

Speaking

of the

Numinous:

the meaning of meaning

Andrew Lohrey

Copyright © 2010 Andrew Lohrey

Smashwords Edition

www.thenuminousone.net

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system or by any means without the permission in writing from the publisher.

Rishi

Falmouth, Tasmania, 7215, Australia

ISBN: 978-0-646-54948-4 (ebook)  
ISBN: 978-1-453-63942-9 (paperback)

Keywords: Numinous, consciousness, global mind, cosmic consciousness, meaning, meaning of meaning, interconnection, empathy

Cover design by Melanie Godfrey-Smith

Book layout by Michelle Lovi
for Amma

and my daughters Leonie, Zoe, Brigid and Cleo
Contents

Introduction

Section One: The Contexts of Self

1 In the Beginning

2 Order and Depth of Meaning

3 The Superposition of Self

4 Intelligent Energy

5 The Fifth Law of Meaning

6 Symbols: The Fourth Level of Self

7 The Culture of Being

8 The Second Context

9 The Host

Section Two: Evolution of Consciousness

10 Modes of Thought

11 Innocent Love

12 Desire

13 The Intellect

14 Empathy

15 Evolution of Consciousness

Endnotes

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Speaking of the Numinous is a discourse on the principal laws and conditions of meaning. I will come to these laws shortly but first a few words about the term numinous. The word numinous is most often used to describe the power and presence of a divinity and it is commonly supposed to have been popularized by the German theologian Rudolf Otto in his influential book, The Idea of the Holy (1923). For Otto the numinous experience is an 'otherness' which has two aspects: the tendency to invoke fear and trembling and the tendency to attract, fascinate and compel.

Leading twentieth century writers such as Carl Jung, C. S. Lewis and Aldoux Huxley adopted and elaborated on Otto's concept of the numinous experience in their own work. In general the term was and still is used to describe an awe-inspired experience of wonder which may be felt in certain meaningful circumstances. The religious use of numinous traces this sense of awe-inspired wonder to the presence of a divinity; to a supernatural God, al Lah, Brahman, Buddha mind, and so on.

The connection of awe and wonder to a supernatural divinity has been criticized by leading atheists such as Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. 1 They claim that awe-inspired wonder is a natural aspect of the human condition and is not related to any supernatural dimension. According to them any account of the supernatural must necessarily be a fiction. My approach differs from both traditional religious ideas of the numinous as well as from the atheist position. The approach in this book is postsecular in that it accepts and agrees with the reality of an impersonal transcendent presence but finds evidence of that reality in non-theological practices and methods that are often used in secular science and technology.

This work does not therefore proceed by arguing for any religious institution or dogma, nor does it rely on scriptural interpretation or sectarian religious discourses. It relies instead upon an evidence-based approach. In both these senses it can be described as postsecular, if we take secular to mean worldly, rational and non-religious. This postsecular approach seeks to explain the spiritual transcendence of a Numinous reality which continually and permanently touches everyone, blessed as well as unblessed.

In Speaking of the Numinous I refer to the reality of the Numinous in terms of laws of meaning. In this respect the Numinous and meaning are coterminous in that both 'meaning' and 'Numinous' refer to the same reality. By the Numinous (with a capital 'N') I mean a universal transcendent spirit that also informs and is immanent in every aspect of our lives. This universal spiritual presence is best described through certain laws of meaning. These laws cross all boundaries and that includes the traditional boundaries between secular science and sectarian religion. The laws of meaning thus refer to the internal structure as well as the outward manifestations of the Numinous. I suggest that this open and all-embracing approach to the Numinous reflects the essentially non-sectarian nature of the postsecular. 2

*

This postsecular view of the Numinous had its origins in a childhood that had little or no religious training but was full of spiritual inspiration. I grew up in a small farming community in the mountains of north-eastern Tasmania. Almost everyone in this community was related for they were the descendants of several large families that had emigrated from Germany in the 1850s. The community was, and still is, unimaginatively called 'Germantown.' My ancestors brought with them a commitment to the Lutheran Church and a dislike of Catholics. As it turned out there were too few of them to sustain a Lutheran pastor so gradually they joined the Anglican Church.

Over the years this religious commitment weakened, even though a small wooden church was built on our farm in an effort to sustain it. This was an ecumenical building used by many denominations. One month we would have the Anglicans, the next month the Presbyterians, then the Catholics, and so on. My lasting impression of this kind of religious instruction was of the enjoyment we had after church when everyone relaxed and came back to our house for afternoon tea. Those cold afternoons in front of an open fire with hot tea, cakes and scones, where everyone talked about common problems, seemed infinitely more appealing to me than the slight embarrassment I felt at singing badly in a cold church up the road.

My great, great grandfather, Henry died in 1868, only fourteen years after he had travelled to the other side of the world. On his headstone is written: 'Heaven is my Fatherland, Heaven is my home.' 3 In my childhood such deeply religious sentiments as these were never discussed. They had long been replaced by the philosophy of the small dairy farmer, which is the credo of hard physical work. My immediate family had little time for religion or a church that increasingly seemed disconnected from us. We were always too busy trying to scratch a living from the land. In the second half of the twentieth century we had become, like many Australians, 'post-religious.'

Yet I also grew up within a geography of hope. 4 This was the influence of the physical environment that affected the way we lived, felt and thought. Each day was shaped by the ever changing colors, hues, moods and temperature of this geography. It was a cultural landscape as much as a physical one and it exerted a daily influence on family members in determining what we did and where we went. The wind, temperature and weather created our patterns of daily work on the farm. Each morning we clambered out of bed certain that life would continue to sprout from the soil and confident that the climate and seasons would nurture us. Within the daily routine of this childhood I began to sense that the landscape had a life of its own, a living cosmology that went beyond the cows, the pigs, the horses and family members.

The sense that we were farming within a larger cosmic farm was helped by the view from our farm. It sat on a mountain that looked out over the world and on a clear day we could see fifty miles in a one hundred and eighty degree arc. The largeness of the view helped to expand me. The sunrises that came over the edge of the world fifty miles out to sea and the sunsets that painted the sky over the mountains behind us took my breath away. And so it was, at some level below social interaction and language, I came to accept that the landscape was a living presence that gave meaning to our toil. This living landscape was my spiritual instructor.

In hindsight I see that this instruction planted the seeds for later thinking about meaning; for the recognition that life extends beyond our skins; that communion is prior to expression; and that interconnection is the nature of everything. These childhood impressions of the landscape were never explicitly articulated by me or anyone that I knew. They came gradually and implicitly as a natural part of my childhood and their messages were always about interconnection.

It is difficult if not impossible for those of us steeped in a culture based on the Enlightenment and subjected on a daily basis to the discourses of science, technology and capitalism to respond fully to spiritual and religious issues in the same manner as our ancestors did. They lived in a pre-modern, slow-moving conservative world that was mainly agrarian. I live in a technological world almost wholly imbued with the scientific spirit, a world which has a tendency to see truth primarily as factual, historical and empirical. This is the postmodern era; a time after two world wars; a time after the dry intellectualism of modernism, the reductionism of psychoanalysis, and the revolutions of sex, race and gender politics. This is a globalized, corporate world of instant communication, worldwide pollution and ever developing medical science. This is a time that David Tacey can call 'post-religious' in his book that proclaims a spiritual revolution. 5

The postsecular spirit of these times does not seem to sit well with pre-modern sentiments or ancient orthodox religious discourses. A sense of these cultural changes and the need to respond to them was acknowledged in the August 2000 Millennium World Peace Summit of Religious and Spiritual Leaders, sponsored by the United Nations. This Summit expressed a concern for a new language of spirit. In this statement, world spiritual and religious leaders were simply saying that because the culture has changed, the vocabulary that represents spirit also needs to change. I share such sentiments.

*

The discourse I have found to be least sectarian and therefore most useful in describing the Numinous is the language of meaning. I would argue that in this language there is a greater explanatory power than in the conventional religious or even psychological discourses (of faith, purpose, mind and consciousness). In addition, my interest in meaning reflects my own training. I began writing this book over forty years ago. At the time I was interested in studying consciousness, a life-long preoccupation. In my twenties I was a psychological counsellor. I read widely in the area but was unsatisfied with the narrow biology-based approach of most clinical psychology. Later I studied applied linguistics, semiotics, semantics and the philosophy of language. Through these subjects I was gradually introduced to the terrain of meaning.

This introduction began subtly. At first, meaning was something I took for granted, like breathing. Then gradually it began to occur to me that here was a territory that could be described and mapped. Increasingly I began to see myself as a cartographer of meaning's many paths, but a cartographer of meaning is not like other map-makers. This is because the territory of meaning does not lie flat like a piece of coast line, nor does it behave like a physical event in a four dimensional continuum. It is both broader and yet closer at hand. I began to realize that the presence of this territory was the terrain of my mind, of my life and spirit. In other words, meaning was the energetic domain of my being.

Over the years I have come to realize that the presence of being cannot be satisfactorily described by the famous phrase: cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) and neither is it well served by: sentio ergo sum, (I feel, therefore I am). Both intellect and feeling are prominent features of being but they are not the whole story. The domain of being is also represented obliquely by the tautology: sum ergo sum – I am, therefore I am. While the 'therefore I am' does not appear to add much to the initial 'I am,' it does at least suggest the essential nature of being which is found in an experience of presence. It is the experience of presence that I suggest is the essence of all meaning.

By approaching being as meaning we can speak about it in two ways. We can refer to it as the ultimate sine qua non; as a universal and divine quintessence; as the meaning of Meaning. This sense is denoted by the use of a capital 'M.' (This is also the sense in which I speak of the Numinous, with a capital 'N.') In the second sense we can speak of it as the meaning of everything other than Meaning. This secondary sense is signified by the idea of 'process' and is denoted by the use of a lower case 'm.' In forthcoming chapters I hope to make clear this distinction between the capital 'M' Meaning and the small 'm' meaning which is made by individuals through their actions and with the use of signs. While these two uses are distinct they are interconnected and indeed integrated, for the conditions and laws of Meaning run through both the meaning made by individuals as well as the Meaning that is always ever-present in the universe.

This understanding of being as meaning is different from the conventional linguistic view of meaning which refers to it as that which is made by individuals when using signs, that is, when expressing themselves through some form of communication. This limited linguistic view does not take account of the meaning of Meaning, which is the essential nature of Meaning per se and which is also the source of an individual's capacity to make meaning. I have also come to realize that Meaning can be studied through meditative reflection as well as by speaking about it. The medium of a book is more suited to the latter mode. Hence, even though the Numinous is a non-visible presence that cannot be pierced by weapons or burned by fire, 6 it can be spoken about and studied through a detailed analysis of the laws of Meaning.

*

There are five assumptions which underpin the subject matter of this book. These five assumptions represent the fundamentals of Meaning. As such they constitute five laws. A law of Meaning expresses the conditions that hold for all and every situation. There are five laws of Meaning and in this Introduction I outline four of them. The following remarks may seem to the reader to be dense at times; however, these are important orientation comments that point to the infinite scope of Meaning.

The first law of Meaning arises from an idea implied by the very notion of a law and that is the idea of the absolute. A law cannot be a law if it is not absolute. The first law of Meaning is absolute interconnection. Absolute interconnection means that there is no outside of Meaning; its all-encompassing scope and interconnections are universal, absolute and infinite. A major consequence of absolute interconnection is that there are no separations in the universe. For example, there is no separation between objects and subjects or mind and matter and hence the presence of this cosmic, transparent, fundamental ocean is logically everywhere: omnipresent. This means that everything is integrated and also that nothing exists outside of Meaning, that is, nothing is born, created, spoken of, measured or located in a space or a time that is outside the precincts of this singular all-embracing Numinous dimension. 7 The visible universe is therefore integrated, undivided and holistic in the manner that the theoretical physicists David Bohm and Basil Hiley refer to in their book, The Undivided Universe. 8

The second law deals with the shape of the Numinous and follows on from the omnipresence of the first law. Meaning's all-encompassing interconnections are circular, hence the idea of a Numinous singularity or One-ness. One-ness is a concept that implies circularity. Meaning's interconnections are circular in two respects. Firstly, they are circular in ways that are outside our deliberations and control. Examples of this are the biological organizing process of self-replication and self-organization. Another example is the inherent circularity of discourse, which is the tendency of language to refer back to itself. The second kind of circular exchange of Meaning involves deliberate self-referencing when, for example, we are involved in self-reflective thinking.

One of the key consequences of the circularity of Meaning is that any sequence of movements has a built-in circular order. That order begins with implicit meaning and then unfolds to become actual, visible explicit meaning. The final step in this circular order is the enfolding of visible, explicit meaning back into implicit meaning. Everything in the universe has this circular order of birth, development and death.

A second important consequence of the circularity of Meaning is that any linear sequences will always represent a small picture within a larger context, a context which always refers back to the details of the sequence. This circular relationship can be represented by the model of a gestalt. A gestalt always has two exchange elements. These are: a set of specific, explicit details, objects or parts that are always immersed in and given coherence and order by a broader implicit context. Another way of saying the same thing is to describe any visible object as that part of the event which is seen. The major part of the event which is not seen represents the implicit ordering that creates the object. The circularity of the second law of Meaning means there is no such thing as an individual object or set of objects existing on their own without an ordering context. For example, there is no such thing as a separate and solo mind.

The third law of Meaning concerns the idea of causality. Meaning's laws write themselves; hence they are self-sustaining, self-creating and self-organizing and can therefore be called uncaused causes. 9 Ralph Waldo Emerson proposed the same kind of causality for his Laws of the Soul. In the text of his 1838 Divinity School Address Emerson wrote that, 'these laws execute themselves. They are out of time, out of space, and not subject to circumstance.' Emerson went on to say that the Laws of the Soul make man 'Providence to himself.' This insightful phrase reflects both the universal scope as well as the circular nature of Meaning for it points to the manner in which our minds are interconnected with, and integrated into, the singular presence of the Numinous One.

Currently there are four fundamental physical forces known to science. These are called gravity, electromagnetism, the nuclear strong force and nuclear weak force. These four fundamental forces are said to account for the physical structures of the universe. Yet science has neglected the quintessential presence of the Numinous and therefore, of Meaning. The four forces identified by science stand as only partial explanations of the universe. This book argues the case that the quintessential force of the Numinous operates prior to these four physical forces and is therefore the source and causal force that orders and structures every particle and point in the universe.

From the perspective of Meaning, the physical world is not composed of separate objects that affect each other through material causes. In Emerson's words, the physical world is the product of 'one will, of one mind; and that one mind is everywhere active, in each ray of the star, in each wavelet of the pool; and whatever opposes that will, is everywhere balked and baffled, because things are made so, and not otherwise.' In these words Emerson describes the self-caused nature of the Providence within. From this position he is able to say that, 'good is positive. Evil is privative, not absolute.' The only absolute is the Numinous One. As a self-sustaining and self-caused absolute the Numinous is by definition omnipotent.

The fourth law of Meaning relates to mind and intelligence. Exchanges of meaning always convey some intelligence and therefore they are characterized as a mental state or a state of mind. 10 Because Meaning is omnipresent this state of mind (call it awareness or consciousness) is everywhere present. Hence the Numinous represents the ever-present presence of a cosmic mind or consciousness. The first law of Meaning concerns absolute interconnection and therefore in terms of mind there must be only one interconnected, holistic field of consciousness. In other words, there is only one mind in the entire universe.

The conventional view of mind is that there are many small, separate individual, solo minds. According to the laws of Meaning there cannot be separate and solo minds. These laws mandate that there is only one integrated singular consciousness in the universe. This is the cosmic singularity of the Numinous One in which we all participate individually and collectively. This book argues that the singularity of cosmic consciousness can be discovered in the scientist's Zero-point field and in addition, as the energetic presence below the surface of the everyday mundane mind of each individual.

The fourth law of Meaning tells us that this absolute and singular domain of intelligence is the source of all individual intelligence. Its scope is therefore omniscient: all knowing. These four laws of Meaning: omnipresence, circularity, omnipotence and omniscience are often considered to be the principal attributes of a divinity. The scope of these four laws of Meaning therefore embraces those experiences of mystical presence that we associate with a sense of divinity as well as all the more mundane meanings we make in our everyday lives. The presence of the Numinous therefore involves both the mystical as well as the mundane.

In Chapter 5 the fifth law of Meaning is discussed. Unlike these first four laws which relate to the meaning of Meaning, the fifth law is concerned with how we think. The fifth law sets a standard or a criterion by which we can aim at in our thinking. This standard can be called sane thinking or sanity. Finally, as these five laws are fundamental they imply that knowing these laws is a knowing from which everything else can be known. In other words, these laws of the Numinous represent the organizational structures of mind, life and society as well as the physical world.

*

The view of this book assumes that each day we swim in this transparent ocean of Meaning, doing our laps, treading water or just moving with the flow. Each individual mind is thus an inclusive and participating feature of this all-pervasive, all-knowing, all-powerful cosmic consciousness. An image that reflects to some degree the circular relationship we have with the Numinous is the hologram. A hologram is a three-dimensional image which has been imprinted onto a photographic plate. When a laser beam illuminates the plate it reveals the three-dimensional image, almost identical to the original object. When a small region of the plate is cut off and is illuminated again by a laser beam, what we see is not a piece of an image, but the whole of the image. This is extraordinary. It means that the whole of the three-dimensional image has been recorded in every part of the plate.

The whole is therefore replicated in every point on the plate while at the same time every point has contributed to the creation of the whole image. This connecting symmetry—of part-to-whole and whole-to-part—gives the hologram its undivided interconnectedness or wholeness. The Numinous One has the same kind of holographic wholeness as the hologram. From this view, individual minds represent various points on the external fabric of cosmic consciousness. In other words, each individual represents a small prism through which the larger (whole) cosmos shines. Individual minds thereby represent local flashpoints in the divine ferment. In this holographic sense, each of us contributes to the consciousness of the whole universe, while at the same time the whole of the divine cosmos is reflected in and through each of us.

Understanding our holographic relationship to the absolute is generally considered to be a spiritual undertaking, one in which the individual self should be emptied into a transcendent formlessness. The word 'kenosis' is often used to describe this kind of undertaking. Yet there is also a more practical, everyday reward for understanding this interrelationship of part-to-whole and whole-to-part. This kind of knowledge avoids the trap of ego inflation where we assume or act as if, 'I am God.' How can a part be the same as the whole? Yet in addition, such an understanding also inhibits us from saying 'I have a solo mind that is separate from the absolute.' A part of the picture (no matter how small) can never be separated out from the whole image.

A holographic understanding of being enables us to appreciate the value, difference and integrity of each individual's mind, and to appreciate how this diversity is vitally necessary to make up the whole fabric of a cosmic multiplicity. Such a view is also essential in cultural and environmental situations for when cultural and ecological diversity is devalued health and wellbeing is reduced. Similarly, when religious or scientific intolerance begins to exclude differences of opinion there is social sickness rather than a healthy holographic diversity that forms a coherently attuned community.

Understanding our holographic relationship to the absolute is a scientific undertaking. For example, the symmetry of the hologram (of part-to-whole and whole-to-part) signifies the possibility of harmony through balance and equilibrium. It also indicates that the whole of the cosmos can only be known if that knowledge is based upon a participatory and integrated perspective where interconnections are valued and where separations and the idea of isolated entities are rejected. In addition, with this holographic view there are no 'outer' forms or separate universes as everything is contained within the singular consciousness of the Numinous.

*

Our relationship to the Numinous is therefore connected and integrated, but how to describe this relationship? The theoretical physicist, David Bohm was inclined to believe there was a structure to our participation in the world. He concluded that no sharp division could be drawn between the individual, the collective and the cosmic dimensions. 11 For me these three states (individual, collective and cosmic) represent a skeleton outline to the underlying structure of our relationship to the Numinous.

This kind of outline is not new for it was foreshadowed by the Franciscan Seraphic Doctor, Bonaventure (1221–1274). Bonaventure wrote about his relationship to God in terms of these dimensions, only he called them the uncreated Word, the incarnate Word and the inspired Word. As my training has been secular and in the Humanities I have been inclined to change the words and expand these dimensions to four. I have called them, in the order suggested by Bonaventure's model: Host, body, culture and symbol. The term I will use in this book for the divine context of the Numinous is 'Host.' I have tended to refrain from using the word 'God' or 'Word' because I wanted to move beyond religious discourses to a more open, postsecular and spiritual understanding. The Host represents the impersonal context of Meaning, which hosts and supports every incarnate form.

Our holographic relationship to the Host is therefore not a two valued either/or one, but a four-valued set of interconnections. Comprehending this relationship means understanding the distinctions as well as the integration of the four contexts of being: Host, body, culture and symbol. These four contexts are simultaneously involved in every action we take as well as in the question of who we are. For example, this four-valued interconnected framework of being is not sympathetic to the common idea that each of us has a local, separate bounded solo identity. Rather, in terms of these four contexts we have minds that are a composite superposition. 'Superposition' is a term used in quantum physics to indicate when an object can be in two or more states, places or realities at the same time. Who we are involves a superposition that incorporates these four contexts of mind which operate simultaneously together so that we are never contained in any one state, place or reality at any given time.

The superposition of these four contexts means that our mind as well as our sense of self is always, in a sense, multi-layered. These layers involve the symbolic expressions we use, the cultural habits we have grown up with and fall back on in behavior as well as the pre-reflective consciousness of the body's activities and movement. Underpinning these three secondary and relative levels of being is the primary and divine context of the Host which holds and supports every thought and sensation within its interconnected, all-pervasive cosmic fabric. Who we are therefore is never a separate, static or solo identity but, rather, a multi-layered superposition involving the absolute and the relative of these four contexts.

*

Speaking of the Numinous is in two sections. The first section is entitled The Contexts of Self and it introduces the reader to the various concepts of Meaning along with its connection to energy and matter. As the superposition of self is discussed in some detail the four contextual levels of Host, body, culture and symbol unfold. The nature of these four levels is unravelled through their micro conditions of implicit and explicit meaning. These conditions reflect what David Bohm calls the implicate and explicate orders and I will argue here that these two orders and conditions of Meaning provide the integrated structure of the four contextual levels of self. The multi-layered model of these four contexts also provides a model for the fifth law of Meaning.

Section Two is subtitled The Evolution of Consciousness. It is concerned with the manner in which, through iteration, the two general conditions of Meaning (implicit and explicit) create the four modes by which we think. These four distinct modes of thought I have called: love, desire, intellect and empathy. These four modes of thought endow individuals with the potential for the four stages of their development and maturation as well as the four stages in the overall historical evolution of human consciousness. These four modes of thinking also create a wide variety of world views and interpretations. Two of these modes tend to separate and divide us from one another. This is the case for the modes of desire and reason. In contrast, the modes of love and empathy connect and join us together as families and communities.

The evolution of consciousness is discussed in the last chapter (14). It draws on Owen Barfield's work on the evolution of consciousness and I have applied his concepts to the conditions of Meaning. In applying the structure of Meaning to Barfield's thesis on the evolution of consciousness I believe I have theorized a more developed framework for that concept. This is a framework that links learning to maturation and to the four modes of thought, and further links these with several evolutionary periods in human history.
Section One:

The Contexts of Self

1 – In the Beginning

In Lewis Carroll's Alice and Wonderland the King advises the White Rabbit 'to begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end: then stop!' This is excellent advice which I shall attempt to follow here. The first question to be asked in relation to the Numinous is: what is meaning? This is the first question because I am going to discuss this transparent metaphysical domain through a vocabulary of meaning. While the nature of meaning is a good question to begin with it is nevertheless a question that a great many people have difficulty answering.

I realized this while living in Brisbane in the first decade of this century. The Mango Tree Café at the Northey Street market had become a Saturday morning ritual for my wife, Amanda and I. 1 After the serious business of buying the week's organic fruit and vegetables we would sometimes have breakfast under the mango trees with Toni and Anna, two of Amanda's post-graduate writing students. The trees were large and shady and surrounded by a beautiful garden, carefully tended by the local unemployed. It was a place to relax and talk.

One morning I asked Toni and Anna how they would describe 'meaning.' It was a conversation stopper. I felt the need to justify such an intrusion:

'Well, what is it you do when you write?'

'We tell stories,' was their quick reply.

'Telling stories is making meaning,' I said.

Anna was a scriptwriter and Toni a novelist and so both knew about narrative and fiction writing. As the conversation progressed into a discussion of narrative as meaning-making, it became clear that while 'meaning' was a familiar word, both these highly intelligent young women saw it as a by-product of thinking and action and not as a territory in its own right.

Most of us are like Anna and Toni for we use the word 'meaning' yet find it hard to say what it refers to. Perhaps this is because meaning is not something imposed on us from outside, like sunlight or taxes. We make meaning in every action, gesture and thought as it is the nature of everything we experience, realize and do. Finding and making meaning is our quest in life, but it is also the essential nature of our being. Meaning is therefore a unique phenomenon. On the one hand it is the core of our being and the heart of every experience and yet we are curiously blind to its very nature. William Shakespeare said something similar in Act 2 of Measure for Measure:

But man, proud man,

Drest in a little brief authority,

Most ignorant of what he's most assured,

His glassy essence,

'His glassy essence' is a poetic description of the transparency of Meaning; the essence of self. Yet this essence is easily overlooked. Like breathing we can easily forget about it.

Traditional approaches

Traditionally meaning has been a difficult concept to pin down. We usually think of it as related to how words and other signs convey some sense, signal or message. This view locates meaning as a by-product of the way signs work and hence it suggests little about the conditions of Meaning itself. Yet this is the question I ask here: 'what is the meaning of Meaning'? In 1922 The Meaning of Meaning first appeared. This was a book which established the ground rules for the twentieth century orthodox view of meaning. In this work the authors, C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards came up with sixteen definitions of meaning. The ambiguity of these competing definitions and the inability of the authors to clarify their position foreshadowed a confusion which continues on into linguistics and cognitive psychology today, so much so that 'meaning,' the central element of both disciplines, has remained largely a mystery. 2 Needless to say, the approach I take to this subject deviates a good deal from standard linguistic approaches.

In religious discourses the use of the word 'meaning' is usually confined to a moral 'lesson' we need to learn. Meaningful experiences are by definition lessons that are good and valuable whereas meaninglessness is a state to be avoided. A similarly vague response is evident in the postmodern humanities where the subject of semantics has no generic standing. Perhaps this is because postmodern humanities value the relative, the inter-subjective and the socially constructed over the given. For the postmodernist, the given is often referred to as 'the myth of the given.' As Meaning represents the 'given' in all circumstances it follows that its status for postmodernism will remain unresolved.

In terms of science, many eminent scientists acknowledge, almost as an aside, that the universe has meaning. Yet the role of Meaning has not rated in any serious scientific analysis or debate. Probably the most important scientific contribution on meaning came from the Vienna Circle of logical positivists. Positivism, of which the logical positivists were a recent branch, is a secular religion that emphasizes reason and logic and the role of science and technology. According to the political philosopher, John Gray the founder of Positivism was the French utopian thinker, Count Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825). 3 The French philosopher, Auguste Comte (1798–1857) is also recognized as having systematized Positivism into a religion complete with its own priests.

The Vienna Circle of logical positivists was a group of early twentieth century philosophers, mathematicians and scientists who published a manifesto in the 1920s called, 'Scientific View of the World.' The manifesto declared that: all meaningful discourse consists either of (a) the formal sentences of logic and mathematics or (b) the factual propositions of the sciences. The logical positivists believed that any assertion which claims to be factual has meaning only if it is possible to say how it might be verified. As a consequence, all metaphysical statements, including the pronouncements of religion were categorized by the logical positivists as meaningless.

Positivism and in particular, the logical positivists heavily influenced twentieth century thinking in the areas of philosophy of science, logic, and the philosophy of language. Yet today the credo of the logical positivists is largely discredited as being overly simplistic. This is because most scientific statements cannot be empirically verified and hence, in terms of the principles of logical positivism, they have to be rejected as pseudo-statements along with religious pronouncements. The problem for the logical positivists became acute in the 1930s when the philosopher Karl Popper pointed out that scientific systems do not rely upon positive proof and verification but on the reverse: the negative capacity of falsification. In other words, science can never prove the positive, but only the negative. This means that scientific truths have to rely on uncertainty like the rest of us; on what in science are called 'probabilities.' As a consequence of these developments, the central idea of the logical positivists; that logical and/or empirical positive verification is essential for statements to have meaning, was destroyed.

The arguments of logical positivists are now no longer accepted in philosophical circles. Yet the general belief system of Positivism and their discourses continues and along with large sections of the general public many scientists today retain the positivistic belief that truth is only obtained by scientific and empirical proof. John Gray also suggests that the Positivists were the original prophets of modernity and greatly influenced both left and right political movements. 4 He also argues that the three main tenets of Positivism are: i) that history is driven by science; ii) that science and technology will enable scarcity to be overcome; iii) and that progress in science is progress in ethics. Such utopian beliefs carry the assumption that the emancipation of humankind is only possible through science and technology.

I suggest such beliefs can easily become illusions in the way that the dreams of the logical positivists were illusions. From a different perspective to Gray, who is highly critical of positivism, I also consider these beliefs to be illusions because mechanical science does not address the issues of culture, consciousness or the metaphysics of Meaning. In this regard, Owen Barfield has also suggested that mechanical science is based upon an idea of 'objective' non-participation which leads to the separation and disconnection of the individual from the physical world. 5 As we shall see, such positivistic thinking has little time for the serious study of Meaning: the Numinous domain which cannot be measured or empirically validated.

Even in modern linguistics, where you would expect it to have fared better, Meaning is often considered to be a can of worms. An example of this attitude comes from the great European linguist, Emile Benveniste who called it 'this Medusa's head.' 6 Those who remember the Greek myth of Perseus will know that Medusa was a Gorgon who had a terrifying head with snakes for hair. If looked at directly Medusa could turn ordinary men to stone. Perseus managed to slay the Gorgon by never looking at her directly. Instead, he looked only at her reflection in his shield. By this deflection the terrible power of Medusa was reduced to manageable proportions.

This may have been Benveniste's point; Meaning appears only manageable when we look for its reflection in the mirror of signs and symbols. A version of this approach is commonly found in poststructuralist theory where Meaning is usually managed by reducing it to the differential reflections given off by the interaction of signs and symbols. Such a view tends to forget that as formal objects, signs and symbols are nothing more than frames for the meanings they contain. In other words, signs are but picture-frames of Meaning and not the other way around. Hence, like the frames of pictures, the world of signs is always made up of the secondary forms that we use to make meaning. This forgetting has enabled scholars to pigeonhole meaning as a sub-section of the discipline of semantics where it sits alongside logic. Yet what has happened to the meaning of Meaning, and what will happen if we gaze upon its power directly? Will we turn to stone, as Benveniste's comments imply? Will we be so fascinated by its mystical energy that we will be unable to move? If we are very lucky this may just happen!

Traditional approaches

In the past there have been a variety of terms, other than Meaning, used to describe the transparent territory of the Numinous. It is worthwhile recalling some of them and the manner in which they are used before moving on to a more focused discussion on Meaning.

Western philosophers and theologians have often employed the terms 'Word' or 'Logos' to refer to the Numinous absolute. What do these terms mean for us today? What does it mean when we read that Jesus was the incarnation of the Logos? It is often difficult to recapture the intricate web of implications that once culturally embedded significant terms like this one. This difficulty is accentuated when we ignore our own cultural biases. Even when we do take them into account we still can be left wondering if the Logos is the same as the biblical sense of 'Word' or 'Wisdom.'

In classical Greek thought the Logos was seen as the principle which is immanent in nature yet transcends all oppositions and imperfections. The Logos was conventionally seen as the ordering, liberating and revealing force which could reconcile the human with the divine. Today the Logos is sometimes seen as a story and sometimes as a word. Logos as story, which is the interpretation of theologians like John Carroll, is an understandable reading but one that I would suggest is inadequate. 7 Yet Logos as Word, or an individual word, is simply perplexing, given what we now know about the dynamic role of symbols. If however the Logos is interpreted as a Numinous force-field then it begins to makes sense as an ordering, liberating and revealing force. This is an interpretation not unlike the one Philo (20BC–40AD) maintained. For Philo the Logos was an energy that called forms into existence by a process he called the combination of contrasts while infusing these forms with an active and vital power that unified them.

As for the term 'Word,' this is a key Christian term. It was used by Bonaventure, a leading Christian mystical teacher of medieval times, in a similar way to how the Stoics used Logos. Bonaventure considered that the forms of the universe were made through the mediating activities of the uncreated Word. 8 In this sense the Word is not an individual linguistic form (of a word) but a cosmic intelligent force as well as a spiritual principle. Bonaventure argued that the uncreated Word took on the flesh of humanity as the incarnate Word. Humanity then presented this story of creation to the world as the inspired Word of the Bible. Bonaventure's interpretation of this cosmic intelligence has three parts: the uncreated, the incarnate and the expressed. I find his approach valuable because it foreshadows what we now know about the various contexts of being. I will refer again to this point in the next few chapters.

Yet a third example of a related vocabulary comes from Indian philosophy. The ancient Sanskrit terms 'Sat, Chit, Ananda' are said to represent the God-consciousness of Brahman, the formless God of Advaita Vedanta. Each of these terms has an individual meaning which then combines with the other terms to form the composite meaning of cosmic consciousness. Sat has a range of interpretations but generally it signifies un-manifest being which represents an eternal, impersonal truth. Chit represents the energy and force of consciousness while Ananda is bliss, love and connection. Together these three signify a transparent and universal creative force that is the basis of our being.

I do not intend to use the terms, 'Logos,' 'Word' or 'Sat, Chit, Ananda' here. These are terms that are integrated into their respective ancient and revered religious and cultural histories. What I seek to articulate is a postsecular account of the Numinous. While I touch upon the territory with which all religions are concerned I am not proposing to rewrite or reinterpret any existing belief system. In addition, as I write from within the sight lines of a contemporary Western learning I make my case from within this perspective.

Three associates

In developing a postsecular account of the Numinous I will be using a modern vocabulary. Yet this vocabulary not only refers to the same territory as 'Logos,' 'Word' and 'Sat, Chit, Ananda,' it also has some of the same kind of overlapping connections inherent in these ancient approaches. For example, the vocabulary of Meaning has three combining terms that support it, and map from different perspectives the same transparent territory. These are the associates of 'mind,' 'life' and 'spirit.'

These terms (meaning, mind, life and spirit) are usually unpacked through the prisms of linguistics, psychology, biology and theology. While the conventional wisdom of each of these disciplines assumes that these four terms refer to separate territories, I am suggesting here that that is not the case. Rather, these four terms constitute different methods of mapping the same transparent territory of the Numinous.

I have found that in order to understand the nature of Meaning more comprehensively it is necessary to combine these four terms into a composite understanding. When this is achieved what is revealed is the degree to which each of the four terms overlaps and reinforces the others. The result is a more complete picture of this infinite transparent domain. For example, both Meaning as essence and meaning as process infer the capacity to create knowledge through an animate force that 'points to' or as linguists say, 'signifies.' The act of signifying also involves a knowing or quality of mind that contains, amongst other things, the potentials for creating truth, illusion and realization. This live and knowing force of Meaning is also closely associated with that other subtle invisible force we call 'spirit.'

Spirit is the central feature of most religions. Spirit represents an essential, active, vivifying force that is referred to in the Bible as the Holy Spirit or Holy Ghost. The Gospel of Mark, for example, tells how Jesus will baptize you with pneuma—the Greek term for Holy Spirit. John who baptizes with water said, in reference to Jesus, 'he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost.' In other words, he will immerse you in the Spirit so your life will be given more meaning. In The Existential Jesus, John Carroll draws our attention to the traditional translation of the Greek—pneumahagion—as 'Holy Spirit' or 'Holy Ghost.' 9

Spirit as a subtle energy is also referred to in the discourses of the ancient Rabbis who spoke about God as the Holy Spirit which brooded over creation and made its presence felt as rushing wind or a blazing fire. The Rabbis believed that the presence of God as spirit could be experienced differently by different people. As a consequence, our relationship to the divine was seen as a private matter that could not be enforced by orthodoxy. In contrast, Saint Augustine understood the Holy Spirit as 'the wind that bloweth where it will.' He saw it as the logical principle of unity in the Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit and maintained that the Holy Spirit was the principle of love between the Father and Son. 10

In Hinduism the Sanskrit term, 'shakti' has a usage that approximates the Greek 'pneuma.' Shakti is said to be the spiritual power or the cosmic consciousness which projects, maintains and dissolves the universe. This spiritual energy is sometimes described as the feminine and creative energy in the universe. A related term is 'Brahmashakti' which refers to the spiritual power that creates, sustains and destroys every form in the universe.

Spirit understood as a subtle moving energy represents an understanding that resonates with the idea of 'life' or 'life force,' or to use Henri Bergson's term, élan vital. A century ago Bergson published his highly influential Creative Evolution in which he argued that we can detect the flux of the élan vital by intuitively noting the flowing sequences of events. 11 Modern biology is vitally interested in the force that it calls 'life' even though Bergson's ideas have been largely dismissed by scientists. In 1944, physicist Erwin Schrodinger published his famous book, What is Life? In it he described the usefulness and beauty of science and pointed to the emerging importance of biology. The question in the title of the book, however, he left unanswered. Schrodinger, a physicist, could not answer the question and neither, I suggest, can most biologists. The reason that mainstream science is unable to answer this question is because the subtle force called 'life' goes well beyond the boundaries of biology.

What we refer to as 'life' is the same subtle energy as 'Meaning,''spirit' or 'pneuma.' This is the energy of the Numinous One which pervades every point in the universe. This is not to say that in every corner of the universe we can find 'life forms.' On the basis of current observations, life forms appear to be limited to this planet. The distinction between 'life per se' and 'life forms' is the same as the difference between the meaning of Meaning and the meaning of a specific phrase. Life per se, pneuma, and the meaning of Meaning refer to the infinite Numinous; the ground from which everything appears and disappears. Given the universal breadth of this cosmic context it is no wonder biologists have had great difficulty defining it.

Traditionally biologists are concerned with 'bell jar' questions, ones that are limited to finite observations in which a form can be said to have life. For instance, is a virus an example of a life form? There has been much debate about this. Or take the question of how humans are made. Biologists know that humans have around 30,000 genes but they do not know about the instructions that cells operate under so that they 'know' which gene to use in order to grow the right body part. I suggest that this understanding will continue to elude biologists as long as they deny the question of life per se.

There is also much confusion about the question: when does life begin? This is a wrong-headed question. Life, like Meaning, has no beginning. Its vital, energetic breath is eternal and ever-present. We would have to go back to the birth of the universe to find something that looks like a beginning of life. Even then, the potentials of the singularity which supposedly created the visible universe in the Big Bang are not generally accepted as a beginning. (Yet the idea of 'no beginning' also does not compute well in science.)

The third overlay of Meaning is mind, or I could say 'consciousness.' In the traditions of Western scholarship the study of psyche and consciousness is now called psychology. In ancient times the study of pneuma was called pneumatology. This ancient term referred to the study of spiritual being. Given the tendency of science to exclude from its investigations anything connected to divinity this association of spirit and self is now no longer used as a synonym for psychology. The word 'consciousness' does, however, retain some of those ancient associations of 'wind,' 'breath,' 'spirit' and 'life-force.'

David Bohm believed that meaning was the essential nature of consciousness. 12 I agree, for it constitutes what I referred to in the Introduction as the fourth law of Meaning. Consciousness cannot be separated from meaning and therefore it does not represent a different and separate subject matter or area of study. The separation of these two represents the traditional view held in mainstream psychology and linguistics, yet consciousness without meaning is akin to the idea of water flowing without motion. 13 I would argue that while 'Meaning' and 'consciousness' are terms with different histories, each nevertheless represents the same energetic but transparent landscape. This correspondence implies that each psychological feature of consciousness is also one of Meaning while each detail of Meaning represents a micro feature of consciousness. 14 We can therefore make meaning consciously, sub-consciously, unconsciously, pre-consciously, self-reflectively and intuitively. Each of these psychological terms represents a set of processes in which meanings are exchanged and transformed.

Throughout this work I will be discussing the Numinous in relation to these four terms: meaning, mind, life and spirit. Mostly my focus will be on the conditions and order of Meaning. The reason for this bias relates to its explanatory power that is superior to the other three terms. However, Meaning's three associates of mind, life and spirit are always inferred in all these discussions.

Relations

The four overlaying threads—meaning, mind, life and spirit—each refer to some aspect of the same numinous field of the absolute. The four threads represent mind in its broadest and most encompassing sense of cosmic consciousness. In the Zen tradition of Buddhism, 'mind is Buddha.' This is a reference to the mind of the universe which is called Buddha. From the perspective of these four threads, this universal mind is the unity of the Numinous: a plenum which is filled with Meaning, life and spirit.

The universal mind is therefore not separate from individual minds for it represents the essential foundation of every mind. In a loose and incorrect way we may at times speak of two minds that are inseparable. These are, firstly, the local mind of everyday experience in which we make meaning through sense perceptions and communication with others. This local mind is always superimposed on the larger mind of inner peace and tranquillity. We can refer to these two minds by using a psychological vocabulary but to do so tends to imply their separation—as in two minds. Instead, I would prefer to speak about them in terms of 'relations.'

The vocabulary of relations tends to highlight connection and integration. The term 'relations' not only refers to the interpersonal exchanges we have with others but more generally to any link or connection between two or more things. Relations per se are mental. They are the stuff that minds are made of. This is to say that relations are the mental framework of the infinite universal mind of the cosmos as well as the mental fabric of the local mind of individuals. In addition, as relations are the stuff that minds are made of they are also always relations of Meaning. As a consequence, every field of relations is also a field of Meaning.

The first law of Meaning says there is no outside of Meaning and that every point in the universe is interconnected with all others. Such 'interconnections' refer to the interconnections of relations. Relations therefore constitute the universal matrix of the Numinous. Such infinite interconnections create a unified, singular and universal whole in which there are no splits or divisions within its relational fabric. This holistic unity implies that the physical world is not separate from the mental world for both worlds have the same architectural structure provided by relations of Meaning.

Scientists have known for a long time that every particle as well as every galaxy exists as a field of relations within larger fields of relationships. The physicist Henry Stapp who is well known for his work in quantum physics wrote that, 'an elementary particle is not an independently existing, unanalysable entity. It is, in essence, a set of relationships that reach outward to other things.' 15 An outward reaching relationship implies an accompanying intelligence and this intelligence can be demonstrated in its ability to create organized forms that interact in organized ways. A form can be solid, liquid, gaseous, abstract or symbolic. As is known, a form of any kind is an expression of a certain regular pattern or assembly of relations. Certain assemblies of relations create the solid and concrete state of matter while other assemblies create the abstract forms of culture and symbols.

The mechanical perspective of materialistic science tends to understand relations as passive and, therefore, 'possessed' properties of matter (or in linguistics, of signs). In this view, relations are caused by interactions between physical or formal objects. This kind of perspective comes out of a Cartesian intellectual tradition that is prone to separate the physical world of matter from the meta-physical world of mind. This was the view of the father of modern science, the French philosopher Rene Descartes (1596–1650).

Descartes' dualism separated the physical body (res extensa) from the non-physical mind (res cogitans). He was the first to formulate the mind-body problem in the form in which it exists today. Descartes' dualism is based upon the possibility of splits and separations. In terms of relations, there are no splits or separations anywhere in the universe, for example, the relations that are always inherent in the extensions and the movements of all physical bodies (res extensia) are relations that can be called asymmetry and non-symmetry. (I discuss these two types of relations on the next page). All extensions and movements are composed of these two kinds of relations.

By using the vocabulary of relations I not only close the Cartesian gap but can demonstrate that the universe is essentially a mental event since relations constitute mental and therefore intelligent structures. In addition, because relations are mental they have the same kind of creative and causal qualities as the omnipotent absolute. This means that relations operate as the animate, social, creative and propagating intelligent forces within every form and system in the universe. The organizing force of relations constitutes the essential dynamic units of the Numinous. When relations are attributed with this kind of causality they are no longer seen as the passive by-products of interacting physical or formal objects but, rather, they assume the significant role of the self-propagating intelligent agencies that construct and structure the entire universe.

Relations of Meaning

Depending upon the subject matter being studied there can be many kinds of relations. However, when studying the laws of Meaning there are three important and basic relations. These are the relations of symmetry, non-symmetry and asymmetry. These three sets of relations are not isolated or separated from each other. Instead, they form an interconnected unified continuum of Meaning which constructs both the local mind of individuals as well as the non-local, infinite mind of the cosmos. What are the defining characteristics of these three relations? I will begin with symmetry.

Symmetry is usually difficult to grasp at the outset and this is because it is essentially a mystical and non-local state. However, we can say that the infinite mind of the cosmos is structured by the interconnected, non-local relations of symmetry. Dictionary definitions of 'symmetry' tend to construct it as a passive by-product that is somehow thrown up by its proximity or association with similar shapes, sizes or formations. Yet symmetry is much more than an interesting kind of similarity or isomorphism. As it represents the essential character of the Numinous it is much more than a passive by-product of some particular form. Rather, its potentials represent the energetic, omnipotent and creative forces that connect and construct each and every form in the universe.

Strictly speaking symmetry is not a relationship because there are no processes or distinctions within the non-local connections of the universal mind. There are just symmetry connections that operate prior to the distinction of time and space and those that are made by conscious deliberation. Symmetry is therefore more the potential for connect-ability than, strictly speaking, an established relationship. It represents the meaning of Meaning: the essence of the Numinous out of which the physical world was, and continues to be born. In addition, this state represents the essential meaningful foundation to all local mind interactions. However, for the purposes of simplicity I will often speak of symmetry as if it were a relationship rather than the potential for connect-ability.

In quantum physics the word 'entanglement' is used to describe the core characteristic of this science. Entanglement is the word used by Erwin Schrodinger, one of the founders of quantum theory, to refer to the connections between separate particles that persist regardless of distance. 16 While it was once assumed that the entanglement of elementary particles was fleeting and had no practical application to the larger world of tables and chairs, scientists like Dean Radin argue that this view is rapidly changing. 17 Microscopic entanglements 'scale up' to affect our everyday macroscopic world of large objects.

In terms of Meaning, symmetry potentials affect our everyday and commonplace lives. Just as entangled relations occur at microscopic levels they also occur within and between people. These connections are instantaneous and always present, and they operate beyond the differences of time and space or sense perception. (I return to this question in later chapters.) Schrodinger's entanglement represents a symmetrical relationship or simply a state of symmetry. Symmetry can therefore be seen as an entangled relationship prior to time and space, and in terms of the Numinous it represents the foundational unity of the universe which is a unity of the meaning of Meaning—a unity that embraces both the physical and the mental.

Thus symmetry is a state of mental intelligence prior to the differences of time and space and hence, prior to the asymmetrical and non-symmetrical relations that are always demonstrated by the extensions and movements of physical and abstract forms. This brings me to the character of the other two relations of asymmetry and non-symmetry. Asymmetrical relations establish systems of irreversible relations, while non-symmetry refers to a difference or distinction that can be made about an asymmetrical system(s). Importantly, these two relations are secondary relations as they logically derived from the potentials of symmetry.

These two derivative relations of asymmetry and non-symmetry order and create the differential characteristics and structures of space and time and they account for the multiple geometric extensions (res extensia) and movement of all physical forms through space and time. These secondary relations are inherent in all aspects of the physical world as well as within our mental acts of perception and conception. In brief, the relations of non-symmetry and asymmetry construct the many and varied processes of the local mind of an individual. In contrast, symmetry represents the essential coherent unity of the Numinous.

From the viewpoint of Meaning, the birth of the universe some fifteen billion years ago unfolded as a multiplicity from the non-local potentials of symmetry. Yet these same meaningful potentials are contained within, and give rise to, all non and asymmetrical physical and mental structures today. This work argues that the unified singularity of the single mind of the Numinous One has an interconnected structure constituted by the relations of symmetry, non-symmetry and asymmetry. This singular unifying, three-part structure represents the undivided wholeness of our being. This interconnected structure of being therefore involves both the local mind of the individual as well as the universal mind of the Numinous One.
2 – Order and Depth of Meaning

In this chapter I want to discuss two conditions. These are the order of Meaning and the depth of Meaning. These conditions begin to explain who we are and how our sense of self is multi-layered. This discussion is therefore in direct opposition to the commonly held belief that we are solo and free agents possessed of the wherewithal to control our destiny. This individualistic belief system is the basis of the free-enterprise philosophy and it is also a key assumption in classic materialistic science.

Order

'Order' is a word that is often set against the ideas of 'randomness,' 'chance' or 'chaos.' Randomness and chance are important ideas for the statistical analysis of experimental results. These terms are not, however, useful for describing the state of the universe or Meaning. This is because Meaning has order, as does the universe. An ordered universe is always the default assumption of science; it is what we make laws and hypotheses about. As for chaos, the theory of chaos has found that order resides within the chaos.

I use the term 'order' to mean a logical arrangement involving various elements of a group. For example, a change that has a beginning, middle and end is an ordered movement. Yet what constitutes 'order' per se? David Bohm and F. David Peat acknowledged the elusiveness of the concept when they wrote in Science, Order and Creativity, (1989): 'As with order, so with structure there can be no complete definition.' 1 In terms of Meaning, I believe it is possible to speak about what constitutes order per se. This is because order is the organizational condition of Meaning. In other words, things are given order and organization through their meaning and, in addition, they are given meaning through their order and organization.

Irreversible change or movement indicates order. Irreversible relations are asymmetrical relations. 'Before,' 'after,' 'higher' and 'lower' are examples of irreversible asymmetrical relations. The order and thus the overall organization of the universe is demonstrated through asymmetrical patterns. Perhaps the ordered pattern with which each of us is most familiar is the one that has a beginning, middle and end: that moves us from birth to adolescence, to adulthood, to middle age, to old age, then to death. This is an asymmetrical order involving the physicality of the body and no matter what medical science does, this pattern is irreversible.

The asymmetrical ordering of the visible universe is often confused with ideas about time, but order and time are not identical. Time is an abstract ratio, the intellectual measuring product of local individual human minds. This ratio involves us in measuring random changes (walking down a street) by reference to a steady set of changes (the hands on the face of a clock). In contrast, order represents the inherent asymmetrical movements of the non-personal universe. These are the movements of Meaning in contrast to the measurements of time which are the movements of small 'm' meaning.

The asymmetrical order of the universe arises out of the symmetrical potentials of cosmic consciousness. When we focus on the nature of order we are confronted with a) the transient nature of all forms and b) a patterning in which every form has a beginning, middle and end. However, when scientists focus on time measurements they are normally confronted with the specific details of abstract calculations, for example, the t factor that is part of some equation.

The confusion between time and order comes from a lack of distinction between what goes on within the local intellect of the individual and what is happening within the larger context of Meaning. The failure to distinguish these two general levels of consciousness is a by-product of a general failure to recognize the superposition of self. While time and order are distinct they are not, however, separate. Rather, they are integrated in such a manner that time is normally superimposed on order. For example, when we humans 'tell the time' such a measurement always rests on the ordered changes occurring in the universe. This integration mirrors how the local individual mind is also a superimposed set of features that are integrated into the larger mind of the Numinous One. Rather than time, it is the asymmetrical order of Meaning which is of interest here.

The order of the universe is demonstrated through motion. Every motion can be modelled as a movement through a circular formation or an arc. The idea of an arc reflects the circularity of the second law of Meaning. In addition, all motions incorporate the three relations of symmetry, non-symmetry and asymmetry (Chapter 1). For example, all motions whether they are called physical, chemical, biological, or psychological have a beginning in symmetry and a structure that is composed of asymmetrical and non-symmetrical relations. Even the slow transient changes that occur in the geology of mountains involve a series of asymmetrical and non-symmetrical relations. In contrast symmetry does not move. It is still.

Symmetry is full of potentials but has no motion. From the potentials of symmetry, asymmetrical and non-symmetrical relations unfold and then enfold, and from these changes order is produced. This universal order means that every physical, chemical, biological or psychological change represents a local manifestation of the cosmic potentials to order and organise the universe. In other words, there is no separate material, physical, chemical or biological causes because there are no motions that have not already been initiated by Meaning's larger ordering potentials.

As relations are always alive the order of the universe represents the order of the mind of the universe. At its simplest, the order of the mind of the universe begins in the stillness of symmetry from which some kind of movement or change is initiated. To initiate a physical, chemical or biological change out of stillness is a causal and creative act of cosmic consciousness. Every change is always ordered through the construction of asymmetrical and non-symmetrical relations even when those changes are of a particle for a fraction of a second. This movement has a beginning, middle and end and it can be represented as an arc which moves from the stillness of these energetic potentials, to the kinetic energy of motion, then back to the stillness of an un-moved silence in the following manner:

Figure 1:

The arc of motion

The arc of kinetic motion portrays the beginning, middle and end of every motion of every form in the universe. This order always involves a series of transformations that create an unfolding movement of the form and then, later, its enfolding. In other words, out of the stillness of un-moved Meaning there is an unfolding into various forms (concrete and abstract) that interact with each other and move in space and can be measured through time. These interactions and movements continue for a period until they are gradually enfolded back into the stillness of their originating potentials. This is the universal order of unfolding and enfolding of Meaning that organizes every movement of every form in the universe.

Some additional descriptive details can be added to the arc of motion by the two conditions of Meaning. These are: implicit and explicit meaning. These are cardinal conditions of Meaning and together they represent what in Indian philosophy is called non-dual dualism. A non-dual dualism is a duality that is interconnected and inseparable. By this I mean these two elements can never be separated and yet they remain uniquely distinct. Ralph Waldo Emerson once said that an inevitable dualism bisects all of nature. This is the yea and nay, the in and out, the odd and even, the yin and yang of the universe.

Through the ages this non-dual dualism has been named in various ways. Owen Barfield, for example, estimated that at least half the weight of Western philosophical thought from Aristotle to Aquinas was carried by the polarity of: actus and potentia—the actual and the potential. 2 Here are two ancient synonyms for implicit and explicit meaning. Implicit meaning always has energetic or causal potentials that are yet-to-be made manifest, while explicit meaning always involves manifest, actual and kinetic forms that move in space and can be measured in time.

The two conditions of implicit and explicit meaning can also be cross-referenced to the three relations of meaning. Thus implicit meaning is structured by the connecting potentials of symmetry. When these connecting potentials exist on their own they represent the Host context of the Numinous. When these connecting potentials operate in concert with the explicit, extended and manifest movement of forms they represent the implications associated with such movement and forms. As for explicit meaning, this condition is always constructed by asymmetrical and non-symmetrical relations. Specifically, this means that every manifest form in the universe has movement and a differential, three-dimensional extended spatial geometry. Such structures are always constructed from a set of asymmetrical and non-symmetrical relations.

The various distinctions we can make about any form, such as its category, size, shape, location, weight, velocity, volume or value, are commonly referred to as their 'differences.' The relationship that constructs a 'difference,' or more correctly a 'discernible difference,' is a non-symmetrical relationship. 3 As such, a non-symmetrical relationship represents some aspect that is distinctive about any particular form, vibration or movement. There are, therefore, no differences that are not differences of Meaning. As a consequence there is no such thing as a separate material physical, chemical or biological event or cause or change or difference. Essentially all events, causes, changes and differences are the intelligent characteristics of Meaning's order and organization. They are characteristics of Meaning because intelligence is what is implied every time we use the terms 'order' and 'organization.' In addition, as relations are always animate (alive) the three animate relationships of Meaning are able to provide the ordered patterns of large forms as well as the finer organization of the universe.

These various terms now come together in the following manner:

  * Implicit meaning: connecting symmetry potentials, universal causes and contextual and implicit knowledge;

  * Explicit meaning: actual, discernable, kinetic, non-symmetrical, asymmetrical, explicit knowledge

In psychological terms, explicit, non and asymmetrical relations construct the content of the conscious mind (cognition; the 'cogito'). This explicit system is involved in deliberation and decision-making. On the other hand, implicit meaning represents the structure of other psychological states which have had such names as the un-repressed unconscious, the repressed, the pre-conscious and pre-reflective consciousness. These various names often resolve down to the two psychological states of the conscious and the unconscious. In terms of relations, these two states can never be separated from each other, as if they were two rooms in a house, for that would mean explicit meaning could be separated from implicit meaning. As implicit and explicit meaning come within the ambit of the first law of Meaning their separation is impossible.

Recently the interconnection of the explicit, conscious mind and the implicit, un-repressed unconscious was demonstrated by an experiment conducted by a group of scientists, led by Professor John-Dylan Haynes from the Max Planck Institute of Human Cognition and Brain Sciences. These scientists measured brain activity to show that there is an unconscious preparation for decision-making by the cogito. 4 This preparation, which is indicated by prior brain activity, can take as long as seven seconds before we make a free-choice decision. In the past this kind of 'readiness-potential' was thought to be only a fraction of a second and was often explained away by the materialistic idea that the mechanism of the brain made the decision rather than the individual's mind. With the recent study, however, it has been widely accepted that decisions are unconsciously prepared. The term 'unconscious' is used here as a loose psychological reference to the broader state of mind that involves the exchanges of implicit meaning.

In effect these studies confirm that the decision-making processes of the conscious mind (the cogito) which involve explicit differential and asymmetrical elements, arise out of the readiness potentials; the connecting context of implicit meaning. The mind therefore is much larger than the processes of cognition and perception. The extent of the mind involves the symmetrical and implicit potentials that exist as the meaningful context for every conscious thought and every form that is manifest within perception. In other words, like the self, the mind is a superposition of local and infinite mind. Such a superposition means that the local cogito is always supported by the much larger implicit mind of the Numinous One.

The controversy surrounding the studies by John-Dylan Haynes and his team revolves around the modern idea that the human mind is a special, separate autonomous entity having 'free will' and the ability to make rational decisions. This positivistic view is held by many scientists who assume the human mind to be an exclusive and private preserve separate from other minds and also separate from the objective, physical environment. Such views represents a bias in favor of the cogito and hence a bias in favor of explicit and differential meaning. The consequence of this bias has meant that hard-nosed scientists begin by separating the world into subjective minds and objective information and then in the process of over-valuing the so called objective data they readily reject everything that is seen to be private and subjective. Such separations as these are illusions for there are no separations in Meaning. In addition, the explicit meaning of the intellect (cogito) cannot exist on its own but must always be framed by deeper contexts of explicit meaning.

Unlike modern materialists the French mathematician, Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) was no positivist. Pascal, one of the founders of the science of probability affirmed that 'the primary axioms of thought are intuited by the heart and that it is the heart that determines the premises for all possible knowledge of the real.' 5 For Pascal, the heart was not a reference to emotions or to a physical organ but to an intuitive understanding. This is the concept of the 'heart' that I apply here. In this sense, the heart refers to the interconnected nature of implicit meaning, which provides the contextual essence of our being. We know this kind of meaning through intuition. Yet modern Positivists have great difficulty coming to terms with intuition and therefore accounting for implicit meaning. Intuitive and implicit knowledge is un-measurable and traditionally what is unmeasurable (non-explicit) has no place in science.

These additional terms can now be added to the ones above so that the two conditions of meaning have the following characteristics:

  * Implicit meaning: connecting, symmetry potentials, universal causal, implicit contextual and intuitive knowledge;

  * Explicit meaning: manifest, explicit, discernable, extended movement, asymmetric and non-symmetrical relations, conscious mind.

Bohm

The renowned theoretical physicist David Bohm spent a lifetime of research in physics and philosophy. In his book, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Bohm introduced a new model of reality. In this model Bohm describes the two great orders of the universe as the implicate and explicate orders. 6 These terms are in essence identical to the two conditions of Meaning, that is to implicit and explicit meaning. For example, 'implicate order' and 'implicit meaning' infer the same quality and holistic totality. In like manner, the terms 'explicate order' and 'explicit meaning' are also essentially identical. For Bohm, the implicate and explicate orders are 'objective' orders of the universe which, in addition, relate to human consciousness. Like the arc of motion, Bohm's model of the implicate and explicate orders is iterative. This means that these orders are applicable to every level of reality—from micro to macro, from particles to people, to the entire universe.

Bohm called the deeper level of reality the implicate order because it hides by enfolding within itself the information and structures of the explicit, physical universe. The potential features of every explicit manifest form are therefore enfolded within the total potentials of the universe. The second movement he called the explicate order because it represents the unfolded, explicit and visible universe we know through observation and the measurements of space and time. Hence physical objects moving in the four dimensions of space and time represent the explicate order. The inter-relationship between Bohm's implicate and explicate orders is identical to the non-dual dualism of implicit and explicit meaning. In addition, like the potentials of implicit meaning the potentials of the implicate order represent the prior cause of every motion and relationship associated with every manifest form.

When Bohm's universal implicate and explicate orders are cross-referenced to the two conditions of Meaning a picture begins to emerge of a singular holographic cosmic consciousness. This is a picture of one mind that has manifest and diverse individual features. This singularity represents the superposition of self. This singular universal mind has the two groups of characteristics:

  * Implicit meaning: the first order of the universe is the implicate order. This order simultaneously connects everything in the universe through its implicit, hidden symmetry causal potentials. These entangled connections are also the basis of contextual, heart and intuitive knowledge.

  * Explicit meaning: the derivative explicate order of the universe is constituted by manifest, non and asymmetrical relations which construct discernible, concrete and abstract forms that interact, move and exchange kinetic energy with each other. These very same relations create the conscious mind which involves the processes of perception and cognition.

In order to portray the dynamic nature of this singular universal mind I have represented it by a directional arc. Such an arc has an order (beginning, middle and end) as well as a depth of meaning. The following figure demonstrates that order and depth.

The arc of motion

Figure 2:

With the terms 'unfolding' and 'enfolding' we can clearly see the irreversible pattern of an asymmetrical order. In biology, the pattern of this arc moves every form from birth to growth to death. As a consequence, out of the potentials of implicit stillness a gradual unfolding begins with germination or conception. For humans, this kinetic, unfolding process continues through birth, infancy, adolescence and adulthood. Then, as we settle into maturity, there begins a pattern of integration that over the years will begin to enfold our bodies in old age and finally, in death, back to the implicit potentials of the implicate order. The path of this irreversible order controls our bodies as well as every other organic and inorganic form in the universe. As such, the motion of this arc makes all forms transient, that is, to appear and then to disappear.

This universal order also means that within the lifetime of any individual person every particle, cell, tissue and organ of his or her body will be created, grow and mature then disappear many times over. However, what remains a constant for every transient particle, cell, tissue and organ as well as for the whole body is the organizational field of those forms. In addition, the organization of each cell provides that cell with a continuity which maintains the integrity of the body's form. The organization of this integral whole is maintained by the larger order of the mind of the universe. The lived order of individual body parts as well as the whole body comes from the order and the movement of meaning as shown by Figure 2.

The focus for science has been confined to the movements of the explicate order. An example of this confinement is evident in the manner in which time is conceived of by scientists. Whether it is through the use of atomic clocks or the ancient tradition of counting by the phases of the moon, time is the measurement of motion. Such measurements are usually only concerned with the movements of explicit forms within the explicate order. As a consequence, where there are no manifest forms (concrete or abstract) there is no movement and so no time. This state of stillness and timelessness is contained within the potentials of implicit meaning. In other words, the past and future of time do not equate with the silent implicitness that represents the foundations of the arc of motion. What has been ignored by most scientists is the importance of the 'no-time' of the present moment. Yet within this silent implicit universal constant we live and die.

A mundane example of the arc of motion is reading a book or listening to music. These actions involve a stream of concrete and abstract forms (notes or letters of the alphabet) unfolding from within the implicit background of subjectivity. These explicit forms exist and interact for a while within the context of a concentrated focus of attention. They then slip from sight to be enfolded once more into the implicitness of the mind. These are small movements but nevertheless vital ones for creating a rich and full life.

What is missing from the example of reading is the role learning has played firstly in our ability to read (literacy) and secondly in the kinds of interpretations we give to these small but important movements. The practices of learning have a history which I discuss in relation to the evolution of consciousness (Section 2, where I discuss the evolution of the four modes of thought). However, for now we can say that true learning (rather than cultural indoctrination) is the key to creating an appreciation of meaning's depth.

The idea that meaning has a depth or a profundity is indicated by the integration of implicit and explicit meaning. This integration means that everything explicit, every discernable concrete or abstract form, floats within a context of deeper implications which in turn float within the pure implicit meaning of the Host. Meaning's depth and profundity therefore concerns the implicit contexts that surround and give support to every discernible (conscious) form. An example of the depth of meaning is how we live our lives permanently in the no-time of the implicit universal constant, which is the present moment. The idea of depth of meaning is therefore of no-time while the idea of motion is represented by the arc of motion which has a beginning, middle and end. This difference is the difference between stillness and motion, or between the present moment and the abstractions of past and future, or between the implicate order and the explicate order, or between implicit and explicit meaning. How then to indicate in some graphic form Meaning's depth?

Depth of Meaning

Some kind of representation can be made of Meaning's depth by a vertical section down through the arc of motion. Such a section has the design of a pyramid having its upper pointy end towards the top of the arc of motion and the lower part in the stillness of implicit potentials. This design is demonstrated by the next figure:

The pyramid of Meaning

Figure 3:

I have used the image of a pyramid to represent Meaning's depth for several reasons. The first point that needs to be made is that the pyramid model does not refer to physical differences. Rather, it seeks to represent a set of distinctions that simply mark off the contexts of Meaning's depth. Represented at the top of this pyramid is the context in which abstract symbolic forms interact. These are the forms we learn, listen to, look at, read and manipulate in speech and writing, music, art and work. In contrast, at the bottom of the pyramid model there is no boundary. This open-ness indicates the infinite potentials and implicitness of the Numinous absolute. This infinity of Meaning represents the foundation of self, of mind and being. In between these two extremes are two more contexts of meaning-making.

Historically the idea of levels of being or mind was described as the Great Chain of Being. According to Ken Wilber the theory of this hierarchy 'consists of anywhere from 3 or 4 levels (e. g. , body, mind, soul, and spirit) to upwards of a dozen or more levels.' 7 The theory of the Great Chain has been established for the larger part of human history. There are, however, many variations on the theme of this hierarchy and Wilber has a good summary of them in his Integral Spirituality. The approach I have taken here is to focus on the structure of Meaning as a general system and then establish distinctions within that structure. This approach differs from that taken by Wilber and most other contemporary writers who endeavor to establish differences within a suggested hierarchy that coincide with developmental stages of growth or with a set of psychological features.

The approach I have taken has resulted in a hierarchy of four interrelated levels. Each level represents a context of implicit meaning. It is the underlying structure of Meaning that provides the integration of the four levels of being as well as the order of the hierarchy. These four levels (set out below) have some ancient precedents. For example, Bonaventure (1221–1274) developed a theological model that had three levels of depth. His three levels foreshadow the present model of the pyramid of meaning.

Bonaventure's model involved a three-part depth of understanding of the Word. The Word refers to our place in the universe and how we are intimately connected to, and part of, the Divine. In Bonaventure's model the first level involves the uncreated Word (God) which then created the incarnate Word (humanity) and then thirdly, the expressed or inspired Word (of the bible). Based upon what we now know about human expressions I have extended Bonaventure's three-stage model to include a fourth. What we now know about expressions is that, whatever the medium or form, all human expressions have both a symbolic as well as a cultural dimension. This distinction therefore gives us four vertical levels of meaning. They are: the universal or what I call in this book the 'Host,' which is equivalent to Bonaventure's uncreated Word. At the next level is the 'body' (incarnate Word: the level of physical forms and bodily organization); at the third level is the expressive contexts of 'culture' (made up of community and collective habits); and finally, the fourth level of symbols (abstract forms).

As these levels are levels of meaning they are more correctly called 'contexts' of Meaning. A context of Meaning is a field of implicit meaning and hence each of these is a context of implication. The superposition of self therefore has four simultaneous, interrelated contexts of implication. These are indicated by the next figure:

Figure 4:

The four contexts of Meaning

4 - Symbol – use of abstract forms

3 - Culture – collective habits

2 - Body – concrete forms

1 - Host – essence, implicitness, implicate order

A similar four-part depth of meaning is found in the work of Origen, one of the great Christian theologians of the Third Century Alexandrian School of philosophy. Origen's approach was concerned with the correct spiritual interpretation of the scriptures rather than the nature of being. However, as our interpretive strategies come directly out of our understanding of self, these two, self and interpretation, involve the same operations and the same understandings. Origen's approach was to suggest that when we read the scriptures there are four levels that should be remembered and taken into account in order to arrive at the full spiritual understanding of the text. Origen's four levels are: the literal, the moral, the allegorical and the Logos. 8 These four levels of scriptural interpretation equate with the four contexts of Meaning: symbol, culture, body and the Host.

I can therefore agree with Origen that every text has a literal message that is underpinned by a moral and cultural set of codes, which in turn are contained within an allegorical or general reading created by the individual. This task of reading is always supported by the context of the Logos; the Host, a term that represents the meaning of Meaning. A similar four-part approach to interpreting the scriptures is revealed in the practice of Lectio Divina, a method currently espoused by the Trappist Monk, Father Thomas Keating. 9 The four levels of Lectio Divina are differently named but the aim of this approach is substantially the same as Origen's which is to achieve a depth of spiritual understanding of the scriptures. The four contexts of Lectio Divina are: 'read,' 'reflect,' 'respond, and 'rest in silence.' 10

While the practice of Lectio Divina and the inter-textual approach taken by Origen to scriptural understanding are both concerned with developing a depth of understanding of the scriptures, these practices reflect the contours of Meaning's depth. That depth is illustrated by the next figure that brings the four contexts together within the pyramid of Meaning:

The four levels of self

Figure 5:

Figure 5 represents a multi-layered image of the superposition of self. These four contexts therefore represent the structure of who we truly are as well as our participation in the world. As this depth-image is incorporated into the arc of motion it means that who we are will change as the body grows older.

One of the important implications of this image of depth relates to profundity. Put another way, the structure of Meaning (and therefore the structure of the Numinous) has four interrelated contexts which have a hierarchy or a progression of profundity. For example, the least meaning is made through exchanges of symbols. This happens for two reasons. The first is that, as a general rule, there is always more meaning within contexts than in the exchanges of constituent symbols. Secondly, the current bias in this Age of Reason is to focus on explicit meaning generated by symbolic exchanges and to ignore contextual and implied meaning. As a consequence of these two symbolic exchanges at the top of the pyramid any meaning tends not to reach downward to other contexts but tends towards closing off meaning in the confined space within the apex of the pyramid.

As the pyramid model indicates, the foundation context of self (our essence) is the infinite context of the Host. This is the context of infinite Meaning and that infinity is always implicit meaning. If our cultural bias is opposed to seriously paying attention to the implicit meaning of contexts then it is a short step to dismissing the whole idea of an impersonal Host context. This conclusion by atheists is a prime example of closing off meaning in the cramped apex of the pyramid.

The progression of profundity down through the pyramid also includes both the contexts of culture and the body. The context of culture involves both the manifest outwards signs of culture as well as the implied meaning of our collective habits; our 'swarm intelligence'; and our participation in a community. As I have just indicated, our cultural habits of expression can inhibit profundity by closing off meaning. However, these habits can also promote a greater depth of understanding through traditions that value the circularity of self-reflection through a sense of community and in particular, by cultural analysis. As for the context of the body, this also displays both explicit and implicit meaning. Implicit meaning at this level is more dense and layered than at the levels above. Such implicitness involves the organization of the body and that includes the organization of all physical forms through particles, cells, tissue and organs as well as social behavior.

Washing up

Everything we do and everything we are carries a density and depth of meaning. Some idea of this depth of meaning can be seen in the following exercise. This is an exercise which can be applied to any action or event. It involves naming each of the four levels of the action or event and a process of understanding the interconnections that construct the overall event. For this exercise I could have focused on an in-depth reading of the scriptures, as does Father Thomas Keating. However, a more usual and less religious task is washing up after a meal. This mundane task is just as appropriate an example of Meaning's density as Lectio Divina or Origen's approach. As more people wash up more often than perform a depth reading of the scriptures I will use this as my example.

The task of washing up can have a range of physical settings—the kitchen, the back yard, or the creek—and these settings are normally considered to be the environment in which the activity takes place. This common binary view can be represented in the following manner:

[washing up] environment

The environment is not, however, a single undifferentiated context. Rather it is composed of four contexts that surround and embed every activity. For example, the task of washing up is usually embedded in symbols that are made manifest by language. The task of washing up is itself a social expression and so can be seen as a feature of culture. Some of the more common aspects of language, such as talking, thinking about the job at hand, or prescriptions about how to do it, help orient and motivate us towards the task. In this sense, thinking represents a symbolic feature. The most immediate context of washing up is, therefore, symbolic:

[washing up] symbols

However, the simple task of washing up does not occur in a cultural vacuum. Rather, it carries within it a great many cultural and sub-cultural assumptions related to the issues of when it is carried out, who does it, and in what manner. We therefore need another set of brackets to represent this cultural context:

[ [ washing up] ] culture

As every housekeeper knows, washing up does not happen by itself; it needs the active engagement of an individual body. Associated with how I manage the physical operations of the task will be my sense of personal identity, and how this identity is supported or undermined by the cultural meaning and attitudes associated with the task. I represent this further context with the next set of brackets:

[ [ [ washing up] ] ] body

Finally, the task of washing up is above all else a meaning making one. The meaning of this meaning making is generated by the nature of Meaning itself, which is the Host context of the task. A few of us may acknowledge this context by offering up the activity to the Lord as a gift; as a way of serving others. For the rest, washing up is likely to be just a non-contextual pain in the butt. Whatever our attitude towards this task we can see from this exercise that even simple actions have a depth of meaning that is entirely integrated, so much so that no part can be separated from the whole. Every activity will therefore be surrounded by four contexts of meaning represented in the following manner:

[ [ [ [ washing up] ] ] ] the Host

Every action or event carries this depth of meaning whether it is flying a rocket to Mars, sitting an exam, climbing a mountain, saying a prayer or writing up the special theory of relativity. Everything we do has a spiritual depth and a set of potentials which we may or may not realize. If we are living in the past we may see ourselves as a victim of washing up. If we live in the future we may see this activity as an annoyance that keeps us from enjoying another life. Fully living in the no-time of the present is to experience washing up as the correct activity.

Living in the no-time of the present is perhaps easier in a beautiful landscape. There we can take in the beauty by seeing beyond the visible forms to a spiritual depth of meaning that encompasses the implicitness of the cosmic Host. The multi-layering of who I am establishes this possibility of seeing beauty around us and of seeing ourselves writ large, not in the narrow sense of puffing up the ego, but in a holographic sense of a miniature wave that is reflected in the macrocosmic ocean depths of the universe. Such a possibility, where the four levels of self play together in harmony, represents the geography of an epiphany.

To summarize: Meaning has both order and depth. Meaning's order relates to motion, that is to the transformations associated with concrete or abstract forms that progress through an arc. Every motion begins out of the Numinous stillness of symmetry and then such motions gradually unfold into states of explicit and differential extension. The motion of this arc continues so that after a while the explicit forms gradually become enfolded again into the infinite implicit context out of which they arose. This is the motion of a seed that grows, shoots, buds, flowers and then dies. The arc of motion is discussed more fully in Section 2. In contrast, Meaning's depth relates to the four contexts of self. These four contexts are discussed more fully in the following chapters.
3 – The Superposition of Self

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said that the key to understanding the universe was an understanding of your own subjectivity. By 'subjectivity' he meant something larger than personal opinions, more like being or self. In this chapter I address the structure of the self. Another way of speaking about the structure of self is to refer to it as the structure of the Numinous. As Meaning is circular and infinite it is possible to refer to the Numinous as the self. This is the approach I intend to take here. The reason for this approach is that 'self' implies participation and this is the nature of Meaning. The self has four contexts and their simultaneous, multi-layered structure can be spoken about as the superposition of self.

Superposition is a principle of quantum physics. This principle claims that before an object is observed or measured we do not know the state it is in because it is in all possible states. It is the act of observation and measurement that causes the object to be limited to a single state. The principle of superposition implies a creative role for consciousness, not only in the act of observation and measurement but also as the implied, energetic background that is full of the potentials for all possible states. While quantum physics is interested in the micro world of particles, we are interested in the self. In this case, the principle of superposition relates to the very structure of mind and Meaning. As such the concept of 'superposition' provides us with a guide to the structure of self.

In regard to the self, superposition acts in reverse to the principles of quantum physics. Instead of moving from all possible states, through the processes of observation, into a single state, in the case of Meaning our sense of who we are is never constituted by any single steady state or identity. In other words, our sense of self will always be constructed from a composite multi-layering of four states (contexts). As a consequence, the principle of superposition, in relation to Meaning, claims there is no private, single, steady state or identity for any individual, whatever their culture. This principle suggests that there is no separate, solo mind isolated from other minds or the environment or from the singular cosmic mind of the Numinous One. It means that the individual is a participator in a participatory universe. The universe in which we are participators has four simultaneous contexts: Host, body, culture and symbols (Figure 6). The simultaneous interactions of these four contexts stand as the permanent, and at times, unstable sense of who we truly are. These four contexts also imply that we are participants in the motions of the universe as these motions arise from the Host potentials of cosmic consciousness.

The superposition of self:

Figure 6:

Figure 6 is a map of mind and of how we interpret the world, and also how we see ourselves and others. It is a model of the local mind and its connections to the infinite mind of the Numinous. The local mind thinks and expresses itself through bodily movements and cultural habits, and with symbols. The infinite mind of the Host represents the foundational context that provides the medium of Meaning by which the local mind is able to create and express itself.

Figure 6 is of a map that has no outside. Even though the image of a pyramid indicates there is an outside to this particular image, the impression I want to convey is that Meaning has no outside. This is to say there is no special meaning outside of Meaning. Hence, there is no physical environment and world of events existing outside of these four contexts and neither is there any special kind of knowledge that is produced by means other than these four contexts. This is not saying that the physical world is imaginary or an illusion. The concrete forms of the physical world, like the abstract world of symbols, certainly exist but they do so at the level of the body as derivative and secondary forms of meaning.

The third law of Meaning says it has agency, order and organization. It follows then that each level of the self possesses a certain kind of agency or causality and therefore has a certain organizational integrity. Given the derivative nature of the second, third and fourth contexts it means that the organizational agency of the second, third and forth levels are relative and so conditional upon the first. This means that the organizational agency of these three levels is relative, conditional and derivative of the Host context which is absolute in the sense that it is omnipotent. The context of the Host therefore has absolute agency and infinite potentials in relation to the organization of all movements and forms.

The agency of an individual person is therefore a four-part agency. The organization of an individual is composed of three parts that are relative and conditional and one part that is absolute. This mixture of the relative with the absolute means that the four parts of the self are neither separated from each other, yet neither are they identical. It also means that to know who we are we must become acquainted with the relative and conditional agency of symbols, culture and our body, as well as with the absolute agency of the Host. For each of these contexts I give a short summary and then extended descriptions in the next four chapters.

Symbols

The fourth context of self involves the symbols of language, measurement, mathematics and money, each of which is associated with abstract forms and thought. In general, the conditional agency of this relative context concerns the manner in which meaning is both hidden and revealed by our use of symbols. (I discuss more fully this contradictory function in Chapter 6). What is important about this context is that we should not simply use symbols without regard to their inherent relative autonomy and agency. If we disregard the agency of this context then the symbols we use will appear to change from their relative agency into an absolute agency. Under such misguided thinking the symbols we use will dominate our lives and lead to our thought patterns becoming rigid and fixed.

Such thinking reverses the relative for the absolute. This reversal can easily happen whenever we over-value the precise explicit details of measurements, money, logic or empirical data and then also disregard the wider context. Meaning is essentially holistic and self-reflective (second law). Whenever we dismiss self-reflection in favor of precise sequential logic or reasoning or measurement then we will be out of tune with the nature of Meaning. When out of tune with Meaning we are lulled by the social conditioning inherent in the collective representations of spin, rhetoric or orthodoxy. The current modernist orthodoxy of positivism is particularly prone to this tendency because of its strict avoidance of self-reflection and the value it places on explicit differences that separate.

A positivistic attitude towards symbols is usually accompanied by the delusional belief that their use can provide us with the certainty of truth and predictability. However, the conditional agency of this context can only ever provide, under the very best conditions, provisional truths that are continually open to correction. The famous Russian physiologist, Ivan Petrovich Pavlov called this context of symbols the 'second signal system' and declared that its use by humans made us distinct from other animals. However, when we take this context for granted and pay little attention to the contradictions of its conditional agency then our responses will tend to imitate the habitual conditioning of animals.

Culture

The relative agency and organization of the third level of self: culture relates to collective representations or what could be called our 'swarm intelligence.' 'Swarm intelligence' is a term used to describe the in-flight maneuvres of birds or the co-coordinated activities in bee hives or termite mounds. As consciousness is singular, the term can apply equally to humans. This is particularly so in regard to our collective habits. Owen Barfield said that collective representations tend to constitute 'the world we all accept as real.' 1 The 'real' world is thus derived from the swarm intelligence of our cultural habits. This identification occurs when our identity is identified with the collective identity.

When we identify ourselves with a cultural institution we tend to make the third context of self dominant in a manner that makes it seem absolute. This kind of warping of the contexts of self unbalances our thought processes so we are unable to truly know who we are or what is real. Yet within contemporary Western society the mainstream, positivist orthodoxy constructs a 'real' material world which appears independent from the processes of observation. The swarm intelligence of this view makes us believe that each of us is a separate, private and isolated person living in a dead universe.

Collective habits are also collective ways to forget. What is usually forgotten by the Positivist is the relative status of this context. As a consequence, the Positivist does not remember that all cultural views, beliefs and systems are relative and provisional. The Positivist finds certainty in the 'real' (by which he means the separation of the physical world from subjectivity) by forgetting about the agency of his culture. Like the fiction writer who tells a story from the omnipotent point of view, the Positivist has tended to assume an objective and omnipotent point of view. Unlike most fiction writers, scientists do not normally take into account their own language and cultural contexts. Yet the scientist and the fiction writer cannot escape the four levels of their own self simply by assuming they are not there. This is not to say that positivistic science or fiction writing is meaningless, only that through their conventions each tends to exclude a great deal of meaning from their thinking.

Positivistic attitudes are always questionable but in this moment in history, they are pervasive. Barfield refers to this kind of forgetting as the making of idols. An idol is made, he writes, when the relative status of a representation is forgotten and it becomes instead a 'real' and unqualified reality. Communities that create the 'real' world of idols suffer from idolatry. This is a state of mind which does not only refer to some primitive forms of religious worship; it also refers to many common features of modernist scientific thought. (I have more to say about the context of culture in Chapter 7).

Body

The relative agency and organization of the body context is more complex than symbols and culture. This is the context in which time, space and all the concrete forms of the physical universe come into existence. It is also the context of pre-reflective consciousness which involves every communication system in the body. The most important physical system associated with how we think abstractly is the nervous system and in particular the two hemispheres of the brain. The two hemispheres of the brain do not have absolute agency as many biologists seem to assume. Rather, they act as the physical vehicles through which various kinds of meanings are made and a range of thoughts are created. I am therefore making a critical distinction here between the Positivist view of the body, seen as an absolute and material causal agent and the conditional view which understands the body to have relative agency like that of a physical instrument.

The differences between these views are incorporated within the story by the neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor who wrote about her experiences of surviving a stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain. In My Stroke of Insight she tells us that for the right hemisphere of the brain no time exists other than the present moment. She goes on to say that, 'The experience of joy happens in the present moment. Our perception and experience of connection with something that is greater than ourselves occurs in the present moment.' 2 Jill Bolte Taylor also says that while the right hemisphere deals with non-verbal communication and the big picture it also orients our body in space. The kind of meaning made by the right hemisphere is therefore meaning that is implicit.

In contrast, she tells us that the left hemisphere deals with language and speech and how words are formed out of letters in linear sequences. The left brain is the seat of our analytical judgment and the place where boundaries are defined. It is where the details of past, present and future time are constructed. These are the descriptions of explicit meaning making. Jill Bolte Taylor goes on to say:

My left hemisphere personality takes pride in its ability to categorize, organize, describe, judge, and critically analyse absolutely everything ... Regardless of whether my mouth is running, my left mind stays busy theorizing, rationalizing, and memorizing ... Our right mind character values humanity, while our left mind character concerns itself with finances and economy. 3

Like most medical professionals, Jill Bolte Taylor does not speak about the kinds of meaning made by each of the hemispheres. She does, however, refer to her left and right 'minds' as well as her feelings and thoughts that are associated with both hemispheres. As Meaning and mind are the two sides of the same coin we can say that the difference between the left and right hemisphere of the brain relates to the kind of meaning that each hemisphere makes. Thus the left hemisphere makes explicit meaning that is focused on detail, outline, extension and forms—both the concrete forms of the environment and the abstract forms of symbols. These processes indicate that the left hemisphere is predisposed towards explicit differentiation, which means that it is taken up with constructing explicit non-symmetrical and asymmetrical relations and systems.

In contrast, we can say that the right hemisphere normally deals in contextual meaning, that is, implicit connections associated with our feelings, and with the larger picture or the transcendent context of the Host. The right brain is where we experience the inner peace, stillness and joy of the present moment and hence this is where the symmetry of cosmic consciousness registers. The two hemispheres of the brain work intimately together on almost every action we undertake. They represent the physical hard-wiring of our mind. In other words, we are hard-wired to feel and express the joy of connection, love and empathy, yet we are also hard-wired to express the hard-edge of differentiation, detail and critical analysis. In terms of making meaning, what is important is not the inherited hard-wiring of two hemispheres of the brain, but how we use these hemispheres to make life meaningful. This is the perspective that says we essentially are meaning and we have a body and the body does not have us.

An important aspect of having a body is the value we give to the body context itself. How we value the body relates directly to our cultural predispositions. These dispositions can be dominated by left brain values or they can express a balanced and relative view which makes use of both hemispheres of the brain. If our cultural predispositions are dominated by modernist orthodoxies they will be the results of left brain mindsets. In these circumstances we will be more likely to view the body's material causality as absolute. If this is the case then the role of thoughts and thinking (meaning) will be relegated, in medical circles at least, to the idea of epiphenomena, or perhaps in medical experiments to the placebo effect—the not 'really' real.

If, on the other hand our cultural predispositions acknowledge implicit meaning, and all that that entails, then the two hemispheres of the brain will be seen as the physical pathways through which the two conditions of meaning (implicit and explicit) are processed. From this balanced view the explicitly detailed functions of the left brain should be offset against the contextual insights of the right, and their balance will produce a culture that values the unity of differences. From this balanced perspective 'we have a body' and as a consequence, the body will be seen to have only relative organization and agency. This organization and agency will therefore always be part of the larger organizational context of the Host.

It is fascinating to read the first hand experiences of Jill Bolte Taylor, a scientist who experienced what was going on in her brain when most of the left hemisphere was out of action. Jill Bolte Taylor's scientific training leads her to speak about the brain as 'having her,' as causing the functioning of her mind: 'I see red because the cells in my left brain tell me I like red.' Yet she also writes as a survivor of a stroke and the language she uses to express this experience is different. She speaks about tending the garden of your mind through self-reflective questioning. These two conflicting discourses reflect much that is inherently wrong with medical science today. On the one hand medical science strives for a sympathetic, right hemisphere bedside manner, yet at the same time dismisses the role that thoughts play in creating illness or health (left mind dominant).

From the perspective of Meaning, the cultural thought patterns of mechanical and positivistic science tells a schizoid story about the private and separate worlds of subjectivity existing in a dead but 'real' universe. The unfortunate effect of such stories is that we become confused about the true nature of who we are while also feeling alienated from our environment. The essential problem with such positivistic thought patterns is they are not self-reflective and do not take into account their own patterns of thought or the role of meaning generally (low right brain functions). Such non self-reflection unfortunately produces positivistic cultural patterns that reinforce, through over-stimulation, the operations of the left hemisphere of the brain. In this manner differential and explicit meaning is intensified, so much so that splits and separations are created in an otherwise interconnected world. As a consequence of this physical and mental collaboration a particular set of cultural thought patterns are produced that disproportionally strengthening the operations of the left hemisphere of the brain. The cultural result is positivism, a doctrine that eschews self-reflection and defends itself against right brain implicit meaning.

This collaboration of mental and physical is also found in relation to the assumptions we make as to how the concrete forms of the environment come into existence. For example, science usually considers that an objective physical world exists independently from our perceiving it. This belief is classic left brain positivism which contains its own contradiction. The contradiction is that the separate physical world is itself a feature of a mind that comes to this conclusion by using symbols within a cultural setting. In whatever way we turn it is impossible to jump out of our minds or move beyond Meaning.

My friend Clinton took up this point by asking, 'did the universe exist before mankind could observe it?' Owen Barfield deals with this kind of question in his book, Saving the Appearances. He answers it by saying that our recognition of the world is the work of subjective construction, a process he calls figuration. From Barfield's perspective we construct the universe through our figurations and thus the extended forms of this construction do not exist before such figurations. Barfield goes on to suggest that how we construct the world by figuration is easier to appreciate when we say that there is no such thing as an unseen rainbow, but may be harder to grasp when we say there is no such thing as an unheard noise or an unfelt solidity. 4 (I discuss these questions further in Chapter 8.) From the balanced perspective of Meaning, the concrete forms of the physical world exist as the physical body exists and that is as the manifest and secondary features of a broader contextual and transcendental consciousness. As such they have relative organization and agency only and are subject to the laws of Meaning as are the other contexts of self.

To return for a moment to Jill Bolte Taylor's story of her stroke, she says, 'It is clear to me that this body functioned like a portal through which the energy of who I am can be beamed.' 5 In this beautiful and balanced (left and right brain) sentence she has captured the relative agency of the body; as a portal or a doorway, through which the energy of who I am can be beamed. The instrument of a doorway having a relative and secondary status in distinction to the essence of 'who I am' is a valid strategy for thinking. The ordering that is implicit within this sentence is the order within the superposition of self. This is an order inherent in the sentence, 'I have a body.' This is an order in which agency and organization are relative and conditional in regard to symbols, culture and the body but absolute in respect to the Host: the meaning of Meaning.

The Host

The Host is the first context of the Numinous and as a consequence, it represents the impersonal foundation of the self. It is the essential foundation stillness for everything that moves. It is the implicit potentials of who I am. It is the knower, the sight within the mechanics of seeing and the recognitions we have within the processes of hearing, smelling, tasting, and feeling as well as the realization within our thoughts and thinking. It is the ineffable connection we have to everything. It is the spiritual and universal impulse that is inherent within every movement and action. It is the source of our nostalgia for paradise and longing for perfection. 6

Why use this term 'Host' for this context? Does it matter what we call this all-pervasive sea of energy that undergirds, and is manifest in, all phenomena? In The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos the cosmologist, Brian Swimme muses over what to call this non-visible reality that equates with the ground state of the universe. He dismisses a variety of terms such as 'quantum fields,' 'quantum potential,' 'false vacuum,' 'possibility wave' and 'universal wave function.' Rather, he settles on the 'all-nourishing abyss' because 'the universe emerged out of the all-nourishing abyss not only fifteen billion years ago but in every moment.' 7 He describes this all-nourishing abyss as an 'unseen ocean of potentiality ... that has an infinity of generative power.'

Another view comes from Hal Puthoff. At the time of writing Puthoff was Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Austin, Texas. A theoretical/experimental physicist, Puthoff often writes about the relationship between quantum vacuum energy research and metaphysics. In an article on quantum vacuum energy Puthoff states:

Throughout mankind's cultural history there has existed the metaphysical concept that man and cosmos are interconnected by a ubiquitous, all-pervasive sea of energy that undergirds, and is manifest in, all phenomena ... contemporary physics similarly posits an all-pervasive energetic field called quantum vacuum energy, or zero-point energy. 8

Yet another example of scientists interested in this deeper context comes from David W. Thomson III and Jim D. Bourassa whose book; Secrets of the Aether describes a universal force called a Gforce. The authors argue that the Gforce 'is everywhere in the universe and is singularly responsible for holding the entire universe together.' 9 The Gforce is calculated to be equal to 1.21 x 1044 newton or 121 million, billion, billion, billion, billion newtons, which is an enormous force. Thomson and Bourassa speak of this universal force as the higher universal order of God.

Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunne call this deeper and more extensive source of reality the Source. 10 David Bohm called this context the implicate order; Buddhists refer to it as Buddha; Lao Tsu called it the Tao (The Way); the mystic Bonaventure called it the uncreated Word; and Meister Eckhart referred to it as God and said that 'God was being.' 11 In the Old Testament it is sometimes referred to as 'I am' and in Hindu mysticism as 'It' or 'This' or 'That.' Hafiz, the Sufi poet refers to it as 'the Beloved.' In this book I call this un-measurable, transparent intelligent force-field of energy and implicitness, the Host.

I believe that names are important because they tend to provide the sight lines of speaking; of where we have come from and where we are likely to go. For example, if I use the title 'Gforce' then readers will expect a spray of mathematical formulas. In contrast, if I use 'the uncreated Word' they will expect a Christian discourse based on the scripture. Similarly, if I use the 'Tao' they could reasonably expect some meditative poetry.

In addition, I think the name for this infinite field of implicitness should not have negative connotations, as in 'void,' 'abyss,' 'zero' and 'vacuum,' all of which suggest emptiness, lack or loss. In contrast, each of the terms 'al Lah,' 'Buddha,' 'Brahma' and 'God' have a strong religious and institutional history that sits uneasily in this postsecular framework with its focus on direct, implicit spiritual connections. While religion is often defined in terms of spirituality the two are distinct. For example, some religious observances have little to do with fostering and developing implicit connections to the spiritual foundation of the self. For all these reasons I think the more positive term 'Host' is useful because it implies a supportive yet essentially spiritual energetic domain that is the supportive foundation of all human behavior no matter one's religious belief.

As for the attributes of the Host, a point to note about the graphics in Figure 6 is the lack of a bottom to the geometric form of the pyramid. This is because the open base of the pyramid represents the essential and infinite universality of Meaning's potentials from which the other three contexts unfold. In his classic study The Perennial Philosophy, Aldous Huxley writes, 'The divine Ground of all existence is a spiritual Absolute, ineffable in terms of discursive thought, but (in certain circumstances) susceptible of being directly experienced.' 12 The divine ground of all existence can, however, be spoken about in terms of Meaning and there are many circumstances in which most of us have experienced its essential vitality in the depths of who we are. (I discuss the attributes of the Host in more detail in Chapter 9.)

When taking these four layers of self into account we come to realize that before everything else, we are spiritual beings. Our essence is Meaning. We will live a spiritual life when conforming to the order inherent within this superposition. Secondly, the superposition of self indicates that we live and make meaning through our body; the physical instrument by which we express ourselves. Thirdly, we live as part of a community within a cultural framework, and finally, we live through the use of symbols. These four levels are lived simultaneously yet they are not equal. The order within the self begins with the spiritual Host and moves through the physical body to the cultural and then to the symbolic. This is an order dictated by Meaning. When we live in harmony with that hierarchical order we will live spiritual lives. When we make meaning in opposition to that order we will be alienated from our self to the degree of that opposition.
4 – Intelligent Energy

The zoologist Richard Dawkins considers that a belief in God is a delusion divorced from the hard-nosed empirical evidence of science. 1 In contrast, the physicist Paul Davies considers it is time for our understanding of the divine to be part of our common scientific view of the world. 2 If Davies' view is correct and Speaking of the Numinous suggests it is, eventually we will not have two kinds of knowledge of the world, one scientific and the other religious, rather we will have an integrated and holographic science in which Meaning is a central feature. In this chapter I want to look at some of the possible connections that may lead to a more integrated, holistic and spiritual science.

One of the most distasteful features of the secular and scientific view is the idea that we live in a universe that is dead and insentient. This view tells us that the physical universe is devoid of being and without spirituality or any Numinous dimension. A common religious response to this secular view is to argue that there is purpose in our lives and within the physical world. Charles Birch's On Purpose is one example of a Christian scientist's response to this secular orthodoxy. From a different religious tradition, The Self-Aware Universe by Amit Goswami has a similar aim.

Both Birch and Goswami are scientists who accept the orthodoxy of realism as well as the scientific method. Their approaches have tended to reproduce a God of Gaps view. The God of Gaps refers to the idea that God exists in the 'gaps' of scientific knowledge. The difficulty with this idea is that as the gaps in scientific knowledge shrink so does the place for God. In addition, such approaches tend to accept as inherent the separation of the religious from the scientific.

While disagreeing with a secular view of the universe my postsecular response contrasts with these essentially religious views. A postsecular response is concerned with the ways in which science can become more holistic and inclusive so that there are no gaps between the Numinous and the physical but only an interconnected continuum. For this integration to occur Meaning has to become an explicit feature of physics. Should this integration ever occur the universe would once again officially be seen as an enchanted and spiritual domain. And for that to transpire our mechanical view of a world composed of separate objects that affect each other through material causes would have to change. As I have already stated, in this book I argue that the quintessential force of the Numinous operates prior to the physical world and it is therefore the source and causal force that orders and structures every particle and point in the universe.

This is not a theological argument which is why I describe it as postsecular. Rather it focuses on the ways in which the laws of Meaning generate the order and organization of the universe. In other words, these laws of the Numinous represent the organizational structures of mind, life and society as well as the physical world. For physics and mechanical science in general, the Numinous has traditionally been deleted from the picture through the convenience of never explicitly making the factors of order and organization a central issue of concern. Rather, in physics, order and organization and therefore Meaning have always been implied aspects of the way in which physical objects are seen to interact.

A postsecular approach aims to discover the organizational relationships that come to light when Meaning is placed explicitly within the reference frame of energy and matter. When Meaning is placed together with energy and matter the universe is re-enchanted by three general propositions. These are:

i) that meaning is intelligent energy;

ii) that intelligence is an inherent feature of energy, in the manner that energy is an inherent feature of matter; and

iii) that meaning is only evident at very low levels of energy.

E = MC2

In Albert Einstein's famous equation the relationship between energy and matter (mass) is represented by the equation: E = MC2. This equation tells us that energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. How are we to understand this equation? The common understanding of energy and matter is that they are different from each other—as in the table is different from the electricity in the power point. Einstein's equation challenges this everyday view by suggesting that when an object has mass it also has a certain energy equivalence. This use of the term 'equivalence' can be understood to mean the 'same as,' hence, energy is the same as matter. This is also a common view held by many scientists. Yet there is a third way to understand Einstein's equation. In this view energy and matter are the same yet different. In their paper 'Beyond E=MC2,' Bernard Haisch, Alfonso Rueda and H. E. Puthoff argue that mass and energy are not equivalent. Instead they say that 'the physical universe is made up of massless electric charges immersed in a vast, energetic, all-pervasive electromagnetic field.' 3 They suggest that mass is created by the interactions of these charges and the broader electromagnetic field. In other words, mass (matter) represents a secondary effect of energy and is therefore not equal to energy. Rather, Haisch, Rueda and Puthoff argue that mass is energy.

An important feature of this view is that matter is no longer considered to be a primary or fundamental property of the universe. In the view of Haisch, Rueda and Puthoff the universe is made up of a vast, all-pervasive field of energy. This all pervasive electromagnetic field is called the zero-point field (ZPF). This name comes from evidence that the field exists even in a vacuum at the temperature of absolute zero where all thermal radiation is absent. The same yet different view leads us to understand that matter (mass) represents a secondary or derivative level of reality; the primary level being energy. In this view, energy and matter are, at some point on a continuum, the same phenomenon (energy), yet at another point on the continuum they are different.

A further point needs to be made about this equation in relation to the general issue of Meaning. This is the assertion that Einstein's equation is not complete. There is something missing from it. What is missing? The element that is missing is some reference to meaning per se. Einstein's equation makes meaning through its symbolic expressions and the cultural understandings of reader and writer. Yet there is no explicit reference to meaning or Meaning in this equation. This is to say there is no mathematical reference (and so no explication) that represents the element of meaning used to create the order and organization of the expressions used in the equation. The erasure of this self-reflective component has important ramifications in terms of the completeness of the equation which is usually taken to be universally applicable.

In this famous equation both explicit and implicit meanings play an important role in constructing the concepts and computations as they do in all equations and mathematical measurements. Yet these important symbolic factors are not represented here. What does this say about the completeness of this equation? Surely it says that this is an incomplete equation and therefore the subject matter to which it refers (the universal relationship between energy and matter) must also be incompletely represented. In other words, even though the equation itself generates meaning, the connection between meaning, energy and matter is not taken into account by the equation.

How could we begin to represent a more complete formulation of these factors? The first and simplest way is to put them together as explicit factors, such as:

MEANING ENERGY MATTER

The justification for this three-part inclusion is the evidence of Einstein's equation which implies that meaning itself is as much a fundamental factor in the physics of the universe as are the categories of energy and matter. In his book Unfolding Meaning 4 David Bohm also recognizes this connection by bringing these three factors together in an interesting and inclusive way. He links meaning to energy and matter in the process he calls 'enfoldment.' According to Bohm, matter enfolds energy and meaning while energy enfolds matter and meaning, but in addition, meaning enfolds matter and energy. The consequence of such a three-way enfoldment process is that any object, such as a particle or the human body will have both energy and meaning.

This three-way enfoldment is a significant challenge to the usual interpretation of Einstein's famous equation. There are also some far reaching consequences of introducing MEANING into this mix as an explicit factor, rather than by way of implication. Let us return, however, to Bohm's consideration of these three factors. He concluded that even though meaning is enfolded in energy and matter, it is the most fundamental and, therefore, the base of the other two. Hence his design:

ENERGY MEANING MATTER

Bohm came to the conclusion that meaning was the most fundamental because we are able to sensibly discuss the concept of the 'meaning of meaning.' The meaning of meaning carries the implication that it can enfold itself whereas we cannot have the matter of matter or the energy of energy. He saw that meaning could refer to itself directly while the other two could not, and because of this self-reflective factor the possibility arises of a reflective consciousness that can comprehend the whole, including itself. 5

Intelligence

Bohm's conclusion about meaning enfolding energy implies a universal continuum in which Meaning is always enfolded in energy and then both are enfolded in matter. I am suggesting that this is the case and that this is why the universe is alive and has meaning for us. Meaning is contained within every particle and point (mass) in the universe yet it also represents the knowing, realization and intelligence we have about these connections. In this regard meaning itself can be considered to be the result of two enfolded elements: intelligence and energy. If we change Bohm's term 'enfolded' to a term more in keeping with the nature of meaning then we would say that meaning always contains the implication of energy and intelligence.

The term 'intelligence' implies a basic 'awareness' and 'knowledge,' and these are always implied whenever we use the term 'Meaning.' (In Chapter 9 intelligence is discussed in more detail.) Hence meaning always assumes an inherent intelligence and, in addition, always carries a charge or force. The presence of both intelligence and energy provides us with the idea of 'intelligent energy' which stands as a functional description of meaning. Some evidence for the combination of intelligence and energy comes from the low energy states of brain activity. Many scientists link states of mental functioning to low level brain-wave frequencies.

The brain is usually seen as an electrochemical organ that can generate low energy states up to 100 micro volts. The electrical activity of the brain is normally measured in waves. These waves vary from one cycle per second (Hz) up to around 100 Hz and this range is conventionally divided into five groups of frequencies:

gamma waves (40–100 Hz) are associated with focus, peak performances, meditation;

beta waves (13–30 + Hz) are associated with alert thinking and working;

alpha waves (8–13 Hz) are associated with relaxation, rest and reflection;

theta waves (4–7 Hz) are associated with reveries, images and light sleep;

delta waves (1–4 Hz) represent the low energy component of deep sleep.

In these conventional descriptions it is taken for granted that these various energy levels coincide with different mental states. Within this assumption there is an association of intelligence and energy, or intelligent energy. This combination is the character of Meaning.

More evidence of this combination of intelligence and energy comes from cell organization, for example, from how cells 'know' when to differentiate early on in their development and then 'remember' this change in order to pass it on to subsequent generations of cells. Furthermore, this connection of intelligence and energy supplies an answer to the question of how and when cells use different genetic information and also how a cell 'knows' enough about its neighboring cell's movements to work out how it fits into the overall scheme of things. Hence the intelligent energy (meaning) associated with cell organization enables cells to know a range of things. But meaning as intelligent energy also provides support for the idea that so called 'information' contained within the micro world of the quantum field guides elementary particles, in other words, that particles know what is going on around them.

In relation to the quantum field, Bohm has suggested the term 'active information' rather than 'meaning' or 'intelligent energy.' 6 For Bohm, 'active' information is distinct from 'passive' information which is the kind used in information theory. According to Bohm, active information is a special kind of information that determines, among other things, the movement of particles. Active information has nothing to do with our knowledge of things. Active information operates on its own and beyond our knowledge in a process that, according to Bohm, 'in-forms.' It does this by having a significant 'form' or pattern but very little energy. According to Bohm the form of the vibration enters into and directs a much greater energy force. This happens in a radio when the patterns carried by the radio wave give a form to the energy provided by the power plug through the amplifier.

While Bohm's comment about the enfoldment of energy and meaning (form) provides us with an important example of meaning as intelligent energy, Bohm himself had no analysis of meaning. Yet I suggest his term 'active information' comes close to the idea of intelligent energy. In addition, the distinction he makes between active information and ordinary information that is associated with our knowledge of things is a distinction mirrored by the distinction between the Meaning of the Host and the meaning making we employ through the secondary contexts of body, culture and symbols.

Polarity gradient

The argument above involving the three terms energy – meaning – matter suggests a three-part continuum where each part involves not an identity but a polarity. For example, in matter there is enfolded energy, hence the polarity here is explicit matter but implicit (enfolded) energy. With high levels of energy there is an explicit force and also enfolded meaning/intelligence, while with meaning there is a low level of energy but also intelligence. This continuum of polarities therefore establishes a hierarchy that runs from meaning to energy to matter and in the process mirrors Bohm's order for MEANING, ENERGY and MATTER.

In order to justify this hierarchy of meaning – energy – matter let us begin by taking the example of a macro object like a table. When observed, a table appears to be 'pure' matter. It does not appear in observation to be enfolded energy. We know this appearance of matter is only half the story and that macro objects do have energy concealed (enfolded) within. Hence the polarity of matter involves something which is revealed and something which is concealed. What is revealed by such objects as tables is the differential extension of their concrete solidity and their inertia, both of which can be spoken of in terms of asymmetrical and non-symmetrical relations. What is concealed is their energy potentials.

I suggest a similar polarity exists in relation to the 'pure' energy of electricity. Thunderbolts or the electricity from power points appear to be pure and not contaminated by anything other than the various features commonly associated with an electrical charge. In Bohm's terms there appears to be nothing enfolded within strong energy charges. Bohm uses a specific phrase here to denote this state. He calls it 'essentially unformed energy.' By this he means that the strong charges from the power point are not in-formed until they are given a form by the weaker patterns of the radio wave. If we were to accept uncritically Bohm's description of 'pure' unformed energy then energy per se would have no polarity.

However, the question arises, how is it possible for a strong unformed energy, like the energy from the power point, to be given a patterned form by a weaker energy source such as a radio wave? For this transformation to take place the stronger charge would have to be sympathetic in some way to patterning enfolded within the weaker charge. Hence, it would need to contain informing 'potentials.' In other words, the explicit patterns carried by the weaker radio wave would need to be able to stimulate already existing potentials held within the stronger energy source. This capacity for changing potentials into actual vibrations represents a set of transformational implications that must be held within all strong energy states, like lightning.

In terms of Meaning, 'potentials' refers to implicit meaning, for implicit meaning is characterized by its hidden potentials. (We should remember that such potentials also contain the implications of intelligence.) Hence Bohm's 'essentially unformed energy' represents a strong charge that by necessity enfolds the 'potential for being informed.' What are therefore enfolded within all electrical changes are the intelligent potentials of implicit meaning. What is revealed is the explicit strength of the charge. Like the polarity of matter, what is concealed in strong energy charges are the informing potentials of intelligence, while what is revealed is the explicit strength of the change. Here is the polarity of energy.

A third and similar polarity exists with low energy states. This time the polarity involves the term 'intelligence.' In relation to the low energy states of a radio wave or brain activity the form of the intelligence is translated by the form of vibrations. 'Form' and 'intelligence' are overlapping terms as it is the form of the vibration which always carries the differential meaning of the intelligence. In other words, it is the form of the vibrations in subtle energy states that makes manifest the explicit nature of the intelligence. As a consequence, what is revealed in the polarity of low energy states is the differential form of the intelligence. What is hidden within low energy states are the implications of the forms, but in addition the implicit potentials of the Numinous. This polarity represents a description of the two—explicit and implicit—conditions of meaning.

In summary, the three-part continuum of meaning – energy – matter creates a polarity gradient that has the following polarized features, both revealing and concealing:

LOWER ENERGY: implicit meaning, hidden; explicit meaning, revealed

HIGHER ENERGY: intelligence, hidden; charge, revealed

MATTER: meaning & energy, hidden; concreteness, revealed

This gradient assumes a continuum in which there is no separation of matter from energy or meaning. In other words, matter cannot exist without energy and meaning, yet energy and meaning can conceivably exist without matter, that is, either as mass-less quanta, or as mass-less symbols, or as the all-pervasive electromagnetic field that has zero-point energy—the Numinous.

A conclusion to be drawn from this gradient is the one reached by Bohm, which is that the all-pervasive interconnected ground state of the universe represents one mind and therefore a singularity of Meaning. In other words, the universe in all its variety and multiplicity is organized and constructed out of the intelligent energy of Meaning—the Numinous. While the mechanical culture of mainstream scientific investigation assumes that the universe is constructed and organized by dead matter and energy, this perspective does not address the important factors of organization within the physical world or the role of meaning and hence mind, life and spirit. These are large and significant omissions.

A logical consequence of this three-part polarity gradient is that meaning is always a feature of energy in the sense that we cannot speak of meaning without implying an energy state. Yet it also means that we cannot speak of energy without also implying some intelligence. This logic also indicates that matter (the visible universe) always hides and contains within itself both energy and meaning (Bohm's implicate order). One of the consequences of this gradient is that every physical form in the universe will have some hidden intelligence and therefore will have both energy and intelligent mind capacities. Some of an object's inherent capacity is emitted and can now be measured as radiation. Some of an object's inherent capacities are also the hidden potentials of its intelligence. The ramifications of this polarity gradient are quite spiritual.

For more than a quarter of a century the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) laboratory has conducted research into human/machine interaction. Their results clearly indicate that the intention of human operators can affect the operations of machines such as random event generators (REG). 7 The PEAR scientists call these effects 'anomalies.' Yet these are the kind of results we would expect if all matter, including inorganic machines, hides within its structure, energy and intelligence. The PEAR results come from the statistics of millions of trials but the results also show that replicability of the experiments is irregular. Again these are results we could expect from experiments involving the concrete solidity of matter that hides energy which in turn conceals intelligence. With this double level of concealment of intelligence one would expect that human/machine interaction would be irregular and dependent on a variety of variables.

In relation to how energy always conceals meaning, Bohm's examples of radio waves was one instance. There is, however, another example involving human behavior which indicates the enfoldment of meaning and energy. This is the example of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) or 'shock treatment.' Shock treatment is frequently used to treat major depression. Shock treatment involves administering a high energy shock to the temples of the patient in order to suppress the thoughts associated with depression. It is highly effective. For example, a report in Science (28June 1985, pp. 1510–11) concluded that 'not a single controlled study has shown another form of treatment to be superior to ECT in the short term management of severe depression.'

Bohm's example of a low energy radio wave informing a high energy source is reversed with shock treatment. Here a high energy state is used specifically to suppress intelligence, in this case, depressive thoughts. (In Bohm's terms this would change an informed state into an (un)formed state.) Thoughts associated with depression have low energy states, less than 40 micro volts, and these thoughts appear to be temporarily enfolded (hidden) by the effect of higher energy states used in shock treatment. How the processes of this enfolding occur is unclear.

It is, however, evident that this treatment is concerned with the blunt suppression of intelligence rather than dealing with those meaning-making capacities that created the depression in the first place. As a consequence, the thought patterns that created the depression usually reappear after a while unless patients are continually given high energy shock treatment. I am therefore suggesting here that the effects of shock treatment represent an example of how meaning is enfolded (hidden) by high energy states.

Levels of energy and meaning

When we focus exclusively on the category of low energy states an extended gradient becomes evident. This is an energy gradient, referred to earlier, that is measured in Hz and associated with various kinds of meaning but extended to include the intelligence of cells, of quanta and the all-pervasive cosmic intelligence of the zero-point energy field. This gradient has the following characteristics:

Low energy gradient

Figure 7:

Energy / Meaning

gamma waves (40 – 100 Hz) / focus, peak performances, meditation;

beta waves (13 – 30 + Hz) / alert thinking and working;

alpha waves (8 – 13 Hz) / relaxation, rest and reflection;

theta waves (4 – 7 Hz) / reveries, images and light sleep;

delta waves (1 – 4 Hz) / deep sleep;

Cell organization / intelligent exchanges/radiation

Light: / intelligent exchanges;

and

Host: Zero-point energy / cosmic consciousness.

The first point to note about this gradient is that as the energy component is lowered there is a corresponding change in meaning and intelligence. This change of meaning is not, however, a linear gradation that runs from most to least, as is implied by the energy measurements of gamma, beta, alpha, theta and delta waves. This change of meaning involves the two conditions of Meaning (implicit and explicit meaning) and is associated with several physical conditions: the brain, cell and particle organization, and finally with the cosmic Host.

These gradations of meaning therefore begin with the implicitness of the Host context and then move on to the differential expressions of electromagnetic forces, cell organization and then to the explicit forms associated with the conscious mind of the individual. At the top of this gradient of energy and meaning we see that gamma waves of 40 Hz are produce by deep states of meditation. The meditative state (of 40+ Hz), sometimes described as a 'higher consciousness,' mirrors the 'lower' state of cosmic implicitness. The higher consciousness of meditation therefore represents a replica of the so called 'lower' state of cosmic consciousness. In other words, deep mediation produces a coherence of meaning through the process of reflection. This coherence operates between the mind of an individual and the cosmic Host. Such a coherent relationship can be said to exist between the part and the whole as well as the whole and the part. This is a highly integrated relationship in which implicit meaning is the basis of the relationship as well as being the focus of the reflection.

A related feature of this graduation of energy and meaning is that low energy states do not automatically imply low levels of meaning and nor do high energy states automatically imply high levels of meaning. Rather, because of the conscious mind's capacity for self-reflection there is a non-linear relationship between energy and meaning. Essentially this means that the low energy state of cosmic consciousness contains the most meaning. Meaning levels then decrease with increased energy levels up until the high energy state of 40+ Hz where meaning again increases. This sudden correlation of meaning with energy occurs because the deep meditative state of 40+ Hz reproduces the high level of meaning that is associated with the low energy state of cosmic consciousness. Deep meditation is therefore a high energy condition that generates high levels of coherent, implicit meaning. Coherent, implicit meaning represents the character of the Zero-point field: the Host.

In contrast to the extreme ends of this gradient are the middle areas of conscious activity where there is no deep meditation but differential exchanges where meaning tends to decrease. This is particularly the case when our cultural disposition is towards non-reflective materialism and/or positivism. Under the influence of these cultural frameworks, implicit meaning tends to be ignored or erased and therefore overall meaning is reduced. (I have more to say about these states of mind in Section 2.)

Another view of the same set of relationships involving energy and meaning can be illustrated by the following figure which highlights the interactions between the cosmic consciousness of the Host and local minds of particles, cells and people:

Cosmic interactions:

Figure 8:

Figure 8 indicates an exchange relationship (indicated by the two-way vertical arrows). These exchanges represent a two-way exchange of energy and meaning. These exchanges imply that the energy source or 'battery' which fires up the whole system (of quanta, cells, brain and body) is the intelligence of cosmic consciousness. In the language of science this energy source represents the potentials of the zero-point field. These potentials can be called symmetry potentials or, in terms of meaning, they are the potentials of implicitness.

The field of cosmic consciousness cannot be measured because our measuring rods are too crude, operating as they do within brain activity at the energy level of 15–30 Hz. This barrier against measurement includes any technology or apparatus which is used to measure extremely low levels of energy, such as the photomultiplier tube. What such technology does is to record very small explicit forces of energy. Yet such technology does not and cannot measure implicit forces, which is simply another way of speaking about energy potentials. This measurement barrier exists because the crude kinetic energy of explicit meaning, active within all measurements, is derived from, and therefore the result of, the prior and more subtle intelligent potentials of implicit Meaning.

Figure 8 also indicates that the cosmic battery that fires up the neurons in the nervous system represents the implicit potentials of the surrounding cosmic consciousness. These potentials operate perpetually as an underlying ambient energy bank of consciousness that surrounds and permeates each particle, cell and body, along with all other material forms in the universe. There is, therefore, no time in which the potentials of the Numinous are not sourcing and supporting every movement of every particle in the universe. Yet there is no linear physical connection (like an electric cord) between the neurons of a particular nervous system and the cosmic energy source which fires them. Rather, the relationship between the cosmic context and each form in the universe is both indwelling and transcendent. This is the kind of relationship which operates between potential and kinetic energy.

Every form in the universe participates in these exchange relationships. Each form floats like a submerged sponge in an energetic ocean of implicit intelligence. Each form therefore represents an open intelligent organizational unit which is nourished, sustained, grown and then destroyed by the underlying ambient ocean of Meaning: the Host context of the Numinous. This exchange relationship between the cosmic context and constituent forms also operates in regard to our sense of self;of who we are.

There are, therefore, no splits or borders within the energy gradient from zero-point to 100 Hz. There are also no separations within the gradient of consciousness between the underlying ambient ocean of Meaning and a mentally active mind or a mind in deep meditation. While these two states are distinct they are highly connected. For example, explicit and differential meaning appears to occur between 4–30 Hz. Explicit meaning is thus manifest within these bands of energy. It is also within these bands of energy where the visible, physical world arises as a series of differential and extended forms. Such forms are perceived and constructed by mentally active minds (15–30 Hz). Meaning below 4 Hz and meaning above 30 Hz lack explicit differentiation and therefore above and below these bands the physical world does not exist.

The meaning that functions below 4 Hz is mostly implicit. In addition, the meaning generated by deliberate reflective meditation tends towards implicit non-differentiation. This tendency towards implicit meaning for both these conditions (below 4 Hz and above 30 Hz) indicates that they lack clear and explicit differentiation and therefore within the consciousness of these bands the physical world will disappear. For example, in deep meditation (40+ Hz) the mind reflects on itself with such a circularity that the implicitness of its cosmic foundation is reproduced. In this state of deep meditation there are no explicit forms.

While each of these various mental states (indicated by energy levels) is distinct they are nevertheless highly integrated. Hence, within this gradient of zero-point to 100 Hz there are various transformations—changes from implicit to explicit meaning—but there are no stops, isolated units or borders that prevent exchanges. This gradient of energy and Meaning indicates that there is no state that can be called a private, separate person who is an isolated causal identity: a solo mind. Rather, there are simply variations in the forces of attractions and exclusions (which construct forms) that float within this ambient ocean. For the religious, a further consequence of the exchanges within Figure 8 is that when religious enthusiasts employ scriptural moralizing to convert the wayward, often these symbolic practices do not to lead to greater spiritual understanding and empathy on the part of adherents. Instead, scriptural practices that are treated as fundamental or dogma can lead to greater divisions, separations and exclusions for these are the negative rewards that come with a passionate tribal bonding associated with such practices.

Support

Apart from the analysis of Meaning, what other evidence is there of this exchange relationship existing between the ground state of the universe and particles, cells and bodies? This two-way exchange of energy and intelligence finds some confirmation in the evidence that consciousness operates at the level of quanta. Bohm noted this when he said that a 'mind-like quality is present even at the level of particle physics.' He then went on to note that, 'as we go to subtler levels, this mind-like quality becomes stronger and more developed.' 8

As for the context of the body, we know that this is a field buzzing with pulsating frequencies. This is a field of meaning that is highly organized and in constant communication with itself. Within the organization of the body's field interconnections are largely pre-reflective, that is, below the level of mentally active brain states. This pre-reflective level of energy has a foundation fullness that contrasts with the mentally active cogito (beta waves) which generates more energy but has fewer transformations of meaning. In contrast, bodily communication between cells normally involves exchanges of meaning by implicit methods. These subterranean interconnections represent the body's life; its alive-ness; its animate and intelligent organization.

Recent research into cell communication has indicated that the energy of these subterranean interconnections is a form of light, or what Fritz-Albert Popp called 'biophoton emissions.' 9 Biophotons are weak emissions of light radiated from the cells of all living things. The light is too faint to be seen by the naked eye, but biophotons have been measured by photomultiplier tubes. Fritz-Albert Popp was a German biophysicist who worked in the early 1970s with the effects of light on living cells. He speculated that because biophotons create a dynamic, coherent web of light, this system could be responsible for chemical reactions within and between cells throughout the organism, as well as controlling the overall regulation of the biological system, including embryonic development. According to Popp, the processes of morphogenesis, growth, differentiation and regeneration can also be explained by the structuring and regulating activity of the coherent biophoton field.

If we accept that meaning is always enfolded in energy then the body's organizational field can be understood as weak electromagnetic exchanges that occur within and between cells. These exchanges represent the body's pre-reflective consciousness. Popp's work seems to support this contention. In his paper to the International Institute of Biophysics he argues that, 'the establishment of a coherent field is a necessary condition of the development of what we call consciousness.' 10

The enfoldment of meaning, energy and matter also indicates that the organizational field of the body has three interrelated components: a material and chemical component along with an electrical and an intelligent function. According to the argument above these three aspects are not equal, for the material and chemical aspects of the body represent derivative features that arise from the electrical and intelligent functions. In terms of illness, this ordering raises the possibility that drug therapy has inherent limitations in dealing effectively with illness. In addition, it suggests that the use of electrical or frequency medicine may yet prove to be effective. Finally, it also suggests that the approach of dealing directly with the meaning making mind of individuals so that they begin to accept responsibility for their own health and wellbeing, may yet become standard medical practice in the future.

Zero-point

In Figure 8 the 'zero-point field' refers to the ground state of every system. The term is synonymous with the amount of ever-present intelligence associated with the vacuum of empty space. This is the intelligence of Meaning, of the Numinous. In his book The Conscious Universe Dean Radin refers to a recent article in Science that argues there is no theoretical minimum energy requirement for transmitting a bit of information. 11 The import of this finding is that Meaning can and does operate at the level of the zero-point energy.

In Figures 7 and 8 it is assumed that at the level of the zero-point field there is a cosmic fullness or plenum of intelligence which surrounds and interpenetrates every form in the universe. These implicit interconnections suggest that the organizational field of the body is also not restricted to the limited processes of self-organization; an organization contained within the boundary provided by the skin. We get some idea of the extended and complex nature of the organizational field of the body when we note that there is no substance in the body that is constant. Of the some million billion cells in the body, 600 billion are dying and the same number are regenerating each day. While this is going on, thousands of biochemical reactions are produced every second. The level of intelligent organization needed to carry out these meaningful operations is mind boggling. This order of magnitude and the organizational level needed for such complex coordination would be possible only if an ever-present intelligent energy guided such exchanges and reactions. The ever-present omniscience of this cosmic intelligence is also evident when one cell replaces another. For example, after a cell dies new cells replace old ones without causing a breakdown in the new cell's—or the body's—cohesive overall organization.

The necessity of an ever-present all-knowing cosmic consciousness becomes obvious when we consider how the body's organization involves instant and continuous coordination of interactions from molecules, genes, cells, organs and muscles within an ever-changing environment. This represents a level of organization well beyond the capabilities of a single organism and also beyond the level of human intellect and imagination. This is a level of organization that demands an ambient ocean of intelligent energy in which each particle, molecule, gene and cell has its reactions refined and coordinated in terms of the whole body-within-an-environment, which by necessity will include the whole universe. For this kind of complexity to occur at each point in the universe there has to be a level of intelligence well beyond the human cogito. Such a field of intelligent energy would contain infinite potentials and can be represented by the underlying zero-point energy field which I refer to as the Host context of the Numinous.

Finally, there is spiritual practice as an example of an exchange between the human mind and the ambient ocean of implicit intelligence. The aim of all spiritual practice is to gain greater understanding of, and connection to, the Numinous. The knowledge that comes from these intuitive and coherent exchanges does not arise out of book learning, intellectual discussion or argument. These activities tend to be too narrow and explicitly differential to resonate easily with the ambient ocean of implicit intelligence. Such intellectual activities tend to create dissonance rather than coherence and resonance. To generate a resonance within spiritual practice we first have to be still and calm. Such an environment of quietness mirrors the stillness of the Numinous. This quietness is the necessary context for deep meditation to occur; the place in which the meditative harmonics of 40+ Hz begin to play.
5 – The Fifth Law of Meaning

The English poet Alexander Pope (1688–1744) suggested that to err is human and to forgive divine. Yet the superposition of self (Figure 6, Chapter 3) indicates that to be divine is also part of our humanity. The interesting question is to what degree do we err and to what degree do we conform to the implicitness of our ground state; the 'I am' of our being? It is perhaps commonly felt that a person who errs a great deal is less than human, which presumes that there may be a mean or average level of erring in order to be classified as normal. Perhaps this is what Pope was implying. In this chapter I look at the ways we err as well as a standard by which we can assess and judge our thinking.

The superposition of self has a thousand consequences. Perhaps one of the important consequences that challenge our cultural assumptions is that this multi-layered structure of self means we are participants living in a participatory universe. One of the benefits of being a participant is that we are never alone. Feeling alone and afraid in a world we never made is only possible if we believe we have separate and solo minds and live as if we were separate from others. According to the multi-layers of self, such a belief is a fiction and to believe it is real is to err in our thinking.

The multi-layered model of self, of Host, body, culture and symbols may also be seen as a kind of laboratory for exploring the self. The self as a laboratory is an ancient idea and one that contrasts to the more commonly held view that we should live by the creeds of our culture. Such creeds can come in the form of scriptural or scientific orthodoxies or cultural habits conformed to without question. The notion of the laboratory of the self places no special value on any orthodoxy or cultural habit but tends to rely on the insights of self-experiment. The knowledge and truth that come from such experiments arise out of the fire of experience. The laboratory of self is the path to maturity, spiritual wisdom and the evolution of consciousness. It represents a model for thinking.

This model for thinking mirrors the self's multi-layered structure. When this multi-layered method of thinking occurs, our thought processes are open to a range of subtle nuances as well as being somewhat experimental. Such multi-layered thinking represents a criterion by which we can judge our thinking processes. This criterion of thinking can be called sane thinking or sanity. As such it is very different from the traditional view of sanity embedded in such terms as 'mental illness.' The traditional view of sanity is related to behavior that is considered to be normal and can be measured in terms of the conventional standards of what it is to be normal. These standards have for many years been set for the profession of psychiatry by the American Psychiatric Association in their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

In contrast to this norm-based view of sanity, the sanity of open, experimental, multi-layered thinking constructs meaning that is empathetic and in tune with the nature of Meaning itself. Such in-sync thinking represents the fifth law of Meaning. The first four laws of Meaning are concerned with the non-personal, universal nature of Meaning and are therefore beyond the influence of language, culture or our thinking. In contrast, the fifth law of Meaning is concerned with how we humans make meaning, and specifically, the degree to which the meaning we make is empathetic and in tune with the multi-layered structure of Meaning itself.

The fifth law of Meaning therefore represents a standard by which we can judge our thinking and our expressions. This standard is laid down by the structures of Meaning. These structures tell us there is always an underlying unity to any differences or distinctions. This means that every concrete or abstract form will be located at the forefront of some larger unifying background context. This is the model of a gestalt which has a foreground of distinctions and a background context of implications. Another way of speaking about the thinking standard of the fifth law of Meaning is to say that everything is always both unified yet distinct.

It may sound contradictory for things to be unified yet distinct but this is a key metaphorical and experimental feature of the laboratory of the self. Unified yet distinct is inherent within the 'part-to-whole and whole-to-part' relationship of the hologram. It is also the key to understanding that every particular difference always exists within an organizational context, or that explicit meaning can never be separated from implicit meaning. The combination of unified yet distinct also represents the kind of diverse, biological balance of species that is necessary in any healthy ecology or environment.

When we apply the fifth law of Meaning to understand who we are or to comprehend the enchantment of the world about us the meaning we make enables us to realize how we are always distinct and unique participants within this unified participatory and spiritual universe. While the fifth law of Meaning provides the standard for sane thinking, it also carries the implications for the underlying rules of the Host's game plan. By this I mean that as participants we can play the game of life in harmony with these underlying laws and thereby live a relatively contented and happy life. In contrast, we may decide to pay no attention to the laws of Meaning and in so doing we will eke out a bleak and miserable existence. This is our freedom of choice as participants in a participatory universe.

When we disregard the multi-layered structure of Meaning and think and speak in ways that create dissonance and discord we will err. In terms of Meaning, there are two general ways we can err in our thinking and expressions. These are:

  * By not distinguishing differences (so that everything is identified together); or

  * By distinguishing differences yet over-valuing them so they become separations that divide.

Both these ways of erring tend to overlap. It is possible, however, to speak about the individual characteristics of each. An example of seeing everything as the same (being unable or unwilling to distinguish differences) is when we do not distinguish the four levels of self but believe our identity to be a seamless, undifferentiated solo and separate state. In such a situation the second, third and fourth levels of self are conflated together in a manner that nullifies their distinctions.

Being unable or unwilling to distinguish differences also occurs when we wish or desire everyone in the family, locale, nation or tribe to have the same opinions, religious views or skin color. A similar example of this kind of identificational thinking is the government policy that mandates an English only policy for young children who have grown up in a tribal culture. Such policies are not empathetic but rest on a fear of what bilingual schooling will do to children and a mistrust of cultural diversity and difference. A desire for things to be the same represents an inability or unwillingness to deal with multi-layers of Meaning and the natural embedded nature of all differences. This simplistic mind set is the basis of intolerance, prejudice and racism. These attitudes can often be accompanied by acts of violence or the demonization of others. These are common but damaging responses in contemporary society and they arise out of an overly simplistic thinking strategy; one that is based upon identification. (I have more to say about identification in later chapters.)

The second invalid thinking strategy occurs when we do recognize differences but then fall in love with them by over-valuing, exaggerating and multiplying them. When this happens differences lose their contextual meaning and then become separations that divide. This thinking strategy often permeates institutions of higher learning that are administered along rational or corporate lines. The training administered to students by such institutions emphasizes rigour and adeptness in distinguishing a multitude of subtle differences. This focus has the unfortunate effect of exiling these differences from their broader contexts so the end result is the fragmentation of knowledge. When this fragmenting strategy is related to the four contexts of self each context is seen as a separate learning area or discipline, as in linguistics, cultural studies, biology and religion. These disciplines are then located as separate and distinct from the question about who we are.

Such a fragmented strategy is a schizoid process that divides the self in a manner that can create self-hatred and war. Such wars become manifest in the number of disagreements we have with others and also in the way we defend the status and reputation of our identity which we believe to be a solo state separate from others. By engaging in wars of reputation and honor we err doubly: first by ignoring the unity that connects the various contexts of self, and secondly by the alienation that comes from experiencing our identity as separate from others. The separate-other may also be attacked or demonized.

The wars we generate within ourselves have many arenas and degrees of intensity that vary from nations at war, to colleagues or families that squabble, to corporate takeovers, to asocial behavior. All such situations are reinforced by the high value we are apt to place on multiple differences that then turn into separations that divide. Our love of differences that separate is a cultural blindness that finds common expression in our focus on money as well as in every facet of our modern fragmented lifestyles. This modern predisposition is a form of autism. It is accompanied by a sense of non-participation in a foreign, strange and dead universe. It is supported by the dogma of materialism which speaks with a narrow focus on the certainty of explicit particulars, divorced from contexts, which are often elevated to the status of objective facts and axiomatic truths.

This second invalid thinking strategy has strong similarities with some malignant biological processes. As there is only one consciousness, this self-similarity of cognition and cell behavior should not be unexpected. A biological example of this kind of erring is the multiple cell differentiation that occurs with cancer. In developmental biology, cellular differentiation is a normal maturation process by which a less specialized cell becomes a more specialized cell. However, malignant cells can arise at any stage during the process of normal differentiation. Cancer cells are malignant and they multiply at an abnormally fast rate so that cell differentiation becomes unorganized and out of control.

In terms of Meaning, the unorganized differentiation of cancer is a biological example of the invalid thinking strategy of fragmentation. On both levels differences become over-valued so they multiply and then this over-supply breaks down organizational connections and unities. While the causes of cancer are multi-faceted and often uncertain, the orthodox treatment is usually concerned with killing or destroying the malignant cells. There is, however, a non-orthodox treatment in which cancer cells are treated with learning processes, just like human beings can be treated with contextual learning for the malignancy of fragmented knowledge. This cancer therapy, known as differentiation therapy, aims to cause cancer cells to resume their normal process of maturation. 1 It does this not by destroying the cells but by retraining them. The same idea applies equally well to humans since the remedy for fragmentation is not death, but contextual learning that assists maturation processes. A therapeutic focus on lifestyle issues for the cancer patient thus represents an important feedback and maturation process that can be efficacious for some cases of cancer.

Thinking about divinity

Our relationship to the Numinous may reflect the harmony of fifth-law thinking or it may represent one of the two erring strategies. To understand ourselves as part of the multi-layered nature of the Numinous is to discover an accord within. Such an intuitive understanding has a unified yet diverse framework without separations of any kind, either spatially or temporally. The superposition of self is therefore a modern version of an ancient model in which the microcosm reflects, in a self-similar manner, the meaning of the macrocosm. This unified yet distinct model indicates that the three levels of the individual are local manifestations of the more general spiritual nature of the universe. The multi-layered model of the self also indicates the depth of meaning that accompanies every activity. Yet to be aware of this depth of meaning is not always easy.

While the implicit potentials of the Host context are unlimited at this level of being, there are no actual forms—no bodies, no images, no discernable differences and no explicit meaning. The being that is here is implicit and hence unmeasurable in any direct sense. This means that this first dimension of reality falls outside all those scientific conventions related to measurement and the four differential dimensions of space and time. The implicitness of the Host context is therefore a dimension of reality prior to the four dimensions of space/time. This is the case because the four dimensions of space and time are each dimensions that contain differential meaning. We could therefore say that in total there are five dimensions of reality, not four as assumed by the laws of physics. 2 At the level of implicitness the Numinous is the transparent universal spiritual ocean in which every visible form floats.

In addition, the being of the Host context is un-gendered. Gender is a feature of the incarnate body, the second level of self. To believe that God is male or female, or a combination of both, is to identify the first context with the second. The Host context is the pure spirit of implicitness. The Host is therefore without form and also without gender. It is the intelligent energy of Meaning, more subtle than a summer breeze yet the mother of all things under heaven.

Some may argue that it is easier to engage in spiritual practices if the divine is seen to have a form. From this stance it is argued that a formless Divinity is too abstract and too difficult for most people to identify with. The argument goes that it is better for practical purposes to worship some form or an image of the Divine which most people can immediately recognize. The dilemma of this strategy is that the images and forms we choose to worship have tended to become idols or cultural orthodoxies. According to Owen Barfield, an idol is a representation that is not experienced as such. 3 In other words, this is an experience of an image stripped of its contextual meaning so it no longer appears to be a representation but becomes instead an absolute in its own right. This can easily happen in the case of the traditional idolatry associated with the patriarchal 'form' of the Father.

If such idolatry should happen then the idol (symbol) of the Father will eclipse the formless Host context. When this happens we reverse the natural order, inherent in the pyramid of Meaning, by identifying the fourth level of symbol (the Father) as the foundation context. In this way we become true sectarian idol worshippers. To actually worship some particular form as a representation of the Divine is a practice that does not rely upon the easy strategy of accepting without question a set of orthodox creeds. Rather, it is a difficult experiential and spiritual exercise of worshipping through the form to the formless transparency beyond. One example of this would be to take a river stone from a creek, place it on a constructed altar and then worship it as a representation of the Numinous which, in essence, it is.

Such an exercise is usually too much of an experiment for most people and this is why the form or image that we worship is usually softer and more involving. Yet the dilemma of worshiping images imbued with traditional identification patterns is that we can easily turn them into non-representational idols. This is the dilemma inherent in most religious worship where we are caught between meaningless rituals on the one hand or conforming activities that simply reinforce our desires without challenging us. In contrast, insightful spiritual worship makes meaning in tune with the structure of Meaning and in this exploration invokes the fifth law of Meaning. Through such multi-layering we may come to realize who we truly are as well as appreciating the contextual depth of meaning that surrounds all transient forms.

The empathy inherent in such multi-layered thinking also leads inevitably to the possibility that there are special people who do not err at all in their thinking. Such people would be at one with the Numinous; a human who is also fully divine: a Krishna, a Buddha, or a Jesus. In terms of the superposition of self, a human who was fully divine would still have the four levels of self but the thinking of such a person would be fully integrated and in harmony with the structure of Meaning and with the implicitness of the foundation context of the Host. This would be an enlightened soul who always made meaning in tune with the laws of Meaning. As a consequence, an enlightened soul would see Meaning in everything because she or he would see themselves in everything. They would have a body form but this form would be only the outward sign of the Numinous.

In general, the fifth law of Meaning tells us that everything we do and experience with our senses is always multi-layered and therefore somewhat experimental and carries a degree of uncertainty or ambiguity. This uncertain state occurs because everything is always both unified yet distinct. These multi-layered features of the fifth law are also the characteristics of empathy, a major mode of thinking which I return to in Section 2.

In the next four chapters I discuss in more detail the agency of each of the four contexts of self as well as some of the ways we err in our thinking in relation to three of these contexts.
6 – Symbols: The Fourth Level of Self

In this chapter I want to focus on how symbols operate and as a consequence, how they affect our thinking. In general, we use symbols to express ourselves. With symbols we can make meaning crudely, superficially and without depth. On the other hand, we can use symbols to carry thoughts that resonate with meaning. The quality of our thoughts therefore relates to our understanding of how symbols operate and our use of them.

There is, therefore, another kind of literacy that is just as important as learning to read and write and add up. This is the literacy that comes with knowing how symbols function to create our patterns of thought. This is knowledge about the fifth law of Meaning and how it is embedded within the very structure of symbols. If we lack this knowledge then symbols are likely to use us and this ignorance can become our preferred method of reacting to the world. Even if we have a post-graduate degree or are recognized as a scientific, technological or theological expert, we may be quite illiterate about how our habitual use of symbols determines fixed patterns of thought.

This book is an exercise in the use of symbols. A book on its own cannot give us the experience of discovering the truth of who we are. A book can, however, point us in the right direction. It can do this by discussing the kinds of confusions that arise when we use symbols badly. By badly I mean using them innocently and without regard to their representational status and their relative autonomy. Even though a book cannot compete with the understanding that comes from working in the presence of a master, it nevertheless represents a convenient way to learn about some of the more common ways we err by relying on habitual thought patterns.

Fourth level

This fourth context of self normally represents a separate and large technical field of linguistic study; my broad-brush approach here, however, will give only the briefest of outlines. In terms of the structure of self, symbols represent the spiky end of the pyramid of meaning. This context involves the symbols of language, measurement, mathematics and money, each of which is associated with exchanges of meaning. Symbols exist at the peak of the pyramid and are always supported by the larger context of cultural habits:

Figure 9:

As the outline of this pyramid indicates, the context of symbols is not an exclusive, private or separate and formal world of language. Rather, they represent a generic context by which human expressions are formed. To know about this level of self is to know that this level of expression exists in all people. This common knowledge represents part of the economy of being and knowing, which are the two sides of the same coin of the self. Their connection means that we know the world to the degree that we know the structure of our own self.

Symbols therefore do not exist like so many objects on a supermarket shelf. Rather, they form the content of our thoughts which in turn are supported by the larger context of culture. As cultures change over time, words once spoken or written will not convey exactly the same meanings over time, or in different cultures. The other qualification that needs to be made here is that cultures are created by individual people. In terms of symbols, this double qualification indicates that every symbolic expression was and always has been created by a particular person within a particular culture.

The other important qualification is that this context of symbols exists within the single all-encompassing consciousness of the Host context. In other words, it is the secondary energy of Meaning that is exchanged when we use symbols. If it were otherwise and each of us was able to speak a private language or have a separate consciousness there would be no communication because this common base of understanding would be missing. In addition, without an all encompassing and unifying base of implicit Meaning there could be no translations across different languages because, in the first place, there would be no community understanding that gives rise to language exchanges. The unity of the Host context therefore underpins each and every symbolic exchange of meaning.

Revealing and concealing

With symbols we navigate, measure, map and discover the world. This is their revealing feature. Yet this mapping and exploration does not happen by itself, unauthored, or without some literacy training. The context of symbols is quite unlike an innocent mirror which reflects an impartial view of an objective physical reality. Rather, the abstract forms that network this context can often blind us with illusions of certainty, separation or concreteness. These are some of the negative results of the concealing feature of symbols.

Using symbols creates both these functions of revealing and concealing meaning. These functions occur, not in sequence, but simultaneously. This means that every human expression reveals as well as conceals some meaning. These contradictory functions are related to the location of symbols in the superposition of self. Located at the top of the pyramid of meaning, symbols by necessity, create maps of other territories. These are the territories of: culture, body and Host. In addition, there is the contextual territory of symbols itself which can be mapped (as I am doing now). Apart from these there is no other territory outside these four—no objective physical world—that can be mapped. Believing we can map an objective world outside ourselves we find on closer inspection that it is a concealing trick of language. (I return to this point shortly.)

The map-making role of symbols is a representational function. It is a disclosing and pointing exercise that signifies a something beyond the expressions used. This happens when, for example, the name of something, like 'pipe,' represents (stands in for) a non-verbal instrument that some people smoke. This representational function can be indicated by a vertical arrow in the following manner:

The arrow between the two terms signifies a vertical relationship down through the four contexts of self (symbols, culture, body, Host). This downward pointing arrow stands for simultaneity; the sense of the present moment of NOW. In addition the vertical arrow points down through the levels of self to the non-verbal object, in this instance, the instrument for smoking. This concrete object exists at the level of the body. When a symbol or sign points to a non-verbal territory we say that this is the function of representation. A depth of meaning is therefore revealed through such vertical, representational connections.

Yet while language reveals meaning through its representational function it will at the same moment conceal meaning. What is concealed is the distinction between the map and the territory. This double action of revealing and concealing meaning also occurs horizontally in the manner that signs relate to other signs. This horizontal movement is shown when we use the English language in the manner that one symbol relates to the rest of the sentence in a left-to-right system. This horizontal relationship is an automatic self-referencing movement of symbol to symbol. It can be indicated by a horizontal arrow:

In contrast to the vertical arrow of simultaniety our ideas of time—having a past, present and future dimension—are marked off by this horizontal arrow. This arrow is often called the 'arrow of time.' Another example of this horizontal movement is the structure of a sentence where letters relate horizontally to words which also relate horizontally to other words.

In terms of my example of a 'pipe,' I have used the words 'non-verbal instrument' to point vertically to a non-symbolic territory. Yet, there is a problem here. The relationship between two symbols is always horizontal because they each are part of the same context of symbols. This is exactly what has occurred in the example above when I indicated that a 'pipe' was a 'non-verbal instrument.' Both terms are of course symbols and hence there is no inter-contextual relationship established here. What has occurred is a small identification: a deception created by my use of languge. This is a deception that makes the reader think that the second term is not a symbol at all but is a non-symbolic reality (there is another deception). By my using the words 'non-verbal instrument' I have constructed what appears to be a separate territory from the symbols I am using. This deception is an illusion. This ability to create illusions by deception is an inherent and stable feature of all language use.

We cannot excape these illusions because they are created by the functions of identification that are associated with the concealing function of language. Yet the contradictory functions of disclosure and concealment work dynamically together in every expression. Taken together they form a cross:

This cross of disclosure and concealment replicates the cross of language which the great linguist Ferdinand de Saussure proposed. 1 Its differences relate to the differences between traditional linguistics and the place that the context of symbols occupies in the superposition of self. The cross of disclosure and concealment also models the contradictory nature of language and in this it reflects the character of the fifth law of Meaning; a law which says that every explicit foreground rests on a background context of implications.

The two axes of the cross (above) work dynamically together indicating that every expression reveals as well as hides meaning. The vertical axis of the cross represents the simultaneity of NOW and thus can be understood to also signify the manner in which implicit meaning registers as a background context within the right hemisphere of the brain. In contrast, the horizontal axis of the cross represents the differentials of time and thus it also models the manner in which the foreground differentials of explicit meaning are created by the pathways of the left hemisphere of the brain.

Even though the language centers of the brain are in the left hemisphere this does not mean that they work in isolation to the right hemisphere. Rather the right and left hemispheres coordinate their responses into smoothly integrated bodily actions. And so it is with language and the use of symbols, the two axes of the cross work dynamically together to produce a smooth integrated expression that contains both (left brain) differentials and (right brain) implicit connections. This combination of differences and connections represents explicit and implicit meaning and this combination of meaning structures all symbolic expressions in every language and every symbol.

Deception

This integrated right/left brain structure of expressions therefore both hides and reveals meaning. This means that no matter how we strive for accuracy in our expressions or measurements they will by necessity conceal some meaning and therefore will be deceptive. For example, in my attempts (above) to be clear about the two axes of language I nevertheless created at least four deceptions. For example, by using the terms, 'non-symbolic reality' and 'non-verbal instrument' I tended to create the extra-symbolic territory within the map I was using. (This is a deception of concreteness.) In addition, the use of a vertical arrow to represent the condition of simultaneity is simply inaccurate—there is no form that can accurately reflect a state of formlessness. Similarly, to represent time as a horizontal arrow is also false. The dimension of time is not one of the three dimensions of space but a distinct dimension having its own characteristics, and extension in space (the horizontal arrow) is not one of them.

In my defense, I would suggest that these four low-level deceptions were largely unavoidable. They are unavoidable because that is the way language works at its very best. In other words, the very best we can hope for with language is to create expressions where there is a balance of concealed and revealed meaning. A balanced expression is one that is open and welcoming of questions about the deceptions and ambiguities which it inherently contains. A balanced expression says the laws of physics are a work in progress.

This provisional status of language is also reflected in the jury system of justice where the jury comes to a verdict on the basis of a confidence beyond reasonable doubt. That place beyond reasonable doubt is one where there is still doubt but the doubt is small in relation to the evidence presented. In other words, there is always doubt associated with any trial, not only because the accused may be innocent but because the evidence is almost entirely constructed and presented though the use of language. What is necessary for justice to be seen to be done is that the inherent doubts of a trial are restricted to a small number. This is also the case with language; what is necessary for effective communication are exchanges in which uncertainty and probabilities are minimized and where the inherent deceptions of language draw attention to themselves.

This acceptance of inherent uncertainty is also the basis of statistical analysis which provides us with levels of confidence based upon probabilities. For example, we think that 'x' has caused 'y' so we assess the probability of this causal connection statistically. Yet what is actually assessed is the negative; we actually assess the probability that the relationship between 'x' and 'y' is due to chance. Our findings show that there is a 95% probability that this relationship is not due to chance. Such an uncertain and negative finding is taken to substantiate the original hypothesis that 'x' has caused 'y.' In terms of a court of law, such a finding would be considered to be beyond reasonable doubt.

In terms of the context of symbols, these levels of uncertainty which are inherent within science and law reflect the general provisionality of symbols. This is the case even with mathematical modelling or statistical analysis. This is the case because the symbols used in any mathematical modelling or statistical analyses do not fall outside the context of symbols but are constrained by the conditions of uncertainty that affect all symbols. Those conditions arise from the choice we make about what kind of mathematical model or statistical analysis to use; the representational nature of the model (how the model relates to the events it is supposed to measure); and finally, by the actual physical conditions of the events measured. Uncertainty is an inherent feature of each of these aspects.

Certainty

When expressing ourselves we make choices about the inherent uncertainty and deception of the symbols we use. We can choose either to accept a level of uncertainty and work provisionally within these limits or, alternatively, we can deny that there is any uncertainty associated with our expressions. Many of us are committed to the positivist view of language where certainty is so honored that we can spend long hours trying to prove that our identity is certain, our honor is intact, our reputation is beyond reproach, and that what we say is always correct. For the religiously minded, certainty derives from the scriptures. Here the text of the scriptures becomes more than mere language through the simple expedient of declaring them to be the 'word of God.' By this literal method the scriptures are not interpreted as having four layers of meaning, as Origen would have us approach them, but as having a single meaning. Such literal understandings can turn quickly into more extreme forms of religious fundamentalism.

Yet while some religious communities are predisposed to fundamentalism, a similar mechanism is at work in positivistic science. Such a criticism may seem to fly in the face of the huge range of stunning industrial, technical and medical successes that science and technology have produced over the last three hundred years. These successes of materialism have undoubtedly contributed to the positivistic view that values the certainty which axiomatic expressions seem to produce. This valuing of certainty has changed little since the 'father of modern science' Galileo Galilei looked through his improved telescope and found empirical verification for Copernicus' heliocentric hypothesis.

The effect of using an item of technology to verify a hypothesis was a revolution in the history of science and it became universally known as the Copernican revolution. Yet this turning-point in science was not some new discovery as it has been popularly portrayed. Rather, it was simply a change in the way we understood truth and certainty. In Saving the Appearances Owen Barfield writes that the Catholic Church had asked Galileo to teach Copernicus' discoveries as hypotheses, not as truth. He declined. As Barfield argues, Copernicus did not suddenly 'discover' that the Earth moved around the Sun for this had been a scientific hypothesis since around the third century BC. 2

Rather, what Galileo did was to use the technology of the telescope to substantiate the heliocentric hypothesis. The scientific revolution thus constituted a new technological method of substantiation which gave science, as distinct from the church, the status of an institution that could produce a positive and certain 'truth.' The so called 'new discovery' of the Copernican revolution was therefore one of the well-springs of positivism. Positivism is a method of manufacturing certain and positive knowledge. Scientific methods are usually attributed with this kind of status. At the heart of the Copernican revolution was a deceit that certain and truthful knowledge is possible through the use of technology. This belief has become the central credo for much of modern science and technology and its values are worshipped today by many orthodox scientific journals.

It should be admitted that through new developments in science and technology we now have much more knowledge about the universe. However, optimism of the truth potentials of technology is astray. It is misplaced because the empirical scientific method does not take into account the use of meaning, mind, culture or symbols. The successful application of some aspects of technology can, at best, only lend weight to a hypothesis, which even when substantiated remains open to falsification and therefore must remain forever provisional and uncertain.

Positive scientific proof of anything is therefore not possible under any circumstances. To assume that truth and certainty can be created by our expressions, by the use of symbols, is to perpetuate a three hundred-year-old positivist misconception. This belief was only seriously challenged within science itself in the 1920s by quantum physics and specifically by Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. We witness this misplaced positivism in the tenor of Galileo's denial of the Church's request. We witness it again today in the value science awards to literalism and to axiomatic, categorical and factual knowledge.

Balance

Returning then to the idea of a balanced expression; a balanced expression is one that is open and not closed. A balanced expression values connections as well as distinctions and then locates distinctions within broader contexts. A balanced expression is one that recognizes its own inherent deceptions, ambiguities and uncertainties and does not try to hide them. A balanced expression values the integration of implicit and explicit meaning; a balanced expression values the integration of the two hemispheres of the brain; a balanced expression values the fifth law of Meaning. If such expressions as these become our default mode of thinking then we will not become enslaved in the prison-house of language, that is, to a left-brain positivistic world; rather we will be free to use symbols and language as the provisional representations they are.

On the other hand, if our thinking is dominated by the habits of positivism then we will expect that symbols and measurements will produce a high level of precision without ambiguity, clarity without deception and the certainty of a truth that is beyond the provisionality of language or probability functions of mathematics. The kind of language that such (left-brain) habits foster are expressed as 'facts,' 'data,' 'proof,' 'objective reality,' 'axiomatic knowledge' and the notion of a separate physical world beyond an isolated individual consciousness. Yet while positivistic thinking spurns uncertainty and ambiguity, its expressions of certainty actually heighten such states through its denial of them. This tendency for the denial of the provisional and the uncertain is sustained by what I call the three language crimes of positivism. These are:

i) the single meaning,

ii) the omission of context, and

iii) idolatry.

These three language crimes represent, in a broad way, how we can err in our thinking when using symbols.

Language crimes

Language crimes are constructed when our language does not reflect the fifth law of Meaning which is spoken of here as the inherent provisionality of language. For example, when we ignore the ambiguities of symbols and forget how they are representations that can deceive and conceal meaning, then we metaphorically poke ourselves in the eye. This blindness is not only symbolic, it is also actual. It can take three forms. The blindness of a language crime occurs:

i) when we think there is only one meaning;

ii) when we ignore contexts by focusing only on local constituent elements;

and

iii) when the maps we create become the territory.

In the first instance, when we believe that a symbolic expression has only one meaning we manufacture certainty out of literal and surface understandings. This is a blindness that can be called the language crime of single meaning. In relation to the second description, when we omit contexts by focusing on constituent particulars we tend to turn any pluralism into oppositional and excluding cases. This is the logic of either/or; of internal/external; of subjective/objective; of them and us. This kind of blindness comes from the language crime of the omission of context.

Finally, when our maps of the world become the actual territory we are seeking to represent, we then make idols out of combining concrete and abstract forms. This combination is called a name/form and its creation represents the crime of idolatry. Within the culture of positivism these three language crimes occur automatically as our default mode of thinking. To move beyond the prison house of positivism we need to deliberately remember how this context works as a reflection of the fifth law of Meaning.

Single meaning

The single meaning is the language crime of literalism or elementalism. 'Elementalism' is a term coined by the philosopher and scientist, Alfred Korzybski who founded the Institute of General Semantics in the United States in 1938. Korzybski's major publication was Science and Sanity, a very long book on meaning and language first published in 1933. 3 Korzybski's work influenced my earlier studies and approach to meaning. He used the term 'elementalism' to denote a language that is elementary and that creates splits and separations where there are none. It was also Korzybski who made popular the idea that the 'map is not the territory it represents.'

The common use of the term 'literal' refers to a straightforward adherence to a surface understanding and the face-value meaning of words. For example, in a crime fiction this kind of understanding is carried by a sequence of action-images involving the details of time, place and action. Such a sequence of events unfolds a literal or single meaning which is found in the linear relationships of these sequences. It is within this first 'horizontal' or linear reading where the truth-effects of the story are created. Many crime fiction writers strive to establish a single meaning through the use of seamless, literal truth-effects. They do this in order to help the reader forget about the deeper contextual meaning of culture and language, which if brought to mind tends to interrupt the identificational 'flow' of the story.

These writers are not the only people who strive after a single meaning. We all do this whenever we use closed categorical statements which tend to produce the single meaning truth-effect. For example, in religious or scientific debates, orthodox categorical and axiomatic statements tend to promote a surface and literal understanding of the scriptures or of scientific theory. Such a declarative form of address automatically confers on the text a single unquestioned meaning. Yet while we can be entertained, or made fearful, by such surface or literal readings this approach is clearly insufficient when it comes to seriously interpreting any piece of fiction or non-fiction, and that includes scientific or religious texts.

Literalism and elementalism ignore the inherent dynamic within the context of symbols to disclose as well as conceal meaning. As a consequence, the literal reading simplifies by forgetting about the depth of meaning that comes from the other contexts of self. By ignoring this depth of meaning we can severely restrict our vision while also reducing the meaning of our lives. An elemental, literal and surface understanding is like wearing a pair of dark glasses that prevents us from seeing the possibility of alternative viewpoints and contexts. Such limitations help create intolerance and bigotry in place of deeper understandings.

Yet contemporary Western culture seems to prefer the literalism of surface understandings and face-value meanings to, for example, the ambiguity of parable and metaphor. Karen Armstrong has argued that this preoccupation with the literal truth is a product of the scientific revolution. She argues that this is because 'reason achieved such spectacular results that mythology was no longer regarded as a valid path to knowledge.' Armstrong suggests that the scientific orientation of the last three hundred years has tended to make us read the scriptures for accurate information. She goes on to say that the Bible 'becomes a holy encyclopaedia in which the faithful look up facts about God.' 4 In such a literal culture the religious metaphor and parable are not considered to be true because they do not have a historical, scientific or empirical single meaning.

The single meaning does, however, provide us with a sense of confidence and certainty even though it is accompanied by a shallow understanding of things. The comfort of this language crime is taken to be a superior truth in such areas as black-letter law or positivistic science. The proponents of both these areas like to believe that hard-edged data and facts, which always have literal and single meaning, deliver certain truths. While such closed and categorical expression offers security and comfort these kinds of truth-effects hide more than they disclose and by so doing simply increase our level of uncertainty beyond reasonable doubt.

The crime of omission

The positivist's crime of omitting contextual meaning is perhaps the greatest blindness of humankind. It is pervasive and occurs in us all. In general, when we ignore broader contexts we forget about the foundation role of implicit meaning. In this forgetting, the four contexts of the self disappear along with the first context of the Host. Forgetting about this cosmic, universal context we tend to over-compensate with a focus on the explicit details of particulars that seem to sit on the end of our nose. In other circumstances we are unable to see the wood for the trees or to take account of the historical context, so we repeat the mistakes of history and also lose the benefits of a broader perspective. Under such left brain stressful conditions we become anxious about what is not the full picture.

In the thinking habits of positivistic science the contexts of culture and symbol are largely ignored as causal factors. As a consequence, both of these contexts are generally treated as innocent or unbiased and therefore not worthy of taking into account. This is also the case in relation to the implicit meaning of the cosmic Host context. For positivistic science, this context is not only not taken into account but it is often explicitly rejected by atheists. From such a logical and empirically-based standpoint scientists believe that the external physical world can be innocently observed as an objective reality that is independent of the observing consciousness. (I have more to say about this in Chapter 13.)

The net result of the omission of the contexts of symbol, culture and meaning generally from scientific investigation has been the tendency to value literal, factual and axiomatic truth. However, these truths come with negative baggage. This is the baggage of an overwhelming reliance on explicit methods and explicit meaning. We find evidence of this (left-brain) bias in all technological developments and computational measurements where explicit and differential units represent the major basis of any understanding or investigation.

The problem of over-reliance on explicit and differential meaning is that it leads not to rational enlightenment, but to blindness. For example, as explicit meaning is made up of differences and distinctions; any tradition that relies exclusively upon explicit meaning tends to exaggerate the effect of differences. To exaggerate a difference will turn it into a boundary line that splits and separates. Not to exaggerate differences is to see them as distinctions within a context. However, when we commit the language crime of ignoring context then the logical outcome of this will be to over-value and multiply differences so that they create splits, separations and divisions.

When this separating mode of thought is applied to the pluralisms that make up the ecology of the universe we create an oppositional, excluding logic of an either/or kind. Yet it is this oppositional logic that scientists tend to use to solve (unsuccessfully) many problems that are essentially integrated and contextual. For example, the current conundrum presented by the dualism of mind and matter has no solution in terms of this oppositional logic. For mind and matter not to be opposed to each other it would mean that they are integrated within a larger context. Yet it is this larger context (of interconnected meaning) which is expressly excluded by this language crime. Similar comments can be made about the role of mind in the physical sciences. Whenever we use language that implies, or even explicitly states, that an internal private world is separate from an external objective world there is no chance of moving beyond the circle of this language crime. Such oppositional logic, based on differences that separate, simply goes round in circles rather than finding connections that offer solutions.

Idolatry

Owen Barfield was a member of an extraordinary group of Oxford scholars called The Inklings. The most famous were C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. None however, was more rigorous about language and meaning than Barfield. In his book, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry, Barfield writes about our modern fondness for idolatry. He defined an idol as 'a representation or image which is not experienced as such.' 5 In terms of the context of symbols, this definition means that an idol is created whenever an abstract symbolic reality loses its representational function and becomes instead a concrete territory.

How does this transformation happen? It happens when the map becomes the territory. When this occurs the representational function of symbols is erased and instead of pointing to a 'something' beyond the expressions used, the pointing refers back to the symbols themselves. For example, for the materialist, the expression 'the physical world' tends to become a concrete reality independent of the mind that expresses these words. This is how the idol of matter is manufactured. In other words, the crime of idolatry is created when the map and territory distinction is lost and these two orders become one.

In general, idols blind us because we identify the abstract forms of symbols with the concrete form of perceptual experience. With this kind of identification a name/form is born, which is a combination of both abstract and concrete forms. I have more to say about name/forms in Chapter 15; for now, however, this identification of abstract with concrete forms can be referred to in Barfield's terms as an idol. And all idols represent language crimes.

When we create the crime of idolatry through these patterns of identification we blind ourselves in two ways. The first is by voiding symbols of their true representational nature so that language seems to become an innocent unbiased mirror that we hold up to reflect a separate reality. The second way we blind ourselves is by investing too much in the idol. This over-investment is what makes idolatry so influential and yet so deceptive and destructive. These blinding mechanisms prevent us both from seeing symbols as provisional and representational, and also from seeing beyond the maps we have created to the more subtle terrain of the territories beyond symbols.

Contemporary idolatry is similar to the idolatry of the past in that it is concerned with the over-valuing of physical and material objects and events. Today this over-valuing is given the acceptable title of 'materialism.' Materialism is the cultural perspective of much of positivistic science and technology along with modern economics, yet it represents the language crime of idolatry. It is a language crime because materialism is constructed within discourse, yet it does not recognize the role of discourse or of contextual meaning. In addition, materialism does not accept that the context of symbols has a dynamic that can both hide and reveal meaning. Rather, materialists believes that the concrete forms of the physical world (created as idols by language crimes) come first in the order of things and that language is like some kind of social adornment that is meaningful or not depending on how the material world interacts.

The language crimes of materialism are pervasive. They occur when we imply or state that our identity is our body and that we die when the body dies. It occurs when we identify physical objects like land, houses and cars as extensions of our identity. It also occurs when we identify the abstract form of nation, tribe or group as part of our identity. It happens when positivistic science and economics value matter and material objects as primary to everything else. It happens when we turn the abstractness of time into the concrete of time travel. It happens when medical science calls the power of the mind to cure ills a 'placebo effect,' meaning that such effects are not real. Materialism represents the great blinding language crime of humanity.

In summary, the context of symbols enables us to navigate, measure, map and discover the world and who we are. Yet often this does not happen. Rather, what normally happens is that our method of using symbols blinds us with illusions of certainty, separations, or with idol worshiping. This blindness is caused by the three language crimes of positivism and they occur because of our failure to learn about this context's contradictory functions that simultaneously reveal as well as conceal meaning. These functions are reflections of the fifth law of Meaning. When we learn about the dynamics of this context of self, this knowledge can enhance our understanding of ourselves and the world about us because we are open to deeper meanings and to the necessity of symbolic ambiguity and uncertainty. Such knowledge assists physical, mental and spiritual wellbeing.
7 – The Culture of Being

The contexts of culture and symbol represent the two contexts of expression and they provide many possibilities for erring in our thinking. This is because these contexts work together both to hide and reveal meaning. When we seek knowledge about ourselves and the world by enquiring into these two contexts we are on track to discover who we truly are. On the other hand, if we choose to see these relative contexts as ultimates or more commonly, to ignore them altogether, then they will inhibit and reduce our understanding.

Recently I watched a television program about a group of British millionaires, experts in making money, who were working on several developmental projects in an African village. They made a great effort to supervise the building of a water project, a potato cooperative and a hotel. After the buildings were almost completed they left to go back to England. Three months later they returned to find work still to be done. 1 What had happened? They were informed by a local non-governmental agency that success depends upon engaging the community in these projects. Engaging with the community is a process of interacting with the culture of the community. Yet the British millionaires began these projects by importing their own unquestioned cultural values into this village and failed to take into account the local culture.

The tendency to ignore culture is very common and not only was this the case with a small group of British millionaires, it also represents the predisposition of the majority of scientists. A current example is the paper by Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunne called 'Sensors, Filters, and the Source of Reality.' 2 This account is written from a non-orthodox position that incorporates consciousness and what the authors call the Source; its thesis is concerned with how sensory information is filtered by the physiology of the body's sensing equipment. With the idea of filtered information comes the possibility of alternative realities.

The idea of filtered information is relevant to this discussion yet the authors' concern with the physical aspects of filtering is so overwhelming that there is no place in their paper for any other consideration, such as the filtering aspects of language and culture. Even though there is a reference to metaphor there is no analysis of how symbols function in ways that can filter information and nor is there any concern with how cultures can filter and block information. This tendency in any scientific discussion to ignore the relative agency of culture and symbols is common. We see in the sphere of politics when national leaders fight wars in foreign countries in order to establish democracy in a culture where none has previously existed. Our ignorance of culture has become so pervasive it now represents a cultural predisposition of global proportions.

Culture is usually defined as a system of shared beliefs, values, customs, norms and artefacts that members of a community utilize in order to cope with their world and with one another. Culture is not generated by the level of technology a society has achieved, although this is an important factor. Culture is a context of self. It is a context of consciousness and represents the immediate support for our use of symbol. Yet this context of thinking has its own relative agency. That relative agency relates to our habits and collective representations.

A culture can be defined as a regime of tacit meaning that is mostly adhered to and expressed by its members without their conscious deliberation. Such collective subliminal responses represent collective representations which manifest as our habits of thinking, behaving and expression. The transmission by cultural habit from one generation to another is also subliminal, that is, below the level of conscious deliberation. The habits of a culture are therefore usually tacit and taken for granted so they are not subject to much investigation or question.

Even though cultural habits tend to be hidden they nevertheless take on a moral role in the form of norms of behavior. A 'norm' refers to the standard or average behavior in a group. The mainstream or orthodox line usually fits within the range of thinking that is called the norm. Outside the norm is the moral ground beyond the support of the mainstream on which a minority of people always stand. The moral persuasion of a norm can be likened to the 'swarm intelligence' of insects or birds. This kind of consciousness is subliminal and it can move a group as a unit in one direction or another without conscious deliberation by individual members of the group.

A way into excavating some of the deeper meaning within ourselves, or within any expression, is to ask about hidden moral implications. This was Origen's strategy for interpreting the scriptures. He urged us always to look beyond the literal messages of the scriptures to their deeper moral implications. In a literary sense, moral implications relate to questions of genre while in the sociological sense they involve questions about normative behavior. How then are we to understand who we are if we do not understand our culture?

Three types of learning

While there are many variations within and between world cultures, in terms of making-meaning there are only three broad types of cultures. These three types have their foundations in the three steps of learning. It is therefore necessary, at this time, to make a slight detour into examining these three learning steps. (I return to them in more detail in Chapter 10.) Learning anything and becoming proficient represents a three-step movement through an ordered arc of meaning-making. The three steps in this arc of learning follow the same contour as the arc of motion (Figure 2). The three steps in the arc of learning are: identification, differentiation and integration. These three steps are involved in everything we learn, regardless of the age of the learner.

The first step of identification is the learning process that involves recognition and identification. This first step represents our 'first take' on a situation before a more considered and comprehensive examination. This first step of learning contains the logic of identity: of A equals A; of this shape equals maternal feelings; of that sensation equals food. This is conditioned thinking. Using this kind of thinking we can jump to all kinds of premature conclusions and this is what we normally do in adolescence. Learning by identification is the difficult process of learning by making errors and then adjusting to those errors. This difficult process of learning by error represents the normal path of learning anything at any age, but it is an especially dominant feature during the first twenty years of life. It is dominant because it is the first step in any learning and we have a lot of new things to learn in this period. (I discuss this process again in Book Two.)

The second step of differentiation begins with the realization that the errors we make in the processes of identification need greater deliberation, scrutiny and differentiation. Such attention to detail can lead to the experience of trying out something new in order to see what happens. This trial and error approach of differentiation is also difficult. While it is also part of the first twenty years of life this step, which is grounded in different body movements and concrete experiences, will only develop fully in the second twenty years of life.

The third step in the arc of learning is the integration and harmony of the former two steps. This involves the integration of the differences that are created by the second step into an overall holistic appreciation or rendering. The third step of integration therefore brings together heart and head, love and intellect into inclusive realizations and intuitive connections that have extrasensory qualities which are markedly different from the exclusions created by a focus on identification or the abstract fragmentations which are generally the outcome of a sole focus on differentiation. The three steps in the arc of learning are shown in the next figure.

The arc of learning

Figure 10:

This normal three-part learning movement through identification, differentiation and integration is often interrupted. In some situations, like those associated with security or love, this learning process never precedes much beyond the first step of identification. When this happens for an entire group of people their patterns of cultural identification become so strong that their bonding and responses to the world remain largely subliminal and habitual. A culture based upon the first learning step of identification is a tribal culture. The overall bonds of a tribe are those that center on the inclusions and exclusions of the tribe.

A tribal culture does not have to have members who carry spears and live in mud huts. A modern-day tribe can have members who belong to exclusive clubs and send their children to exclusive schools and worship in exclusive religions. In terms of meaning, a tribe is a culture based largely upon the learning processes of identification and hence share the habitual values of 'in' and 'out' groups. When we identify with a modern-day tribal culture this double identification of them and us creates strong customs and norms of behavior that carry exclusive values and serious implications of excommunication for those who fall outside the norms of the tribe.

When a society's habitual responses go no further than the second learning step of differentiation the resulting culture will include the communal habits of identification but this time these responses will fit within the values of fragmentation and differentiation. When differences are over-valued they multiply and become separations that divide. A culture based upon divisions and separations is one that fragments knowledge and social interactions through such creeds as individualism and a faith in empirical verification. These are the hallmarks of the culture of Reason (with a capital 'R') and while this regime of meaning is definitely a step away from tribal culture, it is not a full step away when it comes to cultural identity and knowing who we are. This is to say that while much of our modern culture of Reason relies upon the first principles of differentiation for solving problems, when it comes to our sense of who we are, we tend to revert to the tribal thinking and the bonding processes of identification. In other words, we will tend to identify with how the culture already prescribes us to be. As our modern culture of Reason proclaims us to be private and separate identities so this is the view we will normally have of ourselves. (I discuss Reason more fully in Book Two.)

Finally, when a group's responses are no longer preordained by their ancestors but stem from integrated learning then a culture of empathy is the result. Empathy relies on intuitive experiences and feelings of connection, integration and harmony. The unity of such cultural responses is not created by the identification of blind bonding processes, nor is it fragmented by the separations of Reason. Rather, the unity of empathy comes from the integration of these two earlier learning processes into something new that recognizes diversity and acknowledges its necessity for unity. As empathy is not a collective response in any part of the world there appears to be no society that yet has a culture of empathy. Yet that optimistic possibility is always present because empathy is the necessary third step in the learning arc. I shall argue later that to learn and be proficient in any skill or art we have to embrace the integration and holism of empathy. While a society has not yet achieved this level of evolution many individuals have achieved this level of learning in their daily lives and it affects the greater part of their behavior. (I have more to say about empathy in Section 2 and I discuss the evolution of consciousness in Chapter 15.)

Hence, the dawning of the age of empathy is yet to come. However, it has been foreshadowed by astrologers who speak of it as the Age of Aquarius. This astrological forecast is of a future when there will be a harmony of science and religion to such a degree that a religious science and a scientific religion will be formed. A scientific approach to being partially describes my intention in writing this book which is written from the experiential location of empathy.

The three broad cultures of Tribe, Reason and Empathy are indicated by the next figure.

The arc of culture

Figure 11:

Cultural relativity

These broad cultural distinctions of tribe, Reason and empathy are based upon their respective learning processes of identification, differentiation and integration. This means that the core moral code of each of these broad cultural landscapes is laid down by its dominant underlying learning process. Members of tribal communities will therefore predominantly rely upon the processes of identification to survive and for expressing who they are. Likewise, the modern norms of Reason predominantly rely upon differential arguments and financial methods to survive and to discover identity. In regard to a future empathetic society, it will, presumably, rely predominantly upon the value of inclusion with respect for diversity of all kinds. Such a society will be based upon the value of unity through diversity.

Each of these three broad cultural positions has a set of core understandings which represent their norms of behavior and their collective mainstream representations. Yet in each of these three broad social groupings there are those elements that do not fit nicely into the norms and mainstream collective representations of that culture. This means that in any tribal society there will be important cultural elements of Reason and empathy. For example, within the cultures of some Native American tribes there are empathetic features that display integrated views of the universe based upon a sense of holistic interconnection. Likewise in our modern culture of Reason there are elements of tribal cultural identification which provide us with the values of binary logic as well as some empathetic elements that value integration, harmony and empathy. This entanglement of different collective representations occurs because some aspect of every culture is more advanced than others.

This means that every culture of tribe, Reason and empathy provides, through its norms of behavior, an interpretive strategy in order for its participating members to understand the world and themselves. These core interpretative strategies are made up of habits of thought and expression and behavioral predisposition which, for the cultural mainstream, are acted upon, to a large extent, without conscious thought or deliberation. Such mainstream responses are concerned with constructing a world that is known and real, and one in which the future, to a certain extent, is predictable. However, the worlds that are constructed by the cultures of tribe, Reason and empathy are relative to their place within the arc of learning and also relative to the four levels of self. Because they are relative these cultures cannot be absolute. Being relative, the reality that is constructed by their norms is also relative and therefore it is not absolute. The linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf had a similar view. Whorf became famous in the twentieth century for his principle of 'linguistic relativity.'

Whorf studied the language habits of Native Americans, like the Hopi and Shawnee, and compared these with Indo-European expressive habits, or what he called Standard Average European (SAE). What Whorf meant by the principle of linguistic relativity was that 'all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar, or can in some way be calibrated.' 3 This principle means that no one is free to describe nature with absolute impartiality. Different cultures will therefore view the world differently and this difference will depend upon the predisposition of the dominant learning process which underpins the culture. Whorf expressed the idea of the principle of linguistic relativity in terms of grammar rather than learning processes. He suggested that:

Users of markedly different grammars are pointed by their grammars towards different types of observations and different evaluations of external similar acts of observation, and hence are not equivalent as observers but must arrive at somewhat different views of the world. 4

Whorf's principle of relativity assumes that our shared cultural values and belief systems play back into the way we perceive the world. In other words, we observe the world in the manner that we have been taught. For example, the cultural habits and practices of users of Indo-European languages tend to describe the world in differential terms by relying on static nouns rather than verbs. For most of us the appearance of the visible 'object' has become more important than the underlying event that created the concrete or abstract form. In other words, a literalism of the object is more important than the contextual event that gave rise to it.

In relation to our modern-day culture of Reason, we see this literalism at work with the use of the terms: 'time,' 'space' and 'matter.' Yet even though these terms have a universal scope they are not impartial terms and they do not represent an objective universe that is physically separate from our observation, or the relativities of our culture. Rather, as Dan Moonhawk Alford says, the 'objective' assumptions contained in the common use of these three terms 'are more like verbal hallucinations born of a noun-happy family of languages that look at the world in this way.' 5 By this he meant that while these terms are normally used to describe an objective physical world they are nevertheless entirely culturally relative.

They are relative to a cultural tradition that has a bias towards the literal which also means towards differentiation of explicit and discernable differences. Such a bias is reflected in the tendency to use static nouns which in turn reinforces the predisposition for literalism and differentiation. This circularity from cultural predisposition to the use of those symbols that reflects this disposition is a common reinforcement practice for the culture of Reason. This reinforcing circularity from culture to symbol and back again gives us a sense of certainty and credibility about empirical methods, hard data and reasoned argument. However, along with the bias in favor of explicit and discernable differences goes the cultural disinclination to favor the ambiguities of events, contexts and the status of implicit meaning. In short, we are culturally predisposed to take into account the apparent literal certainties of extended, explicit differences, particularly of perception but not the contexts of self and being.

In terms of discovering our true self, the interpretative strategy which a tribe provides for its members enables each person to know without question who they are. In every gesture and style of dress, tribal members indicate the reality of their tribal membership. Likewise the interpretative strategy of Reason enables every member of this modern culture to know without question that they are separate individuals who have private lives. For the person of empathy the reality of who they are revolves around love, tolerance and inclusion and the question of who they are is the most important spiritual question in life.

What is real and therefore absolute for tribal members is the life of the tribe. Essentially this means the close, connecting, participatory but closed reality of strong social bonding. These are dominant and excessive processes that tend to change the relative context of culture into the ultimate binding norms of a tribe. What is real and absolute for the man of Reason are the differential abstractions that measure his financial health as well as constructing an objective physical world which he conceives to be separate from his individual identity. The proselytizing feature of this fragmented world is the religion of Positivism which promotes an idealized view of science through its three main tenets: i) history is driven by science; ii) science will enable scarcity to be overcome; and iii) progress in science goes together with progress in ethics and politics. 6

The real and the absolute for such a positivistic world is constructed by exchanges of abstractions like money and explicit information and a belief in the infallibility of mechanical scientific method. At the core of this real world is scientific measurement which means that the unreal represents that which is un-measurable. God is therefore unreal because He is unmeasurable, but then so also are implicit meaning, intuition, realization and insight unreal. The effects of these erasures are many. For example, Reason's positivistic excesses leads to the relativity of culture being denied. In this manner scientific knowledge is seen not as culturally relative but as factual, raw and axiomatic.

For the person of empathy what is real are the holographic exchanges of love between the four contexts of self. From the perspective of empathy, the four contexts of self come together like a metaphor which has several layers of meaning. A multi-layered, metaphoric understanding therefore tends to be an empathetic one. A multi-layered, metaphoric understanding represents the fifth law of Meaning and a sane method of thinking. Such a perspective takes symbols into account but only as part of a wider reality, a reality that includes the cultural bias of the individual who created the expression in the first place. A metaphoric understanding is necessary to understand allegory and parable and is therefore quite distinct from an either/or tribal view of the world and also distinct from the positive literalism of Reason.

In summary, how we read society and understand ourselves largely depends upon whether we accept or question the learning bias of our culture. If we accept that bias without question then we are unlikely to understand who we are. Such acceptance will involve i) our expectations; ii) the tacit knowledge of culture; and iii) the lost meaning which comes with this blind acceptance. Under these forgetful conditions our moral reactions will tend towards a two-valued, 'black or white' tabloid view of the world where we identify the good, reasonable and familiar as extensions of ourselves, while the strange or different signify the foreign 'other.' Essentially this is the standard ethnocentric or tribal view which is often presented by the tabloid media.

Moral values will therefore vary depending upon our understanding of our own culture. A tabloid and tribal appreciation will tend towards a hard-edged, black or white, idol-worshipping forgetfulness. Such an approach can also involve the fire and brimstone of literal truths when related to the scriptures. A second response involves a materialistic morality which dismisses out of hand any implication of an underlying context of a Host or the background context of the Numinous. Finally, there is a more empathetic and disclosing cultural view that admits to the relative status of the various learning steps and the several levels of self: body, culture and symbol while also acknowledging the cosmic Host and absolute ground state of the un-manifest Numinous.
8 – The Second Context

The body is, before anything else, an organization of meaning. The physical body is not a separate concrete form independent from being. Within this context of the body the reality of the physical world arises. The concrete forms of the physical world arise through a series of transformations that occur through the sensory processes of perception which involve the five senses. In addition, our sense of the body's physical shape, its movements and coordination are also provided by the transformation of meaning, this time by transformations involving pre-reflective consciousness.

The body context is an organizational field. This view is not new. An example of it can be found in the three thousand-year-old text, The Bhagavad Gita. In Chapter 13, Lord Krishna says,

The body is called a field, Arjuna; he who knows it is called the Knower of the field. 1

The Gita term 'field' is surprisingly modern and is often used in contemporary science to describe the interconnections of gravity and electromagnetic radiation. In The Bhagavad Gita the field of the body isholistic, having what can be called local and non-local elements. These are discussed later in this chapter; for now I can say they are not separate domains but distinct features of the body's field of meaning. The body is the second context of self and acts as the base for the expressive contexts of culture and symbol as shown in the next figure:

Figure 12:

This ordered formation of contexts demonstrates that symbols are produced through cultural interactions, and cultures in turn are formed from the expressive habits of individual people. The other context not shown in Figure 12 is the unifying field of the Host which supports and hosts the local organization of the body. The Host context has a primary status in that it is the foundation of the Self. The body context therefore receives its life, incarnation and its organization from the primary potentials of the meaning of Meaning: the resonant field of the Host context.

In effect this means that the body's autonomy, which is relative, relates to its physical structure and motility. For example, without the necessary physical capabilities I will never become an Olympic runner no matter how well motivated I am. In addition, the secondary status of the body means that the physical systems of the body (nervous system, for example) do not originate thought nor can they organize the body's birth, its patterns of growth and maintenance, or its death. Finally, the relative autonomy of the body extends through perceptual processes into the physical environment. The physical world is thus a series of manifestations that arise within the body context by utilizing the potentials of the Host context.

In regard to the secondary nature of the body context, Zen Buddhism tells us that 'Things do not have their own nature.' 2 By this thinking, the body is not self-caused, or a self-organized system. Its nature has been given and continues to be given in the stream of meaning that flows through it and makes it pulsate with the vitality we call life. The incarnate body is therefore an apparatus, an organic form through which meaning is transformed, channelled and made. The body is like a flute in the hands of the master flute player. Because of this dependency we can ask, 'what does a flute know about music?' 3 or, more scientifically, 'what do the cells know about the overall blueprint that arranges the body's form; its morphogenesis?' On the question of morphogenesis Rupert Sheldrake is instructive. He writes:

We know what DNA does: it codes for proteins; it codes for the sequence of amino acids which form proteins. However, there is a big difference between coding for the structure of a protein—a chemical constituent of the organism—and programming the development of an entire organism. It is the difference between making bricks and building a house out of the bricks. You need the bricks to build the house. If you have defective bricks, the house will be defective. But the plan of the house is not contained in the bricks, or the wires, or the beams, or cement. 4

As Sheldrake implies, the physical form of the body can never be the originating source of the meanings that flow through it or of the mind, life and spirit that it displays. It is but a physical instrument through which the intelligent energy of meaning flows. It is an instrument like a flute; it does not create music (meaning) but simply plays a variety of tunes that are suited to the physical geography of the instrument. 5

As an instrument the body can play two broad types of tunes: i) songs of dissonance and disharmony; and ii) songs of harmony, compassion and love. The songs of disharmony are about the extremes of tribalism or Reason. These are high energy partial views presented as the complete picture, the right answer, or as logical, legal and axiomatic. Whenever we sing these songs we become confused by our love of certainty at any price. Such songs also confound us about who we are and what is in our best interests. Such dissonant songs produce war, terrorism, hatred, blame, jealousy, envy, greed and selfishness.

The songs of harmony and love are sung by using the full range of notes from left and right hemispheres of the brain. These songs are about the integration of distinctions and the value of connection and empathy. They tell stories about uncertain and incomplete pictures that have no final closure or solution. They are sustained by intuitive connections that underpin all sensory differences and by a sense of a larger self beyond the small mind of a private world. People who sing these songs, even badly, are likely to experience satisfying pleasures that sustain them through the vicissitudes of life.

In this chapter I want to discuss two features that relate to the songs the body sings. The first lies at the core of dissonance and disharmony and it relates to the question of self-identity and who we are not. I begin discussing this question by using the idea that the body represents the allegorical level of interpretation. The second feature I discuss relates to who we are. I discuss this issue through our interpretations of the concrete forms of the physical world.

Allegory

The question of self, of 'who we are,' is central to the context of the body and it is a question that begins with discovering that we are not the body. I want to discuss this issue in relation to those patterns of identification which embrace the three contexts of body, culture and symbols. Each of these three levels of self can produce identification patterns that when synchronized create a sense of a concrete, static identity: 'I am this body.' Through this common construction the body stops being a secondary context of self and instead becomes an idol. This idol-identity is a core feature of positivism which imagines that individuals have exclusive private identities that are separate from the identity of other people and also separate from an independently existing real physical world.

I want to discuss the idol-identity in terms of allegory. The Christian teacher Origen argued that at this level of interpretation we find the allegorical meaning of a text. In general, an allegory, like a metaphor or aparable, has more than one meaning. It is through an allegorical reading that the implicit tendrils of the allegory or parable become exposed to the light of scrutiny. An allegory is usually a story that is written in a certain way to represent a moral, social, religious or political set of ideas. For example, traditional characters in parables or allegorical stories can represent charity, greed, envy, hatred and so on. Conventionally, the multiple meanings of allegory are said to be the literal and the symbolic.

An allegory thus displays several layers of meaning and reflects the fifth law of Meaning. Even though someone may write an allegorical text, others who read it may interpret it in a literal and/or hard-edged cultural manner. There is a well known example of this happening with the Persian poet Omar Khayyam who wrote The Rubaiyat, a series of spiritual poems. These poems have often been interpreted and translated literally. For example when Omar Khayyam wrote about 'a flask of wine' it has often been assumed he was literally referring to drinking wine and drunkenness. However, if we read his poems as allegories we read these references as being about 'the bliss of divine love that comes when one communes with God in meditation.' 6

People who are unable to read allegories are lost to a literal world of surface understandings. As Owen Barfield reminds us in Saving the Appearances, they have 'eyes that see not and ears that hear not.' Barfield was referring to the biblical 'Parable of the Sower' to illustrate how some people are unable to read and understand the multi-layered depth of meaning that parables and allegories contain.

Barfield saw the 'parable of the Sower' as the key to understanding how deeper meanings contain spiritual truths. He suggests that the parable of the Sower is saying that when we understand this parable it is because we have the ability to 'know' and thus read and understand all parables. Barfield says that to understand this parable becomes 'a sort of pre-condition for the understanding, or knowing of any other.' In the Bible (Mark, Chapter 4) Jesus tells the multitude about the parable of the Sower. During the telling he says:

Know ye not this parable? And how then will ye know all parables? 7

Clearly the ability to know the parable of the Sower (and therefore to be able to read the multi-levels of allegories) was a problem two thousand years ago as it is now. The next line in the parable gives us the meaning of what is to be sown by the Sower:

The sower soweth the word.

When the ancient terms 'Word' or 'Logos' are replaced with 'Meaning' then the idolatry that is produced from not knowing the parable of the sower is the same as the blind literalism that Positivists cling to today. As the Bible story suggests, the ability to read and understand several layers of meaning simultaneously is important because it moves us beyond mere veneers of comprehension. This depth of appreciation and understanding is what is to be sown by the Sower. This depth of understanding comes from an appreciation of the fifth law of Meaning.

Barfield attributes the ability to know the parable of the Sower to an iconoclasm that arises from our imagination. In contrast, I suggest that our ability to read a parable is more a gift of learning. Some people have an innate ability to read multi-layers of meaning yet most of us do not and therefore we need the gift of a critical and iconoclastic learning that teaches us how to read multi-layers of meaning. Most people are unable to accomplish this without some formal training. Unfortunately, without the gift of this kind of learning the multi-layered contexts of life tend to shrink into idols that are empty of deeper meaning and spiritual truth.

The parable and the allegory thus represent a special way of storytelling that helps confront superficial responses and so allows for deeper meaning to resonate with the reader. As the body context represents the allegorical level of self, knowing this context sets before us the possibilities of a subtle, multi-layered empathetic and sane understanding of who we are and of our relationship to the world at large.

Idol-body

As many readers may have guessed, I am setting an allegorical reading of self against the idolatry of: 'I am this body.' This distinction assumes that no idol can be constructed while we maintain a multi-layered allegorical view of things. In other words, if I see my body as incarnate, that is, as the second context of the self; as a representation of the Host, then, the thought: 'I am this body' cannot arise.

The sense of a personal identity, expressed as 'I am this body' is a form of idol worshipping. Such worshipping is usually carried out by the majority of us who think of ourselves as in control of our lives, or who have personal ownership of things like cars and houses. The certainty demanded by this idol is also guaranteed by the repetitive use of the identificational verb 'to be' when linked with the personal pronoun 'I,' as in 'I am a Christian, Muslim or Australian.' This verb of identification reverberates with patterns of cultural bonding and in this manner erases multiple layers of meaning. These identification patterns, in which the several 'vertical' contexts of body, culture and symbol are fused together, become one single, literal, concrete entity.

Because of the welding together of these multiple layers the second context of the self evaporates. In place of the incarnate body is the construction of an idol-body which is imbued with an exclusive sense of a private and personal self. The idol-body lies at the base of the psychological formation called the ego. This is a formation that is guarded by a set of defense mechanisms which work in a similar manner to the way we protect our body from harm. Hence, when we defend our ego we also tighten our muscles as if we were protecting our body.

While the identification of my name (symbol) with my sense of self is often seen as an arbitrary relationship (I could always have a different name) the influence of culture is much more powerful. The contemporary culture of Reason, supported as it is by a positivistic science and technology, provides an underlying justification for the belief in a private, separate self. The assumption of a private self automatically establishes a binary opposition: 'me and not me,' or 'I and not I.'

One of the drawbacks in believing that my identity is my body is that I will die when my body dies. Hence, physical death is equated with death of the self. Our fear of death therefore represents a fear of losing the idol-body. Yet how do we actually lose the identifications that construct the idol-body? They are not lost by the physical death of the body. We can only lose the capacity for idolatry through learning to read the multi-layered weave of deeper contextual meaning and by making connections rather than divisions. For the empathetic person who sings the song of love there are no separations or divisions between me and not me. There is just one consciousness of which I am a part.

The major consequence of believing in an idol-body is our sense of alienation. This happens because I believe that I am a separate island of consciousness disconnected from the other islands as well as from the physical environment and, for the religious minded, separated from God. This is a harsh, miserable and false view of things. The major consequence of the idol-body for science is that it provides a private experiential foundation for a pervasive Positivism that then postulates a private self separate from the physical world. In this manner an individual's belief in a private idol-body reinforces a collective Positivism that then idolizes a mechanical science that deals with idol-space, idol-matter and idol-time.

The environment

The question of who we are is closely connected to our view of the environment. In terms of Meaning, the reality of the physical world arises within the context of the physical body. This is a controversial statement for those who like neat dualistic separations between what is called an independent, objective and physical world on the one hand, and a subjective inner world on the other. This is a realist, materialist and positivistic view of things yet it is also a superficial and literal interpretation of a complex situation that has several layers of meaning. By taking the context of the Host into account the physical world of concrete forms (including the body) can be seen to float in the ambience of implicit Meaning, like so many sponges in water.

This metaphor signifies that the difference between the body's inner and outer spheres is only a distinction within an unbroken continuum of Meaning. The body's internal organization comes from exchanges of Meaning while its external organization comes from exchanges of Meaning. The space in which the body moves and operates is not empty but filled with the potentials of implicitness. We know this because of the first law of Meaning which says that there is no part or scintilla of the universe which does not have meaning; that there is no outside of Meaning. The meaning within and the meaning without represents the same Numinous ocean and any differences that can be distinguished are ones within this interconnected field.

Given this unbroken continuum of Meaning, the physical world will then arise through our processes of perception and observation. This is not to say that the physical world is unreal or an illusion, which is the literal conclusion made by some postmodernists as well as some scientists. Rather, the reality of the physical world is the visible result of several filtering processes, firstly by our sensory apparatus then by our cultural predispositions and finally by the habits of our linguistic community.

These three filtering processes represent the three contexts of self. They are different from each other yet they are entirely interconnected. This multi-layered filtering of the physical world does not necessarily result in illusions—although obviously sometimes it does, as in the case of hallucinations. The normal result of this multi-layered filtering is a physical reality that is always derivative, secondary, provisional and relative. Such a reality is not an illusion. It exists, but exists as a qualified reality. These qualifying terms are usually unacceptable to the realist, materialist and the positivist who hold to the idea of a non-filtered, non-relative, non-secondary, non-provisional and non-qualified objective real world.

Yet in addition to this multi-layered filtering, the concrete objects of the physical world represent the visible features of much larger hidden events. This philosophical principle, 'an object is the visible part of an event,' 8 represents the multi-layered relationship to which I have often referred. It is reflected in the idea that explicit constituents always arise from their implicit background contexts. This permanent gestalt relationship linking explicit to implicit meaning may be illustrated by taking Owen Barfield's example of an unseen rainbow.

An unseen rainbow is an object that does not exist because the events needed to create the 'rainbow' have not yet come together. The events which need to cohere in order for a rainbow to be created involve sunlight shining through rain together with an observation. An unseen rainbow simply is a situation where one of the events, 'observation,' has been taken out of the underlying context. The result is the contradiction of 'an unseen rainbow,' or more accurately, a rainbow that does not yet exist. A similar result can be obtained by extracting another key event from the necessary mix of events, for instance, by deleting the event of sunlight. The result of that will be the same as an unseen rainbow for it will be a non-existing rainbow.

Yet this is not to argue that rainbows are so provisional they are akin to illusions. Rainbows are real in the sense that they are a qualified reality. They are qualified by the underlying events that need to cohere in order for them to exist. The same gestalt principle operates for all the objects of the physical world and that principle says every object represents the visible part of underlying contextual events. As such, all physical objects represent a reality that is secondary and qualified. This is the case right down to the smallest micro-objects of particles and waves which represent the visible distinctions that have arisen from their underlying contexts and these are contexts which are full of potentials.

In terms of Meaning, visible distinctions and/or objects are the characteristics of explicit meaning, while the potentials of underlying events are the characteristics of implicit, contextual Meaning. The hidden context in which the visible objects of the physical world arise is therefore the Host context. This is a universal context of Meaning that surrounds and permeates every object including the human body.

The physical world is therefore not an independent, unqualified, objective reality as the positivist would argue. Rather, it is highly qualified and filtered by the multi-layered contexts of symbols, culture and sensory equipment and, in addition, by the hidden contextual events of the Host which have given rise to this qualified reality. As a consequence of these many processes of filtering and qualification the status of the physical environment (which includes the body context) is always secondary and relative. Thus just as the body is born out of the cosmic ocean of Meaning that supports it throughout its existence, so too do all the other concrete, transient forms of the world come into existence through a series of transformations of Meaning.

Observation

Observation has a central role in empirical science; it is the main factor used to judge the validity of scientific theory and practice. If we were to be scientific about observation we would have to ask: what are the valid criteria for observing? In other words, what is a valid empirical observation? Here we have a problem. There is no scientific procedure for assessing an objective observation, nor is it empirically possible to determine what a valid empirical observation is. 9

The ambiguity that surrounds the idea of a valid observation is largely ignored by positivistic science. I suggest that the confusion which arises from this question comes from the surface and literal use of the term 'observation.' The processes of observing are not singular but have several layers. There are the mechanical and physiological instruments of observation (the physiology of the senses) which explain little about our sense of seeing. Then there are the transformations of Meaning that operate through the physical instruments of the senses in order to create our sense of 'seeing.' Our sense of seeing comes from the light of insight and realization. These are primary factors of Meaning and the physiology of the senses is secondary.

When we see a physical object the process of seeing involves not one light, but two. Without both these lights working in harmony there would be no seeing. The first light (energy) comes from the Numinous through the Host context and this provides the implicit light of the inner sight that operates within the mechanical physiological processes of vision. The second light comes from the energy of sunlight and this registers with the physiological mechanics of the eye and brain in the acts of differential visual perception. Together these physiological and meaning processes create the three dimensional foundation screen of space on which all the explicit concrete forms of the world appear.

These two lights are therefore synchronized in perception. The meaning that is created by the first light of cosmic consciousness is of an implicit awareness that comes from the implications of symmetry connections and their potentials. The meaning that is associated with the second light provided by the sun involves the explicit, discernable, extended and differential forms of what David Bohm called the explicate order. The explicate order is a secondary order of Meaning.

The local perceptual space of the individual's observations therefore represents not a private world but a feature of cosmic consciousness. There are not two spaces: the perceptual which is subjective and the physical space of Einstein's relativity theories, which is objective. This is a false dichotomy. Because Meaning is singular there is only one space which is accessed by the individual through his or her processes of observation and perception. The singularity of Meaning and thus the singularity of space indicate that the physical world is not a separate domain from our consciousness; rather the physical world is part of the singular and universal consciousness which we access through perception.

This singularity of consciousness means that within this field of Meaning we make distinctions, for instance, between the finite and the infinite, or between the local and non-local, or the body and the Host levels of self. These distinctions are made, however, within the overall ambient continuum of Meaning. (In scientific discourse 'non-local' refers to an action at a distance. In terms of meaning it refers to the symmetry potentials of implicitness that exist at every point in the universe. I discuss these terms further in the next chapter.)

As a consequence of the singularity of space, the three dimensions of space represent no more than the explicit, differential and secondary features of Meaning while the undifferentiated background screen of space represents the implicit, undifferentiated symmetry potentials of Meaning. Observation therefore embodies both these kinds of meaning in a manner that unifies the seer with the seen and the knower with the known. Hence, within the processes of observation there is what may be called the Host's universal sight within the individual mechanics of seeing.

This is to say we do not perceive directly, innocently or passively as private individuals. Rather, the processes of perception represent a non-personal, unintended, local example of larger universal movements. Observation is a movement in which the explicate order unfolds out of the implicate order. Hence, when we observe the world, we construct its physical forms within a three dimensional space while also bringing that explicit world into existence. Observation is therefore a local as well as a universal and non-local process of creation.

The underlying processes of observation are therefore never unique or personal and nor do they have valid objective criteria. Rather, the processes of perception follow well established universal principles in which the implicate order transforms into the explicate and then, after a while, enfolds back again into the implicate. The singularity of Meaning and of space indicates that the world is created anew for us whenever we participate in the events of its creation. These are the events of observation.

In this discussion of observation I have been emphasizing the non-personal basis of perception and stressed that these processes are given and so not unique to any individual. This explanation is, however, the ground on which I can build my own local and idiosyncratic method of seeing. Ways of seeing are therefore distinct from the underlying sight of Meaning. The question thus arises, how is it possible to reconcile the given within sense perception with my idiosyncratic ways of seeing?

Ways of seeing

In terms of Meaning, how we observe is always embedded—and so entangled—in the way we think and thus with the three contexts of being: body, culture and symbol. Observing is an act of interpretation because no observation can be separated from our use of symbols or our cultural habits. Therefore, even though the basic sight of seeing is the same for everyone, not everyone sees in the same way.

There are four ways of seeing the world. Each of these ways of seeing is like a set of glasses that creates a different view. These four ways of seeing are called: symbolic-seeing, cultural-seeing, ego-seeing and heart-seeing. These four patterns of seeing are the only ways we humans see the world. This means that individual people do not see the world separately and privately and hence there are not seven billion ways of seeing. However, there is also no single system for correct observation that is complete and accurate; we do not see the world through the same set of glasses. Rather there are only four ways of seeing for everybody no matter their cultural predispositions, academic training or personal histories.

Many of us see only symbolic reality and mistake symbols for the whole truth. As a consequence, symbolic-seeing tends to produce a surface, literal, axiomatic and sometimes mathematical truth. Symbolic-seeing causes us to err by over-valuing differences so they become separations that divide. With such observations there is a reversal of the order in the levels of self which makes symbols (level 4) into something that is concrete and visceral (level 2). Such reversals create dissonance within the system of meaning-making. This dissonance can in some circumstances involve the fundamentalist's 'word of God,' or in another, the 'black-letter' logic of law, or in other situations, the axiomatic truth of a scientific proof. Symbolic seeing is a common literal mode of interpreting the world, oriented as it is to discernable differences that tend to exclude and divide. These kinds of observations fragment the universe into an outer, separate, random and dead place.

A different kind of observation occurs when we see through the habits of culture without recognizing these habits as a context of self. When the implications of culture are ignored we create a cultural-seeing that is blind to culture. A seeing that is culturally blind tends to promote its own cultural ways of seeing. This kind of seeing represents an inability or unwillingness to distinguish differences and it is essentially a tribal view of the world. Such a view can also be reflected in the protocols and conventions of the academic discipline in which we have been trained. A culturally blind person has a tendency to hero worship patriarchal or celebrity figures, to use either/or judgments about people or support justice systems that are essentially tribal (an eye for an eye). A culturally blind scientist disregards the relativities of culture and instead believes that there are such things as 'raw data,' 'factual information that is beyond question' and 'objective truths.'

The third set of glasses that most of us wear permanently is seeing the world through the limitations of our ego. Such ego-seeing is nourished and supported by the great continent of our desires and these represent an inability or unwillingness to distinguish differences. This kind of seeing creates much disharmony because it is limited by the category of self-interest and is based upon the two opposing values of either/or which distort the integration of perception. As a consequence, we see ourselves as different identities that are separate from other identities as well as separate from the environment and from the Numinous. We convince ourselves of this 'truth' by looking into a mirror and seeing a body that is different from other bodies. We therefore become convinced we are separate from others by the materialist assumption 'I am this body.' This common misunderstanding is taken to be an axiomatic truth by all ego-seers.

There is one more way to see. A few are able to see by engaging the right hemisphere of the brain. This is a seeing in which everything is integrated and interconnected. It can also be called heart-seeing. Heart-seeing involves the realization that we participate in a singular interconnected universe which has various inner and outer features. This is the ability to see implicit meaning and as a result, an ability to be able to read and predict likely consequences. Heart-seeing represents seeing through the fifth law of Meaning: it is a seeing that involves multiple layers. In its simplest form it is a seeing in which everything is both unified yet distinct.

Heart-seeing creates harmony because it is in line with the underlying non-personal sight-features of observation; in other words, it is in tune with the structure of self and of Meaning. This is sane seeing. With this kind of seeing we know we are participants in a world where symbols and cultural differences are the natural but provisional features to the underlying ambient unity of connection. Heart-seeing, or what I call 'empathy,' is empty of identification but full of connection and love. It represents the only valid, multi-layered detached approach for the accumulation of scientific knowledge, wisdom and spiritual development.

The four ways of seeing the world—symbolic-seeing, cultural-seeing, ego-seeing and heart-seeing—arise from the inherent sight within Meaning. In other words, we can reconcile the given with the idiosyncratic in the manner that the Host represents the given, background light of sight on which these four ways of seeing are based. These four methods of interpreting the world are like four sets of glasses that can create different views of the world. Yet each of these four views contains a given, core element which is the sight within each way of seeing.

In summary, the body is incarnate, which means it is the secondary support context for the other two expressive levels of being. At this allegorical level we will discover that we are not the symbols we use; nor are we the cultural habits that come to us so naturally, but neither are we the material body that dies. Our cultural perceptions of this world inherently represent how we will order and value the four contexts of self. If we are prone to literalism and the creation of idols then these four contexts tend to be ignored and not taken into account. Yet if we are able to develop a multi-layered allegorical understanding then this ability will lead us to see the infinite interconnections of everything.
9 – The Host

The astronaut Ed Mitchell tells the story of his epiphany that occurred on the way home from the moon on board the command module of Apollo 14:

Looking at the moon, looking at the sun, looking at beyond the earth to these billions and billions of brilliant stars and galaxies was simply the feeling of connectedness, the feeling that the molecules of my body in this spacecraft were manufactured in those stars. We're connected. 1

Mitchell's revelation of connectedness was an epiphany that other astronauts had also experienced. Mitchell's epiphany gave him the insight that the universe was in some way alive and conscious—a thought that he found inexplicable. Mitchell's sudden realization of an interconnected universe represents a realization of the unity of the four levels of self: Host, body, culture and symbols:

The Self

Figure 13:

Experiencing an epiphany is one way to get in touch with the implicit foundations of your self: the Host context. Getting in touch with the foundation of your self is necessary for you to realize who you truly are, for without it you will be lost in a fog of confusion. The foundation of the Host is the essence of who you are. It is the 'I am' of cosmic consciousness, the 'I am' without a predicate, form or location. It is that spark of divine luminosity we call the knower.

Another way of touching the essence of who we are is through a training program. One of the most famous and influential accounts of such a program is to be found in Eugen Herrigel's classic, Zen and the Art of Archery. For the novice the contest which archery creates is not simply about the archer hitting a target some distance off. Rather, this is a contest between the archer and his inner Self. As Herrigel writes:

The contest consists in the archer aiming at himself—and yet not at himself, in hitting himself—and yet not himself, and thus becoming simultaneously the aimer and the aim, the hitter and the hit. Or, to use some expressions which are nearest the heart of the Masters, it is necessary for the archer to become, in spite of himself, an unmoved centre. 2

This kind of contradictory language is difficult to understand if one simply reads the words and has not enjoyed drawing the bow. In a similar manner, the intellectual and head experience of reading a book cannot provide the reader with the kind of realization that comes when the arrow hits the target without any conscious effort.

Yet another way to speak of the implicitness of the Host comes from Douglas Harding. Harding has written On Having No Head in an ironic style that describes the state of mind produced by right brain intuitive knowing:

Reason and imagination and all mental chatter died down. For once, words really failed me. I forgot my name, my humanness, my thingness, all that could be called me or mine. Past and future dropped away ... There existed only Now, the present moment and what was clearly given in it ... Lighter than air, clearer than glass, altogether released from myself, I was nowhere around ... I had always been too busy or too clever or too scared to see. It was naked, uncritical attention to what had all along been staring me in the face—my utter facelessness.

The facelessness that Harding describes is the sensation of not being a body; of having no head; a sensation 'lighter than air, clearer than glass;' a 'vast emptiness vastly filled, a nothing that finds room for everything.' This sensation represents a self-reflected awareness of the sight within seeing. This is the background context in which seeing occurs; a background from which all movement and action stand out. This is the vital void of the Host. Harding first experienced this sensation of headlessness on a still, clear day while walking in the Himalayas.

Like Harding, many of us begin to apprehend this contextual vitality on still, clear days on the high plateau of spirituality while we are immersed in nature. These are special moments for the few who manage to bypass or momentarily downgrade the visceral energy of an alert left brain that embeds us always so forcefully in the explicate order. Standing still we may become aware of the self-luminosity of the seer that stretches to infinity. It is then that we can see beyond the object, tree or cloud, to experience the grace of the Host. In such an epiphany you know with certainty that you are the eternal empty fullness of everything.

These, however, are words on a page and not the experience itself. The limitation of symbols is quite general and does not relate to my inability to use them. In other words, maps are never simply the territory they seek to represent. The territory of the Host is therefore unable to be directly realized through the use of symbols. This limitation also applies to mathematical measurements for the Host context is unable to be measured directly. This limitation relates to the two conditions of meaning and, as a consequence, it is impossible to represent with explicit meaning that prior domain which is always implicit.

Nevertheless, the immediate world created by the small mind of thoughts, feelings, sensations and perceptions is more readily available to the average reader of this book. In such a world we should speak about the attributes of the Host. In contrast, the fully realized person, that is, the individual who is fully oriented to and from the Host context, would not need to speak or write about the Host, nor would this context have any attributes. Attributes are created by the use of symbols, while implicitness which is experienced directly has no attributes.

The first attribute of the Host context that I want to discuss is implicitness.

Implicitness

In Chapter 2 I referred to the two ancient terms actus and potentia—the actual and the potential—that represent the two conditions of meaning—the implicit and the explicit. As Meaning can also be called 'intelligent energy' (Chapter 4) the energy element of implicit meaning will always be the causal potentials of the universe. As suggested in Chapter 1, such potentials are symmetry potentials because symmetry is the basis of implicit meaning. Symmetry potentials thus provide the energy and causal component within the implicitness of Meaning.

The intelligent element of implicit Meaning represents the cosmic screen of consciousness on which the landscapes of the universe are painted. This universal mind represents the sight within every seeing by humans, frogs, walruses, elephants and blind velvet worms; this is the light of awareness within all acts of perception, whatever the organism. This is the sight of implicitness that exists at every point in the entire universe. This is the sacred sight at the core of every perception. It is the sight we all share. Sight is a key feature of the implicit Meaning of the Host which is the cosmic intelligence within every mind as well as the purpose within all life and the creative and causal force within every explicit manifestation. This is the cosmic creative implicitness that orders the universe and is aware of everything at all times.

In terms of the multi-levels of self, there are three kinds of implicit meaning. These are:

  * implicitness – pure undifferentiated symmetry potentials – the Host;

  * implications – in the process of unfolding through body, culture and symbol;

  * implications – that have completed the cycle of unfolding and enfolding.

The first of these represents the Host context of pure implicit potentials which can be described as constituted by implicit to implicit exchanges. (I discuss these exchanges more fully in Chapter 10 where I suggest that they also equate with Rupert Sheldrake's formative causation hypothesis.) Implicit to implicit exchanges create a non-visible universe-wide resonating field of cosmic consciousness.

This ocean of implicitness can be described as non-visible rather than invisible. This cosmos is non-visible rather than invisible because exchanges which are implicit to implicit must remain non-visible. This is the case because the visible can only arise when there is a transformation from implicit to explicit. While there are potentials for this kind of transformation within any implication, such potentials are held in abeyance within pure implicit to implicit exchanges. In other words, implicit to implicit exchanges represent the preponderance of the Host context and the foundation source potentials for all those transformations that do unfold. This non-visible whole is therefore distinct from the invisible implications associated with the unfolding and enfolding contexts of body, culture and symbol.

The invisible implications of these three contexts represent the hidden aspects of the unfolding and enfolding processes that can and will become explicit, and hence visible, over time. Finally, there are the implications which have completed the processes of unfolding and enfolding. When all the implications associated with a particular initial movement have become unfolded, these implications will resemble distinctions that will then further become enfolded within the ground state of implicitness. For example, in respect to a particular person, when every implication associated with the life of that person has been exhausted this person will have reached a state where desire and thought are no more. They will have then fully returned, as realized and enlightened beings, to the silent Host source of their own implicitness.

The conclusion that can be drawn from the three kinds of implicit meaning is that they represent the connecting framework for everything: a framework for the four levels of self and for all transformations that unfold and then enfold. Implicit meaning is the cosmic glue that holds the whole of the universe together as well as the creative and ordering force behind every transformation.

The context of the Host is, therefore, a context firstly and not a person or a form. This is the context of pure implicitness devoid of matter, extension, form and differentiation. The universal potentials of the Host are symmetry potentials, and these causal potentials are the genesis of all micro or macro events, transformations, differences and changes. This primary context represents the organizational force behind every physical, cultural or symbolic transformation in the universe. This context is the universal cloud of unknowing; the inconceivable, un-manifest and unmoving meaning of Meaning—the knower we are before the mind thinks.

Non-locality

Implicitness is also non-local. I could have used the more religious term 'eternal' here but 'non-locality' is a feature of scientific discourse so I have used that. What is non-locality? Non-locality means more than the negative, 'non' in relation to the term 'locality.' It also means more than the 'entanglement' of particles. In a positive sense it indicates an intelligent symmetry connection across space and time. It means infinite interconnectedness: a state in which everything in the universe is connected to everything else. In terms of energy it means a force that acts instantaneously across the entire universe. The negative term 'non-locality' can therefore create a positive image of an integrated, singular quintessence: a universal constant which holistically interconnects everything in the universe. This image represents the invisible, ambient ocean of consciousness that is the Numinous.

This universe-wide and subtle cloud of implicitness is an energetic ocean in which every particle is saturated with instantaneous (universe-wide) intelligent energy. This implicit intelligence can be likened to an amniotic fluid that holds, supports, nourishes and then destroys every form in the universe. Within such a view, every transient physical form floats like a porous sponge in this life-giving field of Meaning. 3

There is therefore no such thing as 'empty space.' Rather, throughout the fifteen billion light years of space there is a fullness, a plenum of implicit connections and symmetry potentials. Connections within this plenum are instantaneous, that is, connections are holistic and non-local and operate outside all the explicit parameters of human measurement. Essentially this means that such connections operate and exist prior to the body. Hence they exist prior to the measurements of time and space and the differentiations of observation, thought and expression. Lacking differentiation, such connections are, by definition, symmetrical and non-local.

An instantaneous connection is not to be confused with a connection related to speed or velocity. The theory that the space of the universe is full of energy moving at super-luminary speeds (many times faster than the speed of light) is a theory that does not fit with the idea of non-local, instantaneous connections. An instantaneous connection has no speed or velocity. It is, rather, a universal constant. Such a constant does not move through space and time for these are categories of the body which exist as derivative effects of the underlying constant. Universal inter-connectedness is simply an inbuilt, integrated unity-feature of the whole system. Instantaneous, non-local participating connections represent the character of implicitness: the 'mind-stuff' of the universe.

One of the founders of quantum physics, Sir James Jeans, once remarked that 'the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine,' and Arthur Eddington agreed that 'the stuff of the world is mind-stuff.' 4 I would add that the 'mind stuff' of the universe is the stuff of Meaning. At the level of the Host this is the symmetry potentials of implicitness. The well established scientific evidence of non-local, instantaneous connections 5 represents, for this writer, evidence of the coherent, participating intelligence of the cosmic Host.

Hence the implicit meaning of the Host context does not have a speed because it is non-local which means it is everywhere and all at once the same. 6 This non-local unity represents the symmetry of simultaneity which is the essence of non-local interconnectedness. In this realm things do not travel faster than the speed of light because there are no 'things' and no 'traveling'; there is just the universal constant of implicit interconnection. On an individual level this intelligence represents the simultaneity of time and space which gives us our sense of the present: the NOW.

Non-local implicitness also endows us with the connections of empathy, or what I called in Chapter 7 'heart meaning.' Heart meaning is the Host's love expressed in our love for another. Loving another always involves two loves: the love of the Host's implicitness (which could be called 'bliss') as well as our idiosyncratic feelings of affection and attraction for another. These two loves (the Host's and mine) synchronize in all feelings of affection, adoration as well as desire. Yet even though these two loves cohere in all our feelings of love they are not equal or the same. When the small mind loves another we often feel afraid of losing them. Such feelings are associated with our sense that we are a separate self. Such feelings, when strong, tend to cloud out the blissful, unconditional heart meaning of the Host context.

In Paramahansa Yogananda's interpretations of the poems by Omar Khayyam he draws our attention to the two loves that are involved in loving another. He tells us that he is 'in love with Love—with God— alone. Then I drank love through all true hearts. I saw that He is the One Cosmic Lover, the One Fragrance that permeates all the variegated blossoms of love in the garden of life.' He goes on, 'To tell another, "I love you," is false until you realize the truth. God as the love in me is in love with His love in you.' 7 Is this not a beautiful way to describe the coherence of the cosmic heart within our love for another?

The Host's heart is therefore the connected bliss of implicitness in which everyone shares. It is the universal heart that we all experience as if it were personal. This means that individual people do not have separate hearts (even though we do have separate heart organs). There is only one heart Meaning because there is only one Numinous. We experience the connecting energy of this one heart when we merge in love with others or when we realize the truth of which Yogananda speaks. When we realize this non-local heart energy it is both intimate yet impersonal for it is the connecting potentials of the universal Host that we are feeling.

As Yogananda implies, it is not unusual to confuse such feelings and think that the object of our affection produces the intimate feelings of desire. This is not possible. It is the impersonal heart energy that comes from within that provides the foundational drive and framework of connection for the more possessive and object-centered desire to flourish. This delightful implicitness of the universe transcends symbols, cultural styles and bodily sensations of pain and pleasure. It exists within everything and between everything, from the smallest mass-less particle to the furthest galaxy.

In summary, the peaceful implicitness of the Host represents our essential nature—who we are. This universal constant represents a quintessence which is holistic, singular, non-local (eternal) interconnected heart energy. We have seen that within the four levels of self there is often coherence or a doubling of the same meaning. This coherence is present in the sight within seeing and now it is evident again as the cosmic heart within our love for another.

Intelligence

What constitutes intelligence? This is a question psychologists have been trying to answer ever since intelligence tests first recorded IQ results. There are two major schools of thought on intelligence. One school believes in a general intelligence factor while the other argues for multiple intelligences. Approximately one hundred years ago the English psychologist Charles Spearman (1863–1945) set out to measure a range of abilities in people. He found a common factor across this range which he called general intelligence or 'g.'

Spearman considered that the 'g' factor provided the individual with the same degree of intelligence in approaching all acts. Yet he also realized that different abilities have specific factors associated with them. This he called the 's' factor. The 's' factor is specific to a particular action or ability and it will vary in strength from one act to another. For example, just because we are good at playing the guitar does not mean we will be proficient at tennis. By taking 'g' and 's' into account, Spearman devised the two factor theory of intelligence. Spearman is usually put into the school that accepts general intelligence, but I would argue that his two factor theory cuts across the division between those who focus on multiple as opposed to general intelligence.

From the perspective of Meaning, intelligence is not an isolated ability of separate individuals but rather it is a universal attribute of the Host. As an attribute of the Host, Spearman's 'g' or general factor represents an attribute of the big mind of the Host context. As a consequence, Spearman's 's' factor is an attribute of the small mind that involves the more personalized contexts of body, culture and symbols. Hence, general intelligence is not the exclusive preserve of humanity but represents an organizational feature of all animate and inanimate forms throughout the universe.

Yet the question persists, what constitutes 'g' apart from the title of 'general intelligence'? Common definitions have resorted to such platitudes as 'success in problem solving' or 'ability to learn,' but such comments do not answer the question and are also based upon the idea that the individual's identity and thus intelligence is a separate and private domain. Spearman's 'g' factor has therefore never been satisfactorily defined. The reason for this, I suspect, is that no one has been able to describe the infinite contextual level implied by the term 'general.'

It is my suggestion that the evidence for the 'g' factor can be discovered in the way meaning operates through the interaction of symbols. For example, in language, signs have the inherent capacity to 'point to' or signify something. This capacity for motion represents a movement of meaning and is therefore an exchange of intelligence and energy from one sign to another. In linguistics this exchange is called signification or signifying. These exchanges of meaning have order and structure. By this I mean they involve complex exchanges of symmetrical, non-symmetrical and asymmetrical relations between signs.

It is important to note that such exchanges are not caused by the abstract objects (signs) themselves. (If a sign is seen as an independent causal form in its own right then it represents an idol and not a representation.) The movement between signs is also not caused by the deliberate intention or will of individuals, for the exchanges between signs are organized mostly below the level of an individual's conscious mind. In addition, the forms involved in the exchange are cultural, which again places them beyond the individual's will. Rather, the underlying source of the exchanges of meaning associated with sign exchange is the agency of Meaning itself. This is the self-caused and self-organized agency of the Numinous.

Hence all communications have an underlying essential generic intelligence: the 'g' factor. (By 'all communications' I mean any exchange of meaning, and that includes particles and cells as well as people.) In addition, communication exchanges are social acts that produce social relations between people, cells and particles. Such exchanges play an important role in creating individual people, cells and particles as well as guiding their behavior. Social exchanges always originate from within the holistic context of Meaning itself. Without the intelligent energy of this singular, holistic context there would be no communication and no exchanges because there would be no connecting transformations and therefore there could be no exchanges of meaning. It is the transformation of meaning which makes a communication a communication.

Charles Spearman's two factor theory of intelligence was correct. In terms of Meaning his 'g' or general intelligence is the infinite intelligent energy of the Host's implicit meaning. His 's' factor represents how this meaning is transformed into explicit forms by individuals. How individuals use the 'g' factor of intelligence relates to the variables of body type and the cultures in which the person is embedded as well as the type of symbols that are used in the linguistic community to which they belong. These three contexts filter the 'g' factor to produce the relative, secondary, conditional, qualified and specific results of the 's' factor. Here is further evidence of coherence. Within sight and love, and now intelligence, there is the harmony of a 'g' factor and an 's' factor.

The integration of these two factors in relation to intelligence has also been found by psychologists who note that differences in general intelligence correlate very highly (. 8 and above) with reactive times, (as in the specific action of pressing a button when a light goes on). This high correlation indicates that the pre-reflective consciousness of the body, (like the contexts of culture and symbol) is involved in intelligence, that is, in both 'g' and 's.' These two factors mean that to accurately measure the intelligence of any one person, psychologists would have to measure every capacity a person has in each of the three contexts of being. This would seem to be a very large and onerous task.

In principle, however, there would be some new consequences that could arise for the psychologist who devised a battery of tests for these three filtering contexts. As each of these contexts can filter out and reduce meaning, the tests would also have to measure that filtering and reduction of meaning. As such filtering of meaning often comes with a blindness induced by patterns of identification, the test results would indicate a read-out of wisdom in a variety of areas. Such intelligence testing would be of a very different nature to the limited approaches currently in use.

Traditionally IQ tests have tended to focus exclusively on pattern recognition and the replication of explicit meaning. This approach is also used in the creation of software for computers and is the basis for arguments about artificial intelligence. There is, however, another more important feature of intelligence which involves how well we integrate patterns and forms into self-reflective wholes. On what grounds do I make such a value judgment? This statement is based upon the idea that intelligence is not a static factor but involves motion. To illustrate the movement of intelligence I return to some of the earlier comments (Chapter 2) that relate to the processes of unfolding, and then enfolding, of all transformations. Figure 14 indicates the order of these transformations:

The arc of change

Figure 14:

In this arc there is a transformational change involving the unfolding and then the enfolding of meaning. The base of this movement rests in the still symmetry potentials of implicitness (the Host). There are three stages in this arc of change. The first stage involves some implicit meaning unfolding into actual, explicit forms that may be concrete or abstract. (Concrete forms arise within the processes of perception while abstract forms arise within cultural and symbolic contexts.)

The second stage of this transformational movement occurs when there is some refinement and maturing of the actual forms, concrete or abstract. The third stage begins with a process of enfolding. This is a process in which explicit differences lose their pre-eminent foreground status and become instead differential features within some larger implicit context. This process of enfolding continues until all differences disappear into the unity and coherence of the underlying ambient ocean of cosmic intelligence.

This arc of change also represents the movement of intelligence. The base of the arc of intelligence is the 'g' factor, which are the silent potentials of implicitness (the Host context). The 's' factor represents how the potentials of 'g' are filtered and transformed through a specific body living within a specific culture and using a specific community system(s) of symbols. This is a cyclic movement within the small mind and as indicated by Figure 15, this movement begins with an unfolding of implicit meaning through the processes of perception and on into the distinctions that mark explicit forms. This is the initial stage of form recognition and identification.

The arc of intelligence

Figure 15:

The second stage in the arc of intelligence involves form differentiation and pattern recognition. The third and final stage in this cycle occurs when forms, patterns and differences become integrated into self-reflective wholes. Traditionally it is the first and second stages of form and pattern recognition and differentiation that are the focus of most IQ tests. The third stage of integration does, however, provide more meaning and hence, more intelligence.

A moment of reflection will tell us that the arc of intelligence is superimposed on the arc of learning (Chapter 7, Figure 10) and also related to how memory works, which I shall discuss shortly. As for learning, intelligence is closely linked to our willingness to learn. This means that the more open we are to learning, the greater access we have to a deeper and more meaningful intelligence. These comments indicate that intelligence is a well-rounded, non-cultural movement that involves every individual in an inter-contextual relationship with the Host context. This relationship involves three capacities which will differ in each person and these capacities reflect the three steps in the arc of intelligence. They are the ability:

i) to identify and discriminate differences;

ii) to recognize patterns across different systems, and;

iii) to comprehend self-reflective implications across contexts.

This last aspect of intelligence involves the difficult practice of learning through self-reflection and sometimes through inner contemplation. This integrating ability rests on a trust in intuitive knowledge and having empathy for others.

Given these three steps in the arc of intelligence it is possible to conclude that artificial intelligence (AI) programs will never be able to mimic human intelligence because computer programs do not begin with implicit meaning. Rather, they begin with explicit computations. The so-called 'intelligence' of computers that some would compare with human intelligence is therefore based upon a computational language which begins and ends with the differentiations of the fourth context of self: symbols. This derivative level cannot ever become the primary level of Meaning and therefore the meaning that computers generate will only ever be derivative meaning from this derivative source.

To summarize: while intelligence is manifest in a multitude of ways through a multitude of forms there is only one Numinous field of intelligence. The singularity of this intelligence has two integrated features: a general or 'g' factor, which relates to the big implicit mind of the Host, and an 's' or specific factor, which is related to the small mind of the individual and the manner in which explicit meaning is created through the specific contexts of body, culture and symbols.

Memory

In The Field, Lynne McTaggart writes that the Zero-Point field is the basis for a number of fundamental phenomena. One of these she refers to as a kind of memory. The suggestion is that wave interference could conceivably imprint everything that ever happened in the history of the universe on this field. The Field would then also be a field of memory. This is also Ervin Laszlo's thesis in his book, Science and the Akashic Field. 8 Laszlo's proposal is similar, in that the Akashic field carries information which in the presence of time becomes memory.

But what is memory? Often theories, like the one Laszlo proposes, refer to memory in terms of 'information' without specifying what constitutes information. I suggest in Chapter 12 that by using the term 'information' we confuse ourselves with several obscure meanings. I suggest that the term 'information' is often used as an idol and so its use should be avoided at all times. The state that is implied by this mechanical term is actually meaning and it is the structure of meaning that can unlock the mystery of memory, as it has done with intelligence.

Physical theories of memory understand it in terms of units which are called physical 'traces' that are somehow stored within the nervous system of the body. This is an example of a positivist tradition of thought that begins and ends with differential and explicit meaning. With this kind of faith in the explicate order we simply create fictitious entities in language—such as a 'trace'—to explain what is essentially a non-material event. When we re-order the universe in this way so that physical objects become primary, the language we employ tends not to map something beyond itself but only reflexively refers back to itself. Hence, the meaning of the noun 'trace' is that of the noun trace.

Essentially, memory is not something material. Rather, it represents a resonance potential which is an important marking feature of intelligence. We could also call memory a mirroring or residual potential that is left within the implicitness of the Host context. This residual potential is an enfolded pattern within the arc of intelligence. Such residual potentials represent a set of implications residing within the non-local field of the Host.

It is the creation of memory that makes the arc of intelligence into the circle of intelligence. This fourth step of memory is also essential if learning is to take place.

The circle of intelligence

Figure 16:

In other words, memory is the imprinted implications (fourth step) that are left within the Host context by the three step movement through recognition, differentiation and integration. Such imprinted implications act as references that create the possibility for later pattern recognition and identification, which are the important first stage features in our intelligent capacity to understanding anything. Without memory there could be no recognition or pattern identification; in other words without memory there would be no 's' factor of intelligence and hence, no perception, no observation and no explicit definition of anything.

The logical question that follows from this is: 'how then do we begin to perceive the world when we have no memory of it'? When we have no memory, nothing is distinct and hence we see nothing and we think nothing. Yet because space is never empty, the nothing that we look at is not empty. This is to say that when we think we see 'nothing' we are actually seeing pure implicit Meaning. And in the act of looking and seeing nothing but implicit Meaning we complete a movement through the circle of intelligence, and through this circular movement memory is slowly created.

Memory is created within the potentials of the Host context. Such potentials relate to the movement of implication through the arc of intelligence. In this sense, memory is the residue of the implications associated with any particular set of movements through the three steps of intelligence. The potential patterns of memory are built up in small increments through the repetition of the movement through the circle of intelligence. This is the experience we have when faced with a strange environment. In such a situation we can be told that there are patterns we need to identify (for example, tracks made by an animal) that are as plain as the nose on your face, but as novices we cannot see them. So we look, and look and look, and slowly we begin to make out a something, a small set of marks in the sand, a bit of fur on a twig and so on. And then we begin to 'see' the patterns of an animal track. Through such repetition the potentials of memory unfold and in this manner we learn.

Being a novice is a common experience in many kinds of learning situations. This is the experience of patiently spending time in perceiving nothing but implicit meaning and then slowly, in small increments, letting the potentials of memory build into something that is discernable, explicit and has differentiation. Building a memory out of the potentials of implicit meaning is a cyclical process. It involves the cyclical action of creation and re-use. Creating the memory of the universe (the Akashic Field) is, therefore, a process by which the explicit world of forms has learnt to unfold from the implicate potentials of the Host.

Hence, like intelligence, memory is not a private attribute. Our memories, both short and long term, are the residual results of the continual cyclic process that has unfolded and then enfolded within us. This is a non-personal universal process that creates all forms, both concrete and abstract, and which also includes the evolution of all organisms. This universal recurring process is localized in individuals who are able to realize, recognize, identify, integrate and harmonize their intelligence. In humans, memory and intelligence work together as a cycle of action to become stabilized in perceptions so that we 'see' objects and think differential thoughts. What we 'see' and think about is the predictable world we know and remember.

As the Host context contains all the potentials of the universe, it therefore acts as the store house or a reflective repository (the Akashic Field) that holds the memory of all actions and behavior associated with every change in every form. In this manner, everything that has ever happened in the history of the universe is recorded within the implicit potentials of the Akashic field of the Host. This universal memory is available as an organizational support for every form and transformation in the universe. Over time this resource can logically create the organizational opportunities for mutations and changes in forms, and hence for the evolution of organisms. We can view memory then as a major resource for the organization of the individual as well as for the organization of the universe.

Individuals who are not fully realized (have not realized their full potentials) are not able to access the universal memory of the Akashic field. This failure is due to the dominance of the small mind which is oriented to a series of fixed meanings associated with the secondary and relative contexts of body, culture and symbols. The result of this orientation is that we can often forget what we have learnt. In particular, we forget because our learning is dominated and inhibited by the belief that we have a separate and static identity.

Forgetfulness

If we liken this infinite Akashic resource to the resources of voters in a parliamentary democracy we can understand why memory sometimes fails us. In parliamentary democracies the general resource of voters is often ignored and forgotten. Why? Because the executive suppresses communication and as a consequence forgets that its authority rests on the power of the voters. Similarly, we often forget what we have individually learnt and what has already been recorded within the Host context. Why? Because what has been individually learnt is sometimes suppressed and inhibited by pain and adverse associations and implications. Hence, the natural exchanges of intelligence from recognition to differentiation to integration will not flow easily and as a consequence, memory (the fourth step) is not engaged.

In these cases memory failures are due to the inability to learn. Such failures can be due to fixed preoccupations with the literal understandings; with the deletion of contexts; or with idols. These problems within the contexts of culture and symbols will inhibit learning and thus inhibit the circle of intelligence. The main difficulty in learning, however, is the belief that we have separate, solo minds and that we are in control of our lives. This belief takes us no further than the first step of identification in the circle of intelligence.

Memory failure can also be due to brain damage, fatigue or pain. These are problems within the body. Brain damage should not, therefore, be identified with intelligence, or with memory storage location within the Host context. Memory is stored not within the body as a 'trace' but as an implicit potential within the first context of the Host. Memory is thus a feature of meaning and not the other way around.

Rupert Sheldrake has raised this question of where memory is stored. Sheldrake argues that neuroscientists have for decades tried to locate memory traces in the brains of individual experimental animals. All to no avail! Over sixty percent of some unfortunate animal's brain has been removed and still it remembers. Sheldrake reports that one researcher remarked that 'memory seems to be both everywhere and nowhere in particular.' 9

Sheldrake's answer to this problem of memory storage is his hypothesis of formative causation. This theory proposes that all organic forms have been organized by fields called 'morphic fields.' Such organization is carried out by 'morphic resonance' which is the influence of like upon like. These fields exist within and around the organism and they contain a series of nested hierarchies of fields within fields. Sheldrake's morphic field theory represents a sympathetic approach to the present one where the three fields of self are nested within each other and are finally contained within the first context of the Host. Memories are thus not enfolded in individual forms (like the brains of rats or humans) but are stored as intelligent potentials in the non-local and infinite abyss of the Host. As such they exist in the first context of meaning and not in the second context of the body.

Three modes

Each of us has different memories because we each of us live different lives. We will therefore perceive the world differently. We also have different memories because of how we employ the three modes of memory. The first mode is subliminal. Normally memories operate subliminally, that is, below the level of conscious awareness, and as such they function as a part of the circle of intelligence. When these subliminal memories are activated we are largely unaware, for example, that within the processes of normal pattern recognition there is stored the enfolded meaning of the past. If we can speak of the energy charge of such memories then this charge is of a low level. This is the kind of low-level energy charge essential to maintain an open but focused concentration on any activity in which we have become proficient.

The second mode operates when the energy charge of memory increases. When there is an increase in energy patterns, recognition begins to take on a force and immediacy of its own. When this happens memory can become dominant aspects of intelligence and hence, our thinking. Our thinking will then tend to be habitual, repetitive and/or orthodox. This happens with all normative and complacent thought. Yet this is also the role of painful memories that can re-occur as the uncontrolled, habitual after-effects of trauma. The memories of a traumatic experience are over-charged to the degree that they dominate our thinking and reduce wellbeing. Hence in both normative (unquestioned) thinking and post-traumatic stress, the energy potentials of memory are unbalanced. In these situations the circle of intelligence does not remain open to new possibilities and to the unfolding and the enfolding of implications. Rather, intelligence is closed and behavior becomes habitual to the degree to which the implications associated with particular painful or fearful memories are not enfolded (finally put to rest). As a consequence, such unresolved implications remain active because of their lack of unfolding.

A third mode comes into force when our memories take on a centripetal strength to the degree that we seem to live within them. Such experiences are like 'out-of-body' experiences. Out-of-body experiences are usually defined as an experience that typically involves a sensation of floating outside of one's body and, in some cases, perceiving one's physical body from a place outside or above one's body. Such experiences can be triggered by life-threatening emergencies or near-death situations. Yet in a more mundane sense, to live within our memories is to live somewhere other than where the body lives. This is not a healthy thing to do.

Even though memory is stored in the Host context, to live in our memories is to not take advantage of this infinite resource, to become a person who feels the connecting love of the Host. Rather, to live in our memories is to be disoriented and forgetful of the present context of the body. Living in our memories happens because their energy charge is sufficiently strong to create a centripetal force within the circle of intelligence, a force that disorients us. To be disoriented is to miss the details of the environment where one lives and this can be dangerous.

Two aspects of memory

I have already mentioned that within the four levels of self there is a doubling of meaning. This coherence is present in the sight within seeing as well as within the cosmic heart of our love for another and also within the two factors of intelligence. This coherence of the infinite and the finite is also present in memory. They are:

i) the infinite, universal Akashic resource of the Host; and

ii) the finite individual soul, which represents the net effect of the memory and intelligence that each person produces in a lifetime.

The most common out-of-body experience is the one we all share, that is when the soul leaves the body after death. In terms of meaning, a soul represents a set of memories that contain a certain level of charge potential. A memory's 'charge potential' is the degree to which the memory can act as the force that moves the circle of intelligence, that is, the degree to which memories are unresolved. This means that a memory's charge potential is inversely related to its resolution, to the degree to which the implications of the memory have been fully resolved by unfolding and then enfolding.

A memory that contains a lot of charge is one that has many unresolved implications. In other words, this is a memory that has failed to fully unfold and then enfold all its implications. This failure can be due to individual habit or a cultural convention of only partially unfolding deeper meanings so that many important implications remain hidden. This habitual or traditional cycle of partial unfolding tends to perpetuate itself until something occurs to force a deeper look (unfolding) and in that deeper understanding the charge potential of a memory can be somewhat dissipated. (Essentially this is what effective psychodynamic therapy does.)

The normal out-of-body experience of the soul leaving the body after death is, therefore, the net result of a whole set of unresolved implications that have accumulated during incarnation, that is, the period when meaning inhabits and organizes a human body. While memories are themselves created by the circle of intelligence, not all the implications attached to any set of memories will be unfolded and hence exhausted within one lifetime. It may take many lifetimes for this unfolding and enfolding cyclical process to be completed.

This means that many people die before they know who they really are. Many people die with unfulfilled desires or believing that they have a separate and personal identity. Such thoughts contain strong charge potentials and hence many unresolved implications. In terms of meaning, the soul represents that set of unresolved implications that exists at the time when the body dies. After the death of the body this set of unresolved implications is itself enfolded temporarily within the non-local, implicate realm of the Numinous before it is again incarnated in a new form. What is reincarnated is, therefore, not a body or a 'personality' but a set of charge potentials, a set of unresolved implications associated with a particular set of memories. What is not reincarnated is the essential, implicit nature of the Host, which never dies nor is it ever born. Your soul exists therefore only as implications, that is, as a set of unresolved implications.

The two aspects of memory that indicate the presence of the Host within us are therefore the infinite resource of the Host context and the unresolved state of the individual soul. The inherent contradiction of these two states is that the state of the soul's unresolved-ness is what prevents it from becoming one with the Host. Logically, the possibility of the final state of unity can only come about when the soul contains no more unresolved implications. It then has no more charge potentials for transformation, and hence it is no more. When this happens the journey of the soul is at an end and the resonance of its implications comes to resemble the pure implicit light of the surrounding cosmic ocean. At this point we can speak about an enlightened soul that has merged with and is indistinguishable from the implicitness of the Host.

Memory per se is, therefore, another attribute of the Host.

The knower

As meaning is also a knowing, the implicit potentials of the Host context are conscious. By this I mean something similar to what Ed Mitchell said about the way in which the universe was in some way conscious. One way to speak about this kind of consciousness is to refer to the Host context as the 'knower.' As the Host context is the foundation to every individual self, the Host is the knower in everyone. We are therefore able to know because we are part of the universal knower. The knower is found in the sight within seeing, the bliss within our love for another, the 'g' factor in intelligence and the universal Akashic field of memory.

The Host knows everything implicitly and this is because the Host context is implicit Meaning. When we know something implicitly we know through intuition, realization, insight and revelation. This kind of knowledge is certain, unlike the knowledge derived from language, discourse and expressions generally. This symbolic knowledge is always uncertain and hypothetical. This state of uncertainty occurs because all expressions contain ambiguities; hence the knowledge of science as well as that from scripture is always hypothetical and grounded in uncertainty.

When uncertainty is acknowledged in science and scripture the solution to problems is based upon hypotheses or probabilities. On this tentative basis we have put astronauts in rockets and sent them to the moon. Yet when uncertainty is rejected there are quick answers, power plays and rhetorical expressions that lie. When uncertainty is rejected the world is divided into either/or oppositional categories and we use statements that are axiomatic or dogmatic. When this happens we divide, separate and fragment what is by nature unified and whole.

To access certain knowledge we have only to look quietly within ourselves to the Host context: the ground of who we are. In contrast, to access uncertain knowledge we only have to express ourselves or read the expressions of others. Ironically, our most common approach to the problems of life is to be over-focused on expressions and to forget about the low-energy luminous screen of implicitness on which this landscape of forms is painted.

Over two thousand years ago Plato retold Socrates' story of the cave of the mind. This is a story which reflects the point I make about our tendency to look in the wrong places. In The Republic Book VII the cave of the mind is described as an underground den which has a mouth opening towards the light. The inhabitants of the cave are chained so they can see only shadows cast on the walls of the cave. Reality for them is the banal existence of these shadows. The light of day beyond the cave, which represents the light of spiritual certainty, truth and beauty, is beyond their understanding.

The allegory of Plato's cave is significant because it captures the essential multi-layered nature of the four levels of self. The shadows on the cave walls represent the provisional reality of an abstract and symbolic world on which we can easily become fixated. The intricacy of these cave shadows can mesmerize us to the extent that we are unable to see the illumination which emanates from the Host context. This illumination is the light of insight, the light of our true Self, yet many of we realists are fixed on the uncertain shadows that we call objective reality.

'Seeing the light' has long been a religious phrase for realizing the significance of God's place in one's life. In this phrase, however, there is an interesting resonance with the difficulty we have of 'seeing the light' with our eyes. For example, sunlight enables us to see everything except the sunlight. What we see is always the light's secondary effects, that is, the secondary forms and images of the physical world. We never can see the primary source of the sun's light itself. In relation to the light of the Host we are in a similar situation. Yet unlike the light of the sun, which is invisible, the inner light of the Host is simply very hard to discern when we first begin to look. However, after long periods of training in meditation or reflective prayer, the luminous nature of this implicit pneuma hagion will gradually become aware of itself as the light of our being.

If we close our eyes and focus on the voidness of this implicitness, most of us will see only blackness. This is because we are tuned into the chatter of explicit sense perceptions. This process of becoming accustomed to our inner light is similar to what Socrates called the bewilderment that overcomes cave dwellers who turn towards the light. He who turns from darkness to light is dazzled by an excess of light. Unaccustomed to the inner light it will take some time of sitting quietly with eyes closed before the blackness is replaced with the low energy light of the Host.

With long periods of meditation that may take years; we can gradually become quieter and more accustomed to the silence of pure implicit meaning and when this happens the light of inner awareness becomes stronger. In the way that sunlight is invisible but makes visible a tangible world, so the light of the cosmic knower is invisible to the novice yet creates all the multiplicities of our lives for us to enjoy.

In summary, when speaking of the attributes of the Host we can say that this foundation context of the self provides our sight, love, the present moment of now, our ability to know anything at all as well as our general intelligence and our memory. In addition, this context of the Host together with the other three secondary and derived contexts of body, culture and symbols represents the totality of the Numinous. The totality of the Numinous is indivisible and simultaneously interconnected even though it has a multiplicity of distinctions and multiple layers. The totality of the Numinous is everywhere present—omnipresent—and circular—having the singularity of One—and because it is composed of intelligent energy it is all knowing—omniscient. Finally, by virtue of its foundation context the Host context has total agency and is therefore all powerful—omnipotent.
Section Two:

The Evolution of Consciousness

10 – Modes of Thought

The Indian word for a spiritual master is 'guru.' My guru is Mata Amritanandamayi: Amma for short. I did not choose Amma as my spiritual teacher; she chose me. On her annual travels around the world Amma regularly visits Australia. In 1992 we were living in Sydney and my brother-in-law suggested that my wife, Amanda and daughter, Cleo and I have a blessing from Amma at one of her public meetings. I was not at all interested but Amanda and Cleo were, so we all went to see this exotic Indian woman in a public hall on Sydney's north shore.

I remember it was a lovely sunny afternoon and everything in the hall seemed harmonious. Amanda and Cleo went up and had a hug from Amma while I sat at the back. I felt unaccountably content just watching. I had no intention of making a spectacle of myself by being hugged by a strange religious woman in public. In any case, what good would it do? I had just finished writing my PhD dissertation at the time and felt rather distant from these mundane events.

Next year Amma came to Sydney again. Amanda had by then become part of the organization and was working in the food tent serving when Cleo came by and asked me to take her up for a blessing. She was nine. How could I refuse? Amma took Cleo in her arms and as I looked at them in this embrace I felt a softening in my bones. Then Amma took hold of me, pushing my head into her shoulder where she held me tight. I do not remember if anything was said. All I remember is the feeling. This was a baptism by pneuma, the kind Jesus used to give. Outside I lay down under a gum tree, disoriented. I looked up at the midday sky and literally saw stars. I felt such strange happiness. I did not know what to do with it but I was sure it would pass.

That was it. No discussion, no discourse, just a hug. The first effects of that hug became apparent to me through my writing. What a strange place for hug effects! That year I was turning my dissertation into a book. For the first time I began to contextualize my writing by giving it a spiritual dimension. This was incredible. I had been a card-carrying atheist for years. I felt I was going soft in the head. However, I could not resist for long the gravitational pull of Amma's silent influence. With embarrassing speed I gave up being an atheist and instead became a devotee.

As I was writing about meaning at the time, I realized that Amma's 'hug-effect' had directed my attention towards the contextual nature of implicit meaning. The 'hug-effect' was also ongoing and deepening. Over the years it has become a constant presence, an exchange without words, more a communion than a communication. Amma's hugs introduced me to something that my left-brain intellectual training had completely overlooked. This was the meaning of these underlying wordless communions that can be described as implicit to implicit exchanges. This meaning came to me in wordless exchanges and these exchanges have slowly become a normal aspect of my life.

With these exchanges there is no flash of light, no vision, no unconsciousness and no hypnosis from rhetorical suggestions. There is just a low-energy sense of knowing and an intuitive, implicit connection with this impersonal reality. These exchanges are more apparent to me when I am involved in some spiritual practice like meditation or prayer. At other times, when my concentration is intense and my mind racing, I become lost to the demands of an energetic daily routine. At these times I seem to be a separate self who is the doer of things. The meaning I make in these energetic moments feels disconnected from the quieter implicit connections I enjoy with the Numinous. This disconnection of self from the unity of the Numinous comes with a disconnected mode of thought, which I will discuss shortly.

Over the years I have been struck by the lack of demands associated with these implicit to implicit, intuitive exchanges. Yet while there are no demands these exchanges have consequences. The difference between demands and consequences is that demands come from other people, from what they ask of us, while consequences arise out of an ability to read the implicit meaning of contexts. For some, consequences maybe exaggerated into superstitious premonitions about the devil, or the role of evil, or as omens for why bad things happen. The consequences of implicit contexts can also be interpreted as the law of karma a sex pounded in Eastern philosophy. Karma is usually seen as the law of cause and effect, which is also expressed in the Christian verse, 'As ye sow, so shall ye reap.' The word 'karma' means 'action' and it is normally used in relation to the idea that every action in the present moment causes a reaction in the future. Positive actions now are said to produce positive results in the future, while negative hurtful actions result in our suffering.

Ralph Waldo Emerson had a slightly different view of consequences. He spoke about these in terms of justice and the Laws of the Soul (as referred to in the Introduction). Emerson's laws of the soul are not made by religious empires or private individuals and while they can be represented they can never become the dogma of religion or the axiomatic truth of science, nor do they entail social demands. More importantly, these laws cannot be monitored by external decree or administered by a moral code or the logic of reason. The monitoring and administration of these laws is carried out by ourselves, in our continuous struggle to clarify and come to terms with the embedded relationship we have with the Numinous.

Like the laws of meaning, Emerson's Laws of the Soul are transcendental cosmic laws that are realized by us to the extent that the foundation context of the Host is realized. For Emerson these Laws are about justice:

In the soul of man there is a justice whose retributions are instant and entire. He who does a good deed, is instantly ennobled. He who does a mean deed, is by the action itself contracted. He who puts off impurity, thereby puts on purity. If a man is at heart just, then in so far is he God; the safety of God, the immortality of God, the majesty of God do enter into that man with justice. If a man dissembles, deceives, he deceives himself, and goes out of acquaintance with his own being.

Emerson went on to say that these laws make man 'the Providence to himself, dispensing good to his goodness, and evil to his sin.' These are impersonal inner laws which I must come to feel and know in order to love my neighbor. This phrase, 'makes me the Providence to myself ' is the key to understanding the consequences of a totally interconnected Numinous. These are holographic laws which connect us to the Host and also impose on us a set of consequences which are inescapable.

The given character of these inescapable laws of the soul is reflected in a series of cyclical movements of Meaning. In these movements we can discern a degree of detail that is only implied in Emerson's laws of the soul. In this chapter, I want to summarize the details of these cyclic movements in terms of:

i) processes of learning;

ii) modes of thought;

iii) maturation; and

iv) the evolution of consciousness.

This chapter gives an overview of these various cycles of Meaning while later chapters elaborate on this overview.

Learning

I have suggested in Chapter 6 that the arc of learning involves three steps. These are: step one, identification; step two, differentiation; and step three, integration. However, memory is also involved in the arc of learning. (I discussed memory in Chapter 8.) As a result of the role of memory the arc of learning becomes a circle that has four steps. These four steps are demonstrated by Figure 17:

The circle of learning:

Figure 17:

During our lifetime we learn many things; some things we learn quickly, others take a lifetime. As the figure above demonstrates, all learning occurs in circles. This is the case for the small circles of learning (how to tie your shoe lace) to the larger circles of learning (how to get on with your neighbors). Different sized circles also have different names. Smallish circles of identification, differentiation and integration tend to be called learning programs. Larger circles that extend over some years tend to be called periods of maturation. Even larger circles that extend over millenniums can be called cultural stages in the evolution of consciousness. There is, however, another kind of learning circle and this relates to how we think, or what we call a mode of thought. A dominant mode of thought tends to coincide with certain maturation stages and also with stages in the evolution of consciousness. Each of these four kinds of circles—learning, maturation, the evolution of consciousness and mode of thought—will be discussed shortly.

As with Emerson's laws of the soul the order and movement within the circle of learning is not idiosyncratic or personal. This order executes itself in slow, inevitable and circular movements. As a result, the path of learning is the inescapable spiritual road we all tread. I say 'spiritual' because the circle of learning ends with integration and interconnection, which are spiritual conditions. One of the consequences of the inescapability of learning is that faith and religious commitment do not develop from non-learning situations—a point Emerson made in his Divinity School Address. This means that faith does not come from patterns of identification which produce closed and intolerant minds associated with scriptural dogma, religious exclusions, or high energy excommunications, suicide bombings or 'burning at the stake.'

Such intense practices represent an attempt to control the laws of the soul by inhibiting learning capacity and, as a consequence, stifling faith. In contrast, faith and religious commitment develop out of the unimpeded movement of these laws from a free-flowing progression through these four steps; from discussions, recognitions, questions, doubts, contextualizing, finding similarities and, importantly, through the enfolding integration of empathy and love.

In addition, the circle of learning provides us with a warning that bad things can and do happen. For example, the shock of bad things happening may represent a necessary feature in a habit of identification that resists learning. The habit that resists learning can come with a life that is full of anxiety, or a life compulsively committed to clinging to the habitual norms of personal and collective possessions, or a life that tends to look back to the past for confirmation, value and truth. Such lives resist the cycle of learning and are highly susceptible to manipulation and to the politics of fear.

In a culture where fear rather than learning is valued it is inevitable that sometimes we will encounter the shock of bad things happening. Yet, on a more positive note, sometimes it is necessary for us to experience such shocks in order to break through rationalizations and habitual resistances into the open-ended, uncertain movement of learning. When we do experience bad things that bring on despair we need to also look behind the immediacy of the trauma to the context in which it arose. Ultimately, this is the context of the Numinous which hosts and supports us in this our spiritual growth. Learning is therefore always difficult. We learn by making mistakes and we especially learn about our mistakes when bad things happen. Perhaps this is why bad things happen.

Modes of thought

I want to turn now to the four modes by which we think. Most people assume that while each of us can think different things, the thinking process itself works the same for everyone. This is not the case. Rather, there are four modes of thought. (In saying this I am using the words 'thinking' and 'thought' in their broadest sense.) Three of these modes of thought are complex patterns associated with the three steps of: identification, differentiation and integration. The fourth mode represents the background field on which the other three modes move.

The structure of each of the four modes of thought is created by the movements of the two implicit and explicit conditions of Meaning. Each mode is structured by an exchange movement or a repetition of these two conditions. Hence, the two conditions of implicit and explicit meaning lead logically to four possible combinations of movements. The four combinations are:

Implicit to implicit;

Implicit to explicit;

Explicit to explicit; and

Explicit to implicit.

The first point to make about these four modes of thought is that they are not culturally specific but rather are given and so relate to all human behavior in every culture. These four modes of thought provide us with a variety of thought processes that can be used for exploring the self and for understanding who we really are. These four modes also give us the potential for flexibility in how we think. Flexibility is important because how we think determines whether we see the world as friendly, strange or threatening. These different attitudes arise not so much from environmental conditions but from the conditions of thought, that is, from our mode of thinking. A further point to be made is that no one thinks predominantly in the same mode throughout his or her life. This is because these four modes of thought also represent the maturation stages we all pass through in the processes of growth and development. Finally, these stages of maturation also represent on the canvas of history the social and cultural stages in the evolution of consciousness.

In comparison to other approaches, these four modes of thought are different from the three degrees of knowledge proposed by Plato. These were: sense-knowledge, geometry, and extra-sensory knowledge or pure intelligence. They are also different from Aristotle's Laws of Thought: identity, non-contradiction and the excluded middle. Aristotle's Laws of Thought have become the basis of Western positivistic logic which has underpinned much modern scientific theory. In addition, the current four mode model has a slightly different emphasis to the three mode model proposed by the philosopher, jurist and critic Owen Barfield. 1 Because of this close connection I will summarize Barfield's model.

Barfield's first mode of thought is called figuration. According to Barfield, figuration is the process whereby sensations, generated by our five senses, are converted into the recognition and the realization of things. Figuration is a good term for it indicates, in contrast to positivism, that all appearances are the filtered, constructed result of these processes. Barfield considers that figuration is a kind of thinking but not, characteristically, a thinking about forms or representations. He considers that the way we think about representations indicates two other modes of thought. These he divides into: alpha-thinking and beta-thinking. Alpha-thinking is like theorizing or theoretical thinking, yet it can also be done by some children. Essentially it is thinking that is intellectual but non-reflective. Beta-thinking on the other hand is reflective thought. Barfield's three modes of thought (figuration, alpha and beta thinking) represent a useful and integrated model for comparison with the current four mode model of thought.

While similar to Barfield's approach, the current four mode model presented here is distinguished from other models by having its foundations securely located within a general system. This is the general system of Meaning. Hence, it is the given structure of Meaning that determines the nature of these four modes of thought and not a set of ad hoc terms related to a series of psychological functions.

Features

The defining character of the first mode of thought is implicit to implicit exchanges. These kinds of exchanges are essentially non-symbolic, non-verbal and extra-sensory, that is, they operate outside the boundaries of sensory perception. In addition, these exchanges are extra-sensory because they contain no explicit distinctions, no sensory or abstract forms and have no symbolic or cultural content. These movements are pre-deliberate and they represent the kind of subliminal exchanges that occur in intuitions, insights and realizations. These exchanges are the basis of Emerson's laws of the soul as well as for unconditional love. In addition, these silent movements create the background field or ground state for all other exchanges involving concrete or abstract forms of expression. The energetic force given off by these implicit exchanges is a force that unifies and integrates.

With this mode of thought there is no thinking about something because there is no 'something' involved. Rather, implicit to implicit thought entails un-symbolized connection and love. A shorthand term for this mode is therefore 'innocent love.' This mode is unlike Barfield's figuration for there are no differences that mark our sensations, or our experiences of the multitudinous forms and objects of the physical world. Yet in common with figuration this mode is a kind of thinking, yet not a thinking about a something.

The second mode of thought does involve an explicit 'something.' This mode involves exchanges of meaning that transform implicit meaning into an explicit something. The structure of this thought process is therefore, implicit to explicit. This structure involves the unfolding of differential meaning which in turn creates the extension of three-dimensional space and the movement of explicit forms that can be measured conceptually in a fourth dimension of time. This mode of thought is broader than, but incorporates, some of the processes of Barfield's figuration, particularly in regard to perception. This second mode, however, goes further than Barfield's figuration (or pattern recognition) because it also involves complex processes of identification. If identification becomes a dominant mode of thought then it tends to be essentially shallow and will entail large scale generalizations. A term that represents thoughts organized by complex patterns of identification is 'desire.'

The third mode of thought involves unfolding exchanges that value and focus on the explicit differences of form, style and substance. These are therefore explicit to explicit thought processes. This mode reflects the characteristics of Barfield's alpha-thinking. This mode tends to value and multiply explicit distinctions and differences. As this mode is orientated to explicit differences, this orientation tends to produce an over-valuing of differences so that differences turn into separations that fragment and divide. Such fragmented thought processes de-value contextual and implicit meaning along with empathy and compassion. This mode of thought represents a dry formal intellectualism that we usually describe as the head variety. A shorthand title for this mode of thought is the 'intellect.'

The final mode of thought in the current model involves exchanges in which stark differences are enfolded. Such differences were unfolded by the intellect and they now begin to be enfolded into larger multi-layered systems and contexts. Such transformations change the focus of the intellect away from pure explicit differences onto distinctions that are seen to exist within broader contextual fabrics. This kind of thinking also involves the practices of contemplation and self-enquiry, and connections of the heart. These are explicit to implicit exchanges. Again this mode is similar to Barfield's beta-thinking. This is the mode of intelligent compassion. A shorthand title for it is 'empathy.' In summary, the four modes of thought have the following titles and structures:

Innocent love......implicit to implicit;

desire....................implicit to explicit;

intellect................explicit to explicit; and

empathy...............explicit to implicit.

In relation to the cycle of learning and its processes of, identification, differentiation and integration, these have a direct relevance to the four modes of thought because they provide the learning dynamic for the three modes of thought: desire, intellect and empathy in the following manner:

desire...........identification..........implicit to explicit;

intellect.......differentiation........explicit to explicit;

empathy.......integration.............explicit to implicit.

As there are no splits or separations within the circle of learning there is also no separation between these four modes of thought. In addition, as the four steps of learning form a circle, so also do the four modes of thought have a circular structure in the following manner:

The circle of thought

Figure 18:

Figure 18 indicates that each mode of thought is dominated by a particular learning process. Thus the main learning process within desire is identification, while differentiation is the dominant learning process for the intellect and integration is the learning process that constructs empathy. The second point about Figure 18 is that learning processes and thoughts do not operate in a vacuum but float within a field of implicit to implicit meaning. It is this interconnected field of implicit meaning that enables these learning processes to move and transform from identification to differentiation and then to integration. Within this field of implicit connections our mode of thinking will also gradually transform from desire to intellect and then to empathy. While the background field of implicit connection does not transform or change it nevertheless represents a mode of thought in its own right.

There are, therefore, four modes of thought, three of which change and transform and are based upon the three learning processes of identification, differentiation and integration. In contrast, the first and last mode of thought (innocent love) does not change or transform and is not based upon any other learning process than connection. It does, however, provide as it were the background context in which the other three modes and processes change.

Figure 18 also indicates a progression in learning and thinking and this has something to tell us about the aims and objectives of formal education. For example if the aim of our educational institutions is only to replicate existing cultural values then we can say that they aim no further than the first step of identification in a three-step learning circle. Similarly, if our educational aim is only to create the capacity for criticism, doubt or skepticism then we go no further than the second step of differentiation in a three-step process. Finally, if our educational objective is to turn out students who can connect abstract knowledge to larger contexts, and in particular to the contexts of self, then such objectives mirror the three stages in the circle of learning. Such an educational approach is more likely to develop a student's understanding of empathy, which is a situation where their head is in tune with their heart.

The educational objective that seeks to develop empathy in students also increases the meaning of a student's life. This happens because meaning is reduced when contexts are ignored or rejected. Most of the meaning in any situation comes from the contexts of a situation. When we ignore or reject contexts we also reduce meaning. For example, the thinking mode of desire tends to reduce meaning by ignoring wider social contexts but it also reduces meaning by ignoring differences. This latter failure is overcome by the intellect which is very good at making-meaning through differentiation. However, the thinking mode of the intellect often falls in love with differences so much so that they become over-valued. When this occurs there will be resistance to moving forward into the next contextual learning step of empathy. As a consequence, differences devoid of a context often represent the normal focus for the intellect.

When the intellect chooses to resist the changing patterns of the circle of learning then we will base our critical faculties on our desires and rationalize them as best we can. In this rear-mirror vision we confuse ourselves while also reducing meaning. Thus the two thinking modes of desire and intellect have little time for the implicit low-energy meaning of multi-layered contexts. As a consequence, these two modes of thought along with their accompanying learning processes predispose us towards pain, distress, confusion, unhappiness and in severe cases, insanity. In the reversed manner, the connections of innocent love and the integration of empathy predispose us towards more integrated, harmonious and meaningful lives.

Similar comments can be made about a learning program that has spiritual objectives. For example, to increase our appreciation of the reality of the Numinous we have to become empathetic or else rely upon innocent and unconditional love. Exercising the intellect through book learning, scriptural virtuosity, political agendas or debating skills will not lead us down this path, no matter how hard we try, neither will financial and materialistic desires or the belief that 'I am this body' take us to the gateway through which we may glimpse the Numinous reality. The experience of me being 'Providence to myself' only occurs when we live life implicitly and take account of contextual integrating meaning. Innocent love and empathy tend to do this.

Maturation

As adults, most of us will use these four modes of thought in relation to the different situations of work, family and love. Yet while we may have a variety of responses in various situations a certain mode of thought will also predominate within those patterns of growth that are called maturation. In other words, the modes of thought of desire, intellect and empathy also represent the several stages in the processes of maturation and development that every person goes through. There are three broad developmental stages in the life of an individual and these equate to the modes of desire, intellect and empathy. The first maturation period of desire spans approximately the first twenty years of life. The second (intellect) covers the next twenty years and the maturation period of empathy accounts for the rest of life. There is no developmental period for innocent love because this is the permanent background context through which the other three maturation periods and modes of thought are expressed.

By bringing together the three modes of thought with the corresponding maturation periods in the life of the individual we have the following matrix:

Desire - identification - the first 20 – 25 years;

Intellect - differentiation - from 20 to 40 years;

Empathy - integration - from 40 years onwards

These three stages also create the developmental movement which forms an arc that represents the three maturation stages in the life span of the average individual:

The arc of maturation

Figure 19:

Identification is the predominant learning mechanism within the first maturation period, from birth to approximately twenty years of age. This learning process begins in infancy with patterns of identification which include the felt experiences of a concrete world. As the infant grows into childhood their learning patterns become increasingly more complex and more abstract yet identification remains the first and most important learning process. This continues to be the case into the teenage years when adolescence is dominated by experimentation and learning how to deal with the hormonal changes that come with puberty and in finding out how to relate to peer groups in a process of discovering identity, likes and preferences.

Childhood learning does not stop at the point of identification and much of it, especially in relation to motility and language acquisition, involves the capacity for increased differentiation and integration. Yet while children will become expert and proficient in many areas overall in the first twenty years, their learning will be driven by their desires and the limitations inherent in the processes of identification. This means that throughout this approximate twenty-year period all learning is moving out of established patterns of identification into greater mastery through the refinements of a personal style and an aesthetic that come with the nuances of integrating distinctions.

This drive to learn comes out of the potentials of the undifferentiated field of implicit to implicit meaning which continues to be the energy source of all behavior and communication for the rest of the individual's life. In the first twenty years, however, learning to master behavior does not involve a single step from visceral intuitions to conscious mastery of action or expertise in some field. Rather, there are several intervening steps of which identification is the first. In the sense used here 'identification' does not mean the deliberate recognition of something or the ability to imitate. Rather, every pattern of identification is a subliminal non-deliberate process beyond and deeper than cognition. Within this process there is a sliding together of two or more features so that they appear, and are recognized, as one. Identification refers to this fusion or welding process that is halfway between undifferentiated, implicit meaning and full conscious differentiation. It is these subliminal patterns of identification that create the internal dynamics of desiring, wanting and childhood longing. These are the common core experiences of infancy, childhood and adolescence. (In Chapter 11 the character of desire is discussed more fully.)

In this first twenty-year period we begin our long maturation and development journey towards a more mature consciousness. Identification is the beginning step in all learning, no matter how old we are. In the first twenty years, however, we often mistakenly take this first learning step to be the final, mature conclusion. When this happens we jump to all kinds of premature conclusions about things, but especially about who we are.

The three-stage model of maturation presented here, involving desire, intellect and empathy, can be compared with several other models such as Carl Jung's second stage of life (discussed in Chapter 14). There is also another model which closely parallels the current one and this is the model of the various houses (ashramas) referred to in the Hindu scriptures. The Hindu ashramas signify the four stages of an ideal spiritual life. Each stage lasts for twenty to twenty-five years. The first stage is Brahamacharya ashram. In this first house the student devotes him or herself to study and prepares for future service to the community. In terms of meaning, this is the learning period in which we move through the various thickets of identification that accompany our wants, longings and desires.

The second spiritual stage is called Grihastha ashram and is traditionally concerned with the householder's responsibilities and marriage. In this period it is sometimes advised that the family is a good training ground for the practice of unselfishness and that in this period the ambition to acquire wealth comes naturally and should be enjoyed. Yet the duty of a spiritual householder is also to offer hospitality to guests, kindness to animals, daily worship and study of the scriptures.

This second house of the householder represents the second stage of maturation. The mode of thought that dominates this twenty-year period is the intellect. This is the stage (from twenty through to about forty years) when at last we begin to master the social and cultural differentiations that for twenty years we have slowly been moving towards. This can be a period of high performance and expertise in our chosen field. However, as is often the case, because of the lack of adequate education and training in the earlier period of desire, this second period of the intellect may not see an end to the identifications of desire. Yet even when this is the case, these strong motivating forces tend to occupy a more subterranean place in our rational and intelligent planning of things.

Another factor influencing this second period of maturation is the current scientific and technological culture in which we live. The positivistic predispositions of this culture have a tendency to reinforce the intellect so that difference and differentiation are valued as ends in themselves. Such cultural reinforcements can easily lead to an excess of differentiation and as a consequence to the over-valuing of abstractions such as money that separate, divide and exclude. Hence, the family member who works so hard in order to make money will often weaken the unity of the family. When this happens the community will also be burdened with the cost of such a crisis. The potentials of this important maturation training period are therefore often undermined by the calculations of a dry intellectualism that places an overly high value on abstractions, like money, prestige and honor.

The third stage of spiritual development is called Vanaprastha ashram. These years between forty and seventy are concerned with gradual retirement from work and a detachment from the material world. It is said that when the skin wrinkles and the hair turns grey one is ready to retire from the responsibilities of the householder. It is advised that this third house of life should be devoted to scriptural study and meditation on God. The fourth and last period of spiritual development, Sanyasa ashram is an extension of the third. This is the period of turning away from the vanities of the world and cultivating God-consciousness, often through a monastic way of life. It is said that during this stage in old age, the call of the Infinite can become so irresistible that even charity and social service seem inadequate.

The Hindu third and fourth houses of spiritual development coincide with the third and final mature stages in the maturation and development of an individual's consciousness. This is the meaning-making period of empathy. When we reach mid-life the development of our consciousness turns naturally towards valuing integration and feelings of empathy. One of the main features of empathy is the integration of sharp differences. This turn of events can often cause a crisis in our life, a life that has grown used to all the division and separations that a finely tuned intellect can create in a modern community. The mid-life crisis that eventually ends in a more integrated, mature and harmonious life is a common feature in contemporary society.

I suggest in Chapter 13 that the 'house' of empathy stretches across many years and has two sub-stages. The first sub-stage involves the integration of meaning that at first sight may appear to be forced upon us, but which in later years is often embraced through social service and perhaps the conscious building of social capital. The second sub-stage involves a conscious endeavor that fully embraces all the characteristics of empathy and which results in a spiritual path that cultivates an awareness of our relationship to the Providence within.

The royal road to unity with the Numinous is therefore down the path of integration and empathy. Yet living an empathetic life does not necessarily mean living in a cave like a sanyasa monk. Essentially, it involves what Socrates said, 'knowing thyself '; having a good knowledge of your feelings and desires through the processes of self-reflection and also relying upon insight and intuition. Insight is, after all, our first sight.

Clearly, not every individual or culture is open to the changes and diverse behavior which are unfolded by each of these maturation stages. In addition, most of us have the tendency to hold on to patterns of behavior already learnt. Holding on usually indicates a habit that is hard to break. There are therefore many reasons why an individual or a group will ignore, or refuse to accept, the inevitability of their own developmental learning path. All too often we get stuck in old habits of desire, or refuse to give up our fondness for the rationalizing games played by the intellect. The result of such holding on and refusal is confusion about values along with a failure to mature into an integrated, empathetic individual.

Cultural influences

Finally, we need explicitly to take into account the cultural influences that impinge upon the individual's learning, modes of thought and patterns of maturation. The relationship between the individual and society is not simply a one-way relationship. Rather, it represents a circular feedback in that the individual's behavior affects collective representations and collective representations reinforce individual behavior. This circular feed-back embeds the individual within a cultural consciousness. This feed-back also creates a link between the individual's learning processes and the three cultural stages. These are the three stages of: tribe, reason and empathy. When these three cultural stages are aligned with the three steps of learning we have the following arc of culture:

The arc of culture

Figure 20:

The three steps of learning (identification, differentiation and integration) are the underlying processes by which the three cultural formations of tribe, reason and empathy are created. Hence, the basis of tribalism lies in its patterns of identification that define the boundaries between them and us. As for reason, this cultural formation rests on the value of abstract differentiation. For empathy, which will be a future cultural formation, this will rest upon those meaning-making processes that integrate head and heart, love and intellect into inclusive social formations where all cultural, ethnic, age, racial, religious and gender differences are accepted.

When we study the nature of each cultural stage within the context of human history we can discern a developmental pattern which Owen Barfield has called the 'evolution of consciousness.' What is the evolution of consciousness? The evolution of consciousness is an epistemological evolution that deals with the ways in which we collectively make meaning and perceive the world. The evolution of consciousness relates to the changes in epistemology which are associated with the three-step circles of: learning, thought, maturation and culture. The evolution of consciousness is therefore distinct from the evolution of ideas. It is also distinct from any theory of biological evolution. The evolution of consciousness is discussed in Chapter 14.

In summary, the laws of the soul are cyclical and inescapable. They are out of time, out of space and not subject to individual choice or circumstance. These laws execute themselves but they are not capricious. They have a structure which is created by the deep cyclical patterns of learning, thought, maturation and culture.
11 – Innocent Love

The celebrated mathematical physicist Roger Penrose considers there is something non-computational going on in our minds. 1 By this he means a 'something' that is not random, not incomprehensible and not able to be captured by mathematical computations. What is this something? Penrose, who looked to the mysteries of quantum mechanics, is unable to satisfactorily answer the question. What is missing from his view of mind is meaning and as a consequence he has no way of knowing that this non-computational something is implicit meaning.

Implicit meaning is non-computational because it contains no exchanges of forms or explicit distinctions. In addition, implicit to implicit exchanges operate below the level of conscious deliberation (the cogito) and hence, this mode of thought is unaffected by the distinctions of perception or computation, or the logic of quantity, time or measurement. Instead, implicit to implicit exchanges involve interconnections that are timeless; in more scientific terminology they are a-temporal, non-local, but very normal. These exchanges operate as an exchange-field between the omnipotence of the Host and an active mind. Some of these exchanges contain the readiness potentials which make it possible for explicit thoughts to arise.

What language can we use to speak about this implicit field? The term, extra sensory perception (ESP) is often used to describe implicit exchanges that are beyond the differences which structure sensory perception. Implicit exchanges that occur between people are usually called telepathy. When these exchanges occur across large distances they are called clairvoyance; when they occur across time they are referred to as precognition and when they operate between physical objects and a person's mind we have psychokinesis. Much has been written about the thousands of ESP experiments which have substantiated these kinds of exchanges. Yet for materialistic science these implicit connections represent a taboo subject. Why is this?

In his 1974 book, The Roots of Coincidence, Arthur Koestler quoted Warren Weaver, one of the founders of modern communications theory as saying, 'I find this [ESP] a subject that is so intellectually uncomfortable as to be almost painful.' 2 Weaver's 'almost painful' resistance to non-computational states remains part of the positivistic culture of science that Koestler methodically details. Dean Radin in his 2006 book, Entangled Minds, refers to these kinds of experiences as 'forbidden knowledge' for scientists. 3 This resistance to implicit exchanges is also promoted by organizations such as the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI). This organization is dedicated to expunging what it considers to be fake science, and especially science that deals with the 'paranormal.' Yet what is normal for a science that deletes consideration of meaning, culture, language or mind? Clearly, such a norm is extremely narrow and highly defined.

Primary Perception

Robert Stone has used the term 'primary perception' in his The Secret Life of Your Cells to describe implicit connections between humans and animals, humans and plants, or humans and cells. 4 I consider 'primary perception' to be a better term than 'ESP' which suggests that sensory perception is normal and that perception which is beyond this range is somehow 'extra' or 'para' normal. These dualistic connotations are unhelpful when looking at this non-visible region of influence. In contrast, primary perception implies a continuum of perception that runs from the Host's sight within seeing through implicit to implicit exchanges, to the secondary perception involving explicit and different forms that are created by the five senses.

The use of the term 'ESP' together with experiments that involve the measurement of psychic phenomena or 'psi' has given support to the idea that these exchanges are the special preserve of the gifted or extraordinary person. I would suggest that this is not the case. Primary perception is the mode of thought that is not a 'thinking about' something but is always available to each and every one of us as well as to every organic and inorganic form in the universe. For these reasons I will not be referring to the many thousands of successful experiments of ESP but rather my focus will be on the normal aspect of this primary perception.

Primary perception is also a term that bypasses the dualism of common psychological terms such as 'conscious' and 'unconscious.' Primary perception is not unconscious in the sense that we have repressed feelings, memories or desires. The closest psychological term to primary perception is the 'un-repressed unconscious' which is a cumbersome term that does not break out of the dualism of Freudian psychology. Primary perception suggests the potentials of the mind before it thinks. It also implies the sight within seeing and the knowing within the recognitions and realizations that are produced through the use of other senses.

Primary perception therefore contains no forms or explicit distinctions that have been generated by sense perception or by concept formation and, in addition, it also operates below the level of conscious deliberation. It can be called a field that exchanges implicit meaning and which has the potential to organize the creation, development and destruction of all forms, from particles to people. This field of implicit Meaning links the processes of an active mind with the universal memory of the Numinous. Rupert Sheldrake has described this kind of field as a 'morphic field.' 5 Sheldrake's morphic fields contain the organizing potentials for the creation, maintenance and development of all forms which include molecules, crystals, cells, tissue, organisms and societies of organisms. Sheldrake does not, however, use the vocabulary of Meaning and therefore does not speak about implicit meaning, but he does continually apply the word 'organization' to indicate a non-personal, implicit knowing.

Sheldrake suggests that morphic fields operate by a process he calls 'morphic resonance.' This is the influence of like upon like. Sheldrake argues that the effect of the organizing principle of like upon like is holistic and it 'enables the regularities of nature to be understood as governed by habits inherited by morphic resonance.' 6 For example, the 'development of crystals is shaped by morphogenetic fields with an inherit memory of previous crystals of the same kind.' Sheldrake suggests that morphic fields operate through morphic resonance at all levels of complexity—from particles to people. He calls his hypothesis the hypothesis of formative causation.

Sheldrake's thesis of formative causation describes the field conditions found in primary perception. His concentration is on biological processes while I tend to focus on the human mind and on Meaning. The vocabulary Sheldrake uses thus derives from biology while I tend to use a language derived from the disciplines of the humanities. Because these vocabularies and focus are different it does not mean that there are two different territories being described. In this particular case it has meant that a different emphasis has been given to essentially the same territory. For example, the process of morphic resonance, of like upon like, can equally well be described as the process of implicit to implicit exchanges because what is exchanged in these processes is a likeness inherent within implicit Meaning. In addition, the organizing potentials of morphic fields represent the same generic potentials inherent in primary perception. These are the organizing potentials for the creation, development, maintenance and destruction of all forms, both concrete and abstract.

The morphic field of primary perception is therefore not an attribute that belongs to the world of secondary sensory perception or to the machinations of intellect (15–30 Hz: see Chapter 4). It is, rather, a mode of thought that has great organizing resonance and which operates within a very low range of frequencies, most probably below the range of 4 Hz. It is within these low ranges that insight, realization and intuitions come to us. These are common, everyday experiences for most people.

Implicit knowing

Knowing implicitly is the knowing of primary perception. This knowledge is certain knowledge and it contrasts with the uncertain knowledge that comes from the intellect and from expressions. This certain knowledge can silently come upon us when we look at a new moon on a clear night and feel awe, wonder and connection. This is the knowing of intuitions, realizations, insights and the 'aha' reaction. Such responses can happen when a closely held view is suddenly enlarged and we are able to distinguish the details of the trees but still perceive the generality of the forest.

Implicit knowing also comes with dreams and dreaming, and from our pre-reflective bodily consciousness which is the context for all well executed actions. Implicitness is also the knowing that is expressed as faith and is felt in spiritual insight. These connections represent those swells of tacit and inferential energy that can move us from one perspective to the next. In their deeper and quieter movements they can become the celestial floods of spiritual harmony, inspiration and love. As consciousness is singular, the structure of this knowing (implicit to implicit) is the same for everyone; hence the everyday sharing of non-verbal activities is an effortless and harmonious way of making implicit to implicit connections with others.

The implicit exchanges of primary perception are also most probably at work within the tendency for fertile women living in close proximity to each other to synchronize their menstrual cycles. The positivistic rationale for this common phenomenon claims that sensory cues that come from chemicals produced in the armpits of the women. This is highly unconvincing as there are all kinds of bodily variables that could accompany this kind of synchronization and none of them indicate a causal and connecting link. In addition, if our general approach to such questions automatically deletes implicit meaning or morphic fields from any consideration then there can only be one (explicit and sensory) answer.

In terms of primary perception, the cause of the synchronization of women's menstrual cycles is not to be found in bodily chemical reactions, but is more likely to be found in the morphic resonance within the primary perception of each woman. This is an implicit, organizational potential which operates as like upon like beyond the conscious control of anyone. The resonance of like upon like has an orientation towards harmony and interconnection and therefore towards synchronization. Given this background influence towards connection and harmony it is little wonder that this resonant force will, in a few short months, exert an influence on the cells of fertile women living in close proximity to each other so that their menstrual cycles are harmonized.

The implicit exchanges of primary perception also represent the sea, as it were, in which the other three modes of thought float. The thought patterns of desire, intellect and empathy are constructed out of the surrounding low-energy state of implicit meaning. In regard to the learning process of identification, this process comes about through a slight but significant transformation to the surrounding sea of implicit to implicit exchanges. This is the change from implicit to explicit meaning; a transformation that creates the forms of our sensory perception. The status of identification (and thus desire and the bonds of tribal society) is therefore located just beyond the morphic field of primary perception.

Identification is a secondary process of learning, whereas primary perception is the sea in which the processes of identification float. In addition, the implicit to implicit exchanges of primary perception also represent the ever-present background potentials for all intellectual work. However, the foundational role of implicit meaning is often ignored by the intellect. This happens, for example when, through cultural reinforcement, we become over-focused on explicit to explicit exchanges and turn them into differences that separate. Finally, in regards to the third mode of thought, empathy, there is a conscious return to valuing the surrounding (given) resonance of implicitness. Such a view also values connection, attraction and feelings of love.

In The Nature of Order, Book One, the architect Christopher Alexander tells us that his aim is to create a scientific view of the world in which 'the idea that everything has a degree of life is well defined.' 7 Alexander, who is concerned with beauty in architecture, argues that even a wave in the ocean 'has some degree of life.' In terms of Meaning, a wave in the ocean is alive and it emits light and so has intelligence and therefore Meaning. The 'degree of life' (or the degree of meaning) we comprehend a wave to have equates to the degree to which we realize our implicit connection to it. This means the degree to which I can tune into the resonance of the ocean and the wave. This knowledge is always there, we just have to quieten down to receive it.

The disposition of this low-energy implicit background field is therefore of love without an agenda; love without grasping; love without hanging on; love that is unconditional. This is primary love that is different from the longing of desire or the high energy of lust. Unconditional love is the primary orientation of this morphic sea that underwrites the three modes of thought as well as the cultural formations of tribe, reason and empathy. This is the quintessential bias of our mind and being and hence it is the predisposition of the universe at large. That many of us overlay this natural loving innocence with fear, anger, doubt, violence and hatred is not surprising given the inherent negative tendencies contained within the modes of desire and intellect.

These negative forms of overwriting tend to confuse and make us think that life and meaning are identified with physical forms and that survival represents our physical form remaining intact. Yet all forms are transient and therefore their demise is already pre-ordained by the inherent laws of Meaning that move through primary perception to the learning circle of identification, differentiation to integration. This movement is not about the survival of the fittest, but about an unfolding—then—enfolding of meaning back to the unconditional love that always underwrites everything we do, and everything that is done. The general orientation of primary perception is therefore about connection and unconditional love.

Dogs

The generality of primary perception has been demonstrated by Rupert Sheldrake. 8 He notes that animals have abilities that humans rarely use in a deliberate manner. In his book, Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home, and other unexplained powers of animals, Sheldrake looks at three kinds of abilities in animals. These are: telepathy, a sense of direction, and premonition. These exchanges are exchanges of meaning between animals and their owners and these exchanges represent nothing more than the normal implicit exchange of primary perception.

If dogs know when their owners are coming home then they know it implicitly. As dogs do not express themselves symbolically they are incapable of knowing this explicitly, symbolically or rationally. Implicit to implicit exchanges are normal for humans as well as for dogs because implicit meaning is the unmediated base of all meaning-making. Without this common base there could be no exchanges of meaning of any kind. In addition, without implicit exchanges there would be no basis for bonding between animal and animal, or between animal and human, or between human and human. This is because bonding as well as sexual attraction are firstly connections of meaning and secondly, connections established by patterns of identification.

In humans these patterns of identification create desires. In dogs such patterns of identification are inherent within the process called conditioned responses. The Russian physiologist, Ivan Pavlov first demonstrated conditioned responses in dogs. The typical procedure for inducing classical conditioning involves presenting the dog with a neutral form (sound of a bell) along with food. The two forms (bell and food) soon become identified so that when the bell alone is sounded the dog expects food.

A similar kind of identification occurs when dogs and humans produce pheromones as part of their sexual repertoire in order to attract a mate. Yet these kinds of identification patterns do not detract from the prime organizational role of meaning. Chemical compounds, for example, are meaningless unless they can convey a specific meaning to the opposite sex. Similarly, a bell is meaningless to a dog unless it has become identified with food. Thus the kind of meaning associated with sexual attraction or with the conditioned response is always identificational. Identification is, however, a secondary process of learning for it is based upon the already established energetic sea of implicit meaning. What is interesting about Rupert Sheldrake's work with dogs is that it breaks with the orthodoxy of conditioning and focuses instead on the primary perception of implicit to implicit exchanges.

In humans, implicit exchanges tend to be eclipsed by differences (in thoughts and perceptions) that involve doubts, divisions and separations. When something is eclipsed it does not mean that the original has disappeared or does not exist. It means rather that the original is just hidden beneath a rewrite. And this is the way it is for most people. We tend to eclipse our normal innocent love and intuitions by ignoring, repressing or suppressing them. We can also do this by rewriting them so they appear as the paranormal.

Prayer

Another common 'non-paranormal' example of implicit to implicit exchanges is found in prayer. In praying we usually talk out loud or silently to the image we have of our God or Host. With intercessory prayer we usually pray as an act of mediation through the Host on behalf of someone else. Such prayer is an act of compassion and love. Intercessory prayer is sometimes called distance prayer as the two people involved can be remote in space and time from one another.

Studies have found that distance prayer can influence not only other people but a variety of biological systems such as bacteria, yeast colonies, motile algae, plants, protozoa, larvae, woodlice, ants, chicks, mice, rats, gerbils, cats and dogs as well as blood cells, neurons, cancer cells and enzyme activity. 9 Such research can be considered similar to drug research in that it takes place under controlled circumstances within a medical environment and is directed towards better health outcomes.

Prayer has many benefits and these have been investigated scientifically. Larry Dossey is a physician who has written about prayer and its relationship to health and illness. He argues that prayer has an attribute that all health-care professionals should be interested in: it apparently works. 10 Dossey tells us that prayer is now returning to medicine after sitting on the sidelines for most of the twentieth century. Those skeptics who have been trained by a positivistic culture may find it hard to accept that prayer can cause better healthcare outcomes. Such people should read Dossey's books for the empirical evidence.

Prayer works because it creates exchanges of energy and meaning (implicit meaning) within and between the implicate order of the Host and the explicate order of people, cells, plants or animals. When it is successful, distance prayer between people and other life forms operates within the low energy frequency range of implicit love. Prayer that is full of meaning is created by a focus on others in a kind of 'wordless beseeching' towards some end. This focus is normally assisted by some form of repetitious action. When prayer does not work well there are too many inhibiting factors at work that override intended implicit exchanges.

What are the factors inhibiting to prayer? Inhibiting factors are those that work against all exchanges of primary perception. In general, this is the kind of high energy intellectual thinking that creates doubt, skepticism, separation and divisions. This kind of negative overwriting goes on in thinking that is dominated by the modes of desire and intellect. Much of science is dominated by these high-energy positivistic, left-brain thinking processes. Such processes are a normal part of empirical rigor. Yet such empirical enthusiasm can also create negative effect with any experiment that seeks to measure primary perception. This is because the exchanges of primary perception (implicit to implicit) can easily be negated by high-energy doubts and skepticism. In addition, such high-energy exchanges constitute inhibitors in their own right and hence they will automatically inhibit the low energy of implicit exchanges.

Thus while high energy skepticism may have a place in mechanical science such thinking does not work well in relation to prayer. To succeed in prayer we need to feel as much in tune as possible with the transcendental life force of primary perception. This is another way of saying that in prayer we need to tune into and amplify the unmediated implicit to implicit cosmic love of our own our true selves.

Body

Another demonstration of the normality of primary perception is discovered within the functions of the body. In his famous study Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty focused on the living human body. He understood the human body to be 'essentially an expressive space' 11 which is a space of meaning. As a consequence, the meaning that the body creates is not confined to the boundary of the skin. This expressive space can be extended by the objects we use to make meaning. Merleau-Ponty pointed out that when an individual learns an instrument, or becomes proficient in driving a vehicle or using a telescope, or when a blind man learns to use a cane, each of these activities incorporates the meaning of the objects into the already established expressive space of the body. As he says, 'the blind man's stick has ceased to be an object for him ... its point has become an area of sensitivity, extending the scope and active radius of touch, and providing a parallel to sight.' 12 The same can be said about the scientist's telescope.

The blind man's stick or the scientist's telescope and, in practice, our eyes, extend the expressive space of our body into a sea of primary perception which is the universe. Rupert Sheldrake makes a similar comment about his perceptual field when he says, 'If I look out the window, my perceptual field is not inside me but outside me. That is, the objects are indeed outside my body but my perception of them is also outside me. I'm suggesting that the perceptual fields we experience extend all around us.' 13 In other words, through primary perception we experience things that extend well beyond the boundary of our skin. Such experiences are based upon symmetrical interconnections that arise through implicit to implicit exchanges.

Merleau-Ponty also spoke of the body as having a comprehension and an incarnate understanding. He pointed out that our body is not merely one expressive space among others. It is our anchorage in the world. It is necessarily 'here' and 'now' and can never be 'past.' As a consequence, the basis of all action and movement is the resonating symmetry potentials of implicit meaning that establish our sense of the 'here' and 'now.' This kind of meaning is devoid of conscious deliberation but full of mimetic resonance. These kinds of meaningful patterns construct habits of behavior which can be described as recurring patterns of implicit meaning that are linked to frequent movement. Such patterns are divorced from conscious deliberation.

The living body is therefore not a chemical machine but an organizational field of Meaning. This field has an incarnate organization, which is the body's morphic field. This organization takes place largely below the level of conscious deliberation but this does not mean that it does not exist. It means, rather, that this mode of thought operates pre-reflectively without our conscious knowledge. At this level of being there are no conscious thoughts, intended deliberations or image making, doubts or skepticism. At this level we experience the world non-conceptually, as Zen Buddhists might say. At this level there are exchanges of meaning (between cells, sub-systems and the whole body) that are like a language. But unlike a human language, these exchanges are dominated not by explicit exchanges but by exchanges of implicit meaning, of like upon like.

When we perceive, conceptualize or express in words and theories, we do so entirely within the organizational framework of the body, that is, within its non-explicit, pre-logical field-context of implicit meaning. While the child will gradually develop mastery over what have been involuntary actions, neither the child nor the adult can ever gain mastery over a whole raft of involuntary, pre-reflective interactions that control, dominate and organize every aspect of their body in its every voluntary and involuntary motion and gesture. For example, we do not need to think deliberately about where our limbs are when performing actions and movements because the body's incarnate awareness has already positioned them. This is a major and fundamental area in which these implicit to implicit exchanges can never be reduced to differential, deliberate intent.

Learned habits

Another example of the operation of primary perception is in the development of habits. For the botanist, a plant's habit may be described as its general growth patterns. For the psychologist, a habit represents an act, response, practice or custom established in one's behavioral repertoire by frequent repetition. For Sheldrake, the regularities of nature are habits and they are formed by repetitive resonance of like upon like. For the phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty, a habit is the 'language' of the body. He suggests that 'habit in general enables us to understand the general synthesis of one's own body.' 14 In terms of Meaning, human habits are not physical or chemical but the result of repetitive patterns of like upon like. The behavioral habits of humans involve both the morphic field of implicit to implicit exchanges as well as some closely associated patterns of identification. A habit can be considered a pre-reflective implicit organizational process.

A consciously learned habit can develop into an expertise or adeptness in some particular area, for example, in playing the piano. This kind of habitual behavior is developed through many hours of concentration and repetitive actions. (A repetitive movement always creates implicit to implicit exchanges.) Proficiency in playing a piano comes from melding together meaning that is consciously constructed (involving the culture of music) with the implicit, repetitive movements of the body. Such proficiency represents a technical expertise that should also be integrated into the field of primary perception, which also means with some of the creative energy of the Host context. With these deeper connections of implicitness a depth of creativity may be produced. We experience this kind of integrated creativity on those spontaneous occasions when the ego manages to get out of the way of the underlying creative process.

A large part of the execution of a learned habit is therefore undertaken without conscious deliberation. In other words, a large proportion of the execution of playing the piano does not involve deliberately differentiating in space and time, nor the conscious recall of notes or key and pedal positions. Rather, this non-deliberateness represents an implicit, pre-reflective understanding which is largely associated with bodily movements and motility. This implicit set of understandings rests on the larger creative implicit to implicit potentials of the Host which always provide the source and creative energy for such activities.

The factor that is critical in distinguishing between different kinds of human habits is not the set of body movements involved. For example, what distinguishes types of habits is not the difference between playing tennis, typing on a keyboard or a blind man using a stick to 'see' the world. Rather, habits have important differences in terms of how open to learning and modification—and therefore how flexible—they are, or how closed and inflexible are their repetitive, circular sequences.

Inflexible habits are often considered to be 'bad' in some social or medical sense although this is not usually the case for the habits of accent. Habits that are deliberately learnt are usually open to change and modification. An inflexible habit operates automatically below the level of conscious deliberation by making the same circular identificational meaning over and over again, without change, through repetitive cycles of action. Such closed identificational cycles are different from the open habits needed to learn the piano. The closures of identificational patterns stand as the reason why inflexible habits are sometimes considered bad or hard to change.

Developing an expertise in some areas like writing, singing, playing an instrument, or training in a profession will always entail developing an accompanying set of flexible habits. Such behavior has to be open to the possibility of modification. A flexible habit will therefore have a configuration of meaning in which there is a series of nested sub-sets that freely interact with each other so as to create a coherent pattern or wholeness to the behavior. These are learning situations in which the general outlines of sequences involved are flexible enough to be modified by constant, subtle, repetitive intervention.

An example of a learned and flexible habit is when an experienced organ player is faced with the situation of giving a live performance on a 'strange' organ with a short rehearsal. She is capable of doing this because the habits she has acquired in her professional career are open enough to be creative, which involves the possibility of complex modification. Thus, in the short rehearsal, she does not fret about consciously learning the spatial positions of each stop and pedal of the new organ, as if she needed some practice in rote learning. Rather, in playing she gives herself entirely to the music and by focusing on the musical significance of an action and how to concentrate it in certain places she reaches precisely for those stops and pedals that bring it into being. What is then rendered is a coherent musical configuration that contains deep, overlapping layers of meaning and significance. 15

Expressing oneself through flexible habits represents those rare opportunities for the Host musician to play through us as instruments. The music that is rendered often seems to be divine. These special creative experiences happen when our ego defenses are down and the four contexts of self are open enough to interact implicitly and with some degree of freedom. The effect of this is an art form that can resonate with a multi-layered harmonic of deep significance.

Mother and child

Finally, the most common aspect of primary perception is the innocent love which is exchanged between mother and child. At birth our being begins with almost nothing but a structure of feeling; a vast intuitive knowledge that is given to us. This tacit comprehending begins a set of developmental processes that gradually unfolds and transforms and together with increased specialization become the stable features of character. The first six months in an infant's life is a significant region of influence that affects later growth and development. This region of influence represents the implicit field involving mother and child. This field is not a 'blank slate.' Rather, it represents exchanges of those primary potentials of a yet to be developed character. Although separate from each other in space, both the mother and child form a symbiotic whole; a single unified field of implicit coherence.

With his psychoanalytic approach to child development, Erik Erikson called this first phase a time when the infant develops a sense of trust or mistrust. In the cognitive theory of Jean Piaget the first two years represented the sensory motor phase of child development. 16 In terms of Meaning the first six months in an infant's life is dominated by the implicit to implicit structure of feeling and intuition. This structure has a natural organizational bias in favor of love, connection and dependency. Trust is created when this natural bias for love is supported. Mistrust develops when this implicit structure is unsupported. These tendencies for trust and mistrust occur because they are the natural responses to the implicit interconnecting field of mother and child.

The infant's capacity to learn during this early period results in exchanges of meaning that occur within the interconnections and love of this field. These exchanges are overwhelmingly implicit but over the first six months there also will be a growing number of identifications and recognitions associated with sensory motor activity such as vocal intonations, body movements and what child psychiatrists call 'mental cueing.'

The organization of this field of mother and child will therefore gradually change over time and these developments are tied to the child's increased capacity for greater levels of identification and then of differentiation and specialization. These developmental processes create an ever-changing balance between the child's inherent tendency for connection and love and its tendency for autonomy associated with greater levels of specialization and differentiation. A child's physical mastery over themselves and their environment therefore rests firmly on this inherent field of implicit exchange which the child shares with its mother.

In the first six months there are huge implicit exchanges of meaning occurring in this field. These exchanges will largely flow from the implicit meaning of the mother and the immediate parental environment (usually involving other parental figures) through the primary perception of each to the implicit understanding of the child. A portion of these exchanges may be negative. For example, the predispositions of the mother will usually be made up of implicit meaning. In addition, the mother's attitudes at times can be associated with the agitation that arises from unfulfilled desire or a keen intellect. These attitudes and responses, which inherently contain much implicit meaning, will be subliminally (implicitly) transferred across this field to the infant to affect its understanding of the world. In this manner an infant can take on the subliminal predispositions and attitudes of its parents without any conscious thought.

Out of the initial structure of feeling there grows, through the seeds of sensory identification, the capacity for the child to locate itself as distinct from its mother and physically autonomous. Normally around six months of age the infant can differentiate sufficiently so as to assertively create and recognize the boundaries of its own body image in a mirror and recognize this as distinct from his or her mother's image. When this level of identification and differentiation is reached, the implicit unity of the mother and child field is not broken, rather this is simply the beginning of a more complex developmental stage. Between some mothers and children this implicit field of love is never broken and continues on permanently as a background resonance throughout life.

This vital and continuous implicit learning by the infant is gradually supplemented by the slower patterns of explicit learning. These slower learning processes, associated with the unfolding of explicit meaning, involve the establishment of complex formations; for example, from babbling to specific expressions. In Donald Winnicott's view the learning objective of the child is a search for reality, not an attempt to escape from it. 17 From the viewpoint of Meaning, this is correct. The child is in search of the reality that learning presents; that is, of the enjoyment of unfolding all the implications of its growth. This discovery activity is associated with everything that he or she experiences.

The implicit field of mother and child will thus gradually transform over the years and with that change the child's capacity to use explicit meaning increases and becomes more specialized in a range of areas. Gradually the child will employ more and more complex systems such as a language and a repertoire of behavior that can convey a diverse range of meanings. However, children differ widely in their capacity to learn and each child will set its own pace through its ability to handle and comprehend wider areas and more complex, explicit differentiation. This means that some children will want to be kept immersed in the implicit energy field of mother and child for longer periods than others. A famous example of this was the so called 'late development' of Albert Einstein whose mother was disturbed by how long it took him to talk.

Cultural learning

The mimetic resonance of the mother and child field provides the basic and continuing context for all later learning. As the child grows older this implicit field extends to wider areas of cultural learning. The deep structure of implicit to implicit meaning provides the basic context for the learning of speech and the use of complex grammar as well as for the later genres in social behavior. In learning to speak the child develops the implicit habits of a language type and accent. In addition, it learns to use a complex set of grammatical rules that it is unable to specifically identify or explicitly describe.

The child's inability to articulate the grammar of language it uses arises because the child's language acquisition is not a conscious and explicit process, nor is it driven by the explicit and deliberate logic of grammatical rule or proposition. Rather, this deeper learning involves the meanings of primary perception and what has been transmitted implicitly and subliminally from the mother and the wider cultural environment to the child. This deep implicit structure is from implicit cultural background to the child's implicitly learned response.

If we accept the integrating role of implicit to implicit exchanges there is suddenly no need to propose the semi-biological analogy of the mind having a series of 'mental organs' as Noam Chomsky has done in order to account for the deep transformations involved in early childhood language acquisition. 18 Essentially, these vast exchanges of meaning are the dynamic features of the child's cultural field in action. They represent the learned patterns of implicit comprehension which all healthy, normal children possess. From an empirical perspective these exchanges can appear as 'compressions' of meaning, that is, compressed packets of meaning that when explicitly unravelled can amount to thousands of words about grammatical rules and conventions.

From the perspective of primary perception, this view is incorrect because implicit exchanges of implicit meaning represent the base for all communication. We implicitly share all kinds of implicit understandings because each of us is part of the common pool of implicitness that is the Numinous. This means that every communication, even those of children, will share a common set of implicit understandings, such as those associated with grammatical convention. Communication is therefore always possible, even across different languages. The story of language separation portrayed by the mythological Tower of Babel is therefore false because every communication and every mind has the same implicit, coherent foundation.

Finally, the pervasive unity of the mother and child field can be seen as an echo of the cosmic unity we may experience in spiritual moments. The role of the mother in this resonant field is like that of a surrogate for the cosmic Host. The mother is the infant's host. She provides the resting and holding context in which the infant can grow and develop. This context of support is a self-similar replication of the impersonal Host which holds all of us within a cosmic embrace. In this sense the cosmic Host is the mother of us all. At a local level, the mother's love and support provides the child with continuity for the many maturation and environmental changes the child will experience. The 'mother unity' is the child's first lived experience of this wholeness, a wholeness that can only ever be created by implicit to implicit exchanges.

In summary, the morphic field of implicit to implicit exchanges constitutes the foundation on which, and through which, the explicit world is built. Without this foundation sea of meaning there would be no mind, life or spirit, let alone any forms, concrete or abstract. The orientation of this universal constant is innocent and unconditional attraction, love and connection. When we manage to arrive at an active recognition of the importance of unmediated implicit to implicit exchanges we can begin to have faith in a believable vision of the Numinous reality and in the unity within and behind all things that guides and impels us along a spiritual path.
12 – Desire

Desire is the dominant mode of thought associated with the growth and development of the first twenty years of life. It is also a mode of community thought that constitutes the culture of tribes both ancient and modern. As a natural part of the maturation process desire does not lend itself easily to censure or to praise. It is, rather, a necessary learning experience that each of us, when young, should embrace and then as we grow older, leave behind. This provisional status of desire is often reflected in the ambiguous manner that religions respond to it. For example, Buddhism tells us to transcend our desires. How to do this is through desiring to do so. A related ambiguity operates for Christians who flaunts their desire for God but will condemn or repress sexual desires.

From the perspective of Meaning, if we are to learn to grow and mature with the unfolding nature of our evolution then the young should learn to consciously experience the necessary daydreams of their desires. These are the chimeras that make each of us fallible and that slip away into more mature and empathetic responses as we grow older. A useful practice for slowly wearing away the identification patterns that create our desires is the routine of helping others. Such actions are often an effort but they have the mundane uplifting effect of tending to make us look beyond our wants or fears to others. Such changes in adolescence signal the first evolving step beyond the prison-house that desire can create.

If adults are ever to move beyond the necessary fallible experiences of childhood desires they have to reflect for a time on their experience of desire. To understand desire we have to come to terms with the paradoxical nature of identification and how this is the result of exchanges of implicit to explicit meaning. These are the issues raised in this chapter.

Identification

The processes of identification creates our desires. In Freudian psychoanalysis identification is the means by which the personality is constituted. 'It is not simply one psychical mechanism among others, but the operation itself whereby the human subject is constituted.' 1 In terms of meaning and modes of thought, this statement is far too extreme. The human subject is not constituted by the mechanism of identification as Freud would have us believe. Rather, identification represents only the first step in the three-step process of learning that includes: identification, differentiation and integration.

The meaning associated with an expertise in any field, whether in physical movement or with the intellect, is characterized by our capacity to produce coherent, integrated distinctions and differences. To reach this plateau of finesse there are three developmental and learning steps we have to take. The first step involves identification; the second step involves differentiation and the third, the integration of distinctions and differences. Mastery of any movement or of a set of concepts comes from progress through these three learning steps. Mastery, therefore, does not come easily or in one simple jump from its base in implicit meaning. Rather, this progressive development can take many years but its path always travels through the territories of identification, differentiation and integration.

In the first twenty years of life we will normally travel through these three developmental steps many times and hence will develop an expertise in a variety of areas, but especially in body movement. We will be able to run faster, jump higher and have greater flexibility than any other time in our lives. Some of us will develop an expertise in social areas, that is, we will know our own preferences and be able to articulate our views of the world and still retain friends and group allegiances. In this period most of us will therefore have some appreciation of what it feels like to have an expertise and mastery in some areas. Yet in the first twenty years most of us will also have the common learning experience of being stuck in some patterns of identification related to our likes and who we are.

Identification is a fusing and confusing process. As a learning process, it represents our 'first take' on a situation before a more considered and comprehensive exploration. As such, when we rest in this first house, believing it to be built on solid and secure ground, we are liable to be shocked at its frailty. The immediate results of identification will always have us jumping to those premature conclusions which are the marks of normal immaturity. Learning through identification is the difficult process of learning by trial and error. This difficult process represents the normal path of learning anything at any age but it is an especially dominant feature during the first twenty years of life. It is dominant because it is the first step in any learning and in this period we have a lot of new things to learn.

One thing to note about identification is that meaning itself provides the necessary causal impulse for the movement and momentum in this kind of thinking. There is therefore no need to propose some kind of semi-biological factor like the Freudian 'drive' or the Darwinian 'instinct,' or Chomsky's 'mental organ.' Meaning itself is the causal dynamic that produces the movement of identification through its inherent and implicit character of connection and attraction.

Thus meaning's inherent force for connection (attraction) is not confined to what Freud saw as the sexual instinct or to the idea of libidinal development but rather it represents a general 'law of attraction.' The law of attraction is an inherent feature of implicit to implicit exchanges of innocent love (Chapter 10). When the attraction of implicit exchanges is combined with a movement of exclusion so there is a joint attraction and exclusion movement, then at this point distinctions are formed. In terms of relations, this is the formation of a non-symmetrical relationship and as such it represents a distinction or a difference of some kind. This is a transformation of meaning from innocent love to the beginnings of conscious learning; from implicit to explicit meaning. The mechanism of identification will therefore always combine the processes of attraction with exclusion.

The attraction/exclusion mechanism of identification is the first learning step into a world of conscious recognition and deliberation. Through the attraction/exclusion processes of identification an infant begins to recognize and identify objects as well as to create speech out of their expressive movements and babblings. The same attraction/exclusion processes are at work in adults. For example, we recognize and identify speech through the connecting frequency waves that we then divide up into distinct units of sound which are then combined together to form speech patterns. Hearing speech is therefore firstly an identificational process that requires the attraction of overlapping, oscillating waves of various frequencies as well as an excluding process that divides up the spectrum of vibrations into units of sound.

The attraction/exclusion mechanism of identification is absolutely essential for any recognition to occur and for undertaking more complex conscious deliberation as well as for learning generally. Problems begin to arise from identification, however, when our learning does not progress beyond the point of attraction/exclusion. When this happens we tend to fall in love with the mechanism of identification and in so doing repeat it over and over again. When this happens we create complex patterns of identification and these constitute our desires. A further point about the mechanism of attraction/exclusion is that it operates at a subliminal level. It is therefore beyond personal control and hence, functions below the level of conscious deliberation. The mechanism of attraction/exclusion represents the subliminal events which produce the distinctions that are the origin of conscious deliberations. As a consequence, when we fall in love with this subliminal process of attraction/exclusion the tendency is to perpetuate these processes which in turn lead to the construction of our desires. As we are not aware of the processes of attraction/exclusion we will also not be totally aware of the make up of our desires.

A desire is therefore created when the natural learning processes of recognition and identification are subliminally repeated again and again so that these processes build upon each other to become more complex and broader and inclusive of a whole raft of other differences. With this situation the normal three-part learning process of identification, differentiation and integration is interrupted and we become stuck in a set of fixed, habitual identificational patterns and desiring responses. When, for instance, the normal grasping by the infant transforms into an unexpressed longing in adolescence such patterns represent the complex mode of desire. The common initial stage of desire comes about during childhood when we begin to construct our sense of a separate identity.

Identity

In contemporary Western society personal identity represents that closed circle of meaning which continually announces its separation from others, the environment and the Host. This identification circle we experience as separate from others and private. This construction is the false self. It presents itself as an independent, self-autonomous, self-organizing agency, which can be spoken about in psychological terms as the 'ego.' At the base of the ego is the idol-body which is constructed from the identification of self and the body.

Our sense of personal identity has been welded together from a series of formations and sensibilities (concrete and abstract) to create an undifferentiated structure of meaning that is 'me.' The structure of 'me' is a unity made up of a series of smaller identification patterns which congeal together because of their attraction to each other. The structure of a personal 'me' is therefore constructed both from attraction and exclusion. While the internal structure is a result of attraction, my separation from others is constructed from a sense of exclusion. Overall the complex structure of 'me' is the result of the attraction/exclusion principles of identification.

It is possible to unpack the structure of 'me' as it involves nothing more than locating the subset players in this circle of attraction. For visual purposes this circle can be represented by the subset: 'A,' 'B,' 'C,' 'D,' 'E,' 'F,' in the following manner:

Figure 21:

The Structure of 'me'

The cast in this drama of personal identity consists of the following players:

A – I am this body;

B – I am male/female;

C – I am my feelings;

D – I am my thoughts;

E – I am what others assume or say I am;

F – I am a symbol

When identified together these six players create the drama of my false and separate identity. Because of them I am an embodied male person with thoughts and feelings and a role in life that has been given by others. We take this drama for granted when signing our name or speaking of 'my' possessions or 'my' free will. Yet we are not idols. An idol is a representation that is assumed not to be a representation. In this drama of identity there are six representations that are assumed not to be representations. This is a six-fold forgetting! What is missing and forgotten in this drama is what constitutes my true self. The true self is not bounded by name and form, or thought or bodily sensation. Our quintessential nature is implicit meaning—innocent love. As a consequence of the normal six-fold forgetting we act like the ventriloquist dummy that believes itself to be a real person—the false self believes itself to be the real self. The false self sprouts and grows during childhood and adolescence. Hence in the early morning of our childhood we begin to fragment ourselves by creating the turbulence that comes with a series of small moments of identification which are then magnetized together into the circular center of attraction that constitutes our separate, excluding, autonomous selves.

In the culture in which I grew up I created small identification patterns because the name and body I have were always taken by others to be 'me.' I accepted this identification without question. I also experienced many moments of fear, guilt, repression, shame and pain. Such moments over-stimulated and reinforced my growing sense of a separate, excluded identity. In these ways I became a name/form—an undifferentiated identification of name and form. I gradually came to understand that 'I am my body.' This understanding is normal and was accepted without question by my parents and the community in which I lived.

These sensibilities were reinforced every time the adults in my childhood physically punished me. I then experienced the visceral knowing that I was a separate individual. My name and body positioned me as separate from my parents, teachers and classmates. In school we were always expected to act competitively in class and often aggressively on the sports field, for this is the nature of ambitious and competitive individuals. Thus I expressed my identity through my desire to succeed in class and in sport. I represented this combination of identity and desire with simple words such as 'I want ...' and 'that is mine.' And with these kinds of experiences I assumed ownership of a landscape of meaning that was given by the cosmic Host. Like the pastoral squatters of early Australian history, who were also my ancestors, I pegged out an area of meaning and called it 'mine' and 'me.'

Like these same pastoral squatters I created an individual identity by assuming that there was no prior ownership to this landscape of meaning, that it was 'empty' and so rightfully 'mine.' The Australian landscape was never empty. It was always full of the implicit dreaming of another culture. And so is the landscape of my being, which may appear void but is also always full of connective and innocent love. In addition, as with these early Australian squatters, when I declared my individual autonomy it brought with it a whole set of exclusions. Like them I also fenced in that which I assumed to be rightfully mine and then I denied access to the original inhabitants. And so with a strong sense of personal ownership that marked off my individual autonomy I gave birth to a new set of defense mechanisms. These were my fears and anxieties that exclude the original ocean of innocent love that implicitly connects me to others, the environment and to the impersonal Host.

Each morning when I wake I begin a daily and common ritual that casts me out of the paradise of implicit meaning into a fragmented and competitive world of struggle, pain and tears. Every morning when we wake from a night of integrating sleep, this mechanism of fragmentation habitually and automatically 'kicks in.' Our state of integration is then transformed into a process of gradual fragmentation and this change is created initially by the sense that we are autonomous, separate individuals. This is our sense constructed by the 'me concept'; a sense that is autonomous, wilful and in control. Yet this inauthentic self also has to be experienced fully, confidently and assertively in order for us to realize that it is false.

Desire

Some of us pass through the first twenty years easily but most do it with great difficulty. Each person's journey is different. Cultures and institutional influences can make this journey more difficult under repressive and unjust regimes. On the other hand they can make this journey of learning through trial and error easier by providing the empathetic conditions for learning about this natural unfolding. Firstly, this means empathetically assisting the unfolding of sexual desires in adolescents by providing an open, learning context where the many intricate and unique conditions of desires can be articulated and discriminated. Our desires will die when we have developed a critical level of discrimination about them. In general, discrimination is fully established when we master a vocabulary for each and every aspect of our desires. When this level of differentiation is reached the energy caught up in desire will begin to dissipate. This is because discrimination creates differences within the identification patterns of desire and this intelligence tends to mature and evolve our consciousness. This movement away from identification patterns to patterns of differentiation is a natural feature of the arc of learning. It also represents a movement towards empathy and a thinking strategy that reflects the fifth law of Meaning.

Learning about the identification patterns of desire is not easy. This is because desire represents the mode of thought that justifies the inauthentic self. Essentially it is the self-assertive striving (grasping, clinging, wanting) after the lost paradise of connection, love and security. In this sense, desire is an attempt to replace the original innocent love of the Host that was lost with the construction of an identity that separates. The tragedy of desire is that it is like a kind of puppetry undertaken by the puppet of the false self. As such it can never be satisfied because it continually points us in the wrong direction.

The personal attraction that is evident in sexual desire is not so much a love for another as the need for connection, a bridge across an apparent gap between self and other. Desire's main preoccupation is not with giving but in taking through closure with another object. Such taking by closure is a subliminal exchange that does not create peace and fulfilment so much as disorder. Caught in the whirlwind of desire we start to believe that we need—and have to have in order to survive—intense identifications with another person. This blindness, in which the geographic horizon shrinks, can be stifling and all consuming. Desire makes us lonely and the gravitational pull of attraction to another seems only to add weight to our identity. If innocent love is a mode of thought that is like the fullness of a deep river, then desire is like the swirling turbulence of the rapids. The confusion and tumult created by this mode comes from the impossibility of it ever being satisfied.

The direction that desire points us in is always towards an outward object; hence any object can be an object of desire, even the object of our own body. The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan said that all desire is the 'desire of the Other.' 2 The object does not have to be a sexual object, although this is very common after puberty. Desire expands our sense of identity by including any objects such as money, consumer goods and other people. We believe that our identity expands when we identify with some external object for that object then becomes part of 'me.' It becomes part of 'me' because when I strongly desire it the longing seems to ease as I develop a sense of possession. When we possess something the object rightfully becomes 'mine.' It belongs to and becomes part of my identity. In this way I own my wife and children as well as my car, horse and dogs.

Desire reinforces our belief in the false self because our desires seem real. A sense of personal identity and our accompanying desires therefore represent synchronized patterns that reinforce each other. With this mode of thinking, illusion builds on illusion in a thickening fog of disorganization and unpredictability. When desires are not fulfilled we come to believe that our personal identity has failed. This sense of failure does not readily recognize that the failed self is actually an inauthentic self. The sense of failure created by identification patterns can at times become so extreme that they turn into depression.

The irony of identity and desire is that we forget about who we truly are and what we like. This happens even though we may spend more time and energy on these two things than on anything else. In general our desires reduce meaning by forgetting or rejecting differences that are close at hand and yet at the same time we over-value superficial differences that are further away. This double action of forgetting close-at-hand differences and over-valuing distant and superficial differences represents the either/or stance of the peer 'in-group.'

When this sensibility is developed by a whole community the community represents a tribal community. Adolescent peer groups and tribes are therefore dominated by the forgetful patterns of identification and desire. When close-at-hand differences do surface and make themselves felt in an in-group, family or a community then the tribal response is normally to suppress them. This happens with all orthodoxies and in this respect all modern orthodoxies are tribal.

Learning

Both identity and desire are sustained and perpetuated by their own centripetal forces that inhibit further learning. Yet if learning were to take place, then unfolding would quite naturally occur and the processes of identification could gradually give way to differentiation and then finally to integration. There are therefore two steps in this unfolding process. The first step away from identification involves some discrimination about our identity and desires. The second step involves transforming the connecting bonds within the structure of desire into some larger connecting context such as compassion or empathy. For adults this can often mean transforming the energy of grasping, wanting, or lust into the heart energy of helping others in compassion and empathy. Should this two-step movement of learning take place then our desires will begin to slowly reduce and our identity will become more like a representation than an idol.

Formal education and learning institutions do not normally tackle the special training that is required to unfold the identification patterns associated with identity and desire. Rather, many education and learning institutions ignore or repress learning about identity and desire and hence, through this strategy, they tend to create non-learning environments. As a consequence, many of us have the experience of never growing up out of the restrictive and child-like world of identification.

This means that for many people the identification patterns associated with identity and desire will be a strong if not a dominant feature for the second period of growth (from 20 to 40 years). This is the period of the intellect when a natural emphasis is placed on the capacity to embrace full differentiation. It is during this period that identity and desire are usually transmuted and rationalized into the more socially acceptable responses such as those centered around ambitions and personal agendas. Finally, the identifications of identity and desire will, for many of us, carry over into the third period of growth which begins in mid-life. During these later years many of the problems contemporary society faces are associated with how to keep our desires from faltering and how to deal with those aspects of our identity that resist integration.

Adolescent desires extended beyond their natural 'use by' date tend to become rancid in adults. The desire for perpetual youth, for example, is an unhealthy and not uncommon experience in contemporary society.

Desires that continue beyond the second twenty-year period of growth do so because they have not fully unfolded in previously secure learning situations that could have allowed for greater differentiation of feelings and sensibilities. This lack of learning contains much unawareness and forgetting. Forgetting is a characteristic of identification.

Thus when desires are repressed, and not explored or unravelled in adolescence, they tend to be held in suspension. In later years the same suspended desires may be celebrated and as a consequence, perpetuated into old age, well beyond their use-by date. In a similar manner when our identity is not confidently exposed to society it will also be held in suspension. With such suspended desires and identities we do not develop a critical vocabulary for them, rather, we tend to develop a set of rationalizations of them. Such rationalizations help us forget about the natural biological changes that are happening to our maturing body. In place of the physical reality we see in the mirror each morning we tend to create the illusion of desirability and youthfulness. This happens with face-lifts, hormone replacement therapy or Viagra. When we rely on this kind of technological assistance to keep us desirable, we no longer want to learn how the natural ageing processes of the body point to a deeper, spiritual meaning of life. With these kinds of forgetful regimes we inhibit the evolution of our consciousness.

In terms of learning, the experiences of desiring and having an identity can be positive in our youth when exploration is a vital part of unravelling life's mysteries. When we grow older, however, and habitual responses take over and learning ceases, then desires can have negative and even tragic outcomes. Negative outcomes manifest in the form of insatiable appetites for acquisition, control or retribution. By contrast, when adolescents explore their sexuality with others there is a novelty created from discovering similarities and a unity of feelings. In later life there is often a striving after that lost sense of novelty. With adolescent desire there is a youthful range of behavior that seeks after insight and learning through connection and re-connection. With desire in later life there is often a manic seeking, not after learning, but oblivion.

Tribes

When a social group shares a world view that is based upon a fondness for identification the group is constituted as a tribe. Within tribal regimes the individual's sense of who they are is extended to include the identity of the tribe. Hence, tribal identity and individual identity are identified together as being the same. Tribal regimes can be ancient or modern, religious, secular or postsecular. The differences between these four kinds of tribes involve how closely a tribe's culture reflects either the thought mode of innocent love or the intellect. The closer to innocent love the more ancient and unified will be the tribal culture. In contrast, the modern tribe that incorporates high levels of symbolic abstractions into their culture will tend to embed within its view of the world a separating binary morality.

We find the presence of unifying symmetrical thought in The Dreaming, the sacred world of the ancient tribes of Australian Aborigines. Such tribes tend to have a culture in which their common patterns of identification are closely associated with the implications of a spirit world. In terms of Meaning, the spirit world of The Dreaming is the world of primary perception, a world created and given by implicit exchanges that involve innocent identification patterns. According to W. E. H. Stanner, the 'central meaning of The Dreaming is that of a sacred, heroic time long ago when man and nature came to be as they are.' 3 Yet neither time nor history, as we understand them, is involved in this meaning. The Dreaming cannot be fixed in time because it is also here and now. It is truly a non-local sensibility. As Stanner suggests, The Dreaming is also a kind of logos or principle of order transcending everything mundane or significant. This principle of order also provides a narrative for tribal people to know who they are and to understand about things that once happened and are still happening.

For an Australian Aborigine, The Dreaming is a complex set of meanings that embraces both the modes of thought of innocent love and identification. The symmetrical connections of these two modes create unities in places that can astound the modern mind. For example, as Stanner points out, an Aboriginal may see as a unity 'two persons, such as two siblings or a grandparent and a grandchild, or a living man and something inanimate, as when he tells you that, say, the wollybut tree, a totem, is his wife's brother.' 4 Stanner goes on to say that there is also a kind of unity between waking-life and dreaming-life. For example, it is through the medium of dream-contact with a spirit that an artist is inspired to produce a new song. 'It is by dreaming that a man divines the intention of someone to kill him by sorcery, or a relative to visit him.' Also a man is seen to father a child, not by sexual intercourse, but by the act of dreaming about a spirit-child. 'His own spirit, during a dream, 'finds' a child and directs it to his wife, who then conceives.' 5

The symmetrical thought patterns of The Dreaming (combining primary perception with identification patterns) creates a cosmology of how the universe became a moral system; of what life is and what it can be, while its narratives set out the norms of behavior for marriage, exogamy, sister exchange, initiation and breaches of custom. As for the identity of individual members, these are formed by fully living this implicit yet identifying philosophy within the existing cultural matrix of the tribe.

Stanner goes on to tells us that 'the Aborigines have no gods, just or unjust, to adjudicate the world.' 6 For gods to play a role in this ancient tribal regime would mean incorporating into their culture a substantial role for abstract symbolic representations. Such a change would move this ancient culture away from embracing both the modes of innocent love and identification to a regime that embraces the intellect as well as identification. This is the combination of thought patterns we find in modern tribalism, both within the religious and secular models.

Modern religious tribes make use of abstract symbols and hence they are able to have gods. Importantly, however, the modern religious tribe perpetuated itself with a set of exclusions that are based upon a binary morality of them and us. Such exclusions occur between religions so that my religion is always seen to be superior to other sects; infidels, pagans, heretics or foreign others. Tribal exclusions can also occur within religions and these are usually in relation to the sort of official positions that are barred to women and homosexuals. Any religious activity where gender or sexual activity is excluded and/or repressed represents an institutional failure to come to terms with the empathetic learning necessary for individual maturation and spiritual evolution.

One example of this tribal resistance to spiritual evolution is Saint Augustine's doctrine of Original Sin. In discussing this doctrine Karen Armstrong argues that the fall of Rome deeply influenced Augustine's doctrine of Original Sin. As Armstrong says, 'Augustine believed that God had condemned humanity to an eternal damnation, simply because of Adam's one sin. The inherited guilt was passed on to all his descendants through the sexual act.' Armstrong goes on to argue that sexual desire was seen by Augustine to swamp rationality in a similar way that 'Rome, source of rationality, law and order in the West, [was] brought low by barbarian tribes.' 7 While the fall of Rome can be seen as an important influence in Saint Augustine's view of sin, the role of sexual desire also figures largely in his doctrine of Original Sin. The unfortunate heritage of this doctrine has left many Christians with a largely negative view of humanity as well as their own flesh, which is taken to be inherently and fundamentally flawed.

Yet desire as a mode of thinking is not the original mode of thought. The original mode is innocent love, a state of primary perception involving the interconnections of implicit meaning. Rather than Original Sin, the natural order of meaning indicates that the basis of our being is actually original love. Matthew Fox takes a very similar line in his book, Original Blessing. The natural order of the cosmos is thus reversed by the doctrine of Original Sin. This means that the doctrine itself represents a forgetful aspect of desire, for through its teaching and unquestioned acceptance, this doctrine creates and spreads the virus of identification in a manner that reinforces our forgetting and extends our desires. Saint Augustine was therefore wrong about Adam's sin being original and I suspect, this failure by the great man reflects more his view of himself than any principle for humanity.

The controversy surrounding the social role of sexual desire has a long history. A common example of this controversy is the widespread practice of punishing sexual desires that occur outside of the institution of marriage. However, desire is a stage in our maturation and evolution, a stage that each of us needs to pass through in order to evolve. Suppression and punishment therefore do not seem adequate or fair responses to what is a necessary developmental stage. In effect, suppression (by external force), or repression (by an internal force), or the punishment of sexual desires represent effective means of perpetuating the pain and exclusions of modern religious tribalism.

When a young body is full of hormones, the complex implications of this biological change have to unfold. If this inevitable unfolding is ignored by institutions that repress, suppress or forget this necessity then pain and ignorance is created in place of learning. Unforced celibacy is a gift given to very few. If this state is not seen as a special gift but is simply imposed on the young by a tribal Church then the fruits of this repression, as has been shown, is a plentiful harvest of negative tendencies.

Secular tribalism

In contemporary society desire and its collective tribal expressions continue to be a potent force. We turn to it at times when our personal and national security seems threatened. For example, after the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001 many New Yorkers flew the American flag on their cars as a sign of national unity and solidarity. Cars without flags were liable to have their windscreens broken. In addition, in the days and weeks after 9/11, nine people of Middle-Eastern appearance were reportedly murdered. Many of these were Sikhs whose only crime was that they wore turbans and looked stereotypically Middle-Eastern. These were some of the 'them and us' manifestations of modern tribalism.

The foreign policies of many nation states are based on the modern tribal credo of 'national interest.' However, communities in industrialized nations in times of peace usually do not overtly act towards their neighbors in a tribal manner. Yet the force of desire is never far below the surface in these communities. This is because our desires are continually fed by many institutions that perpetuate and stimulate our tribal and adolescent sensibilities. These are the sensibilities in which we forget distinctions close at hand but over-value differences further afield.

In addition, the forgetfulness of desire is perpetuated by the narrative genre of 'romance.' Romance is a story that is rendered emblematically by the illusion of a tragic, isolated individual forever estranged from a world 'he never made.' In such narratives our feeling of desperately wanting the impossible (a lost love or staying young) is the romance of desire. It is desire desiring its own expression. This is the dominant genre of popular Western culture. Within this genre, desire can be expressed romantically, sexually, patriotically, religiously and existentially or as an aspect of a nostalgic past.

Stories based upon patterns of identification carry romantic and simplistic expectations that are essentially false. This Hollywood/Bollywood style deceit encapsulates, reinforces and reflects our underlying sense of estrangement from the world. This duplicity gives us a romantic foundation for our belief that the subject is a separate individual quite apart from the objects he or she so desires. In contemporary culture it is common for the sentimental sensibilities of desire to combine romantic love with avarice, or at other times to combine maudlin nostalgia with murderous hatred. 8 These opposites usually come together in a manner that hides the negative while promoting the surface and sentimental positive.

To find pleasure in forgetting indicates a widespread social amnesia. It is also an attempt to turn back the maturation and evolutionary clock to the time when we were adolescents. Yet it is just as impossible to turn back the clock as it is to remain a child. When we attempt such absurdities we create a culture that multiplies disconnections, conflict and disorder. Yet for most people desire is not simply the short period of adolescence which we all pass through so that by mid-twenties we have left it behind. For most people, desire continues into their old age and represents one of their major responses to the world. The socially acceptable consequences of desire are the fire of competition and the drive for social status and success.

Apart from the prevalence of the modern romantic or patriotic tribe there is the secular tribe of the Positivist. This is a tribe in which its members do not live in one location, wave flags or dress in a special style or uniform manner. The cultural regime of this tribe is established by its materialist view of the world which is underpinned by a binary morality that marks out a set of closed traditions and orthodoxies that exclude those who would question its authority. The modern tribe of the positivist over-values the use of abstract symbols and because of these preferences it produces a universe of fragmentation and a world of differences that separate. (I have more to say about this positivism in the next chapter.)

In general, for a community to evolve beyond its tribal roots it must develop and master a critical vocabulary about its own patterns of identification that produce the amnesia of its culture. Learning about one's own cultural patterns of identification begins by learning to read the implicit meaning of contexts. Such learning enhances our ability to read the consequences of our actions. This ability is severely stunted by desire. For some communities developing a critical vocabulary may mean no more than a beginning which lifts literacy levels across the whole community. This is best achieved by a postsecular education system in which both boys and girls are valued students. Such systems are not tied to tribal or closed religious belief systems. Gradually with an increase in the capacity to read contexts and critically discriminate about their own identification patterns an individual, and a community, will evolve.

In summary, desire is a mode of thought which we all must inevitably pass through. Desire therefore represents both a natural and yet a problematic state. This double layering of meaning represents a state of learning in which we have to live through and in which we have to make mistakes. It is learning through trial and error. Desire and the identification patterns which create it are not original condition of humanity but represent the second and passing stage in a maturing and evolving process. What is inevitable is the journey that each of us must take, not the mistakes we make in order to pass through this stage. This means that humanity is not eternally condemned by its desires. Rather, it means that we should seriously reflect on the ways in which we can begin to leave them behind after thirty years of age.
13 – The Intellect

The intellect is a dominant mode of thought associated with the development of the second twenty years of life (20–40 years). It is also a mode of community thought that constitutes the culture of Reason. Like desire, the intellect is a transition stage in learning and a midway point in maturation and hence the cultural experiences of Reason are those that each of us should embrace and use in the service of empathy. These conditions mark the intellect as a provisional station in the evolution of mind.

The intellect's provisional status comes from the place it holds within the arc of learning and also within the evolution of consciousness. Its location lies between desire on the one hand and empathy on the other. This location is relative and therefore conditional on these two modes of thought. The relativity of this location automatically makes the intellect a servant of either desire or empathy as the following figure demonstrates:

Figure 22:

Arc of learning

A provisional station in the evolution of mind is not the modern view of the intellect. As we currently live in the Age of Reason there is a widespread tendency in the West to see reason as having a status of infallibility, a rank once reserved for the Holy Scriptures. How then is this jewel of the Enlightenment not an unconditional authority that philosophers like Rene Descartes once imagined?

The cultural predisposition in this Age of Reason is one that reinforces and over-values what the intellect is supposed to represent. In terms of the arc of learning, the intellect is concerned with the knowledge that comes from making distinctions and differentiating. The culture of Reason, which embodies the values and discourses of materialism, realism and positivism, has fallen in love with this ability to make distinctions and to differentiate and as a consequence, our modern culture has an oversupply of differences, so much so that our knowledge has become fragmented and our lives isolated and alienated.

A Rational culture that values explicit differences above all else constructs a Tower-of-Babel world. This is the established Western and commercial world view that splits, divides, fragments and excludes. This world view translates in personal terms so that most of us work hard to achieve success through detailed, explicit competitive methods. This is what many of us will do in our mid twenties when we rationally organize our life into the compartments of work, love-life, family and community. This is especially the case for those of us who are workaholics who work more than sixty hours a week. Such people are especially prone to those rationally walled worlds that split head from heart but which can give logical proof, justification and reasoned argument to everything. In the early part of this period (20 to 40 years of age) when private self-interest is our moral guide, the intellect can begin to act like a cheap lawyer who represents a dodgy client.

Yet when the client is empathy, the intellect-lawyer loses the illusion that it is a sole independent rational agent and becomes instead, just a discerning set of features within a broader social, community and spiritual context. The intellect is therefore always acting, not on its own behalf because that is impossible, but in the service of another mode of thought. The intellect cannot act on its own behalf, for instance, to show how intelligent it is, because to do so is to prove how special and brilliant is the individual. In such circumstances it transforms into positivism. Nor can the intellect simply act objectively, for instance, to unselfishly expand the level of scientific knowledge. Again this is an act of realism on behalf of the desires and the identity of the individual.

Thus this provisional station in the evolution of mind produces knowledge that is based on explicit to explicit exchanges and these exchanges lie mid-way between the implicit to explicit patterns of identifications associated with desires on the one hand, and the integration of distinctions associated with empathy on the other. The intellect is therefore the lever-point midway between these other two modes of thought. As a lever-point the differential knowledge generated by the intellect can serve either our desires or our empathy, but not both at the same time.

The intellect's inbuilt moral compass therefore continually points us either forward or backwards in the flow of meaning that is the arc of learning, maturation and the evolution of consciousness. In pointing forward the intellect will lose some of its force and energy that is associated with hard edged differences, intellectual argument and conflicts. It can do this by reducing the emphasis and its single-pointed focus on logical units and explicit particulars that with a rational paradigm seem to exist without contexts. It can also be used in the service of empathy by using symbols as representations and not as self-referencing idols. When we employ such a relative frame we find that implicit meaning, ambiguity and uncertainty are each accepted as necessary elements in learning processes that are open ended and essentially self-reflective.

The other important factor associated with this mode of thought is its reliance on the use of symbols. The intellect's association with symbols can be seen if we overlay on Figure 23 the apex of the pyramid of meaning as follows:

Figure 23:

Intellect and symbols

Through the use of symbols the mind extends, expands, develops and matures. This evolution is achieved by generating interlocking systems of explicit distinctions and differences. The most efficient way of achieving systems of distinctions is by the use of symbols in language or by using symbols to create technology. Language and technology increases differentiation (explicit to explicit exchanges) because they are both differential systems that tend to make definite and manifest the abstractness of symbolic thought. Our knowledge about nature and the physical world has therefore developed through the corresponding development in the use of symbols through new vocabularies and new technology. Through these highly differential systems the scientific revolution and the Age of Reason were born.

The use of the symbols of language also provides a literacy capacity in areas where before there are only vague feelings and sensations. In addition, language use increases the individual's capacity to express thoughts and feelings and as a consequence to come to terms with problems and the vicissitudes of life. Language use also increases our ability to reason, to differentiate and to analyse situations. When we first learn a new vocabulary it is like discovering a new world. In addition, through language use we are able to break down the gross generalizations that come with patterns of identification which are associated with desires and tribal life. In addition, through an increasing use of symbols the formless divinity of ancient tribes can be given a form with names such as 'God.'

The intellect's use of symbols is therefore the key developmental feature in maturing and evolving the mind beyond adolescent desires or the superstitions and generalizations of tribal existence. The benefits of a high level of symbolization are therefore extremely important for a community and for the individual in order to move beyond a conditioned life dominated by identification. Yet when the intellect does not serve empathy or act as a provisional station in an evolving mind, but instead turns back to desire, then this resistance to the evolution of consciousness can create all kinds of problems. These are the problems that come from over-valuing explicit differences so they become separations that divide. It is this kind of erring I address now.

Without contexts

The Age of Reason is appropriately represented by the mechanical metaphor of 'the machine': the clock, the internal combustion engine and now the computer. 'The machine' is a comforting technological metaphor for what seems to provide us with the possibility of certainty. In this Age a key feature of the orthodox mindset is therefore its general intolerance of uncertainty. Uncertainty always seems to accompany implicit, contextual meaning. This implicit and contextual meaning is generally missing from the repertoire of the orthodoxies of Reason (positivism, materialism and realism).1 As a consequence of this failure there is an accompanying inability to predict the consequences of actions. A notable case is modern economics which is hard pressed to predict anything the market may or may not do.

Intolerance to implicit contextual meaning is also a feature of the professional skeptic who creates certainty in the world by constantly doubting. Skepticism and doubt represent the comforting reassurance that the Host context and a cosmic order are illusions. The skeptic denies the existence of God, extra-sensory perception, telepathy, ghosts, the memory of water and everything else that seems to challenge the orthodoxy of a mechanical, explicitly defined, rational universe. Amongst the scientific community skeptics have organized themselves into an organization called the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) in order to protect the orthodoxy of Reason from possible back-sliding colleagues.

In an earlier evolutionary age the master orthodoxies were more likely to be geographically restricted and based on religion. Historically the critics of all orthodoxies have been treated harshly. Once they were burnt at thestake or condemned as heretics. Now, under the active influence of skeptics, they simply have their scientific reputations destroyed. Such a change we call progress. I realize that it is controversial to refer to Reason in this disparaging manner. Reason has had a distinguished career in philosophy from the Greeks until now and it is usually held up as a virtue, something to be admired and valued in itself. Yet the underlying cause of Reason's fall from grace is a cultural failure to more forward into empathy.

When the intellect is a servant of empathy it is open to contextual meaning and on an individual level, we experience empathy and have compassion as the end point of our thoughts and actions. When science finally becomes empathetic it will fully encompass the contextual meaning of the environment. As global warming has now become an actuality a large part of the scientific community has been forced to take this particular context into account. Yet the orthodox positions of positivism, materialism and realism are still skeptical of humanity's role in global warming. Such skepticism is indicative of an inability to deal with contextual meaning and a failure to predict consequences.

This culture of Reason has an unbounded faith in explicit particulars, yet an exclusive focus on explicit differences always produces splits, separations and the fragmentation of knowledge. This fragmentary world view was summed up succinctly by one old Australian Aboriginal man who spoke to W. E. H. Stanner as though he was speaking in verse: 2

White man got no dreaming

Him go 'nother way

White man, him got different.

Him go road belong himself.

This old Aboriginal man was correct; the rational white man has no God and he travels a fragmented road of heterogeneity without a context. 3 At the base of this road is the belief that explicit particulars exist independently, without the need of a context. A universe that only contains explicit particulars is an entirely physical and dead universe. In such a universe there is no context of the Host and no dreaming. As symbols and culture are also excluded from scientific analysis there is no recognition of language crimes and hence no realization of the limitations of this positivistic kind of Reason. The culture of fragmentation puts its faith in deductive logic because deductive logic is constructed by explicit, differential particulars. Hence, when confronted with the many questions of mind the materialist white man answers by negating it: 'mind is what the brain does.'

The four key contexts which the orthodoxies of Reason ignore are the contexts of Host, identity, culture and symbols. As a consequence, these orthodox discourses of Reason simply deny the relevance of the Numinous in any of their deliberations. They also deny the importance and relevance of their own cultural predispositions and they are silent on the relative agency of symbols. From this skeptical standpoint the idea of linguistic relativity, as proposed by Benjamin Lee Whorf, where different world views depend upon the kind of linguistic community we belong to, is simply countered by the language crimes of inductive scientific method. These are the crimes of a literal and surface reading, of contextual denial and the crime of idolatry.

As a substitute for contextual meaning the several orthodoxies of Reason have tended to rely on binary oppositional judgments; the either/or values that create the false divisions between matter and mind, head and heart, logic and intuition, reason and faith, and cognition and feeling. Such binary logic was at work in Rene Descartes' philosophy and it is at work in Western medicine today where the body is predominantly seen as a physical machine and where the usual focus on physical symptoms excludes the broader view of a constitution or 'biofield.' This binary logic is also at work in the discourses of those scientists who seriously propose that the universe is a simulation and that there are probably multiple universes 'out there.' According to Paul Davies these ideas come from scientists who want to find an acceptable scientific answer for why the universe is so bio-friendly. 4

By 'bio-friendly' he means how the universe is so attuned to producing life, that is, the 'life' which inhabits 'living organisms.' By 'acceptable answer' Davies is countering the unacceptable answer of God and/or notions of intelligent design. This materialistic stand on a bio-friendly universe is symptomatic of a more general and mainstream denial by scientists of all contextual meaning.

The three language crimes of literalness, omission of context and idolatry have become the stable normative features within the culture of Reason and hence they have grown into a set of widely held conventions while also sustaining the values of the scientific method. The contradiction of this denial of contextual meaning is that while strenuously avoiding the personal on the one hand, the orthodoxies of positivism, materialism and realism have nevertheless placed scientific enquiry squarely within the frame of identity and desire. This has happened through the normative ambitions that motivate individual scientists for reputation and status amongst peers. As a consequence, not only do anomalous phenomena fall outside the strict guidelines of mainstream (proper) science, but in addition, transparent and independent research has become an endangered species amongst the growing forest of industry financed science. Industry financed science is the kind of science that is framed by the desire for identity and motivations of industry.

History

Why has Reason failed to take account of contextual meaning? Over the last three hundred years there have been several significant events that have influenced the intellect away from contextual meaning. Perhaps the most obvious has been the development of technology. The technological developments of the last three hundred years have dramatically changed the way humans live. Technology has the effect of systematizing the intellect by making differences manifest and often venerable. This influence also narrows the focus of the mind. A narrow focus on explicit meaning tends to ignore or exclude implicit contextual meaning.

As a consequence of this bias towards explicit meaning the technological mind tends to imagine that positive truths come from technology. This approach was apparent even when Galileo looked through his improved telescope and found empirical verification for Copernicus' heliocentric hypothesis. The scientific revolution that followed brought a new status for science as the legitimate institution that could produce a positive and certain 'truth.' Even today this kind of positivism holds sway and technology continues to be seen as the means for gaining positive truths. Yet science and technology cannot offer positive proof of anything. They can only provide us with negative proofs—the verification of null hypotheses. Hence the positive proofs of science are fictions and they represent a feature of the language crimes of Positivism.

Another important event for why Reason has failed to take account of contextual meaning comes from the founder of the scientific method. This was the English philosopher, statesman and scientist Francis Bacon (1561–1626) who established and popularized the scientific method of enquiry. Bacon's methods of scientific enquiry opposed the method of simply stating an opinion and also his method attempted to replace Aristotelian reasoning which had been in vogue for over two thousand years. Bacon's focus was primarily concerned with the material world and the presumed laws that governed that world.

Bacon's aim was a noble one and his influence considerable in establishing a sure method for scientific enquiry. Yet his enthusiasm for his projects also provided a productive soil in which the blindness of positivism grew. One example may indicate the depth of that fertile ground. Bacon's concern for an empirical scientific approach beyond personal opinion led him to reject the duality of actus (the actual) and potentia (potentials), a polarity that Owen Barfield estimates 'had carried perhaps half the weight of philosophical thought of the Western mind' for over two thousand years. 5 This polarity had become for Bacon a 'frigida distinctio'—mere words. Bacon replaced this duality with a heavy emphasis on actus—the actual.

In this decisive move Bacon threw the 'baby out with the bath water' for he excluded from his method of scientific enquiry any reference to potentials and with it any reference to the implicit meaning of contexts. Implicit meaning always contains the potentials of the yet-to-be made manifest. In contrast, explicit meaning always consists of actual, manifest forms that move in space and can be measured in time. This exclusion came at the beginning of the scientific revolution and has become a central tenet of the empirical, scientific method ever since. This exclusion continues on today in the fragmentations that characterize our modernist culture.

Idols

Francis Bacon's deductive method of scientific enquiry was therefore justly opposed to private opinions; however, this opposition was unjustly extended to include everything that is seen to be subjective. The result of this exclusion has been a method of scientific enquiry that works within the narrow constraints of binary oppositions, which is the tradition of including only that which is explicit (objective) and excluding everything that is seen to be subjective. This has meant that the provisionality of symbols have been excluded from the scientific method along with the relativities of culture. When these two contexts are excluded the weight of scientific enquiry falls on the concrete empirical objects of the physical universe. This weight then becomes the overweight of idolatry.

The language crime of idolatry appears when a representation is not accepted as such but is assumed to be an ultimate; an object beyond question or interpretation; in other words, an idol. A modern scientific idol is an axiomatic truth. An idol is an expression of certainty, while a representation is always a symbolic expression that is provisional and to a degree, uncertain. From the current perspective it is ironic that Frances Bacon used the term 'idols' in his prosecution of the deductive method. Bacon argued that idols of the mind obstruct the path to correct scientific reasoning, by which he meant deductive reasoning.

Bacon identified four idols of the mind which he called idols of the cave, idols of the tribe, idols of the marketplace and idols of the theater. These four idols represented the then current discursive and expressive conventions which he considered led to faulty reasoning. Yet in his enthusiasm for correct scientific reasoning, Bacon's exclusions were so severe that the entire field of discourse and communication was excluded from the scientific method. As a consequence, the correct reasoning that gave us the scientific method has ironically created idols of the mind.

The language crime of idolatry has two aspects: i) on the one hand the intellect denies its own expressive and communication practices while ii) over-valuing the differential and explicit logic of its concepts and measurements. In this manner, the scientific method separates the actual communication practices by which we study the universe from the measurements and conceptual results of these discursive methods. As a consequence, the deductive method strives to be logically pure and not reflectively sensitive to language constructions, or forms of expression, or rhetoric or writing or debating techniques. Rather, such methods tend to be focused exclusively on direct logical connections. While logical connections are immensely important for any enquiry they do not represent the whole picture that is available to scientific enquiry nor everything that is available to the intellect.

Bacon's correct scientific reasoning has produced idols because when discursive practices are denied or simply neglected the logic of concepts is over-valued and the symbols that carry this logic are made into idols. The following diagram indicates the mechanics of the crime of idolatry:

Figure 24:

The mechanism of idolatry

The mechanism for making idols operates by separating the discursive practices from the logical consequences which these practices produce. With this separation we have negated discourse but produced pure logic or deductive reasoning. When this kind of pure reasoning becomes the basis of convention and cultural habits there is a cultural tendency to ignore the depth of meaning inherent within the representative nature of symbols, but in addition, to highlight and over-value the surface, the literal, the superficial and the internally consistent.

Contemporary idolatry is similar to the idolatry of the past in that it is concerned with the over-valuing of surface expressions and undervaluing of contextual events. In modern commercial situations this tendency to ignore the context of symbols has produced discourses of rhetoric, spin and the corporate management of public opinion. Rhetoric and spin always result from a subtext of personal interest. Subtexts operate within the symbolic context, yet when this context is ignored or erased then the subterranean message of sub-texts is also ignored or erased. The result will always be surface and literal understandings that can be as internally consistent as deductive reasoning.

When rhetorical expressions become social habits of expression the symbols used to construct the internally consistent rhetoric seem to take on a life of their own. When such symbols are identified with objects they become symbol/object (name/form). A name/form represents an undifferentiated material and symbolic reality. Such a reality appears to be concrete and separate from the symbols that created it and also separate from the mind in which it was conceived. Such constructions represent the idol of materialism. Materialism is entirely constructed within discourse, yet as a system of thought it ignores the implications of discourse which can both hide and reveal meaning. Materialists believe that the concrete forms of the physical world (that are created as idols from the crimes of language) come first in the order of things and that language is like some kind of innocent mirror that is meaningful or not depending on material conditions.

The culture of materialism is pervasive. It underpins the belief that our identity is our body and that we die when the body dies. It also supports us when we identify physical objects like land, houses and cars as extensions of our identity. It also gives sustenance to the belief that the objects of nation, tribe or group are part of our identity. The idol of materialism also fortifies mechanical science and economics when they place matter and material objects above everything else. Materialism dominates our thoughts when we turn the abstractness of time into the concrete of time travel. It buttresses medical science when the power of the mind to cure ills is called a 'placebo effect,' meaning that such effects are not real. The idol of materialism represents the great blinding language crime of humanity.

Naming rights

The orthodoxy of materialism has such a strong hold on mechanical science that its practitioners assume an automatic right to 'name as physical' that which is non-physical. This assumed right also represents the right to exclude the non-physical from consideration. It is achieved, like the conjuror's trick, by materializing things—turning non-physical states into material objects. In this manner scientists can easily erase the ambiguity of provisional symbols and implicit meaning through the expediency of strategically deploying a concrete noun.

A significant example is 'broken symmetries.' This is an important term for scientists in their explanation of what occurred in the first few seconds after the Big Bang when the visible universe came into existence. Since symmetry is the pure, implicit potential of the Host, how is it possible for a non-physical potential to be broken? Material things can be broken, potentials and relations cannot. Potentials and relations simply transform. The conventional description of the first few seconds after the Big Bang is a description of such transformations. These are the transformations emanating from the symmetry potentials of the Numinous that changed into a variety of explicit states.

Another example of naming as physical that which is non-physical is 'fields' and 'interactions.' Both these terms are often used in science as if they are the material features of particles. Yet these non-physical fields are fields of interactions and therefore of relations. As all relations are relations of meaning they are, therefore, fields of meaning. But what then is a 'particle' or even an 'elementary particle'? Such terms are imbued with the materialistic tendency of naming everything as a static noun in order to conjure up the image of a small piece of physical matter. Yet as the great physicist Werner Heisenberg has said about trying to develop an accurate description of an elementary particle, all that can be written down is 'a tendency for being.' A tendency for being does not have a very materialistic ring about it. A tendency for being is similar to 'a potential for transformation.' Such phrases point us towards the pure implicit state of the Numinous.

Then there is the important term 'information.' Information Theory is a vampire theory. By this I mean it lives on the life-blood of meaning yet ignores the source of its own vitality. In 1948 Claude Shannon developed information theory and, as Bell Laboratories say, the world of communication technology has never been the same since. Information theory is modelled on a telephone exchange. The model needs both a conscious sender and conscious receiver, both of whom draw upon a common culture and a common symbolic system in order to send and receive messages across a space and through time.

In addition, because information theory is anchored within the constraints of materialism, 'information' does not represent a composite of implicit and explicit meaning. Rather, information tends to be seen only as a system of explicit units which are viewed as the passive by-products of other material causes. Everything other than explicit units is considered as 'noise.' In line with the dictates of materialism, information theory therefore includes explicit differences but excludes the implicit contexts of culture and symbols.

These major exclusions have caused all kinds of explanatory difficulties. For example, in the telephone exchange model the material causes are the individuals on either end of the line. In cell communication where information theory is often used, the material causes are the cells. Yet the problem of using a telephone exchange model to explain cell communication is that we have to assume that cells are like small people with the same cognitive capacities of mind as humans. This assumption has little to support it.

David Bohm's criticism of information theory reflects the view presented here. He pointed out that within the quantum field, exchanges of information actively occur without our knowledge and so this kind of 'active information' is different from the 'passive' information associated with information theory. Bohm's criticism indicates that the passive units associated with information theory cannot operate within the context of the body. From my own experience, the telephone exchange model of information theory is useless in elucidating the nature of culture or language. Hence information theory is simply a tool of materialism that erases the major part of all meaning in any situation and that is implicit, contextual meaning.

By using the term 'information' to explain cell communication or any other physical exchange we distort the processes that we seek to represent. This has happened even within frontier science that challenges the orthodox model. For example, Jacques Benveniste's work on 'digital biology' and the 'memory of water,' Rupert Sheldrake's thesis of 'morphic resonance' and Fritz-Albert Popp's experiments with biophotons all refer to exchanges of information. By so doing these scientists recreate an idol of science that reduces our understanding and meaning.

Facticity and aneroxia

Apart from the activities of science the fragmenting tendencies of Reason can have the negative effects of producing an over-supply of words, verbosity, or in some cases, the related condition facticity. What is facticity? Facticity is a state of mind where we create facts out of fictions. A current crop of scientific factitious results are the 'objective facts' 'raw data' and an 'independent physical world.' In some extreme circumstances the factitious can become a virtual world of its own and then we have a factitious disorder. A range of factitious disorders are recognized by psychiatrists as mental illness. The most severe is Munchausen syndrome where the patient feigns or actually induces an illness in his or her own body. Such extreme cases of factitious disorder rest on the more normal rationalizing tendencies that can be called a facticity of mind. Such a facticity of mind most probably constitutes a tacit cultural support for the modern teenager's desire to live a virtual life. We find evidence of this desire in a study in the UK conducted by the Broadcaster Audience Research Board where it was found that teenagers now spend seven and a half hours per day in front of a screen. 6 For many a good deal of this time is spent living a virtual life, which is a life lived without the implicit meaning of contexts.

In addition, the factitious, literal, objectified, non-participatory, rational mode of thinking does not seem to establish an appropriate or useful set of criteria for the young adult who is faced with the contexts of marriage, family and society. These are the pertinent contexts that young adults will live within and through during the second twenty years of their lives. The cultural influence of Reason actually handicaps young adults by continually turning them away from implicit contextual meaning. Yet when we live within a series of cultural contexts the implicit influence of these contexts will simply contradict the literal world of Reason. A focus on literal and explicit particulars without regard to the contexts of one's own body, the social and cultural norms we live in or the dynamics of language is guaranteed to make young adults more stressed, more aggressive and more self destructive. Take the extreme example of anorexia nervosa.

On the ABC television news on Wednesday, September 13, 2006 we were told that Australian researchers had uncovered important new information about why female patients with anorexia nervosa see themselves as overweight. They found patients with the illness shut down large parts of their brain when looking at images of themselves. Patients with anorexia were shown images of themselves as well as other women while their brains were being scanned. The result: when they looked at themselves there was a massive suppression of brain activity.

This suppression of brain activity represents the body's reaction when denial takes place. Denial is a major feature of the adult intellect when it denies implicit contextual meaning. Denial is a mechanism for reducing large amounts of meaning through suppression or repression. Patients with anorexia nervosa deny their own body image in favor of an image that is not there—an image of 'fatness.' In other words, this illness involves an overwhelming desire for perfection and hence for explicit certainty. Such desires are valued over the uncertainty associated with their body which is identified by them as their identity. Under the extreme conditions of anorexia, manufactured certainty seems better—even when it produces illusions—than what the patient sees as the uncertainty associated with their actual body image. In the case of this illness, the body image is also the self image and so the materialistic identification pattern 'I am this body' is extremely strong.

Anorexia nervosa is an extreme expression of the values of Reason. Here in this illness is a narrowing of the intellect which is working overtime suppressing brain activity (denial) while creating great insecurity and fear. The self as a body form is an identification that forms the logical base for the split between the 'inner' and the 'outer,' which in mechanical science is usually referred to as the difference between the subjective and the objective. These so called logical splits of Reason are reflected in the fragmented world of the anorexic and they come at the price of denying contextual integrating meaning. Such integration is the kind of therapeutic meaning that anorexics most need.

The moral compass

We currently live in the Age of Reason. As a consequence, the culture of reason represents the underlying authority of this age. This authority has become the master cultural orthodoxy of this age. Yet the orthodoxy of Reason has not provided us with a full and free intellect. Rather, the intellect has been hijacked by the discourses of positivism, materialism and realism, discourses which have narrowed the focus of the intellect so that it is pre-eminently concerned with explicit particulars and their interactions. As a consequence of this narrowing, the authority of Reason is often turned into defending itself against attacks that ask for broader perspectives. Yet a rational defense or a rationalization is perhaps a natural response in this culture.

The overall effect of this rational culture does not make us more logical but, ironically, it reduces the scope and breadth of our intellectual capacities by focusing them on our desires and identity. The culture of fragmentation and non-participation is therefore a culture that promotes a narrow selfishness; of self interest and ego justification over the interests of others. It is also a culture that inhibits the maturation processes that move us from the house of desire to the house of the intellect and then onto the house of empathy. It inhibits natural maturation processes because this positivistic culture continually turns us back to desire and actively resists any maturing growth into the contexts of empathy.

Individually we can choose to accept or reject the cosmic progress of Meaning that is slowly moving us forward (in the arc of learning) towards a greater spiritual consciousness. Virtue and truth are lost when we choose to resist the inevitability of this slow growth forward towards empathy. Such resistance creates confusion brought on by the crimes of language when trying to justify actions that are directed ultimately at securing our identity and satisfying our desires. This kind of mind at a corporate level can poison crops, animals, humans and the earth for good financial bottom-line results. It is this kind of political mind that ignores human rights and tells young adults to die in suicide bombings for the glory of a text. This is a positivistic state of mind that rationally assumes certainty will come out of the end of a logical sentence.

In contrast, we may choose to go with the flow and accept a less confrontational, low-energy creative learning. In this choice we move towards a more meaningful and spiritual future. In moving with the cosmos we automatically take on the empathetic implications of coming to terms with the four contexts of self: symbols, culture, body and Host. Being empathetic also means trusting your intuition, having an open curiosity and a capacity for self-reflection and compassion. In terms of social relations, choosing to accept the inevitable cosmic movement forward we have to let go of old identity-centered habits and self-reflectively look within for greater meaning and satisfaction.

There is no simple answer to why some people move with the flow of maturation and evolution while others resist this growth. One answer could be that those who resist their own evolution do so because they are so blinded by the cultural conventions of language crimes that they cannot make a deliberate choice to let go of the self-defensive postures that deploys a range of personal weapons such as blame, revenge and retribution. A more empathetic answer might be that they are not yet ready to move forward and that they will do so when they become more spiritually evolved.

In summary, the intellect has a provisional status that comes from the place it holds within the arc of learning. Its location lies between desire on the one hand and empathy on the other. When the intellect is employed in the service of desire it works against the slow, imperceptible evolutionary movement of consciousness. This backwards reaction is Reason acting ostensibly for the good of society but actually in the service of selfish desires. The language crimes of positivism come from a love of differences that divide. This love is accompanied by a rejection of implicit contextual meaning that integrates. When the intellect moves in tune with the evolution of consciousness it places itself in harmony with the processes of learning and maturation. The intellect's impulse forward makes it a discerning aspect of empathy, which I discuss in the next chapter.
14 – Empathy

Empathy is commonly referred to as: the ability to imagine oneself in another's place and understand the other's feelings, desires, ideas, and actions. At first glance this definition seems to apply equally well to 'sympathy.' However, empathy is not sympathy. The 'like' in sympathy tends to dominate so our feelings for the other tend to become extensions of our own identity. In contrast, empathy contains both compassion and impersonal love.

With empathy we are detached from our desires but also disengaged from defending our identity. Such detachment is not like the scientist's idea of non-participation, but rather it involves a willingness to acknowledge and accommodate differences within a broad sense of self. Empathy embodies the understanding that everything is distinct yet part of a unified consciousness. This kind of compassion recognizes that other people have different and legitimate destinies. This kind of understanding represents the contradiction that things are unified yet distinct. Empathy develops as our sense of the personal diminishes. Empathy is therefore a wisdom that views the self not as a separate identity or a body that dies, but as an impersonal, eternal spiritual essence.

Empathy is an expression of the fifth law of Meaning and as such it provides the only valid method of thinking. More generally, empathy represents the only valid and therefore sane response to the world. 'Sane' and 'sanity' have been much used terms over the last century but their use has generally lacked any systematic context beyond the vague idea of adjusting individual needs to society, or in Erich Fromm's case, of 'adjusting society to the needs of man.' 1 As a consequence of linking human needs to some vague notion of sanity we have been served up with many pessimistic words that allegedly prove the intrinsic failures of both society and individuals.

Empathy, and therefore sanity, cannot be linked to what many psychologists consider as human needs. Rather, it is a mode of thought concerned with the multi-faceted ability to read and comprehend several levels of meaning at once. This is the ability to recognize, read and appreciate parables, allegories, metaphors and ironies. It is the ability to read and understand the subtexts of any text but in particular the texts of who we are. Empathy represents an appreciation of the four events (contexts) we call the superposition of self. This same mode of thought therefore has the capacity to see the hidden events that give rise to any and every visible form, either concrete or abstract. The sanity of empathy is the realization that our true nature is love and this is what connects every one of us to the rest of the universe.

Rather than linking it to human needs, empathy is the final stage in a three-stage maturation process, as the following figure indicates:

The arc of maturation

Figure 25:

This final maturation stage normally presents itself to us in the mid-40s when most of us begin (in spite of ourselves) to value unity and integration over the logical 'head' meaning of differences, or the youthful tendency for exploring desires. When these connecting, contextual elements of empathy are valued we begin to see further connections and to discover that implicit connections are the very essence of everything.

As a maturation process, empathy has two sub-stages. The first usually covers approximately twenty years (from 40–60) and involves a series of integrating processes connected with the contexts of family, community and humanity. The second sub-stage tends to come in later life and has a greater spiritual focus that integrates the various contexts of the self and cultivates an embedded, participatory relationship with the cosmos. The defining features of these two sub-stages therefore have a focus, firstly on process, and secondly on essence. Together these two sub-stages of empathy represent the inevitable final stage (mid-life onwards) of our maturation and spiritual development.

Even though empathy is a maturation process, the practices of empathy should be taught in every school. This should happen because empathy is the only valid method of thinking and would therefore help prepare students for a more balanced and happier life and also for this final maturation stage. Such teaching and learning would be concerned with increasing the student's ability to read subtexts and with that ability to appreciate the multiple meanings of parables, allegories, metaphors and ironies.

Such teaching and learning would also need to focus on valuing the implicit meaning of contexts and especially the contexts of our own culture, history and society. The key context for students is their own experiences. This focus can be created by experiential learning, problem solving and task-based learning. However, the most important feature of their experience is self-reflection. Self-reflection should be a feature of every lesson, whatever the curriculum. Self-reflection is not a box-ticking self-assessment exercise but a central aspect of empathy development. Learning empathy will also aid the other two earlier learning processes of identification and differentiation and this support in turn assists the evolution of a student's consciousness.

In general, empathy as a mode of thought is open and receptive to the implicit meaning of any context. As a consequence, empathy enables us to be aware of the possible consequences of our actions as well as the actions of others. We also need empathy to not only understand but put into practice Emerson's phrase, 'makes me the Providence to myself.' If we have no empathy this phrase will have little practical meaning for us. Yet if self-reflection and connection are the established features of our general response to the world then we will be awake and mindful to the likely consequences of any action or behavior.

Empathetic responses therefore come from a conscious learning that embodies the main features of the earlier learning stages: innocent love, desire and intellect. Yet empathy changes these earlier responses into the broader, integrated context of a knowing that has compassion and discernment. Empathy brings together heart and head, love and intellect into inclusive realizations and intuitive connections that also have some of the qualities of primary perception.

The empathetic capacity is therefore not focused on the hard edged differences of sense perception, logic or abstract ideas. For the empathetic view, distinctions always exist within contexts that already have broader implications. It is therefore a mode of thought where the head works in the service of the heart and where intuitions, realizations and insights are the key learning processes. Empathetic learning is therefore not the identificational learning of desire which, in a social setting, is essentially intolerant, exclusive and in today's Western culture, sentimental.

Empathy has none of this denial, hypocrisy or sentimentality. Empathy is also not 'emotional intelligence.' 2 Having intelligence about emotions does not guarantee empathy. It may simply be the result of diplomatic training, such as the businessman receives before he visits a foreign country. In such situations this training does not obliterate the businessman's self-interest; rather, it augments it. Training to identify emotions is like studying comparative religions. This is usually an exercise that does not necessarily make students more tolerant.

In The Allegory of Love, C. S. Lewis said that humanity does not pass through phases like a train passes through stations; 'being alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind. Whatever we have been, in some sort we are still.' 3 This is an apt description of empathy. Empathy may seem like the end 'station' in the evolution of consciousness yet it includes the core of what has gone before. What we have been in innocent love, desire and intellect, in some 'sort' we are in empathy. This is because empathy incorporates and expresses the main features of these three modes of thought in a complex, holistic and loving sensibility that does not mirror these earlier modes but creates something that is entirely new.

For many people the integrating sensibilities of empathy (if they are experienced at all) coexist alongside more narrow expressions of desire and reason. The weave of various modes of thought is often complex and represents what is commonly called 'character'—the 'good' and the 'bad' traits of the mature person who has reached mid-life. And so when most of us finally arrive at the age of empathy (around mid-life) we are not suddenly born again or transformed into divine beings akin to saints. This maturation stage is more like the slow discovery that life is more complex than we had previously anticipated.

At mid-life most of us arrive with the baggage of our past modes of thought and hence we tend to deploy the personal habits we brought with us rather than use what is always free and given in this place. The important question in terms of maturation is: what do we use to daily reinforce old habits or, conversely, to embrace new implicit contexts? If we continually do things that reinforce self-interest, possessiveness or sexual desire, then any possible maturing into empathy will likely be miniscule. Similarly, if we assume that the path of logic and positivistic reason leads to the promised land of certainty, then our ability to find those secure, primary connections of empathy will also be undermined.

The arc of maturation (Figure 25) indicates that life in a human body is a spiritual journey taken by everyone, no matter their class, creed or tribe. The end of this evolutionary journey is a spiritual place that looks similar to where we began. This similarity occurs because empathy is a reflection of innocent love, yet it comes with the awareness of a seasoned traveler. Our evolution begins in what Barfield calls 'original participation' and all of us will eventually end this voyage realizing we are immortal and connected empathetically to everything else.

A society based upon empathy does not return to a rural innocence or a tribal paradise. Similarly, a fifty-year-old who feels the tension of a mid-life crisis cannot turn the clock back to adolescence or childhood innocence. Many may try to return to the identifications of youth through cosmetic surgery or drugs, yet these attempts amount to a failure to recognize the nature of the cosmic change that is already occurring. Empathy is therefore not a turning back, not even to innocent love, even though it contains a great deal of innocent love. Rather, it is a forward moving learning that relies upon intuition, curiosity and letting go of those old habits of mind.

Except for those lucky few who seem to come into this world fully mature, for most of us the process of expanding our empathetic capacities is slow and difficult. It means taking on the burden of a conscious strategy and a daily practice that has a focus on love; a value indicative of this mode of thought. It means changing our high-energy anxieties and defenses into lower-energy concerns for others, and in the process helping to create a sense of unity in families and communities. Such changes are helped by exchanges that are based on the value of implicit meaning.

Implicit exchanges have a particular connecting significance that other kinds of relationships, such as those coerced by power, law or financial rewards, do not have. These are voluntary exchanges and they help produce friendly and secure connections between citizens who participate freely in a community. This kind of social interaction can build a strong sense of security based upon expectations of reciprocity and trust. The empathy values that are attached to this kind of behavior are generosity and a caring concern for the welfare of others.

Voluntary and spontaneous social interactions usually create strong connections and selfless actions that are undertaken in friendship for the welfare of others without thought of reward. They are the unplanned acts of kindness and love that come directly from our most basic implicit and connective nature. These sorts of positive social actions only happen spontaneously in the present moment. In other words, they only materialize if we are not coerced; if the past is not at our back and the future not in our face. These are the acts of our true selves.

The connection that comes from such interactions does not spring from the bonding of identification. Rather, this is the open connection with strangers in friendship. Spontaneous acts of kindness to strangers are also not generated by tribal law, scriptural knowledge or from logical dictates or legal rules. They come from the realization that we all are our 'brother's keeper'; that we are all neighbors in the same neighborhood.

Social capital

Yet not all communities have such a sense of community. Not all communities have strong norms of reciprocity. Not all communities have members who are free to mix democratically and voluntarily. Not all communities have the same level of social capital. Social capital is a measurement of social interaction and positive trust in a community.

'More people in America watch Friends than have friends.' Leading US sociologist Robert Putnam made this semi-serious remark in a talk on social capital that he gave in 2000 to a large audience at the Brisbane Convention Centre. Putnam's bestselling book, Bowling Alone: The Decline and Revival of American Community, describes the factors that make up social capital and how community wealth in the United States has declined dramatically since the 1970s. The central premise of social capital is that social networks and social relations are tangible assets that have value and meaning.

Social capital is about building social empathy and this mode of thought grows when the social ecology is nurturing and stable. This is a cultural ecology that is open, inclusive and pluralistic. This is a community that values democratic processes, has transparency and is based on equality of the sexes and races and the rule of law. Measurements of social capital have been made of every state in the United States of America and these have been related to social outcomes. For example, we learn from Putnam that the level of social capital in a community significantly affects things like school achievement, public health, democratic participation, trust, lower levels of violent crime and increased economic prosperity. These are the remedial effects of empathy at a community level.

The empathy inherent in social capital exists because by mid-life most people have epistemologically evolved so that this mode of thought has become an inherent but often neglected aspect of their life. For some people the gradual tacit pull towards connection and integration is a relief; for others it is unwelcome news. Those who are more attuned to the affective benefits that flow from the norms of reciprocity will recognize the benefits that come from implicit, spontaneous connection with others. The value of these connections can resonate within conscious awareness and in this manner the significance of social unity becomes a way of valuing community and of serving others. Serving others is the aim of much non-violent social action.

Serving others

Serving others is primarily a strategy for evolving one's own consciousness, of making us more empathetic. As most of us have complex and contradictory tendencies, our desires and intellect are normally entangled in the practice of serving others. This is why serving others often creates a tension within us. This is also why 'bad' people can sometimes do 'good' things. This is why our motives are never entirely pure. Under these uncertain and sometimes contradictory conditions we can be influenced by the political skeptics who criticize progressive social action on the basis that those who do it, act on the basis of self-interest. Such comments are usually spoken from a different maturation location than empathy.

Serving others through non-violent social action is often advocated by religious institutions that wish to extend and strengthen social connections in order to connect with the Numinous. The extension of community to the Numinous is a natural extension in terms of implicit meaning and context. This is why the answer to the religious question, 'how do I find God?' is sometimes answered by the worldly injunction: 'serve others!' Serving others is a practical way to build empathy for it tends to help us refuse the centripetal pull of our desires. In the process we become closer to the implicit meaning of the Host because our border defenses are momentarily loosened by such serving and in this letting go we may become conscious that implicit, cosmic meaning flows freely through us.

However, one does not have to believe in a transcendent being to be empathetic. The plains of empathy are very broad and many different kinds of people populate the mid-field. There are many atheists who take up some kind of non-violent social action and serve others, and in doing so exhibit empathy. Hence the atheist may be no less empathetic than the person who believes in a personal God and regularly attends a church, mosque or temple. If we are driven to calculate how we may match up with others in the maturation and evolutionary stakes then that decision, based upon meaning, relates not to creed, philosophy or the dogma one espouses. It relates to one's actions. When calculating empathy, actions always speak louder than words.

Second stage

While the maturation period of empathy begins around mid-life there is a second stage that turns us away from the vanities of the world in order to cultivate spiritual connections with the implicit Host context. The maturation period of this second stage usually occurs when we retire from work in old age. A spiritual consciousness can develop at any age and some seem to be born with it, however, for those who do not resist growing old this second stage of empathy tends to develop when the body does not work so well and old age is a constant reminder of the body's mortality.

A spiritual consciousness is concerned with the essential question of who we are. For those who take their spiritual development seriously this stage of empathy is usually regularized by some kind of practice that is deliberately undertaken on a regular, if not daily basis. Any activity can be a spiritual practice. Washing up can be a spiritual practice. A practice becomes a spiritual practice when it is performed regularly and when the person undertaking the practice does so willingly without want of a reward. Not wanting rewards is a direct method of devaluing our false identity. It is only our identity that wants to be sustained by some kind of material or emotional reward.

Successful spiritual practices should bring about two kinds of changes in us. Firstly, such practices will make us more discerning about the implicit nature of who we truly are and, secondly, they should increase our ability to 'hear' the Host context. This is the kind of hearing which comes with a greater sensitivity to everything about us, including the food we eat, the people we mix with, and the environment we live in. This kind of sensitive hearing can at times be a burden, but it is the beginning of an appreciation and understanding of the mystical that is always inherent within even the mundane. This sensitive hearing also represents a self-reflective connection to, and an awareness of, the implicit basis of our being. The tension which this kind of spiritual hearing can engender is therefore not usually one where we experience a low-energy state of quietness. On the contrary, as St. John of the Cross writes in the Dark Night of the Soul, 'until the soul arrives at the state of quietness, it never remains in the same state for long together, but is ascending and descending continually.' 4

Under the influence of an increased sensitivity and self-reflection we may gain at any moment some insight into the laws of Meaning or into our old habits and patterns of identification. Our horizon may then expand into something like exaltation, yet shortly some anxiety or sense of failure arises and we will descend into a vale of tears. Such ascending into bliss and descending into humiliation and despair seems to be a necessary learning experience that will continue until our desires and sense of separate personhood is finally washed away in those experiences of empathy that are strong enough to become a state of equilibrium and quietness. While spiritual ascending and descending can be very tiring it is nevertheless usually anchored in a growing awareness of the meaning of the Numinous. For spiritual aspirants, ascending and descending will continue until they have evolved to the state when all the implications associated with their notions of a separate self have been mindfully unfolded, critically looked at and then forgotten. Until then they will ascend and descend continually.

Such ascending and descending is also associated with the feeling of letting go and not from a striving after. Normally we want to hang on to our habits, ambitions and desires and, sometimes, to pain and anger or a sense of injustice. Most of us want to hang on to our personal identity and social reputation. Such hanging on does not integrate meaning or evolve consciousness, quite the reverse. A mature and spiritual experience of empathy is a product of a highly integrated and sensitive mind. A highly integrated mind is always mindful of its true foundation: the Numinous. To be mindful of this context is to know that 'I am whole' and not a series of separate parts that push and pull against each other. Hence, to begin to become aware of the laws of Meaning we have to have some sense of what the Sufi poet-saint Kabir said about the One:

Behold but One in all things; it is the second that leads you astray. 5

The second that leads us astray is the body that appears as the self and which desires. The second that leads us astray is the dry intellectualism of reason. The second leads us astray not because the term 'two' has a history of connoting the negative (duo, duplicity, two-timing and so on) as Aldous Huxley has pointed out, 6 but simply because we tend to value it above the first. The tendency to see the second as the first is what leads us astray.

Empathy implicitly denies this tradition of the second becoming the first. The integrating wisdom of empathy, when realized as a value in itself, beholds the One in all things. Yet that One is not a personalized focal point like the illustrious and charismatic form of a super-person. It is, rather, the Numinous essence of love; the holism of the holographic mind in which the parts combine to produce the whole and yet the whole which resides within each part also transcends them.

Empathy is the contradictory way that leads us into the garden of paradise through the gates of connection, attraction, dependency and love. The stronger we experience the inclusions of empathy the more we affirm the natural laws of Meaning. These are inclusive laws in which Meaning is always the One mind in all things. This order inherent in these laws does not mean denying that the second is the second. It simply means recognizing this order and seeing Meaning in all things.

Commandments

Quite often religions have become tribal empires and their achievements are measured by the success of their marketing strategies. Yet often their beginnings have come out of more evolved and mystical states. For example, the Franciscan priest Richard Rohr is reported to have said that 'Jesus didn't come to found a tribe.' 7 If we are to take the Sermon on the Mount seriously then he came to proclaim the value of empathy and the mystery of implicit connections. As a teacher, Jesus was passionate about loving our neighbor but less concerned about the Hebrew Ten Commandments. He reduced this moralizing list down to two. We are firstly to love God without limit and secondly to love our neighbor as ourselves.

These two commandments represent a perfect guide to the laws of Meaning and the path of empathy. However, these two are not equal. Unless we begin by firstly knowing the divine and universal value of love we cannot love our neighbor as ourselves. To love your neighbor as yourself is only possible if we already have a highly integrated mind that reflects the interconnections of implicit Meaning. Without this integrated knowledge it is impossible to love another as yourself because the other will be seen as a separate identity from your identity.

Hearing and knowing the Numinous within is therefore the necessary condition for a highly refined sense of empathy, which in turn is a reflective condition for knowing the laws of Meaning. This holographic knowledge comes through implicit to implicit connections of the heart and not from rational or moralizing doctrines. This knowledge is common to those who, like Ralph Waldo Emerson, tread a serious spiritual path and have some recognition of Meaning's game plan.

What can be said about this game of life and the laws that govern it? Firstly, there is no freedom of choice about playing the game of life. We are involved, we do participate, and we have to play. Secondly, the game plan involves us moving through ignorance to wisdom through knowledge. There is no other path and no other game. We move from ignorance through knowledge to wisdom by experiencing the various aspects of the arc of learning and maturation. This is an experience of learning to learn. One of the oldest prayers ever recorded speaks of this learning:

Oh Lord, lead me from untruth to truth;

From darkness to light;

from death to immortality.

This prayer points towards our evolution from ignorance, darkness and death towards knowledge, light and immortality. The path of this evolving movement is always through the arc of learning and maturation. Yet what is to be learnt? We must learn how to behold the Numinous One in all things. We learn this lesson through the unifying realization that there is only one mind, which is immanent, omniscient, impersonal, reflective and omnipresent and which never dies. We learn this lesson when we discover that we are part of that immortal, single cosmic consciousness. We can gain that experience of unity whenever we intuitively experience the multiple layers of the self as an epiphany.

If we resist the learning of maturation then the path can be painful and even intolerable. When we do not learn, we do not evolve. When we fail to assist the natural unfolding of the implications of our life we will resist and hang on to what appear to be the comforts of old habits and traditions. As a consequence, learning, maturation and the evolution of consciousness are inhibited and so our ability to understand, comprehend and interpret the world is seriously affected. Under such reactive conditions our consciousness remains dominated by the identifications of desire and the rationalizations of the intellect, and this means that many of the connections associated with empathy simply do not register.

Connections that do not register in the mind of a person do not exist for that person. As a consequence, such people cannot hear the Numinous or understand the consequences of the laws of Meaning. Hence for many atheist scientists this Numinous context is easily denied. For others, their behavior will be motivated by the symbolic reality of religious scripts; what others have said or written down but what they themselves have yet to experience. For both groups (the atheist scientist and the religious book learner) the truth of their position is dominated by restrictive, second-hand, flat language.

Most of us fear the transition from incarnation to disembodied soul and hang on to what we see as 'life.' Yet what is it we hang on to? Life is not the body that is physically recycled every few years. Fear of death is the fear of losing control and one's identity, which we take to be our physical form. Yet control and identity are like all the other things we cling to, and like them, inevitably we will be forced to open our hands and let them go. In letting go of our defense mechanisms we become empathetic for it is only then that we can make that evolutionary leap forward. And this happens because letting go is part of the cosmic plan that involves the intelligent energy of the Numinous working to guide the individual towards greater integration and harmony.

By letting go of identity and desire we become re-oriented to empathy which is our basic loving nature. This change of orientation comes not from a rational decision of wanting to 'hedge our bets,' like some free-market investor in the afterlife. This is a natural change that comes with giving up. In death, inevitably, we have to let go and, in letting go, come to realize that the cosmic current of life is too strong to resist. This happens when the processes of dying take us over, enfolding us once more into the immortality of the One.

Redemption thus does not come from guilt, fear or emotional turmoil. Redemption comes from learning; from learning to integrate and connect; and from learning to hear the music of love. In a similar manner, salvation arrives when we assist in our own evolution. And the gate to heaven opens with the realization that we are quintessentially immortal, spiritual beings. When we make these changes our consciousness transforms from ignorance, darkness and death into knowledge, light and immortality.
15 – The Evolution of Consciousness

The evolution of consciousness is a set of transformations mandated by the laws of Meaning. These laws have created the three steps of learning, maturation and the interlocking changes within the three modes of thought; desire, reason and empathy. The differences between each of these movements relate to the difference between the processes of learning, maturation, thought and finally, culture. The evolution of consciousness is, therefore, a movement related to the changes within the cultural knowledge of a society. Essentially, it is a cultural and an epistemological evolution.

Epistemology is the study of human knowledge and concerns the way we know what we know. An epistemological evolution is therefore about the dominant ways in which a society has made, and continues to make, meaning. The evolution of a society's consciousness refers to a series of epistemological changes which in turn relate to the dominant habits by which a society collectively thinks. Within this theory of the evolution of consciousness are time spans that represent the historical periods which contain a dominant culture marked by a particular mode of thought. These historical periods coincide with the four modes of thought and the dominant culture in the following manner:

Mode – Age – History

Innocent love – The Age of Innocence – up to Eden;

Desire – The Age of Tribalism – continuing;

Intellect – The Age of Reason – from 3000 years ago;

Empathy – The Age of Empathy – the future

The four periods indicated here are slightly different from the processes of maturation where there are only three stages. With the evolution of consciousness there are four periods which equate with the Age of Innocence, Tribalism, Reason and Empathy. However, the Age of Innocence does not represent a human evolutionary period as such, because this is the foundation state out of which humankind has evolved. (I discuss this shortly.) The three ages of Tribe, Reason and Empathy also relate to the arc of learning. When the movements of this arc are superimposed on the four evolutionary periods we have the following arc of evolution:

The arc of evolution

Figure 26:

The three evolutionary periods of Tribe, Reason and Empathy can be compared with Owen Barfield's approach in Saving the Appearances. Barfield firstly identified three thought processes: figuration, alpha-thinking and beta-thinking and then related these to three cultural formations. For Barfield, figuration is a subliminal, pre-reflective process that transforms sense perceptions into representations or a 'thing' in a familiar world. His alpha-thinking is concerned with the way we treat representations analytically and objectively. As for beta-thinking, this occurs when our thinking is deliberately self-reflective.

The second feature in developing a theory of the evolution of consciousness is to connect the three individual thought processes to collective consciousness. In order to do this Barfield focuses on the notion of 'participation.' He views 'participation' as the way in which individual and collective minds take part in, and are entangled with, the universal mind. For Barfield, it is the changing nature of this participation which marks the stages in the evolutionary progress of consciousness. However, he does not refer to definite stages of consciousness but rather he identifies three periods of human history which relate to the idea of participation. According to Barfield, there was a period in the distant past which was marked by original participation. He also suggests that in the future there will be a place of final participation. The present age of science and technology he identifies as a time of non-participation.

For Barfield, original participation is a mode of collective thought that predominantly reflects the individual's thought processes of figuration. These features are common to pre-literate communities. In terms of the current theory of evolution of consciousness, the original participation of pre-literate communities represents the features of ancient tribal cultures which were and are dominated by the thought processes of identification.

Barfield's final participation represents a future stage in human consciousness, one in which we knowingly and with full awareness will reflect on, and participate in, nature and consciousness. This future stage of consciousness is achieved through deliberate reflective beta-thinking processes. Again, for the current theory these are the features of a future empathetic society.

Barfield sees the current scientific age as dominated by alpha-thinking. This is a mode of thought which tends to objectify the physical world and because of this ideal it denies our participation in that world. For Barfield, the evolution from original participation to scientific non-participation has been 'a more or less continuous progress from a vague but immediate awareness of the 'meaning' of phenomena towards an increased preoccupation with the phenomena themselves.' 1 The current Age of Reason is therefore a general title for Barfield's age of non-participation and alpha thinking.

Age of Innocence

As can be seen from Figure 26, the mode of innocent love represents the foundation of the other three stages. This place is prior to what Barfield calls original participation. The exchanges of meaning in the mode of innocent love are never deliberate and have no explicit discernable features and there is no call on our capacity to deal with language or representation. This innocence is unselfconscious and is similar to the type of pre-reflective consciousness that a child displays within the first six months of its life.

It is also the type of unreflected consciousness which is described in the Genesis story of Adam and Eve. Standing on later and hence different epistemological turf, the innocence of this state was described in the Genesis story as paradise. This was a paradise before Adam and Eve ate the apple from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. In this paradise there was no differentiation of self from other, rather there was a primary unity that encompassed self and God, and this intuitive sensibility was a daily and implicit aspect of Adam and Eve's life. There were, therefore, no abstract, symbolic exchanges within this original participation and innocent consciousness.

As the parable indicates, the innocence of this consciousness is shattered when Adam and Eve gain knowledge through an increased self-consciousness. This increased awareness is rendered by the drama of eating an apple from the tree of knowledge. Knowledge, and especially self-knowledge, can only be gained if there is some capacity to make distinctions such as the cardinal one between self and others. With this distinction we begin to gain some capacity for the abstract, symbolic exchange called language. Through language, concepts are formed and abstract thoughts arise. Such exchanges are quite different from the intuitive connections that mark the Age of Innocence.

The Age of Innocence is recorded in the Bible as coming to an end in Eden when humankind gained the knowledge of good and evil. Biologists may like to make other assertions about when this Age ended. I imagine they would look at the evidence of fossil remains when brain size seemed to grow in a somewhat similar manner to the way brain size now grows in the first year after birth. This increase in brain size in infants is directly linked to an increasing capability to make meaning through the use of symbols. There seems to be no reason to suppose that the link between brain size and language use would be different in our biological evolution. The capacity for language provides a growing knowledge and use of distinctions and differences—knowledge that in a bygone age may have been expressed as the knowledge of good and evil.

Participation and consciousness in the Age of Innocence was thus original and innocent in that meaning was exchanged by implicit connections rather than by signs used within a system of symbolic representations. In a group that operates within this mode of consciousness, exchanges of meaning would remain non-symbolic and hence non-representational and tacit. As such, these exchanges represent connections that are subliminal, or in terms of meaning, mostly implicit to implicit. Such exchanges create instinctual connections, unity and common communion. These are also the implicit foundations of the self today.

To some modern psychologists these exchanges may exhibit the characteristics of stimulus/response or conditioning, but such terms as these simply indicate that these kinds of exchanges do not contain deliberation or reflective differentiation. As a consequence, such exchanges would not, for those who lived them, have the character of what we know as language exchanges.

Symbolic exchanges and the thoughts they create lead to reflective and abstract knowledge. Such abstract thoughts have their rudimentary beginnings in recognitions which come from patterns of identification and these are created in association with our first sense of an experiential body. This identification leads to further generalized identifications regarding the separation of other people and things. These kinds of identificational meanings can only be expressed and communicated to others through symbolic exchanges. And so it is only by gaining some mastery of abstract symbols that we become 'self-conscious' and learn to distinguish between our own body and the bodies of others.

Without the advent of some rudimentary capacity in language there are no abstract thoughts (like myself and other) created and exchanged. As a consequence, within the framework of a primary innocent consciousness, which the Genesis parable seems to have well understood, there is simply connection, unity and innocent participation in an uninterrupted field of divinity. This connection, unity and participation are all constructed by implicit to implicit exchanges of meaning.

In whatever way we may like to speak about this period in the history of human development it ended when we gained the capacity to use language. The gradual development of this new knowledge parallels the growing knowledge capacities of infants, children and adolescents. This is a knowledge capacity based upon the processes of identification, differentiation and then integration. A society organized primarily along the lines of identification is a tribal society. Hence after the Age of Innocence came the Age of Tribalism.

The Age of Tribalism

The Age of Tribalism began when Adam and Eve were cast out of paradise. In childhood development this stage of meaning-making begins when the infant starts to comprehend itself as distinct from others, around six to seven months. The connection between maturation processes and the evolution of consciousness rests on the evidence that maturation is a kind of evolution. How could it be otherwise when society is made up of individuals? Hence, the evolution of consciousness must be reflected within the growth cycle of those individuals.

The close connection between evolution and maturation processes means that a tribal society will often display behavior that is infantile, childish or adolescent. This is especially the case in relation to the bonding patterns that give a tribe its sense of identity. These are the strong cultural bonds generated by the group desiring a common unity and identity. Such desires are commonly associated with the location or territory in which the tribe lives and they are encapsulated and expressed in collective and common terms that infer 'them' and 'us' mentality. Group desires give power and social influence to those who espouse them and this prestige represents tribalism's attraction, especially for the adolescent.

Barfield wrote much about the history of language. He concluded that 'throughout the recorded history of language the movement of meaning has been from concrete to abstract.' 2 By this he meant that the evolutionary path begins with exchanges that are predominantly concrete (such as those involving food, clothing, tools and women) and runs towards the more abstract exchanges involving communication through the use of abstract language.

The current proposal reflects Barfield's concern with language but suggests that the evolution of consciousness is dependent on our use of, and our relationship to, symbols (the fourth level of self). This proposal says that each of the three stages in the evolution of consciousness (Tribe, Reason and Empathy) will treat symbols differently. For example, ancient tribal societies will have a tendency to be pre-literate and they will not have a great number of words in their vocabulary. In some instances they will have no word for God, as is the case in traditional Australian Aboriginal societies.

However, the key difference between these three evolutionary periods is the manner in which symbolic representation is understood. The idea of representation is therefore the key to understanding how consciousness evolves. In Chapter 6 the function of representation was indicated by a vertical arrow that pointed downwards. This vertical structure signifies the relationship that a map has to the territory it represents. When the representational function operates effectively the map is never seen as the territory, but a representation of it. Map and territory are therefore different but not separate: they are distinct but interconnected. An awareness of this representational role and function is a mark of an evolved and empathetic consciousness. When that awareness is lacking this is an indication that such a consciousness is less evolved.

In the case of tribalism the role and function of representation is generally less well understood while the distinction between map and territory is also not commonly made. Rather, this distinction tends to be ignored and the two (map and territory) tend to run together into a single entity. This entity can be called name/form. The process by which it is constructed is through a pattern of identification. A name/form is neither an abstract symbol that has a representational function nor is it exclusively a concrete non-symbolic form or some kind of behavior. Instead, it is understood as an amalgam of both. A name/form is both symbolic and yet it is a concrete reality. In Sanskrit name/forms are referred to by the term namarupa. A namarupa is an identification of symbol and concrete form: a name/form.

Name/forms do not constitute a language, yet they are used in ancient tribal societies to exchange meaning. Languages are constructed from systems of signs that have representational meanings and which function like maps of territories. The distinction between map and territory is easily made within a consciousness that operates in the evolutionary period of Reason. Yet within Reason the dominant mode of thinking is one that tends to construct splits and divisions where there are actually connections and unity. This tendency to divide means that the map and territory distinction tends to be exaggerated by a reasonable mind so that language appears disconnected from the territory it represents. Within the consciousness of Reason symbolic maps become 'mere words' on a page while the territory transforms into a very 'real' physical world that is wholly disconnected from the individual and consciousness.

In contrast to the Age of Reason, in the Age of Empathy the map and territory are seen as different but not separate: they are distinct but connected. An awareness of this representational role and function is therefore a mark of an evolved and empathetic consciousness.

Maturation and culture

The current argument for the evolution of consciousness suggests that the movement of evolution is dependent on our relationship to symbols, whereas Barfield's model proposed a movement of language from concrete to abstract. These two proposals are not in conflict but support each other. For example, they come together in the maturation path that children and adolescents take. In other words, the general character of the Age of Tribalism reflects the consciousness in the first twenty years of life in that concrete realities are slowly superseded by the acquisition and mastery of more abstract symbolic exchanges.

We can witness the beginning of this movement from the concrete to the more abstract forms in the development of early childhood speech patterns. The same kind of change is also observed in the speech patterns of pre-literate tribal societies. Communication patterns that deal with concrete exchanges and experiential forms are sometimes loosely called a 'language.' Yet such a designation is inaccurate. It is inaccurate because language is a system of representations which are essentially abstract and symbolic. Language acquisition by children always has pre-reflective antecedents, that is, non-deliberate noises which come in the form of an infant's expressive movements and babbling.

A similar point is made by George Steiner. Referring to the child development studies of Piaget and J. S. Bruner he writes, 'in the young child adaptive, generic, intelligent organization of behavior precedes, by a considerable margin, the development of anything that can be called language.' 3 Yet the transformation from concrete, behavioral experiences to abstract symbols is not a clearly defined border for children or tribal societies. Rather, the changeover is always slow and involves large movements beginning with predominantly identification patterns and then moving slowly to predominantly systems of differentiation. This is a very large developmental change and it relates, for example, to the changes that occur between infancy, adolescence and adulthood, or between ancient tribal societies and modern tribal societies.

My youngest daughter, Cleo, made me aware of the differences between speech patterns based upon concrete, experiential forms and those that are based upon abstract representations. It was an occasion when we were living in Berkeley, California. Cleo, who was three years old, had become firm friends with Lindsay, a dark skinned African American girl her age who attended the same day school. After school Lindsay often came to our house to play. One afternoon we dropped Lindsay off at her home and soon after my wife, Amanda, and I began to talk about the social status of black Americans in our neighborhood, including Lindsay's parents. Suddenly Cleo spoke up from the back seat. 'Lindsay is not black,' she said. Amanda and I looked at one another. How to respond to that?

I understood this response to indicate that Cleo had no comprehension of the abstract representation 'black American.' This was not a case of her ignoring a clearly perceptible difference, but rather a situation where the abstract symbols we used had not registered in Cleo's consciousness. They had not registered perhaps because the concept of 'black American' was outside the boundaries of the meanings she made, which at that age were primarily concerned with felt experience and concrete realities. It may have been that her concrete experience of 'black' was akin to having dirty hands and thus she concluded that Lindsay was not black.

There are few if any truly symbolic objects in the speech patterns of infants. This is because their speech patterns include the babbling noises they make prior to speech. Such concrete speech patterns at best represent non-deliberate, identificational name/forms. The consciousness of infants and children has therefore not evolved to the point where maps and territory can be distinguished from each other or where symbolic maps have representational functions. For children this maturational development from name/forms to having the ability to distinguish between name and form (map and territory) happens only when they have developed competent intellectual capabilities.

This capacity for symbolic literacy develops somewhere between the years of seven and fourteen. It comes into existence when children are at last able to reflect on, and speak about, language as a general representational system. It is only with this self-reflective ability that children fully enter the symbolic order and begin to develop the negative-capabilities that can create abstract knowledge. To emphasize this point is to say that a child does not enter the symbolic order, as the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan believed, when the infant's babbling changes into recognizable words (usually around the seventh month). Rather, the child finishes eating the apple from the tree of knowledge at least a decade after Lacan's 'mirror stage.'

This passage from the name/forms of infancy and childhood to the more general literate landscape involving the use of representational language should be an occasion for a family to celebrate as puberty is often celebrated in some cultures. Yet interestingly this moment of gaining a foothold on the mountain of self-reflection, even though it is a significant epistemological change, is generally ignored. Sometimes this change is associated with, but overshadowed by, the coinciding physical changes of puberty.

Pre-literate societies

The current proposal is that the evolution of consciousness depends upon our relationship to symbols. This proposition overlaps with Barfield's focus on participation, yet both follow the general line taken by early anthropologists. This was the view that in so-called 'primitive' societies there is evidence of a 'pre-logical mentality.' Such a mentality was variously called animism or naturism. Barfield argues that its central aspect is participation. By this he means an undifferentiated and imaginative connection with, and participation in society, the environment and an active spiritual world. As Barfield says, 'participation' begins by being an activity, and essentially a communal or social activity.' 4 A sense of a separate self is therefore missing in such a community. And so to comprehend this mentality we must understand it 'by virtue, not of the law of identity, but of the law of participation.' 5

The major epistemological features of this 'pre-logical mentality' are the speech patterns of a society that do not fully comprehend the difference between the map and the territory and therefore lack an understanding of the representational function of language. This lack represents an evolutionary lack and involves an ignorance of the true representational nature of language. In such pre-literate societies exchanges of communication occur but such exchanges convey concrete meanings by the medium of name/forms. The meaningful results conveyed by the exchanges of name/forms often come in the form of fighting, conflicts and war.

Coincidentally, the day I was writing these sentences I received an email from an internet discussion group to which I belong. This email was from a fellow participant interested in the relationship between language and thought. I use part of it here as its arrival on my computer seemed to herald a meaningful, a-causal connection.

Then I became aware of another extraordinary piece of research by anthropologist Dan Everett (published in the mainstream journal Anthropology Today) about the Piraha, an Amazonian tribe who have no words for numbers, no quantifiers, no definite articles, no words for colors, no tenses, no representational art, and no semantic embedding ... The Piraha language is nearly devoid of any sort of abstraction ... Words are only used in concrete reference to objects of direct experience. There are, for example, no myths of any sort in Piraha, nor do the Piraha tell fictional stories. 6

As described in this email, some of the speech expressions attributed to the Piraha may have to wait on further independent confirmation. Yet the general point made here is one that reflects the kind of pre-literate consciousness that name/forms create in both children and primitive tribal societies. This is also the kind of concrete symbolic meaning-making that is described in earlier anthropological studies and cited by Barfield.

Yet the consciousness created by the use of name/forms continues on in our modern, highly fragmented intellectual episteme today. Even though contemporary symbolic exchanges in formal Western mainstream culture tend to be dominated by abstract systems (different genres, discourses, measurements and money) we nevertheless worship a range of idols, even in science. Idols are name/forms; a concrete form that has symbolic significance. There are many such idols we worship: the fashion statement, the national flag and the million dollar house are examples of modern day name/forms. The modern consciousness in this Age of Reason thus often tends to turn back to the conditions of desire and identity, and hence to embrace the kind of consciousness possessed by ancient tribes.

In contrast to the selective use of name/forms in the Age of Reason, the consciousness of earlier societies, no matter their particular speech patterns, commonly rely upon the exchanges of name/forms. For example, originally money was not a token that represented a value, as is the case today. An instance of this is the barley/shekel which was originally taken to be both a unit of currency and a unit of weight, just as the British Pound was originally a unit nominating a one pound mass of silver. With such money the token and the value are the same, there is therefore no map and territory distinction, rather there is only a name/form.

In addition, trading before the modern era of Reason was commonly undertaken in precious metals, jewelry, spices and slaves. The value of these exchanges was always equal to the form of the objects exchanged and hence, there was no map and territory distinction, rather there were only name/forms. The transformation from these kinds of tribal understandings to a more empathetic consciousness, in which symbols are always treated as maps representing territories, is a change that has been slow even in contemporary society owing to the comforting habits of the past.

Forgetting

The problem of perpetuating tribal habits in modern societies by continuing to use name/forms is that it amounts to forgetting. For example, once the adolescent or a society has developed the abstract capacity to distinguish between map and territory this self-reflective capacity must be honored. When we can distinguish between name and form, yet do not do so, we dishonor ourselves by refusing to evolve our consciousness. When we ignore a distinguishable difference we begin to construct confusion along with a set of suppressive, negative and often rationalizing tendencies. Why do we forget about our capacity to distinguish? There may be many reasons associated with the social context in which we live, but the gravitational pull from the planets of desire and identity are cardinal influences that always inhibit our remembering.

With tribalism there is always a practical necessity to forget that is associated with creating and maintaining the identity and unity of the tribe. Such maintenance happens when differences within the tribe are forgotten, suppressed or positively ignored. What helps this kind of forgetting is the heightened strangeness of the 'other' outside the tribe. What perpetuates the forgetting is also the concrete nature of inter-tribal exchanges.

With children there is a gradual developmental change from speech patterns dominated by identification (name/forms) to a consciousness that can speak about the representational function of symbols. Yet adolescents often forget about this map/territory distinction. In addition, they are usually not taught to reflect on, or how to use language as an abstract system of representations. Such forgetting is also given a boost with the advent of puberty. For girls puberty can occur somewhere between nine to fourteen years and for boys, ten to seventeen. Hormonal desires are not always sexual, although they are commonly associated with partnership displays or with maintaining the unity of a group. The basic character of desire is that it expresses and reinforces the identifications of name/forms and in particular, the name/form of identity.

During these years of great hormonal and physical change the adolescent's consciousness will change from innocent participation into a set of abstract meaning-making capacities which enable the adolescent to think, for the first time, like an adult. Adolescents will gradually develop self-knowledge about what they like and who they are, along with a capacity to use signs as fully symbolic representations. In addition, they will begin to regularly forget and ignore distinctions and differences that they are now capable of making.

Ironically, this epistemological upgrade of consciousness has meant that through the gift of language we have tended to turn away from and forget the representational nature of language when it comes to the issue of desire and identity. As a consequence, even though the child or the tribe may emerge into the epistemological light of language literacy this capacity is not always related to the self: the question of who we are and where we belong. Rather, there is often a wilful forgetting that lives on today in the Age of Reason where the issue of personal identity is as confused as ever.

Identity

The inherent contradiction of identity in modern societies is that our sense of identity is normally in competition with other identities. This sense of separation heightens our desire for connection, unity and love. In this manner we forget the already existing implicit connections of our innocence. We forget the connections and similarities we have with others close at hand who now seem different and in competition to 'us' or 'our group.'

Even today, living in the Age of Reason, we sometimes use the non-literate concrete forms of exchange. We use them especially in relation to our tribe and our identity. The evidence of this is to be found embedded in language. Some notion of the subject exists in every human language. As George Steiner tells us, 'no language has been found to lack a first and second-person singular pronoun.' 7 Yet in the speech patterns of pre-literate societies the subject is obviously not expressed in the literate terms of a first or second-person singular pronoun. This abstract literacy will be missing from the concrete, undifferentiated speech patterns of pre-literate societies.

Yet in all societies, whether in contemporary Western society or the pre-literate tribe, concrete pre-literate meanings continue to be made. This is the case for our construction of identity. Even though there are large cultural differences between modern industrialized communities and early tribal societies, the identification patterns associated with identity construction follow similar lines. For example, the individualism of modern society (the self as a separate person) represents the regular construction of identity, while in tribal societies the self is constructed not as an individual but as a tribal member. Even though these are large cultural differences, in all societies identity construction is undertaken by a common slippage of meaning that fuses together the concrete of perception with abstract symbolic expressions.

The most immediate and important concrete form is the body. As a consequence this form, along with the symbols that are associated with it during its childhood (for example, good, bad, naughty or bright, as well as a name) are identified together as a unit: a name/form. While these identification processes are the common currency in pre-literate tribal exchanges they still have key roles to play in contemporary society. This means that even though we have a developed capacity to deal with signs as abstract representations, this intellectual ability does not ensure that we remember to distinguish between name and form when it comes to our sense of who we are. In other words, our identity is likely to be constructed from the patterns of exchange common to early childhood as well as common to pre-literate tribal societies. Hence, the conceptual essence of identity is a 'namarupa': a name/form—'I am this body.'

Participation

Barfield's principal proposition is that the evolution of consciousness is evidenced by a progressive decline of participation. This decline has been accompanied by increasing degrees of abstraction. For example, he argues that 'the gradual emergence of man from original participation amounts also to the gradual emergence of "men" from "man".' 8 Looking back from the twentieth century, a period in which Barfield imaginatively describes scientific consciousness in terms of 'dashboard knowledge' 9 where participation is largely rejected, he seems to me to see only the benefits of the Age of Tribalism. These are the benefits of a greater connectedness and participation than is now generally the case.

Barfield's focus on participation certainly provides a solid foundation for a study of intellectual and conceptual change. This is an area where his argument is strongest and where his general proposition for evolution is most cogent. For example, our modern concepts of space, time and movement each have current meanings which were unknown in earlier times when participation was a central cultural assumption. For example, we now commonly understand space to be a mindless, lifeless, unlimited void which is simply the absence of phenomena. In ancient times space was conceived quite differently, more like a 'mental mobile' to use Barfield's words. Space then was an extension of ourselves and we were seen as the microcosm within the larger macrocosm.

Similarly, the modern concept of movement is of an external object moving through a space/time continuum at a certain velocity. In this kind of description, metaphysics and consciousness have no role to play since movement is assumed to be a clinical, objective operation that can be measured mathematically. Barfield reminds us that we only have to read Plato's description of the world as 'a moving image of eternity' to realize that within this ancient philosophy were embedded assumptions about our participation in the world that have now eluded most of us. For example, in ancient times metaphysics and astronomy were conceived of as one and the same.

We may decide to dismiss such ancient assumptions as infantile or unsophisticated. To do this would be like the schoolboy who attends comparative religion classes and comes away with the view that 'other' religions are inferior to his. To appreciate cultural differences we must first understand and come to terms with the cultural ground on which we stand. In the absence of this self-reflective cultural knowledge there is only the hard-edged bias of the uninformed. This is the case whether cultural differences exist geographically or historically. Barfield's point about participation is that the modern scientific view which constructs an independent physical world does not come from being better informed. Rather, it is a view that comes from a significant deletion of meaning. This is the deletion of connection and participation; in other words, a depletion of contextual, implicit meaning in relation to the contexts of symbols, culture, mind and Meaning.

I agree with Barfield's general conclusion that in regard to our relationship to society and the environment this stage (the Age of Tribalism) involved higher levels of connection and participation than the period that followed. However, Barfield's analytical tool of 'participation' does force a narrowing of his analysis. This is especially so when it comes to the question of tribalism per se and the manner in which tribes relate to other tribes. This is a different question to the way tribes might conceive of their implicit relationship to the cosmos.

With a tribal mentality our actions towards foreign others tend to lack empathy and are often hurtful. In short, our actions will often be the results of the forgetting associated with the use of identificational patterns of exchange. Barfield's focus on participation has tended to neglect tribal and often brutal relationship to others. In the time before modern science there seems to be, for him, no obvious negative equivalents. Yet this was clearly a period when tribalism, in its most generalized sense of 'them' and 'us' was a given and continues to be given communal direction and focus through the marshalling of collective desires. These desires are usually centered on the ownership of a particular piece of territory which is aggressively defended. Acts of territorialism are usually given a direction and focus by patriarchal strongmen who habitually undertake bloodthirsty raids, incursions and wars that have created almost continuous social conflict and turmoil over millenniums.

The down side of tribalism is therefore the failure to evolve and the consequent pain that is generated by the suppression of differences within the tribe as well as intolerance of differences outside the group. Tribalism has the tendency to deny differences in the creation of a group's desire for cultural identity and yet, at the same time, this mode of thinking heightens outside and superficial differences, such as gender, skin color, location, clothing or sexual preferences so that these differences become the point of separation that divides. This double action of ignoring yet over-valuing differences is a common feature of the identification patterns within desire as well as within tribes, even those religious, ethnic and patriotic groups who live in a modern economy.

It is clear, even from a cursory glance at contemporary politics that the Age of Tribalism lives on today in most communities to some extent and that desire is its cultural mainstay. Even in the area of religion, tribalism was and still is the accepted way of doing business, of protecting one's 'turf ' by excluding the outsider. If my religious commitment is motivated by my desires then 'my' religion will always seem purer and more truthful than others and I will believe that it contains the only key to unlocking the door to paradise. Other people's religion will therefore, by definition, be impure, heretical or ignorant.

When we exclude we forget and we forget what does not substantiate our desires. Such are the meaning-making strategies that ignore the distinctions that are close at hand and yet highlight differences that are further away. This forgetting yet highlighting of differences is the cause of all prejudice, intolerance, bigotry and exclusions.

In summary, the Age of Tribalism represents that long period in the evolution of consciousness which maintained a connecting and participating balance in the sphere of the cosmos, but was and continues to be unbalanced in the sphere of human relations.

The Age of Reason

The second stage in the evolution of consciousness, the Age of Reason involves a greater use of the intellect or what Barfield calls alpha-thinking. The beginnings of the Age of Reason are seen by Barfield in the gradual conceptual changes that have occurred over a period of three thousand years, beginning with the emergence of Greek thought from the Orient and culminating finally in the rise of mechanical science four hundred years ago. From this perspective the Copernican revolution marks not a new discovery that initiated a scientific revolution, but a time when the consciousness of a collective intellect finally arose from its early three thousand-year-old foundations. In terms of meaning, this three thousand year period represents the slow transformation from European tribalism to European Reason.

Barfield's alpha-thinking represents speculative thinking that rejects our participation in the world. It is associated with science and speculation about the world while assuming a separation between the observer and that world. This is thinking that rejects our embedded participation in the world and hence rejects the causal role of meaning, mind, life and spirit. Barfield locates some of the early semantic tendrils of this second evolutionary stage within the systematic study by the ancient Greeks of astronomy. These early developments in abstract, speculative consciousness gradually transform over several thousand years into the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Barfield refers to alpha-thinking as the main function of this stage of consciousness but there is more to be said about Reason than non-participation. As we have seen, when the intellect is used in the service of identity or desire it rejects implicit meaning while aggressively promoting the hard-edge of Reason. This is a mode of forgetting that represents overkill in the use of discernable differences. We love them so much that they become cutting instruments that divide and separate a unified, holistic world. With this mode of thought, name and form are not yoked together as they are in the concrete exchanges of childhood or tribalism, yet they are also not connected and integrated into a larger contextual system of being, as they are in empathy. Rather, maps and their territories are treated by the Age of Reason as separate zones of influence: as the physical world that is independent and separate from language and consciousness. The map and the territory are seen to have their own separate and independent characteristics and variables.

The common face of this excess of differentiation is our pride in an abstract intellect which holds itself to be Reasonable, with a capital 'R' and as the sole reliable and legitimate means to human enlightenment and truth. Yet the ideal of Reason creates the 'good' of rationality and as well as the 'bad' of irrationality. Such a binary division takes us not much further than the 'them' and 'us' of tribalism. Hence, Reason, with a capital 'R' is itself unreasonable because it is unbalanced and made excessive by a positivistic, self-reinforcing culture. It is excessive in its reliance on discernable differences which exclude implicit contextual meaning.

Some may argue that this contemporary sense of non-participation was necessary so that mechanical science could be born and continue to operate. Yet non-participation directly contradicts the central epistemological premise that continued from Aristotle to Aquinas and this was our assumed participation in nature. Barfield argues that we can either conclude that this 'persistent assumption was a piece of elaborate deception' which happened to last for most of human history down to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, or on the other hand, we can accept that we really are part of the universe and do participate in it. If we accept participation then it logically means that our recent non-participation represents a wilful blindness.

I have mentioned that in the Age of Tribalism there is an imbalance in our relationships to others (both personal and community) which is offset by a greater balance specifically in regard to our relationship to the cosmos. This situation is reversed in the Age of Reason. In this more recent period the virus of denial has settled on our relationship to the cosmos. On the other hand, under the tutelage of Reason our social relations seem to have become more balanced. We see evidence of this social balance within the evolution of a modern Western consciousness in what is sometimes called Western liberal humanism. This is a religion without a God. Its ethical ideals have provided many with the hope of finding purpose and meaning in their lives. These ideals also relate to the important issue of stability within social formations that are based upon the rule of law, rational administration, democratic participation, universal franchise and the unifying benefits of cross-cultural diversity.

The social stability and benefits that have flowed from the ideals of Western liberal humanism, together with the material wealth and physical health generated by technology and science, are the evolutionary gains made by the Age of Reason. Yet because this age carries the infection of denial that limits our ability to see beyond appearances and disappearances, this evolutionary period has not been an entirely successful antidote to the limitations of tribalism or desire.

This has meant that our personal and collective desires have often found expression through the use of science and technology. In other words, science and technology have often simply given us the means for disposing of our enemies much more efficiently. In this Age of Reason, both desire and intellect commonly operate side by side in the warfare we all too often witness in families, regions, tribes, nation-states and in religious crusades and jihads. Like the consciousness of individuals, contemporary human societies now display a complex amalgam of modes of thought.

Thus, one of the dominant and positive outcomes for meaning-making in this current Age of Reason has been the social balance and stability we see emanating from democratic institutions and nations. The downside to this Age has been a conceptual imbalance in regard to our place in the cosmos. This kind of meaning-making has led to a general denial of the role of contextual implicit meaning and all that involves. The outcome has been a loss of connection and a sense of self that is divorced from a fragmented and meaningless world.

The Age of Empathy

The Age of Empathy is yet to dawn. Unlike the Age of Reason which is currently supported in many countries around the world by a vast array of tertiary institutions, empathy has no official standing or institutional base. As a widespread social practice, empathy has yet to become normalized by a range of institutions and social behavior.

One way to confirm that empathy is not yet a widespread collective response is to compare the hero figures of each of the last three evolutionary stages of consciousness. For example, the heroes of Tribalism are predominantly strong patriarchal warrior figures while the heroes of Reason are again males who are likely to be white-coated scientists or technocrats. Who are the heroes of empathy? There are a few names that spring to mind: Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr. and in his latter years Nelson Mandela. These names stand out because these individuals are seen as exceptional.

Yet what of the empathetic primary school teacher, hospice worker or midwife? Such figures seem a long way away from contemporary notions of celebrity or even who is socially important. While empathy has yet to become a widespread collective response in any society there are many individuals whose way of life and mode of thought is predominantly empathetic. In addition, each of us lives through a period of growth when the effects of empathy are felt most acutely. This is a period that begins around forty to forty-five years of age and it corresponds with Carl Jung's notion of the second stage of life.

Jung believed that while our dreams may change and vary over the years, they nevertheless follow a pattern related to our psychic growth. He called this pattern the 'process of individuation.' The process of individuation continues on long after childhood for it involves the major shift of merging of the ego with the Self. While the ego is well understood in psychology, the Self is less so. Jung viewed the 'Self ' both as the totality of the whole psyche and as the center and source of our dream images. For Jung, the Self has a supra-personal force and as a consequence it has cosmic dimensions. Jung's Self is therefore relatively aligned with the Hindu notion of 'Self ' and with the use I have been employing here.

For Jung, we enter a second stage of psychic growth (individuation) around thirty-five to forty years of age. This can be a time of great change and crisis. Around this period statistics have shown a rise in the frequency of depression in men and women. The conventional view is that these feelings are related to career success or failure for men while with women depression is often related to sexual or child-related problems. Jung was impatient with such 'simpleminded' views and 'stressed that the human organism was simply preparing itself for death.' 10 In other words, our mid-life crisis is not the results of social success or failure, lack of children, war, religious conversion or even illness. These are but the outward signs of internal and essentially spiritual changes that are taking place. Jung also believed we gradually emerge from these processes of psychic growth as more mature personalities.

Jung's psychological focus on dreams provides a different kind of explanation to the current one of Meaning. In terms of the evolution of consciousness the processes that mark Jung's second stage of life represent the changes we experience when entering the last evolutionary period of consciousness, which is the mode of thought I call empathy. In other words, there are not two stages of psychic growth as Jung proposed, but three. These three represent the steps in an ever-growing maturity as well as the developmental stages of consciousness. The first two stages last for approximately twenty years each, while the final stage of empathy begins around the time we are approaching forty years of age.

The evolution of the average individual's consciousness therefore relates to the social evolution of consciousness in the following manner:

Individual – Age – Historic Period

First 6 months: – the Age of Innocence – up to Eden;

Innocent Love

First 20 years: – the Age of Tribalism – continuing;

Desire

To 40 years: – the Age of Reason – from 3000 years ago;

Intellect

Mid-life on: – the Age of Empathy – the future

Empathy

The progression through each of the developmental stages is not a matter in which the individual has freedom of choice. This progress is inevitable for the pathway through these stages is determined by the Laws of Meaning. In terms of empathy, some people may appear to belittle affected by the character of this mid-life stage. In other words, some people will have arrested development or immaturity, or be lost in desire or abstract forms, like money. If this is the case then such lack of progress is no more than that. As there are many cultural supports that help to hold us suspended in earlier developmental stages, many instances of arrested development are considered normal. Each of us will therefore respond in our own manner to these inescapable evolutionary processes.

The evolution of consciousness also represents the evolution of spirituality—the spirituality of individuals as well as the spirituality of societies. Spirituality is measured in terms of our relationship to symbols, the fourth level of self, as indicated by Figure 27:

The arc of spirituality

Figure 27:

The evolution of spirituality represents a patterned three-stage unfolding and then enfolding of meaning. This unfolding is marked by the transformation of innocent connection into desire and then the further transformation into the differentiations of the intellect. Through the use of the intellect we begin to enfold meaning through the integration of differences so they become distinctions within larger contexts. Enfolding continues until all distinct particulars completely disappear into the unity of the implicit Host context. The final evolutionary stage of empathy is marked by the enfolding and integration of all differences.

The spirituality of a tribal mind turns on the identification of name with form to create a whole variety of name/forms. This kind of spirituality is often associated with the supernatural, superstitions, magic and the occult. Ancient tribal spirituality usually engenders fear and anxiety in its members even though from an outsider's point of view this spirituality may seem closer to nature and more idealistic than contemporary society. Modern tribes maintain a sense of the spiritual based on orthodoxy. Orthodoxies are created from language which is treated as sacrosanct. The sacrosanct is always a construction involving the identification of name and form: name/forms.

The spirituality of a reasoning mind is the kind that looks for purity in dissection and in smaller and smaller bits of knowledge. This kind of purity produces a fragmentation of knowledge and inevitably, of society. The basis of this purity comes from creating binary oppositions such as the separation of the subjective (including language) from the physical world (objective reality). Both these opposites are then over-valued so that those who hold on to the certainty of a separate physical world tend to negate the idea of a divine, transcendent being as the underlying context of everything. In a similar manner, those who actually seek spiritual connection through reason tend to over-compensate with the symbolic and hence, over-value the orthodoxy of formal ritual and the symbolism and rules of religion. Under the cultural regime of reason, true spirituality is squeezed between a scientific purity involving dissection and a muscular orthodoxy of religion.

A mature spirituality comes with empathy. This is a mind that can discern the difference between name and form, yet also can see their necessary interconnection. With this sensibility names have a resonance so they do not appear as mere words but as important direction pointers. Equally, the physical world is not over or undervalued and as a consequence its concrete forms represent an important secondary context of self. Balance and equipoise are the essential ingredients of an empathetic spirituality. For the empathetic, love is more important than rules, compassion more significant than logic, while the innocent connection of primary perception re-establishes itself as a normal part of any communication.

The future

The Age of Empathy has yet to be born—as the song says about the Age of Aquarius. This lack indicates only that our individual responses during and after mid-life have not yet evolved into what is considered to be recognizably useful collective habits.

What will this future society look like? To begin with it will be a postsecular society. A postsecular society is one where spirituality will be an explicit part of how science is done. Such a society will be one of inclusion and participation, where national security is balanced with a tolerance of different lifestyles, cultures and the spiritual path each of us takes. Within this postsecular society mainstream religions will no longer be tribal and exclusive but will promote an inclusive attitude and a tolerance of the differences of race, gender, sexual preferences and spiritual practices.

A postsecular society will be strong and secure and have open, transparent and democratic institutions where inclusive participation is celebrated and actively pursued at a political as well as an individual level. The policies of social inclusion and participation can only eventuate when a community has a widespread literacy with a capacity to treat maps as representations of other territories. These capacities can also help to create long-term strategies for social unity through the valuing of cultural and ethnic diversity.

The principle of inclusive participation may well translate in school and tertiary education so that teaching empathy becomes the overriding educational objective of these institutions. In relation to the business world, the weight given to social capital and the environment would replace the value now given to the financial bottom line. The principle of inclusive participation would also mean that any industrial development would be assessed primarily on the basis of its ability to enhance a sustainable future.

In the future Age of Empathy the social harmony that will flow from political, educational and business practices will be supported and reinforced by an integrated science. Such a science would automatically take account of all the interrelated factors affecting the context of the planet's environment as well as the intelligent energy of Meaning, mind, life and spirit. Such a science would understand the physical universe to be spiritualized which means that it is organized and ordered by the cosmic mind of the Numinous.

A science that takes account of Meaning would have a focus on connections, similarities, implications, organization and the field qualities of phenomena. This would be a dynamic rather than mechanical science that would accept the essential role of uncertainty and context. It would also be evidence-based science and not driven by the orthodoxy of positivism, materialism, realism or any other dogma. A science that took Meaning into account would value and be able to assess the relative influences of culture and language in relation to every experiment, hypothesis or theory. Such an approach would also accept that Meaning and thus mind was the underlying reality of the universe and as a consequence this would place the individual, once again, at the center of the universe.

This final chapter has briefly outlined some of the major features in the evolution of consciousness. It should be remembered that the evolution of consciousness refers to one consciousness. This is the consciousness of the Numinous. The evolution of consciousness is therefore an evolution primarily of the Numinous One and only secondarily an evolution of humankind. The mind of the Numinous is gradually changing and evolving in ways that have been mandated by the Laws of Meaning which make up the structure of this singular mind.

The evolution of consciousness is therefore a cosmic movement directed at evolving the mind of each individual so gradually they become aware that their evolution is part of the evolution of the Numinous.

Endnotes
Introduction

1 'The Four Horsemen,' Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, September 2007: http://video.google.com.au/videosearch/

2 For a discourse on the ideas of the postsecular, see John A. McClure, Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison, (Athens, Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, 2007).

3 Henry's grave is at Cullenswood church near St. Marys on the east coast of Tasmania.

4 The phrase, 'the geography of hope' is used in: Testimony: Writers of the West Speak on Behalf of Utah Wilderness, compiled by Stephen Trimble and Terry Tempest Williams, (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 1996).

5 David Tacey, The Spiritual Revolution, (Sydney: Harper Collins, 2003), Chapter 8.

6 These lines refer to the Self and come from The Bhagavad Gita, Translated Eknath Easwaran, (London: Arkana, 1986), Chapter 2, 23.

7 I cannot say if Meaning represents what scientists have been calling 'ether.' The existence of ether in the form of ether drift and ether wind was a question asked in the 1887 ether-drift experiment of Albert Michelson and Edward Morley. After what was reported to be the negative results of these experiments the idea of 'empty space' was fully embraced by mainstream science. Yet many scientists continue to disagree with the idea of empty space. James DeMeo had this to say about the mainstream scientific view: 'I submit, these [the propositions that space is empty and immobile, and the universe is dead] are unproven, and even disproven assertions, challenged in large measure by Dayton Miller's exceptional work on the ether drift.' Dayton Miller's Ether-Drift Experiments: A Fresh Look: http://www.orgonelab.org/energyinspace.htm. This is a useful website in which DeMeo has brought together many of the original papers and experiments on ether and ether-drift. However, the question of the existence of ether and whether space is empty are two distinct questions. I leave the question of ether to others; however, regarding the question of whether space is empty and the universe dead, I argue in this work that space is full of the relationships of Meaning which are alive. For related arguments see Chapter 4.

8 David Bohm and B. J. Hiley, The Undivided Universe, (London: Routledge, 1995).

9 James Lovelock's idea of Gaia ( James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth is Fighting Back – and How We Can Still Save Humanity, (Melbourne: Allen Lane, 2006)) proposes that the planet Earth is a living system: Gaia. This system, which includes the biosphere, 'has kept our planet fit for life for over three billion years.' Lovelock calls this system physiological because it has the 'unconscious goal of regulating the climate and the chemistry at a comfortable state for life.' These are strange words to describe a physiological system. An 'unconscious goal' is a phrase which relates more accurately to mind, intelligence and Meaning. I would argue that the vast system of Gaia involves not only an Earth-wide self-regulating system but must also embrace a connecting inter-galactic regulating system. Such a universe-wide system would then have the goal to regulate all conditions, organic and inorganic so that the Earth's conditions are fit for life forms. In addition, the use of the term 'self-regulation' suggests much more than the involvement of some physiological mechanism. It implies a system of Meaning that is cosmic.

10 I argue this point later in this work and also in The Meaning of Consciousness, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997).

11 David Bohm, On Dialogue, Edited Lee Nichol, (London: Routledge, 1996), Foreword.
Chapter 1

1 The Northy Street market is in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.

2 C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning, (London: Ark, 1985).

3 John Gray, Al Qaeda and what it Means to be Modern, (London: Faber and Faber, 2007), 29.

4 Ibid., 27.

5 Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry, (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1988).

6 Emile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, Translated M. E. Meek, (Florida: University of Miami Press, 1971), 106.

7 John Carroll, The Existential Jesus, (Melbourne: Scribe, 2007), 23.

8 Bernard McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism, (New York: Crossroad Herder, 1998), 90–91.

9 Carroll, The Existential Jesus, 25.

10 Karen Armstrong, A History of God, (New York: Ballantine Books, 1993), 200.

11 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, Translated Arthur Mitchell, (Lantham, MD: UPA, 1983).

12 Basil Hiley and David Peat (eds), David Bohm, Quantum Implications: Essays in Honour of David Bohm, (London: Routledge, 1991), 436.

13 This metaphor I have borrowed from Galen Moore, 'On the Nature of Spiritual Meaning,' which was published on a website that no longer exists. (www.geocities.com/Athens/Crete/mindspirit, accessed in 2006.)

14 This is a point I have made in The Meaning of Consciousness, (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1997), Chapter 5.

15 Henry Strapp, 'S-Matrix Interpretation of Quantum Theory,' Phys Rev D3, (March 1971), 1303–20.

16 Dean Radin, Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality, (New York: Paraview Pocket Books, 2006), 14.

17 Ibid., 2.
Chapter 2

1 David Bohm and F. David Peat, Science, Order and Creativity, (London: Routledge, 1989), Chapter 3.

2 Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry, (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 93.

3 The work of the distinguished mathematician G. Spencer-Brown is relevant to the point I make here concerning discernable differences. In his Laws of Form, Spencer-Brown says that a universe comes into being (appears in conscious awareness) when a space is severed or taken apart. For Spencer-Brown a form is created (appears or comes into existence) when distinctions are made. This happens because distinctions are taken to be the form itself. Spencer-Brown suggests that we normally make no distinction between the distinctions of the form and the form itself. I agree, for it is impossible to have a form without also having distinctions. The novelty of Spencer-Brown's Laws of Form is that he presents a calculus based on the identity of distinction and form. In terms of meaning, a distinction, which is also a discernable difference, is simply an explicit feature that constructs all the forms of the universe. In other words, a form is always constructed out of an integrated set of explicit distinctions (we call them non and asymmetrical relations). What is important in Spencer-Brown's work is that with the phrase 'marks of distinction' he described the general character of explicit meaning. In addition, his identity of form and distinction also indicates something profound. If all forms are constructed out of explicit discernable distinctions then all the visible forms of the physical world are created within consciousness and, specifically, within the parameters of being. This conclusion is based upon the understanding that a form (of any kind) cannot and does not exist without its constructing marks of distinction, that is, without marks of explicit meaning. As explicit meaning is an important aspect of perception and conception, the forms of the universe can only arise within this context. As a consequence, a universe comes into existence (appears in conscious awareness) when forms are created by the integration of their explicit distinctions and these forms arise out of their background of implicit meaning.

4 'Unconscious Decisions in the Brain,'Nature Neuroscience, 13 April 2008, http://www.physorg.com

5 Leonardo Boff, Francis of Assisi, Translated John W. Diercksmeier, (New York: Orbis Books, 2006), 9.

6 For a flavor of Bohm's work on the implicate and explicate orders, see David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, (London: Ark, 1983); Basil Hiley and David Peat (eds.), Quantum Implications, (London: Routledge, 1991); and David Bohm and Basil Hiley, The Undivided Universe, (London: Routledge, 1995).

7 Ken Wilber, Integral Spirituality: A Startling New Role for Religion in the Modern and Postmodern World, (Boston: Integral Books, 2007), 232.

8 See Laurence Freeman, Good Heart: A Buddhist Perspective on the Teaching of Jesus, (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1998), Introduction.

9 See http://www.centeringprayer.com/lectio_divina.html

10 Thomas Keating (ed.), The Divine Indwelling, 'Lectio Divina as a tool of Discernment,' (New York: Lantern Books, 2001), 25–36.
Chapter 3

1 Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry, (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 20.

2 Jill Bolte Taylor, My Stroke of Insight, (New York: Viking, 2006), 30.

3 Ibid., 142.

4 Owen Barfield, (1988), Chapter 3.

5 Jill Bolte Taylor, (2006), 54.

6 The phrase, 'nostalgia for paradise' was used by the philosopher and writer Mircea Eliade in his book, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy.

7 Brian Swimme, The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos, (New York: Orbis, 1996), 100.

8 Hal Puthoff, 'Quantum Vacuum Energy,' http://www.metanexus.net/magazine/tabid/68/id/2639/Default.aspx.

9 David W. Thomson III and Jim D. Bourassa, Secrets of the Aether, (eBook, 2007), Chapter 3.

10 Zachary Jones, Brenda Dunne, Elissa Hoeger and Robert Jahn (eds.), Filters and Reflections: Perspectives of Reality, (Princeton, New Jersey: ICRL Press, 2009).

11 D. T. Suzuki, Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist, (London: Routledge, 2002), 4.

12 Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, (New York: Harper and Row, 1945), 21.
Chapter 4

1 Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, (London: Bantam, 2007).

2 Paul Davies, God and the New Physics, (London: J. M. Dent, 1983). Davies ended this book with the proposition that 'science is a surer path to God then religion.'

3 'Beyond E = MC2,' Bernard Haisch, Alfonso Rueda and H. E. Puthoff, The Sciences, Vol. 34, No. 6, (1994), 26–31.

4 David Bohm, Unfolding Meaning, (London: Ark, 1994).

5 Ibid., 91.

6 David Bohm and Basil Hiley, The Undivided Universe, (London: Routledge, 1995), 35.

7 R. G. Jahn, B. J. Dunne, R. D. Nelson, Y. H. Dobyns and G. J. Bradish, 'Correlations of Random Binary Sequences with Pre-Stated Operator Intention: A Review of a 12-Year Program,' Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 11, No. 3, (1997), 345–67. See also: Robert G. Jahn and Brenda J. Dunne, 'The PEAR Proposition,' Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 19, No. 2, (2005), 195–245.

8 David Bohm and Basil Hiley, (1995), 386.

9 Lynne McTaggart, The Field, (London: Harper Collins, 2003), Chapter 3.

10 Fritz-Albert Popp, 'Consciousness as Evolutionary Process based on Coherent States,' International Institute of Biophysics, (2003), http://lifescientists.de/publication/pub2003-04-11.htm.

11 Dean Radin, The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena, (San Francisco: Harper Edge, 1997), 285.
Chapter 5

1 http://www.medterms.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=19760

2 In The Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 21, No. 3, (2007), James Edward Beichler argues for a five-dimensional reality: 'Three Logical Proofs: The Five-dimensional Reality of Space-Time.' While Beichler locates his argument for five dimensions within physics and so does not mention meaning his paper nevertheless has some interesting parallels with my approach. In addition he tells how Einstein finally gave up on the five-dimensional hypothesis as a way of developing a unified theory of everything. He reports that Einstein stipulated in his last publication before he died that the five-dimensional hypothesis would only be tenable if it could be explained why the fifth dimension cannot be detected. Had Einstein known about meaning he would have realized what he and other scientists were calling the fifth dimension represents implicit meaning and this is invisible.

3 Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry, (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 110.
Chapter 6

1 This is the cross of language that the great linguist Ferdinand de Saussure proposed. For a good description of Saussure's cross of language, see Roman Jakobson, Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1978), 100. For a more detailed discussion, see Andrew Lohrey, The Meaning of Consciousness, (Ann Arbor, Michigan University Press, 1997).

2 Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry, (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), Chapter VII.

3 Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics, third edition, (Lakeville, Connecticut: The Institute of General Semantics, 1948).

4 Karen Armstrong, 'Comment and Analysis,' Guardian Weekly, August 19–25, (2005), 13.

5 Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry, 110.
Chapter 7

1 'Millionaire's Mission,' on ABC Australian television, May 2008.

2 Zachary Jones, Brenda Dunne, Elissa Hoeger and Robert John (eds.), Filters and Reflections: Perspectives on Reality, (Princeton NJ: ICRL Press, 2009). 3 John B. Carroll (ed.), Language Thought and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1979), 214.

4 Ibid., 221.

5 Dan Moonhawk Alford, 'The Great Whorf Hypothesis Hoax: Sin, Suffering and Redemption in Academe,' http://www.enformy.com/dma-Chap7.htm.

6 For a fuller description, see John Gray, Al Qaeda and what it Means to be Modern, (London: Faber and Faber, 2007), Chapter 3.
Chapter 8

1 The Bhagavad Gita, Translation and Introduction, Eknath Easwaran, (London:Penguin, 1986). Other translations also refer to the body as a 'field.'

2 Thich Nhat Hanh, Zen Keys, (New York: Anchor Books, 1974), 104.

3 Krishna Das uses this analogy in his DVD: One Life at a Time.

4 Rupert Sheldrake: 'Part I – Mind, Memory, and Archetype Morphic Resonance and the Collective Unconscious,' Psychological Perspectives, Vol. 18, No. 1, Spring (1987), 9–25.

5 The view that the body is not its own cause is reflected by such terms as 'biofield,' 'epiphenomenon of genome' and 'the Biofield Control System.' These are terms used by some biologists to refer to the organizational field of the body. The Biofield Control System (BCS) is said to control development, maintenance reproduction and death of the organism. This field includes the mind and it is said to control all aspects of the organism from behavior to cell activity. The Biological Control system is not, however, based on the order and structure of meaning so there are critical differences between the field contexts of self: Host, body, culture and symbols and the field of the BCS. The theory of the BCS tends to relate only to living organisms while the principles at work in the four contexts of being include non-biological, physical systems as well.

6 See Paramahansa Yogananda, Wine of the Mystics, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, A Spiritual Interpretation, Translated Edward Fitzgerald, (Los Angles: Self-Realization Fellowship, 1994), 31.

7 Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry, (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 178. Barfield's quoted parable comes from The Holy Bible, King James Version, Mark, Chapter 4:

i And he began again to teach by the sea side: and there was gathered unto him a great multitude, so that he entered into a ship, and sat in the sea; and the whole multitude was by the sea on the land.

ii And he taught them many things by parables, and said unto them in his doctrine,

iii Hearken; Behold, there went out a sower to sow:

iv And it came to pass, as he sowed, some fell by the way side, and the fowls of the air came and devoured it up.

v And some fell on stony ground, where it had not much earth; and immediately it sprang up, because it had no depth of earth:

vi But when the sun was up, it was scorched; and because it had no root, it withered away.

vii And some fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up, and choked it, and it yielded no fruit.

viii And other fell on good ground, and did yield fruit that sprang up and increased; and brought forth, some thirty, and some sixty, and some an

ix And he said unto them, He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.

x And when he was alone, they that were about him with the twelve asked of him the parable.

xi And he said unto them, Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables:

xii That seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest at any time they should be converted, and their sins should be forgiven them.

xiii And he said unto them, Know ye not this parable? and how then will ye know all parables?

xiv The sower soweth the word.

8 See for example, Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, (New York: The Free Press, 1969).

9 See: http://cogprints.org/4356/
Chapter 9

1 Edgar Mitchel Interview on Dateline NBC, April 19, 1996.

2 Eugen Herrigel, Zen and the Art of Archery, Translated R. F. C. Hull, (London: Penguin, 2004), 16.

3 The metaphor of sponges that I use to refer to the relationship that physical objects have to the Host is borrowed from the work of Russian astrophysicist, Nikolai Kozyrev. See http://divinecosmos.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=95&Itemid=36

4 Dean Radin, The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena, (San Francisco: Harper Edge, 1997), 270.

5 See for example 'Physicists bid farewell to reality?' at News@Nature. com, April 18, 2007.

6 The symmetry state of implicitness also relates to the question, 'how fast is thought?' Intuitively the question seems wrong. In a paper on this subject the authors Elizabeth Rauscher and Russell Targ concluded that 'the speed of thought is transcendent of any finite velocity.' How could it be otherwise? 'Speed' is a measurement that arises in thought and thought in turn arises out of the implicit meaning of the Host. The question of the speed of thought is therefore deeply entangled with the nature of symmetry potentials. The question therefore could be directed at meaning: 'how fast is implicit meaning?'The answer: 'it does not compute!' Elizabeth A. Rauscher and Russell Targ, 'The Speed of Thought: Investigation of a Complex Space-Time Metric to Describe Psychic Phenomena,' Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 15, No. 3, (2001), 331–54.

7 Paramahansa Yogananda, Wine of the Mystics: The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: A Spiritual Interpretation, (Los Angeles: Self-Realization Fellowship, 1994), 197.

8 Ervin Laszlo, Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything, (Rochester: Inner Traditions, 2004), Chapter 4.

9 Rupert Sheldrake, The Rebirth of Nature, (London: Rider, 1993), 93.
Chapter 10

1 Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry, (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1988).

Chapter 11

1 Roger Penrose, The Emperor's New Mind, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

2 Arthur Koestler, The Roots of Coincidence, (London: Picador, 1974), 19.

3 Dean Radin, Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality, (New York: Paraview Pocket Books, 2006), 7.

4 Robert Stone, The Secret Life of Your Cells, (Atglen: Whitford Press, 1989).

5 See for example, Morphogenic Fields, Rupert Sheldrake, The Rebirth of Nature: New Science and the Revival of Animism, (London: Rider, 1990), 87.

6 Ibid., 89.

7 Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe, Book One, (Berkeley: The Centre for Environmental Structure, 2002), 32.

8 Rupert Sheldrake, Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home, and other unexplained powers of animals, (London: Arrow, 2000).

9 Ibid., 227.

10 Larry Dossey, Healing Beyond the Body: Medicine and the Infinite Reach of the Mind, (Boston: Shambala, 2001), 222.

11 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, (London: Routledge, 2003), 169.

12 Ibid., 165.

13 Rupert Sheldrake, 'Extended Mind, Power, & Prayer: Morphic Resonance and the Collective Unconscious – Part III,' Psychological Perspectives, Vol. 19, No. 1, (Spring 1988), 64-78.

14 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, (2003), 175.

15 This example is taken from Phenomenology of Perception, (2003), 168.

16 Henry W. Mayer, Three Theories of Child Development, (New York: Harper and Row, 1966).

17 Adam Phillips, Winnicott, (London: Fontana, 1988), 68.

18 Noam Chomsky, Language and Responsibility: Based on Conversations with Mitsou Ronat, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), Chapter 4.
Chapter 12

1 J. Laplanche and J.B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, Translated D. Nicholson-Smith, (New York: W.W. Norton, 1973), 206.

2 Jacques Lacan, 'The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire in the Freudian unconscious,' in Écrits: A selection, Translated Alan Sheridan, (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997).

3 W.E.H. Stanner, The Dreaming and Other Essays, (Melbourne: Black Inc, 2009), 57.

4 Ibid., 59.

5 Ibid., 60.

6 Ibid., 64.

7 Karen Armstrong, The History of God: The 4000 Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1994), 123.

8 See Howard W. Fulweiler, 'Here a Captive Heart Busted': Studies in the Sentimental Journey of Modern Literature, (New York: Fordham University Press, 1993).
Chapter 13

1 Materialism is usually understood in philosophy as the doctrine that whatever exists is either matter or entirely dependent on matter for existence. The related term 'realism' denotes the doctrine that physical objects exist independently from being perceived. These views of the world are often contrasted to idealism—the doctrine which maintains that the real is of the nature of thought. While the history of the Positivists is well known the intellectual frame out of which they grew is less well appreciated. This frame was established by the advent of a modern and a highly developed technology and a science based upon a rational scientific method. These two influences produced an intellectual framework that was buttressed by the conventions of viewing the world through the prism of a series of language crimes. These language crimes were taken up and celebrated by the Positivists to the degree that they became the basis for the religion of Positivism, the founder of which was Count Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825). The philosopher John Gray suggests that the Positivists did not aim to merely revolutionize society (they were critical of capitalism), their aim was to found a new religion. John Gray, Al Qaeda and what it Means to be Modern, (London: Faber and Faber, 2007) 30.

Saint-Simon envisaged a religious assembly of 'the twenty-one elect of humanity' which were to be called the Council of Newton. This religious cult soon acquired all the paraphernalia of a church—hymns, alters, priests in their vestments and its own calendar. Gray says that the transformation o Positivism into a religion, after Saint-Simon's death, was completed by Auguste Comte (1798–1857) who had an almost unlimited faith in the power of social engineering. Over the last three hundred years the religion of Positivism came into existence and then vanished. Today the influences of Positivism are not religious but cultural. These influences continue 'to blow' as Hans Kung says: Hans Kung, The Beginning of All Things, Translated John Bowden, (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. , 2007), 96.

2 W. E. H. Stanner, The Dreaming and Other Essays, (Melbourne: Black Inc, 2009), 57.

3 'Heterogeneity without a norm' is a phrase used by Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991).

4 Paul Davies, 'Be warned, this could be the Matrix,' The Sydney Morning Herald, ( July 24, 2004), 11.

5 Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry, (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 93.

6 See http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1153583/Social-websites-harm-childrens-brains-Chilling-warning-parents-neuroscientist.html
Chapter 14

1 Eric Fromm, The Sane Society, (London: Routledge, 2002), 70. 2 D. Goleman, Emotional Intelligence, (New York: Bantam, 1995).

3 This is a quotation comes from Howard Fulweiler, 'Here a Captive Heart Busted': Studies in the Sentimental Journey of Modern Literature, (New York: Fordham University Press, 1993), 9.

4 St. John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul, Translated and edited E. Allison Peers, (New York: Image Books, 1990), 165.

5 Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 10.

6 Ibid., 11.

7 This was said in an interview with Stephen Crittenden on ABC Radio National, on the Religion Report, November 15, 2006.
Chapter 15

1 Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry, (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 143.

2 Ibid., 117.

3 George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, (London: Oxford University Press, 1976), 129.

4 Owen Barfield, (1988), 32.

5 Ibid., 31.

6 Email to author from: Charles Eisenstein, on Monday 05/29/2006, 9:47 PM

7 George Steiner, (1976), 97.

8 Owen Barfield, (1988), 184.

9 For a detailed explanation of dashboard knowledge, see Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning, (Wesleyan Paperback, 1984), 23-24.

10 Frank Mc Lynn, Carl Gustav Jung: A Biography, (London: Black Swan, 1997), 301.
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Acknowledgements

I would like to express sincere appreciation:

To the School of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics at the University of Queensland, where early drafts were written;

To Rob Wall and Lorraine Biggs, for their useful suggestions on early drafts;

To Clinton Swanson who has been a most sympathetic and supportive critic;

To Melanie Godfry-Smith, for her patience, good humor and the cover design;

To Michelle Lovi, for the ease with which she supplied the service of typesetting;

To Cleo, who was such a helpful and astute critic of her father's manuscript; and

To Amanda, whose love has made this enterprise possible and whose editing skills and extraordinary intelligence helped guide the book's gestation and birth.

