The Points of Existence - On Relativity and Mysticism
On the points of existence.
This writing is actually from the original version of The Zero Principle, which was meant to be the primary book on mysticism from me. I later decided to expand on it because let’s face it, I did not know what I was talking about, as you will see. This is not to be taken seriously, but as entertainment. It’s only trying to express, not argue. Anyway, grab a beverage and enjoy, as this is a long one.
The point is not the point. It is beyond the point. The point is to point to it. In a way, the points of existence are the inevitable result of the Great Divide. Relativity manifests as soon as you create a circle to move around.
The circle is a sphere of action in which special cases of the Undivided play their parts. Were it not for this, nothing would happen. A reflectible consequence is that of the Universal Soul, or Alaya. The germ has the potential of “popping out”. The Mundane Egg, or Brahmanda, is the state without which division is impossible.
Hiranyagarbha is the state from which the cosmos followed. There is another name for it: the Dormant Womb. Ergo, space is feminine. Space is the pointless point, or the point at which all points converge. It is the ultimate being. The existence beyond which there is no second.
The thought that gave birth to the Egg, which gave birth to the cosmos, is also without a second. This means that the Eternal Self remains intact. The space in which all the points act is the flowing and ebbing of the One Great Energy, which “powers” their vitality. The Mediator carries content of information from the One into the Many. However, this is a one-way line of communication.
The Beginnings
What followed the Thought was expansion. It is entirely a matter of who you ask that determines what happened in the beginning of the universe. There are multiple theories of the birth of the cosmos, even in the scientific world. On the one hand, there is the popular Big Bang theory. I do not subscribe to this theory in the sense that the universe resulted from nothing but extreme heat and density, which then blew outward and expanded.
Numerous people will say that it came out of literal nothingness. Which is an absurd concept on the face. It explains precisely nothing, pun intended. That something can come out of nothing is a contradictory point to me. How on fuck would that make any sense? It would not happen. So, my theory of the birth of the universe is that it came out of a cow’s behind. Okay, maybe not.
There are various theories or models about the universe in different religious traditions, such as the “dramatic model” of Hinduism or the “organic model” of Taoism, to use Watts’s terms for them. However, the “machine model” of the West is the most popular one. Which explains everything, including human beings, in terms of mechanisms. No wonder we feel out of touch with nature in the grand scheme of things, or mere empty shells.
They are important to understand why we feel the way we do, as in our attitude toward the basic sensations of the world. For the time being, I can recount all three.
In the machine theory of the cosmos, a supreme architect or technician builds or makes the world. The organic theory is one where the processes of nature are in complete harmony with each other and happen spontaneously. But there is nothing or nobody to command them. The dramatic theory is that the cosmos is a colossal “play” of the godhead, which they call Brahman.
We can synthesize all these models of the cosmos into a coherent theory of how things came to be, or how they are. Or, at least that is what I will try to do later. What enables this is the multiple perspectives theory, which appears in this article.
The Shape of Things
What we will take up next is the shape, or rather, the structure of existence. What things are. This could be a long discourse, depending on the school of philosophy. Early Greeks explained atoms, from the Greek - atomos -, so which cannot be cut any more. The smallest possible “part” of a thing. And they called these parts or elements the Platonic solids.
Little pyramids composed the atoms of fire, cubes comprised earth, balls comprised water, and little wormy cones made up air. Of course, currently we observe that none of them are what atoms look like. But they had some notions about them in the infancy of physics.
Later, they added aether, which had the function of explaining the “hidden” aspects of matter. Only even that turned out to be something else entirely. Yes, there are “hidden variables” in nature, as David Bohm called them, and they carry information in ways that we cannot even imagine without computers or pencils and paper.
However, to claim that we know what matter is made of is to invoke spooks, to my mind. Because it contains nothing. The keyword is “made”. There is nobody who commanded matter or molded it. However, we grow up in a culture that considers such exotic things as matter to be made of something else.
Wherever you describe any thing or event, reduce it to a mathematical equation. That is all anything will ever be. Structure will be the only “matter” in nature. We cannot describe matter except in terms of structure or mathematics. This is the reason we have a division between the “structuralists” and “materialists”. That they cannot quite decide what is matter.
We have a way of “shoving” things to fit models. This is preeminently true of physics, where we have countless theories in every conceivable way to explain the shape of things. Where people are fighting over their theories. Sure, the general attitude is that there is no winning or losing in science. Yeah, right…You want to bet on that? People are always trying to one-up each other, especially in the academic world.
Hence, which theory will win in the end is, I think, beside the point. I think it will be a perpetual battlefield for the reason I stated. That matter will not be of any importance, and never will be. When you ask what makes up a thing, you are always attempting to defocus the microscope because you want something solid.
Existence does not allow for a “goop” from which things organize. People always describe them—and note this term—as comprising numbers and language. Yes, you can hit your head on the table, and it will hurt like hell. So, it is definitely there, in some form. But form, or structure, is not a solid, stationary thing.
The reason we can even bang our heads on the table is because the matter in it is moving too fast for us to put our heads through it. It is pulsating so rapidly that it will repel our head. Atoms are mostly space. What keeps anything, like the pattern of our bodies, from scattering to the four winds is profoundly weird to me.
Yes, the answer is quantum electrodynamics, or QED, among other phenomena. But it tucks beneath it so many strange aspects, that it prompted Frank Wilczek in an interview, the man responsible for the theory of protons, to say that it, it being quarks and “stuff” of that kind, to have almost mystical properties.
The Relationship of Things
What is then the relationship that is found between these properties or parts of atoms? I am not going to even go there. Into the science of it. Instead, I will try to describe my idea of how events interact with each other in a very overhead way, and this will become explicit in the Polarity chapter, where I try to show this interaction through “eventuation”.
For now, let us consider the relationship between not atoms, but events. Incidentally, what is the difference between a thing and an event? A thing is never in a stationary state. It is always in motion. Maybe instead of describing the processes of nature as things, we should call them events. However, that is my opinion.
Because an event is something that is in a relationship with other events. No event exists in isolation. This idea is supported by various concepts found in traditions such as the “Big Three,” as I call them. Those are Taoism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. They state that if you isolate an event from its relationship to other events, or the field in which the event is happening, the properties of said event change and collapse. Another way of putting it is that nothing exists independently from the rest, which is the idea of “interdependence”.
Buddhists define this interdependence of all events as nothing existing apart from its context or conditions. They mutually appear. Their connection is reciprocal. They are all up in each other’s pants. However, we have a way of disconnecting events from each other. The relationships we make come down to the faculty of our thinking, albeit temporary.
We come to feel that they exist independently from each other. Which eventually leads to emotional backlashing. So, events do not exist independently of each other. After all, we are living in a single universe. To me, even abstractly, the unrelatedness of events in this single universe makes no sense.
In fact, as far as I understand quantum theory, it is trying to unify physics. That means that it is seeking a way to “connect the dots”. In a sense, every theory is always designed with that goal in mind. I will explain how this all fits together in a moment.
Reflections on Things
To switch a bit to something else entirely, when we are reflecting, we are making a comparison between something that has already happened. The very term “reflection” suggests that something is being bounced back. We usually engage in self-reflection. To the degree that we reflect on something, or connect dots in our minds, to that degree we find new points. This prompts a question in my mind.
Can we reflect on anything we can think about, or is there a kind of “meta-reflecting” going on, when, for example, we meditate or take substances What I mean is, the content of, let us say an LSD trip is such, that you can think about all of it as being the reflections of the deeper level of our mind. If that is so, I wonder this same point about the mystical vision.
If it reflects the content of bliss, or our true identity, then we might just have to grant one of the weirdest notions I have ever had. Which is the following. Since the content of the perfect state is pure love and realizing your true identity, would it mean that you are “regurgitating” the memory of it in your mind?
Because I once realized, while discussing a friend’s LSD trip, that the “link” between the ego and his presence within the mystical experience has to be bound on some level. Otherwise, there would be nothing to pull them back to their ordinary consciousness from it. So, what if you are only remembering what the perfect state was before there was anything else? This is a terrifying idea.
Because it would mean that the “freedom” of the mystic is, in a sense, complete bliss. Because it has no present moment. It would be like having a wonderful dream, which you barely remember. Which is what kind of happens because the people who claim to get it “lose” most of the memory of it.
Sorry, I am just reflecting or thinking out loud all kinds of nonsense. I think the mystical vision has to be rooted in the present moment, otherwise it would make no sense when they say that it is the moment which counts, and where one can realize their true “Buddha-nature”, which is another term for enlightenment. However, this idea of reflecting on the content of anything, whether it is memories or feelings, is the activity where we can often get a new perspective on things.
Multiple Perspectives Theory
Here, we get to the meat of the article: the Multiple Perspectives point of view. It states that no single point of view, or position, can survive on its own. It always requires context. As an example, let us take philosophy.
For the sake of argument, let us say that you take the view that there is a radical distinction between good and evil. And you went around advocating that the goodness in people must win, always, and evil must be abolished completely. Then, one day, you discovered a text on a tradition and its principles, which stated that the evil in people is not always as evil as it seems.
That their particular actions are sometimes a complicated series of motives and events that lead to them making an error in judgment. That it depended on all kinds of factors and conditions, and that, from a certain point of view, was not evil at all in the end. Evil seemed now to you to be extremely relative. It depends on so many things. So, the distinction between good and evil is not that radical after all. It changes your views.
The point of this is to show that if we take a single line of sight, very often it leads to myopia and a “fixed” view, which prevents us from seeing the context or relationship to other views. You always need multiple lines of sight, so as to overcome this myopia. This is true of the spiritual domain. If you go into it thinking that you are going to gain something spiritually, and whatever it is, a perfect state of mind or what have you, and eliminate the negative things, you are stuck at an extreme.
So, the Multi-Perspective view is a reminder that maybe, just maybe, this perfection is not as perfect as you think, at least from this perspective. Of course, it is not so bleak as it sounds. Nevertheless, failing to see things from multiple perspectives, is, I think, obvious that it keeps us from seeing the bigger picture. The solution to one problem might create a whole new set of problems if we are not aware of the subtle relationships of it to other things.
Connecting The Dots
Earlier, I made the remark that all theories are trying to connect dots, in a way, by offering solutions to problems. They are trying to unify often things that seem incompatible. For example, socionics, as a sort of psychological framework, tries to unify the different aspects of human cognitive functions, based originally on Carl Jung’s work, to form a unified theory based on people’s personality types.
Not necessarily a completely unified theory, but a more coherent and complete than, let us say, the Meyer-Briggs model. In this way, they are both connecting the dots in psychology. It is not a scientific theory, but pseudoscience. So, I would advise people against taking them too seriously. Which is the reason I also advise against taking this writing seriously, because it is anything but scientific. I would rather describe this as pseudo-mystical woo-woo.
The connecting of the dots is what we do with our minds all the time. Reflecting upon memories, or the content of one’s mind means that you are drawing connections between several points. This is played off on ALL levels of existence. All information seeks to organize itself. I call that self-organization, which is a property of eventuation, [my own concept] as a whole. The more dots we connect, the more unified the thing becomes. There are exceptions, of course.
This connecting does not come without its downsides. Often, we get into a tricky situation, taking something simple as making new human contacts. Because it creates new situations, new dots to connect, and so on. And the more the thing sometimes appears connected, the more it will damage us when we lose that connection.
Relativity Means Family
Making connections, such as human relationships, is one aspect of it. The consequence will be that, eventually, we will lose our family and friends. And this is one of the most awful forms of disconnecting when it comes to living. But I never felt like this “disconnection”, was a bad thing necessarily. I mean, naturally, I will mourn and be devastated if I lose my loved ones. However, death, as we shall see later, is not “the end” to anything.
It only seems that way because we are, viewing it from inside the cup in which the coffee is pouring. As if that made any fucking sense. I will show that what appears as the disappearance of patterns is a cycle. But not to deviate from the topic at hand, this “relatives view” of the cosmos is one in which we take usually due consideration as to the relationships that we form, at least on some level.
Making friends is always that happens relatively quickly and spontaneously. So is falling in love, in particular. There is simply no stopping it when it hits you like a raging bull. The more we get these spontaneous “pops” of relations, the more meaningful our life becomes the same time. And this is another thing. That things being meaningful can be directly correlated to the amount of “connectedness” that we experience. This is true even when people, for example, join movements. They feel like it gives their life meaning.
Connecting to one’s self, such as going to psychotherapy, also gives people a tremendous sense meaning. Because it opens up new domains of dots to be connected. The more dots we have to connect, the more we feel like there is a purpose to all of this. It fits into a “plan”. Not God’s plan, mind you, but your plan. Even if it is subconscious. We feel like we have a purpose in moments where the individual will feel “together” with their environment. But I am using the word purpose in a special sense. I know a lot of philosopher types would scoff at me for discussing meaning and purpose in this way.
It is not wrong, however to make the distinction that being meaningful, are what you do. It is the present moment that makes them so, not any abstract ideas. The sphere of one’s influence, coupled with the connectedness or the relationship of the individual to their surroundings, is the sense in which I am using the word “meaningful”.
The Center Which is Everywhere
There is also a peculiar point of view which can be designated by the sphere or perspective of the individual, called the “center which is everywhere, but whose circumference is nowhere,” to draw the expression from Voltaire. Everybody is at the center.
When you look out at the world, you can see 360 degrees all around. And you are viewing it all from the center. Because, from your standpoint, it feels like you are in the middle of everything. All the points in this sphere of experience, or circle of action, are within the oval of your immediate existence. Every center, according to Watts, has this sphere of experience. That which is above has to be below.
He made the remark that all sentient beings, no matter whether it is a fruit fly on one end or a planet on the other, have a “hierarchy of beings” above and below them. And the sphere of experience in this context is the level of awareness within them.
You see, he regarded all forms of life, whether organic or inorganic, as having self-awareness or consciousness to some extent. His attitude to it all was that all minerals are a rudimentary form of it, whereas most scientists would say, in comparison, that consciousness is a highly “complexificated” form of minerals, to borrow a word from Pierre Teilhard. It all depends on one’s outlook.
Instead of shoving life down, you lift it up by saying, woo-hoo! Instead of, oh well, it is nothing but a bunch of idiotic matter which does not have any resonance of being within it, you say wow-wee, is this not amazing or what?! And there is something so right, in this way of feeling. It warms my fuzzy little bum.
Pointing to Things
Speaking of bums, pointing to things can also be a point. I take up certain concepts so I can point to what underlies them, as an example. We point to things because we find them interesting or noteworthy. There are different pointing to things. There is first the little child pointing to something vague with its finger. Then, there is something you can point out during a discussion. Then there is a third kind, called pointing to reality.
The first kind is peculiar because it brings to my mind how we are systematically taught to ignore the unimportant things as kids, and told which things are important. This comes from our parents foremost, and second, from our peer group and teachers.
The second can be highly useful in all human communication. When you want to draw interest to a new topic, or any item that can be considered, you “point it out”. That keeps the conversation moving, always to something new.
The last one is what this article is particularly preoccupied with. It tries to point to the underlying identity of yourself and the cosmos. This is made extremely difficult for one reason. And that reason is words. They have a habit of dividing reality into at least two levels. One, the translation of anything to consciously analyzable data, and two, the interpretation made by the receiving party regarding said data.
The End Point
If there is a point to this article, it is that all points depend on their contexts. You would not know what you meant by a thing unless it was contrasted with a background. You can think of this literally or in several ways. One way being that any event in the natural universe will never be capable of existing in isolation. Scientists have surely tried to do that for hundreds of years. But they figured it out a long time ago that as soon as you isolate something, or apparently isolate it, you change the properties of the experiment.
This was made clear by the infamous Double-Slit experiment, where the observation of the particles changed the behavior of the particles. The act of observation alters the thing being observed. Nothing’s existence, or “thingness,” is independent. This, if anything, is one of the core messages of Buddhism and Taoism. Nothing has a self-essence, which would magically make the thing put actions forward by itself.
This is rather strange. Is the universe not one such entity? I mean, it certainly seems to do its thing and have motion within it. If no single event puts any processes forward by itself, how could have the Big Bang happened in the first place? It is all very puzzling to me. And that is the point of existence.
L.
