lose memory of the whole. Lost in a labyrinthine complexity, ego consciousness could never ‘wake’ itself. It is fortunate, therefore, that evolution follows a progression, that the universe has a lifespan, and that time exists, for it allows us to choose.

Awareness can only be attained collectively, though it is often sought individually. Humans experience this awareness within themselves as individuals only when they experience it between themselves in the collective, in relation to one another. The importance of relationship, of connection, becomes paramount here, for total awareness is only realized through relationship. Every nexus between every human is itself a third party, an independent entity in which the potential for complete awareness is present, yet not often acknowledged or utilized to its full possibility. The observer and the observed are connected through an observation, which is tantamount to a relationship.

As a whole, and combined with all other beings, humanity can achieve balance. This requires each being to have connection to every other being. It requires an equal nexus between every being, particle and entity within the universe. Though this may seem impossible, the existence of nonlocal and atemporal cause makes it possible. In fact, nonlocal cause makes it inevitable that total awareness has already occurred and is occurring.

As evenly distributed cause and effect combined, the observer and the observed are formless, and joined in the same mind, which is of a universal quality coextensive with the universe, and beyond. This allows connections to be infinite in number, and datum to be communicated instantaneously without regard to time or distance. Metaphors such as the Net of Indra in Hindu mythology, in which each creature is connected to and is but a reflection of every other creature in a vast, unbreakable web, allude to this possibility.

In quantum theory, individual particles have no value and no meaning in and of themselves, but can only be understood in relation to their connections with other particles, in terms of the nexus between themselves and their observer, and between the preparation of an experimental observation and the actual observation. It is the relationship which is creative, and relating is the creative act. The act of observing creates a tunneling connection between that which is observed and the observer. Since primitive humans developed sympathetic magic, belief systems have recognized this connection between observer and object. What is old is what is new, and in some ways the ‘new’ physics of the 20th and 21st centuries simply restate ancient ideas. Yet a universal belief system is not possible for humanity, though a universal experience is. This experience can be found in relationship, and ultimately, only in the connections forged between observers.

It might be argued that since humans are not aware of this infinite connection with everyone and everything else, that such awareness is neither existent nor possible. On a purely physical level, this would seem to be the case. Yet simply because one is not aware of a fact does not mean that that fact is not true. It is simply not evident. The history of science shows that on a purely physical level, a multitude of facts existed in the human world without humans being aware of them: a non-geocentric universe; atoms and particles; unicellular life; the tendency of lifeforms to evolve. These facts and entities are now taken as evident, but for most of human history they were not even known to exist. Humanity lacked historical context to believe in them, and so when these facts and entities were postulated, they were often vociferously denied. We hold that some of what we propose is also radical, but that one day, humanity will have the context to come to accept at least some of these conclusions, if it doesn’t burn itself out in the meantime.

We have argued that the defense mechanisms of repression, projection and denial are powerful, universal forces which have been in use since the creation of the physical cosmos. We have stated that psychological principles underly this universe. Indeed, in books such as The Dao of Physics, by Fritjof Kapra, and Wholeness and The Implicate Order, by David Boehm, physicists have argued for such a connection, noting the remarkable parallels between Eastern mysticism and 20th century physics. We would add the unity of other such ‘opposites’, such as the universal application of psychological principles as well as myth to this grand equation. If we are correct, then defense mechanisms such as denial are very powerful forces. They can obfuscate consciousness of an infinite awareness, yet they cannot destroy it. By repressing consciousness of reality, these defenses simply force it into the unconscious realm of myth, imaginal experiences, and the related archetypal content of dreams and visions. Through these nonlogical ways, reality is experienced indirectly rather than directly.

Defense mechanisms are precisely that; defenses against awareness. In psychology, it is easily seen that the defense mechanisms of repression, denial and projection do not alter the truth. They merely hide it from conscious awareness. The truth continues to be despite the defenses raised against it. In the same way, the full awareness that humans participate in collectively continues despite their lack of full, shared knowledge of it.

It may be asked: How is it possible that, if a thing is full awareness itself, it can lack full awareness of the condition of awareness?

The true import of the question – how that which is the essence of awareness can lack complete knowledge of itself – is that the lack of complete awareness prevents the limited human mind and any other intelligences within the universe, be they artificial or biological in origin, from knowing the full answer to the question posed. The human mind may ask the question, yet never fully understand the answer given. Its awareness is split into transcendental and emanant aspects. In order to preserve memory of itself and to retain its formless infinity, the infinite cannot allow itself to be identified with any one form. And as logic is formalism, this transcendental awareness cannot even permit an understanding of itself to be grasped by rational means. And so, transcendental consciousness has never forgotten its own nature, but human consciousness will never fully understand this or the nature of wholeness as long as it identifies with form.

Yet once consciousness is forced underground, it continues to ‘speak’ and express itself indirectly through dreams and visions, through the hallucinations of the mad, through the weirdness of hauntings and the visceral expressions of art, music and drama. It becomes impulse and emotion, always incompletely understood by intelligence alone. Intuitive knowing is knowing that something is true without knowing why it is true. Although we cannot trace in logical, stepwise fashion the ultimate cause – what came before the universe, what exists ‘outside’ of it – we can still know intuitively that there is something that preceded it, and that transcends it.

Neither our own intelligence nor Artificial Intelligence, being a product of human intelligence, can answer the ultimate questions. Being products of the system of limits, our understanding will always be limited. It has been held by theorem that a computer can never fully understand itself. Will we ever be able to fully understand ourselves? Subsisting within the boundaries of the METS continuum, intelligences are subject to the confines of that dimension. These limits represent the limits of understanding. That is why intelligence, by itself, can only take any species so far in becoming fully aware. We reiterate that intelligence is not awareness, though it is a subset of it.

The entities and organisms within the cosmos are in various states of sleep/wakefulness along a continuum. Biological evolution occurs as organisms progressively develop into beings endowed with greater levels of consciousness. Although such physical aggregates – as individual organisms – are manifestations of imbalance, these METS concentrates will eventually disperse into the cosmos by a natural process of thermodynamic circulation. This rebalancing occurs on a physical plane. Since they precipitate into unsustainable densities, organisms are programmed, as the cells which constitute them are programmed, to die. Yet their physical deaths do not result in the cessation of their awareness, which is eventually incorporated into a greater consciousness. On the plane of consciousness, this death through diffusion is actually a rebirth into higher and higher orders of awareness. It is awareness without form, awareness of that which is without form. Form impedes this awareness. As long as humans wed themselves to form, they obscure their true nature, which is endless. Deathlessness can only be realized when identification with form is abandoned.

The Awareness Continuum

Subjective awareness – associated always with individual ego consciousness – is only partial awareness. Beings only partly aware are also partly unaware. The divided nature of their minds prevents them from attaining complete awareness solely through their individual efforts. By separating the observer from that which is observed, the subjective observer denies their own role in the drawing of boundaries and ‘creation’. The human mind creates the universe through in a partially successful attempt to separate the observer from the observed. We say that this act is partially successful because, according to the Uncertainty Principle, any human measure of a quantum system accurately captures one aspect of it. Ego consciousness has a single objective: to continue this bisection so that subject and object are completely separated from one another, in order to effectuate a complete, objective measurement. This is the underlying psychological goal of scientific understanding in general and physics in particular: to know completely, objectively and with certainty. From a scientific standpoint, this can only be accomplished when a complete separation between observer and observed object is achieved. Yet we hold that discrete entities are not actualities, and that scientific understanding can therefore always only be partial. The universe wants to hold together, not be driven apart through an endless analysis that results in infinite division. Physics has not found the ultimate, indivisible particle. Any entity can be divided into tinier and tinier fragments ad infinitum.

Psychologically, those who maintain that an ultimate, objective understanding of reality can be achieved through scientific means alone tend toward partial awareness. Partial awareness also means partial unawareness. Here, we equate unawareness with projection, repression and denial. Those who subscribe to the belief that science by itself can yield total awareness attempt to assemble the transcendent whole from its pieces. This is anathema to transcendence, which has never lost its unitary character. Despite appearances, reality has never been divided. The field of awareness remains unified.

Unawareness, expressed in the defense mechanisms, acts as a form of drag. This inertia concedes energy to the defense mechanisms, which strengthens their hold upon the observer. Projected images appear elaborate in place of the simplicity of reality. These mechanisms create convoluted structures: projections within projections, images within images, dreams within dreams, membranes within membranes. These labyrinthine architectures and the defense mechanisms which create them require vast stores of energy to maintain. This energy is unavailable for redispersal, and so it is unavailable for awareness.

Unawareness should not be confused with the unconscious. We seek here to make a distinction between the unconscious – which we hold is aware but not directly available to and accessible by conscious awareness – and unawareness. Though the conscious mind may not be directly aware of the unconscious, this does not mean that the unconscious is unaware, or that it is unaware of the conscious mind. The unconscious is simply submerged below the level of conscious awareness, and it does appear as if unconscious material is aware of its conscious counterpart and the conscious world, or else it would not seek to communicate with the waking mind through dreams, myths, madness and other content from the imaginal realm. Archetypal contents ‘float’ to the surface of the conscious mind, which is a mere fraction of total awareness. Conscious and unconscious content together comprise the totality of awareness.

Unawareness is different. It is akin to dreamless sleep, and to the state of death, as death is viewed from the point of view of the living organism. Unawareness represents annihilation and as that term suggests, it is nihilistic. Unawareness seeks to shroud itself within its own mystery. It seeks neither to know nor to be known. 

Although the field of awareness remains unified, ego consciousness seeks to divide it through every act of observation and measure. The energy of unawareness is turned back upon the human mind through repression and denial, which are ultimately expressed as nihilistic forces. Unawareness still maintains a hold on ego consciousness and seeks to dissolve the ego’s conscious gains into the uroboric ocean of raw, chaotic energy. The goals of the dichotomous mind – and all minds seek to create dichotomies – are thus divided. The human mind and therefore its objectives are bifurcated. This is why it remains only partly aware, and why its observations create further splits within the mind. Drawing more and more membranes through its observations, it sees dualities, since every boundary creates a new duality. The human mind’s scientific measures are always only partially accurate. The organismic mind, being a division, works against itself and at cross-purposes. These purposes are the seeking of awareness and at the same time the blotting out of awareness through repression and denial. This unawareness is most like the state of death which the ego consciousness fears.

In the closed system of the mind, parts of the psyche remain unaware. They are partly submerged to some degree in the uroboric substrate. Although we have described the uroboros as unconscious, and thus we place it within the subset of awareness, we believe that the emerging, infantile ego also longs for its connection with the oceanic unconscious to which it remains connected. It’s sense of an autonomous self remains nascent and weak, and it resists being born. It has a chthonic instinct to remain submerged, and this is expressed in the nihilistic impulse often found in humans. This unawareness is associated with the death impulse. The human instincts to wish for death in the form of a dreamless sleep. This death wish is what we mean when we refer to unawareness and the impulse to remain submerged.

Above all the ego seeks its own survival. Yet since our minds are split, it also seeks its own death, and to be drowned in the undifferentiated energy of dreamless sleep. These aspects within the individual personality war within one another and are forced to fight over a limited energy supply. That is the dilemma of being human: boundaries not only limit the amount of energy available to the psyche from the ‘outside’ but within it as well. And all is ultimately within.

A heterotrophic organism which gains energy from the outside can only gain in energy to the extent that its outer membrane can hold that energy. It seeks a net gain in energy at the expense of the total energy in its environment. In humans, the psyche represents its own inner ecology which is closed to the outside world. Within this closed system, separate parts of this personality seek to gain energy at the expense of other parts. The conservation laws, and particularly the law of conservation of energy, must be obeyed. The personality is ‘at war’ not only with the outside world and competitors in the external environment over limited shares of energy in a zero-sum game for survival, but it is also at war with itself. These parts of the individual’s personality spar over the limited psychic energy available to the individual as a whole. Part of this system seeks discovery through awareness, while another part seeks concealment through the defense mechanisms. This may in part explain the meaning of the kabbalistic metaphysics in which the Ein Sof seeks to shroud itself in its own mystery, resisting being known.

Through this intrapsychic struggle, the part of the mind which seeks self-discovery (consciousness) concedes energy to that part which seeks unawareness and death. The defense mechanisms require energy to maintain. This energy becomes unavailable to the individual who seeks self-discovery and awareness. The chthonic impulse is nothing more than a desire to lapse back into an undetermined state. Yet this nihilistic end state is as much a fantasy as the ego’s idea that it can continue on forever as an autarkic self in its own realm. Death, as the cessation of biological life, is inevitable. Yet death, as the termination of awareness, is a fantasy.

On the other side of this polarity of impulses, the individual seeks to survive at all costs. The individual self requires energy to survive as a subjective self. It is constantly seeking to maintain its own integument, its own individuality, and so it must keep uroboric forces at bay. Yet it also requires energy for the conscious ego to repress awareness of reality as an unbound, unified state, and to project a simulation which it superimposes upon the vacuum-like repression. Therefore, much energy is spent by ego consciousness in defending against the truth, which is its participation in the unitary nature of reality. To be divided against oneself is a self-defeating enterprise.

We seek here to describe the war between the defense mechanisms and those parts of the personality which seek awareness. These parts of the psyche, according to the Freudian view, are in indefinite conflict with one another. Much energy is spent in the effort at total repression, and it is never entirely successful. Control as a strategy eventually fails when it is applied by one aspect of the personality against its other aspects. It is one of the premises of this book that strategies other than control would be more successful. We recommend reconciling with the shadow energy represented by the drives, rather than seeking to control and repress it. Strategies of control ultimately fail.

Total Balance

We have said that total awareness is the ultimate goal of evolution. To be completely open-minded is to move toward total awareness. To be wholly willing is also another way of achieving total awareness.

Humans subsist in a substrate where there will always be some imbalance somewhere in spacetime, at least until maximum entropy is achieved. This thermodynamic equilibrium describes more than a physical state. it also describes a mental state, a condition of consciousness, and a state of formless reality in which the final boundary of the cosmos is dissolved. It is withdrawn.

We ourselves are unsure of whether the ego consciousness nascent in humans can ever attain this ideal state of perfect balance. From this side of the barrier which represents the edge of spacetime, the answers to such questions are unknowable. In the event that perfect awareness can be reached through human consciousness, then total balance can be achieved. The final projection will be withdrawn. In the event that total awareness can be moved toward, yet never fully culminated, then evolution may be an endless process, and consciousness, as it is associated with humans, may reach ever greater approximations of this wholeness, yet never fully attain it. Ego consciousness would then be in an eternal state of becoming. The simulation would achieve ever greater approximations of reality, but the final projection would never completely be withdrawn. The final boundary between ego consciousness and the transcendental aspect of awareness would always remain, to some extent or in some physical form.

Changing into Changelessness

We have postulated that there exists a transcendent awareness which is changeless and existed in the ‘era’ before the universe came into being. By its nature, this transcendent consciousness must be all-pervasive, and extend its reach into human consciousness as well. If this transcendence is all-encompassing, how can it embody itself in limited forms which are only partly aware? This represents a paradox. As with the paradoxes inherent in the quantum world, this duality and contradiction is resolved by looking at the quandary in another way.

When the observer looks at an ambiguous image such as an optical illusion, it induces multistable perception in the perceiver. The weight of evidence suggests that mental models of these images cannot be stably represented in the visual cortex. Two images can be seen in the same basic illustration, but due to the limitations of human perception, only one image can be perceived at any one time. This leaves the brain with an either/or choice of what to observe.

Yet the nonperceptual reality of transcendental awareness is different. It is possible that both tracks of awareness exist simultaneously in a both/and fashion in the same way that quantum particles exhibit the nature and function of waves and particles at the same time. It depends on how the observer looks at the particles. From an emanant perspective, humans are always in a state of evolving, of becoming. From their vantagepoints in spacetime, they never arrive at total awareness, and only relativistic descriptions can be made. They can see waves or particles, but not both simultaneously. The Indeterminacy Principle shows that we can measure either one aspect of a quantum system (particle position) or the other (momentum), but not both at the same time.

Yet since awareness is ever-present and omniscient in its transcendental aspect, it is not subject to this either/or alternative of multistable perception. Another way of stating this is that, although humans are not transcendentally aware, transcendental awareness is aware of them. Although humans are not fully conscious, total consciousness is conscious of them and in them. It depends upon which side of the ultimate spacetime boundary the observer sees from.

Humans remain mired in a paradox: in order to attain awareness, they must be cognizant that they are already aware. This they cannot do with their divided minds, with and through which we convince ourselves that any observation is partial, that being is divided into a body-mind duality, and that the matter-energy continuum in the universe is fragmented into a multiplicity of beings and things, where the dense nature of material systems obscures the nature of nonmaterial awareness. Once the mind has convinced itself of and conditioned itself in these ‘realities’, the totality of awareness becomes inaccessible, and is relegated to unconscious strata.

Denial remains the force behind this dynamic, and denial is wielded by a slumbering inertia which seeks to drag conscious awareness back down into an undetermined, uroboric state. By denying that awareness is already whole and total, whole and total awareness is pushed further out of consciousness. It is this denial of awareness that represents a renunciation of life. Every human sees themselves as limited in spacetime, and so subject to the inevitability of death. A subjectively conscious self is a contingent consciousness. It is conditioned on the belief in mortality, and upon the view that the cessation of bodily existence is equated with the cessation of consciousness. It is this belief which denies the reality of an eternal consciousness which transcends biological death. Death is thus a psychological state in which the mind fails to embrace total consciousness. Since the mind isn’t located anywhere, the death of the body does not represent the cessation of the lifeforce or the end of consciousness.

Pure consciousness is the end goal of evolution. Yet in the end, the only realization which will be required is that awareness is already achieved and is already total. In place of the necessity of change, in place of a perpetual becoming, this change in mind is the only change that is required. In their fully conscious state, humans will then realize that nothing needed to change at all.

Nonresistance

The principle of nonresistance is key to this change of mind. Resistance is a concept of both physics and psychology. In classical, Newtonian physics, when a force is resisted, energy is conceded to the force resisted. When an object in motion encounters a stationary object, energy is expended attempting to overcome the resistance of inertia. In the realm of human consciousness, this psychological resistance counteracts awareness. Although the total ‘amount’ or ‘quality’ of awareness is not ultimately affected or destroyed by this resistance, awareness is obscured. Energy is conceded to the psychological mechanisms of repression and denial, which conversely require energy to keep their defenses in place. Energy is conceded to repress unconscious forces and expended to sustain the defense mechanisms themselves.

Through the exertion of human will, humans simply reinforce these intrapsychic conflicts. They struggle against the uroboric pull of undifferentiated unconsciousness. They war within themselves to control socially unacceptable and destructive impulses. At the same time, they use the defense mechanisms to repress and deny true awareness and project their own versions of reality, and this reality is somewhat different for every human being. This intrapsychic resistance between the impulses and the superego which seek to control them, between the chthonic death wish and the drive to survive, consume enormous energies. What all these power struggles have in common is resistance.

The first step beyond willingness must be nonresistance.  When encountering resistance, the human urge is to struggle against it. It is to resist resistance. In place of this urge to fight, which harnesses all three levels of the brain processes in the cause of the human personality’s struggle against itself, humans need practice relinquishment, and surrender. The mind, being divided, is only a war against itself. For who in the end is really outside of itself to fight? Through this realization, greater awareness is attained.

Willingness is not willpower. The rational mind often concludes that willpower, in the form of control and combined with intelligent solutions, is the correct adaptive response to apply to basic human ills. The evidence of human experience in the narrative of history shows that this just isn’t so. Experience, and not the deductive reasoning detached from any experiential evidence, provides a better guide to what are correct, adaptive solutions. We believe that nonresistance – for the human personality to cease the struggle against itself – will free up energy for a greater awareness to solve old problems.

Observation

Observation is at work in both meditation and the scientific method. Observing is a powerful method toward greater awareness, since it simply seeks to watch the subject it contemplates and does not try to measure or change the object of contemplation. In order to transcend the defense mechanisms, the world created through projective identification must simply be observed, without seeking to change any aspect of the observed system. It is a principle of the quantum world that the act of observing a particle, by shedding light on the particle measured, may alter what is seen and measured. By targeting photons on subatomic particles, those particles may actually be influenced by the energy released by the light particles. Therefore, the act of observing the world can change the world. There may be no such thing as a purely objective observation. This change occurs on a physical level, since by virtue of shedding light upon a quantum process, the process itself is disturbed.

This is not a necessary fact, but a possible fact. In other words, an apparatus can record the state of a quantum system without disturbing the system observed. Yet it is also possible to change the state of a quantum system by shedding light upon it. Therefore, simple observations can alter what is studied. This obvious tendency also exists in the macroworld which humans occupy, observe and study. As subjective creatures, we must come to understand we are a part of every experiment, and that we are composed of the same particles as anything we seek to study.

In this act of scientific observation, we believe that psychological principals are also at work, and that these principles are explained by the defense mechanism of projective identification. Something is sought in the act of observing: the complete and whole understanding of the object or system observed. The attempt at observing with the intent of understanding requires measurement, and measurement changes the thing it seeks to measures. Measurement is intention. When we seek to measure, we seek something. We conclude that the act of observing something without any agenda of change, including the intention to understand or to measure it, allows the observer to perceive that object as one with its observer.

As resistance has a physical definition, it also has a psychological function. ‘Without resistance’ means, in this case, without an agenda of change. It means without an intent to measure, to quantify or even to understand. To observe is, as we mean the term here, to observe without intention. To seek to understand is a form of seeking, and seeking is intention. This intention is a form of resistance applied against that which is studied. It seeks to wrest the secrets of the subject from the subject. That which is beyond thought – its uncertainty – resists being known. What this intellectual seeking resists is the immeasurability inherent in any observation. To truly observe without an agenda is to approach any object or process guilelessly and open-mindedly, with no intention for it or regarding it.

‘Without resistance’ also means without judgment of any kind, with no preexisting opinions as to what that which is observed is or what it reveals. It is to observe without seeking meaning. The interpretations the human mind places upon perceived objects leads to continued imprisonment within simulated experience. The gnostic traditions hold that the spiritual light is trapped within matter, and by this we take it to mean that human interpretations, which create meaning, trap them in the world they see. That which is observed has no function which the observer really understands, for it is empty. It is devoid of meaning, and open to the superposition of all interpretations. Only judgment imposes the function which a thing is ‘supposed’ to have.

For the human observer, eliminating the polluting effects of judgment – whether these judgments are moral or purely cognitive in nature – is not wholly possible. A judgment is simply another projection placed on that which is observed. To place a judgment upon our judgment about a thing is to render an interpretation on an interpretation, or a definition about a definition. It sets a boundary around an existing boundary. Taken to its extreme, this, it can be seen, leads to a nearly infinite regress of boundary within boundary. Judgment is an expression of resistance.

Yet once we become cognizant that we are attaching judgments of any kind to an object of contemplation, we can simply note the judgment, without attempting to alter or remove the judgment as well. To attempt to remove the judgment – the meaning we attach to an observation – simply places another layer onto the act of observation and obscures the system observed. Observing with a nonjudgmental stance in mind is the proper posture with which to begin any observation.

We have said that to observe without resistance is to observe without intention. By this, we do not mean that the act of observation itself comes without the intent to observe. Any act has an intention, including the intention to observe. Instead, we mean that observation must be done without any particular outcome in mind. ‘Without resistance’ means without desire. The human observer will, of course, attempt to put the objects of their observation to the observer’s own purposes, and this may be done unconsciously. To judge is to assign a function. Even if it is to conform to a preexisting theory or hypothesis, there will be an expectation in any act of observation. This expectation pollutes the act of observation and increases the probability that the outcome expected and desired will be the one observed. To observe without expectations or desires of any kind is to look at the subject observed without these preexisting notions about how a thing should be or will be or even about what it really is.

These conditions for observing are garnered from certain meditative approaches common to religion as well as practices in psychotherapy developed in Dialectical Behavioral Therapy by Dr. Marsha Linehan. From these methods, it can be seen that the act of pure observation described above is very different than conventional observation, as it has been conventionally described and practiced. In fact, the observing we recommend has seldom been practiced throughout the history of the universe. It is perhaps true that it has never been practiced, for if it had, then the very act of observation would allow the observed to be withdrawn back into the observer, to be replaced by what always is: perfect awareness, perfect balance. Jung referred to this process as the withdrawal of projections.

The unaided human mind cannot attain the capability of pure observation by itself. The human mind needs the multidimensional perspective provided by the transcendent mind, or rather, by the transcendent aspect of its own mind, in order to see a thing as it really is from all points in spacetime simultaneously. This is another way of stating that only the multidimensional perspective afforded by all observers in the collective can lead to transcendental observation. In a connected universe, relationship is key. Quantum dynamics holds that the connection is essential to an understanding of the whole, for there are no ultimately parts, but only an unbroken whole subsisting in a web. Therefore, the observer must recognize that she exists as part of an unbroken whole, unified with the object of her observation. She must acknowledge this unbroken connection in order to compensate for the distorting effects of subjectivity in any observation. Any pure observation, no matter how mundane, is the withdrawal of a projection. What connects the observer to the observed is the act of observation. This action, this nexus, provides the link within the unified field of awareness between observer and object. By recognizing this unity, awareness of awareness is attained.

The individual human mind requires this transcendental approach to ‘reach’ awareness because, from its perspective as a single organism trapped in subjective spacetime, the unaided human mind can only observe from a single location and point in time. Yet true observation, accurate observation, takes place from all ‘points’ in spacetime contemporaneously. To be human is to be limited in these choices, as the individual human mind cannot make all observations from all perspectives simultaneously.

If this inherent limitation prevents the individual mind from the certainty of observation provided by multiple perspectives, how can a single mind attain to this transcendental awareness? Simply through the naked act of observing. The human task is this: simply observe whatever is there to observe, with open-minded attention, nonresistance, willingness, and nonjudgment. Any pure observation links all human minds and the minds of all other universal observers to achieve absolute awareness. When this happens, the universe collapses from form to consciousness. Consciousness becomes total, and the final projection is withdrawn.

Methods Beyond Observation

Naked observation (observation devoid of all attachment) may seem like an act of meditation, and it is. It appears to be like an objective measurement of science, and it is this, too. It may seem to be in the nature of a contemplative act, a form of prayer which recognizes the unity between the transcendental and the emanant. It is no different than this.

Yet as we have stated, there are other avenues to total awareness, including vision quests, the imbibing of certain entheogenic substances, lucid dreaming, life review events, psychotherapeutic approaches, philosophical methods and religious rites. Therefore, the common vision we speak of in which all universal observers join should not be thought of at this period in universal history as a monolithic effort for all of humanity to approach in the same way. We have stated that a universal approach to awareness is impossible, but that a common experience is both possible and necessary. Humans are individuals as well as a species. The ego serves as a site for the combination of transcendental awareness and emanant experience, which together yield an expansion of consciousness. As this site, or container, each individual mind is an essential value in the equation of awareness. To hold that there is only one way to attain this expansion is to deny the freedom of the individual.

Therefore, at this stage of evolution, the individual should choose the methods which appeal to them. We have spent a great deal of effort describing the problems inherent in an intellectual worldview. This is simply because, in our view, the intellect underestimates the power of primal processes related to survival drives. Human self-interest should not be taken as a stage through which humans have already passed by virtue of intellectual control over instinctual drives, and the dangers associated with combining the natural tendency toward egocentric orientation with powerful technologies must not be overlooked, for this combination is destroying our world.

At this stage in human evolution, balance must be attained between individual and collective aspects. Eventually, a common mindset will be achieved. But that is far into the future. For now, the vehicle of the individual is as necessary for the evolution toward balance as is the development of a species mind. True creativity is often an individual venture which takes place within a single human mind. Though humans must work toward a common vision for themselves and the planet, it is also true that conventional worldviews can act as a drag on progress. Individuals counteract this trend toward conventional solutions by providing ingenious new solutions to problems.

The nonscientific methods toward awareness which we espouse provide ‘wormholes’ which ‘short circuit’ the obfuscating, mundane awareness which acts as the baseline, default state of conventional human consciousness. This commonplace reality – sometimes referred to as the world dream – is the displacing reality which hides rather than reveals. As we have stated, this ordinary reality is in the nature of a series of overlapping projections which include within their catchment the ultimate field of the physical universe itself. In place of commonplace reality, the avenues listed above allow in an unconventional awareness which may at first appear quite startling to conventional consciousness. Yet unconventionality is usually a hallmark of the individual, and not of groups or the species as a whole.

Revolutionary new ideas eventually become conventional. Conventional worldviews create establishments. Established orders develop vested interests. Vested interests persecute those holding revolutionary new ideas When used as an exclusive method, any conventional discipline is not likely to result in total awareness. In fact, when any predominates over the others, any discipline tends to create a monolithic state. A comprehensive approach involving a synthesis of disciplines is ideal. Syncretic knowledge, we believe, is superior to any single monolithic approach. It is when humans cling to or regard one way of knowing, one method, as exclusive and superior to the others that they are pulled back into ignorance.

Frequency Oscillations

The nature of physical reality in some sense serves as a metaphor for ultimate reality. Physical reality is reflected reality. For some decades in the sphere of physics, and even referenced in ancient times in both Eastern and Western civilizations, the concept of the atom as an indivisible particle held sway. According to this physical description, the atom was likened to a point in spacetime. Since its discovery in particle physics experiments, this atomos has been found to be composed of yet other particles. Some of these constituents in turn have been discovered to be composed of even other particles. By colliding particles into other particles at great velocities, particles can be transformed into other particles. In a way, any species of matter may be transubstantiated into any other kind of matter, if only for brief instants of time. It is commonly accepted that matter is but a stable form of energy. As force carriers, particles are in reality information carriers. They are datum.  Each particle interaction results from an exchange of messenger particles called bosons between other particles involved in the interaction.

While an atom remains the tiniest component which retains the qualities of the element which it constitutes, the idea in physics that an atom is indivisible has been experimentally falsified. Based upon experimental evidence, there are no ultimately indivisible particles which serve as the fundamental constituents of the material universe. Instead, there are interactions. It is the connection between entities such as particles which is paramount. These connections serve as conduits for the more even distribution of matter, energy and data throughout the spacetime structure of the universe.

Since all matter is convertible into other forms of matter, and since matter is convertible into energy, the fundamental hypothesis of the medieval alchemist – that all elements could be transformed into gold – is in a rough sense, verified. Yet, as Jung discovered, these alchemical experiments were symbolic of the psychological transformation of the prima materia of proto-consciousness into its ultimate essence through the seven-stage process of calcination, solution, coagulation, sublimation, mortification, separation and conjunction. Jung called this seven-phase process individuation.

Mythologist, Joseph Campbell, discovered a parallel process in the hero’s journey of the world myth, which he broke down into 12 stages:

  1. ordinary world,
  2. call to adventure,
  3. refusal of the call,
  4. meeting with the mentor,
  5. crossing the first threshold,
  6. tests, allies, enemies,
  7. approach the innermost cave,
  8. supreme ordeal,
  9. seizing the sword,
  10. the road back,
  11. final battle (resurrection), and
  12. return with elixir.

To Campbell, the transformative aspect of facing the fear of death, often mythologically and dramatically embodied as the hero’s greatest earthly fear, allows human consciousness tainted by narcissistic goals and immature desires to be distilled and purified into a more rarified essence.

In Western mysticism, the stages are described by scholar, Evelyn Underhill, as awakening, purgation, illumination, surrender, and union.  Whichever model is used, there are stages to the transformation of individual human conscious understanding into an awareness at depth. These perspectives utilize the knowledge gained through psychology, mythology and mysticism to attain a transmutation of unconscious forces into conscious awareness. We hold that the science of particle physics is simply psychology, myth and mystic knowledge expressed on another level.

The idea of a dimensioned point which is indivisible, which possesses no interior distinctions and which serves as the nonreducible building block for all matter was once a topic of some debate from some metaphysical and philosophical perspectives. Yet an indivisible atom no longer serves as a basis for the standard model of physics. According to quantum principles, the concept of ‘particle’ is simply one of an icon, a data point. These ‘points’ are quanta, or packets of information. If, through boson interactions, they may exchange information in particle collisions, then they are translatable to other forms of data, and consciousness may be readily transformed as well.

Nevertheless, from the standard model of physics and from the materialistic perspective of philosophy, the universe is essentially physical in its causes and must have physical substance and meaning at its roots. These are supposedly governed by random and probable processes. According to these theories, consciousness, too, is essentially governed by random and probabilistic events. These are its agents of change. There is no transcendence, and no purposive evolution of conscious understanding to reveal a greater awareness.

The theoretical harmonizing of the quantum and macro scales of the universe has created a new kind of physics as theorists seek to understand physical reality. The irreconcilability of quantum mechanics and the general theory of relativity required something like string theory to enter and fill the void. Large objects and infinitesimal ones do not seem to behave by the same laws. There is a fundamental disconnect since quantum theory cannot account for gravity.

Our thesis, based on reasoning by analogy, is that the physical universe is a reflection of consciousness, and the laws of physics are paralleled by the laws of psychology. If there is a discrepancy in the laws of physics, then there is also a parallel discrepancy in psychological understanding. We find this discrepancy to be a fundamental psychological incongruity inherent in the human understanding of its own mind. This gap in physical theory is reflective of a gap in psychological knowledge.

As physical theory advances, it may be used as metaphor for psychological understanding. Transcendental awareness, as the observation of totality, is not merely the observation of all ‘points’ in spacetime. The reason for this is that string theory holds that point-particles are not the ultimate building blocks of the cosmos, and quantum mechanics holds that there are no ultimate constituents which can be said to represent the final, irreducible ‘particles’ of matter.

String theory conceives of the universe’s building blocks as being vibrating torus-like structures called strings. The observation of wholeness which is pure consciousness is represented by the resonance of all frequencies as well. This resonance is more akin to string theory than the older particle-point theories. Here, again, we note the importance of relationship, of connection between parts. In string theory, matter and energy are now conceived of as composed of looping strings which vibrate at certain frequencies. We extend the metaphor to describe the universe as a vibratory instrument composed of smaller vibrating parts which seek to come into resonance with one another, and with the cosmos as a whole. It can be likened to the string section of an orchestra which seeks to strike a single, harmonious note. As string theory is really an amalgam of hypotheses which in our belief reflect psychological truths. It represents by analogy a new ‘theory’ of awareness in the field of psychology.

The idea of oscillation intrigues us, for it alludes to relationship in a way that the standard model of physics, the point-particle model, may not adequately address. When two objects oscillate at the same frequency, they come into resonance. This resonance can occur without regard to space. Two violins or two voices can reach the same note across an orchestra hall and be heard without regard to the distance between them. We also hold that this oscillation is transtemporal. Harmonies can be achieved across time and without regard to it. Undetected by scientific instruments currently in use, there are, according to Rupert Sheldrake and his hypothesis of morphic resonance, fields from the past which are nonmaterial and nonenergetic in nature. They are not detected by human devices which are made to measure matter and energy. Yet these past fields can and do come into resonance with matter-energy fields which exist in the present. In this way, they communicate with and influence the present fields.

When a living thing dies, it dies not only in time to its survivors in the present. It also dies in space, so that those who survive its passing no longer experience it as here. Yet since according to our conjecture spacetime is projected from the mind, can anything ever really die?

Our answer is ‘no’. Consciousness, in its formless expression, can never perish. Particles are quanta of information which, when assembled into larger aggregations, represent icons within the cosmos. When an organism dies, its icon in the simulation is withdrawn back into the projecting mind, and so it seems to perish from conscious awareness. Yet its death seems real only to the observer who, having projected its icon away from its mental source, then confuses the icon or symbol of the being – the creature, the organism – with its ultimate nature, which was information, or awareness. This is the semantic trap made by the mind when it confuses the inner model – the representation – with the thing which it represents. Yet the transtemporal fields of the dead, conceived of by Rupert Sheldrake in The Presence of the Past and The Rebirth of Nature, may come into oscillation with fields of a similar oscillation associated with living beings. This is a major component of the true unified field theory, the theory of everything which scientists seek.

Through transtemporal fields, all beings resonate in a unified field which crosses the temporal barriers laid down by the human mind. The existence of nonlocal cause supports this hypothesis, and allows this resonance to take place without regard to electromagnetic signaling; in other words, without regard to the speed of light or to distance. This resonance occurs, we postulate, between any observer and the object of her observation.

We have described the arbitrary and illusive nature of boundary. Boundary is usually regarded by humans as a membrane which defines the entities subsisting within the spatial dimension. Humans have ends in space defined by the membrane of their skin. However, since the inception of relativity theory, space cannot be conceived of as severable from time. Space and time are unified in a single dimension of spacetime. The artificial boundaries thus imposed by the mind are also of a temporal nature in addition to possessing spatial dimensions defined by height, width and breadth. And so, bodies are born and die in a boundered continuum of past/present/future as well as having boundaries in the three spatial dimensions. These borders, the result of the mind’s atomization of time, are projected to hide the true nature of reality, which is now. Since reality is simply awareness, awareness must always be now. It must be aware of what is now. Any organism always exists in its now, whether it is aware of this now or not. Perfect and universal awareness is thus always in the present moment, and once this is realized, the past and the future collapse as unreal states into an eternal now.

We have described the matter-energy continuum as a manifestation of imbalance. The perception of time is also a distortion which is symptomatic of the imbalance created by the defense mechanism of projection. Only when the act of observation focuses on the now does that observation become pure, and the time states of past and future dissolve into an eternal now. Thus, the awareness of which we speak is awareness of now. To be in the now is to be fully aware. Now is awareness. Awareness is always only awareness of what is, not what was or what will be.

The simulated barriers imposed by the division of the now and the projection of time are proved false by the existence of oscillations across time. These are reached, and the imagined barriers breached, through the methods of observation, meditation, the use of entheogenic substances, life review events, and other ways of knowing which contradict the reality of time and its unidirectional flow from past to present to future.

Structure of the Individual

Metaphorically, we conceptualize the individual self as having an hourglass, or double-funnel shape. Awareness from within the embodied ego pours through the individual and out into the world. Awareness from the world exterior to the individual pours into the individual and seeks ingress into its interior world. The self, or ego, acts as the gatekeeper. It determines which ‘world’ to let in or out, and how much experience and energy, and of what kind, to allow through the funnel and into or out from the ego which represents the self. The pedestal of the hourglass, which bears resemblance to the structure of blackholes, may be widened or closed at will. By refusing or denying ideas and experiences, the neck of the hourglass is pinched off. The defense mechanisms of repression, projection and denial are thus key to determining whether the pedestal of the individual self constricts or opens. By remaining willing and open to ideas and experience without judgment, the waist of the hourglass opens.

The hourglass shape may be symbolic, yet it is useful in understanding the individual self, or ego. This metaphor takes into account not only the space around and within the body, but time as well.

In physics, as objects approach the speed of light, the duration of events is perceived differently by differently placed observers. This relativistic description would seem to stymie any ability to attain an absolute awareness which is identical for all beings. And this is where pure science, as a mode of apprehending the absolute, fails. It is the mind’s belief in time, projected onto the physical substrate of space, which is responsible for this relativistic limitation.

When one considers that both past and future are fantasy states invented by the mind to order experience and assign cause, then the differences between the three aspects of time – past, present and future – can dissolve in favor of a single time state, now, which is experienced by all observers simultaneously. What is highly significant is that all living things which are aware live in simultaneity. Everything that lives, lives in its own now. It may not be aware of that now if it attempts to recall past events or predict future ones. Yet it has access to its present. Now always is. A being lives always and only in its own present. In a relativistic sense, an event may actually occur at different moments, depending on the speed and perspective of the observer, yet it is always experienced as happening now to that observer.

What the observer experiences is always happening now, for that observer. The promise of absolute awareness lives in the fact that sentient observers always have access to now. In reality, they have access to nothing else. Transcendent awareness represents the totality of all observations ever made in the past, present or future by all observers which ever were, are or will be. This can only occur in a simultaneity as all observers experience these events as occurring now.

And yet, even when humans experience the now, they begin translating its timeless nature into time itself. The present may be experienced as the specious present in the sense that perceptions of an event are felt as being in the present when in reality these perceptions are reconstructed by the brain and are therefore a remembered, recreated present. This sense of the present is false in the sense that what the observer experiences is really a brain-based phenomenon, a model of the present based on the past. This is distinct from the real present, which is considered the split-second momentary phenomenon of whatever transpires in the present instant. The real present is at most the present instant sandwiched between the ever-intruding past and a future which threaten to overwhelm present experience. However, even this real present may be expanded, and through its expansion, time itself and the false divisions within time can be dissolved. The human sense of time can thus be transcended. For time is only a sense, and not a reality. Time depends on the senses to detect changes in conditions. We hold, therefore, that in addition to sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell, and psychic sense, time is also a sense.

The experience of the real present can be expanded so that, instead of the individual self retaining the shape of a neck in an hourglass, the pedestal expands. In this way, the individual becomes a conduit not only for increasing amounts and intensities of energy and experience, but also of the timeless now. This awareness of the timeless is experienced as endlessness, as opposed to the merely momentary phenomenon of the present humans most often experience. The now is endless because it is timeless, while time is a function of quantity. As the ego defines itself by space, matter and energy, it also defines itself by time. The ego, which associates with the body, is born and dies. Yet if time is an illusion, then awareness is only of the present, and the self can be regarded as the moment that is. The self is now.

Reality may thus be experienced as expansive and limitless, or as constricted and finite. It depends upon whether the individual affirms the limitlessness of experience in the present moment, or whether the individual winnows the moment down to the sensate instant, or to the specious present recreated by the brain-based sense of self. Or perhaps the ego rejects the present altogether by remaining in memories (fantasies) or projections of the future (fantasies). Indeed, most humans spend most present moments in repression and denial of the present, projecting past and future fantasy states to displace the present. This time displacement creates the reality humans experience, and also most of their suffering.

Being open to experience and staying within the experience of the present moment without resistance or judgment are gateways into an expanded awareness. We note that this is synonmous with meditation.

Pragmatism and Practice

Problems created by the intellect are, as we have seen, insoluble by the intellect alone. Yet intelligence is able to convince itself that it alone has solutions to problems which it alone has created. Being a product of the system of imbalance, the intellect can never truly see the roots of imbalance, but can only detect the results of imbalance and provide prescriptions for these symptoms. Being a product of imbalance, it cannot by itself arrive at comprehensive solutions which result in a return to balance.

Intelligence can serve as a faculty, as a mechanism and as a conduit for true change, but not unaided. It is time for a more open human mind to consider other forms of knowing and of practice in its approach to problems created by the intellect. Since the Enlightenment, human intelligence has been the vanguard and the exclusive agent used to solve problems. At best, this approach has created imbalances have postponed the final reckoning we must face as possible fate, and as an answer to Fermi’s Paradox. At worst, these imbalances have accumulated and multiplied in a synergistic reaction which has reached crisis proportions. It is time, perhaps, to seek a different path. That time is Now.

© 2022 by Michael C. Just

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Apophenia; Arrow of time; Atomism; Biocosm; Consilience; Cosmological natural selection; Cyclic model; Dream argument; Ein Sof; Emergence; Eternal return; Evolution; Evolution of biological complexity; Evolution of the brain; Evolutionary epistemology; Evolutionary neuroscience; Fight-or-flight response; Fine-tuned universe; Gestalt Psychology; Great Famine; Incompleteness Theorem; Laws of Thermodynamics; Lexical Similarity; Magic; Many-minds interpretation; Mind uploading; Noosphere; Quantum Darwinism; Quantum mysticism; Silicon; Simulated reality; Time perception; Transhumanism; Universal Darwinism

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In addition to the above-referenced books, articles, research studies and their authors, the author of this manuscript is indebted to the following individuals for their theoretical and practical contributions to this work. Degrees and formal titles have been omitted for the sake of brevity:

Graham Allison, Stephen Pearl Andrews, Isaac Asimov, John D. Barrow, Adrian Bejan, David Boehm, Niels Bohr, Nick Bostrom, James Cameron, Joseph Campbell,  Fritjof Capra, Teilhard de Chardin, Arthur C. Clarke, Albert Einstein,  Hans Eysnck, Sigmund Freud, James M. Gardner, Kurt Godel, Stephen Jay Gould, Brian Greene,  Stephen Hawking, Werner Heisenberg, Thomas Hobbes, Ernest Holmes, Jerry Jampolsky, Carl Gustaf Jung, Belden C. Lane, Francois de La Rochefoucald, Marsha Linehan, James Lovelock, Lynn Margulis, Paul MacClean, C. Lloyd Morgan, Roger Penrose, Don Miguel Ruiz, Rupert Sheldrake, Arthur Schopenhauer, Helen Schuchman, Michael A. Singer, William Thetford, Frank J. Tipler, Alan Turing, Vladimir Vernadsky, Kenneth Wapnick, John Archibald Wheeler, Ken Wilber, E.O. Wilson, Fred Alan Wolf, William Wordsworth