Addendum to Despair

I used the phrase "spiritual despair" in my last post and in past posts as well, but I'm unhappy with the phrase.  I think it paints an inaccurate picture.  Spiritual despair sounds like hopelessness, which is not the feeling I'm attempting to portray.  It might be more accurate to call it "spiritual unrest."  I'm trying to describe a feeling whereby one perceives, through a sensibility that is not entirely conscious, that things are not as they should be, if all were well.  Now, this can be a personal perception but it can also be a sense of the culture in which one is rooted, or even the world at large.  In this case, I actually mean all of the above, because I believe this unrest, this discontent, is rife and covers every level of life, from top to bottom, from the external to the internal.

At odd moments in my life, things have seemed to miraculously align, and I've had the strangest sensation that I am walking along a thin beam of light.  It only lasts for mere hours, or a couple of days at most, because the least wayward or inauthentic thought or feeling wipes one off that path.  This is, of course, an entirely internal and subjective experience.  Be that as it may, it perhaps offers a useful contrast to the sense of being out of alignment, which is more common, or certainly out of step with a culture or a world that both seem quite mad.

Though I am concerned with the world at large and hope to address many of the broad issues over the next year or two, through focusing on various writers, artists, or thinkers, all of this seems a house of cards if one hasn't taken care of one's own internal house, first and foremost.

Anyway, I wanted to address the use of the aforementioned phrase because I'm not happy with it and feel it gives a false impression.  I do not feel hopeless.  Angry at times, frustrated at others, but primarily, I feel determined to push on and walk the path I intend to walk, come hell or high water.  So be it.

Addicted to Hope

 Here's another film produced by Green Renaissance, "Addicted to Hope." The fellow in this film seems to have figured life out for himself.  I like that his name is never mentioned.  It's simply what he's learned and how he lives.  It gave me pause for thought, the distinction he makes between happiness and meaning. In my own life, I've not sought happiness so much as meaning. 

 The "pursuit of happiness" has always been a carrot on a stick.  We in the West have unconsciously believed -- an unexamined belief -- that happiness is the result of the fulfillment of our desires.  What a small, childish, selfish definition of happiness that is. 

As long as we think in strictly personal terms -- "I want my own happiness!" -- we will be striving towards a goal which will forever elude us.  And rightfully so.  We're fortunate if it eludes us.  Why?  Because then there is still the hope that we might find a deeper meaning than our own mere happiness.  The selfish pursuit of happiness implies that life is a competition.  It isn't.  Competition is something to be outgrown.  Cooperation is the way into the future.

In terms of helping people, as the protagonist of this little film suggests, I think it's important to remember that we aren't obliging anyone by lending a helping hand.  We're all just folks, struggling together, rather than against one another. 

The fact is, you can only truly help another person if you don't want anything from them.  Your actions will only really support their independence of thought and action if there are no strings attached.  As long you're still holding onto the idea of getting something in return, you're only involved in a transaction of selfishness.  Tit for tat.  While reciprocity is crucial in human relationship, calculation isn't.  If you're a calculating person, I don't want to know you.

However, if you're able to rise above that tendency and you aspire to be of some use to others, then you begin to enter the realm of impersonal love.  It's a case of expanding your sphere of interest until it is so wide, it collapses upon itself and your concern for others undoes your exclusive concern for yourself.  

Sometimes we need to hold people accountable.  But the first person you must hold accountable is yourself.  As our protagonist points out, we have no control over the circumstances into which we're born.  Perhaps they were tragic; you may have suffered mightily.  I don't mean to minimize that.

Although the damage is real, it need not define you forever.  Healing is always a possibility but it entails vulnerability, trust, integrity of purpose and intent upon your part. And real courage. The rewards, however, are immense. You fully join the panoply of life. And you can rewrite the part you play.

If you hold onto and honor the ideals that light the core of your own heart, then you have a light to offer another. Not everyone wants the light. Some prefer the dark. Leave them be.  It helped me to hear our protagonist remind us not to judge the way others have carried their own heavy load. 

Choice is our defining characteristic, our lever of Archimedes. I've made mine; you will make yours.  Life is not yet over.  That means there is still hope for meaningful action. And that's reason enough to go on.

A Few Light Ruminations

I've been thinking about the videos I posted regarding the gravitational curvature of space and the rippling of gravitational waves.  Physicists speak about it as a curvature or ripple in the "fabric" of space.  Okay, that's a quaint phrase -- the "fabric of space."  If space can curve, what is it that is curving?  If space can ripple, what is it that's rippling?  What exactly is that "fabric?"  Because as far as I can determine, physics has only inferred the "fabric" of space.  Of what is this fabric comprised?  A "fabric" has to BE something, right?  Surely some scientist has posed this question, but if they have, I've yet to encounter it.

Could it be possible that dark matter and dark energy are somehow the "fabric" of space?  Here I'm out of my depth, because I can't conceive in any three dimensional way what dark matter might be.  Again, we've deduced that dark matter exists, yet we can't actually perceive it.  It's a supposition, albeit one supported by tests and, presumably, mathematics.

The theoretical physicist David Bohm posited something he called "the implicate universe."  In effect, the implicate universe gives rise to the actual, physical universe.  Now, this is not a new idea -- esoteric systems of thought embedded within Sufism and Vedanta talk about the "subtle universe," a realm made of subtle energies, subtle matter, and templates, that subsequently give rise to the physical, or gross, universe of perceptible matter.

But perception itself is a tricky issue.  We're confined to a universe perceivable to our physical senses: sight, smell, touch, taste, and hearing.  As we've learned thoroughly in the past 125 years, most of what exists is outside our range of perception.  That doesn't mean that it doesn't exist; it simply means that it isn't perceptible within the primitive range of our organs of sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch.

With subatomic physics and quantum realities, we've apparently reached the limit -- for the moment -- of our perceptual capacities, or our ability to infer the existence of things we cannot perceive in any knowable manner.  When dealing with subatomic "particles" -- a term which is a misnomer in itself -- we're only talking about probabilities.  We can only say what the probability is that something may be in a particular location.  And we approach the conundrum that what we're looking for at the subatomic level is only perceivable, and only seems to exist, when we look for it.  The looking fixes it, for an infinitesimal moment, in a measurable "place."  The measuring itself makes it appear to be here, rather than there.  It's wherever we look for it.  How's that for a skull-splitter?

It's possible that at this level we are dealing with the transition point, or the permeable barrier, between Bohm's so-called "implicate universe" -- or, in another nomenclature, the "subtle universe" -- and the universe we can see or measure.  In other words, where the template of subtle energy translates into and creates physical form.

Then there's the matter of time. Contemporary physicists all talk about time as though it is an existent component, or thing, in/and/of the physical universe.  Space-time, they call it, as though it were one and the same thing.  But my gut tells me this is wrong.  I have a strong intuitive sense that the perception of time is simply an illusion.  You may be able to someday "show" me space, but how can you show me "time?"  Clocks aside, we feel time pass, don't we?  Time is a matter of perception, is it not?  It's a perceptual illusion, perhaps.

I recently watched a science video wherein the narrator bemoaned that we are forever trapped in linear time, and the fleeting "now" is forever caught between the distant past and the imminent but immaterial future.  His feeling was that only memory allows us to escape the cage of the present moment.

Isn't that a strange way to think?  In terms of consciousness, instead of physics, we only ever have the present moment.  The "now" is curiously ever-existent as we seem to float upon it through the stream of living existence, all willy-nilly and beyond our control.  The stream of time, as many a philosopher has called it.

However, one of the postulations of relativity is that, with regard to time, all moments exist simultaneously.  In this conception, all of the past exists right now, equally with the present.  In the same respect, all future moments exist right now, in the present moment.  It's just that we don't have the apparatus of consciousness with which we could perceive this presumed reality.

Or do we?  If you study the history of consciousness as evident in mystical experience, what you find most often is a description that, at base, speaks of a tremendously expanded consciousness that is able to perceive in a way and in a manner far beyond our ordinary, rational 3D realm.  What if one version of expanded consciousness was that it allowed one to perceive what relativity predicts?  What if there is a state of consciousness, latent within human beings, which has the potential capacity to experience all of the past and all of the future, simultaneously.  How mind-blowing would that be?!  And yet there are some few historical figures, if you dig deep enough, who seemed to have a capacity resembling that.  Perhaps they were just the leading edge of human development, breaking the ground to which we may all someday wend?

In contemporary culture, there are certainly lots of folks who would like to have some semblance of that experience through the medium of psychotropic plants or hallucinogenic drugs.  But that's just the precocious and immature mind of present-day humanity.  You can't pretend to puberty before your body actually goes through those hormonal changes, entirely on its own schedule, not yours.  Thankfully, kids are more or less content to be kids, though the onset of puberty is happening earlier and earlier.  But what I mean to say is, these are states you can't have for the asking.  You have to have developed the psychological and, yes, spiritual maturity necessary for that state of consciousness to unfold in a natural way, just as you have to wait for your body to mature based upon its own timing.

Anyway, just some errant thoughts and a bit more recreational thinking.