Tag Archives: meaning

Weaving Candyfloss

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It seems to me what we call “me” – our ego – is spun up as we develop from a foetus. Something like candyfloss at the fun fair where a stick is held within a spinning sugar stranding machine so that this wonderful pink confection arises seemingly from nowhere. I remember the mixture of awe and anticipation as a child as it magically appeared from nowhere.

If that’s a helpful image, then what is the stick from which our ego is spun? In a material sense of course it is our genes and the physical bodies of our parents. The sugar that adheres is our bodily experience. Our ego is a confection of embodiment. Our particularly experienced ego, our very selves in this life are the latest manifestation of emergence that has been unfolding since the Big Bang and the accretion of the earth and moon 4.6 billion years ago and the emergence of life 3.7 billion years ago. Life evolving through single cells and dinosaurs to humans. We are just the latest, and not the last, expression of life. What though is the point of our ego, It will die. What trace will be left, and for what purpose? This candyfloss will re-merge with all that is as our individual body fades. Why have this sweet separated space in which we become?

Carl Sagan said “ we are the way the cosmos gets to know itself”.

And that knowing is through relationship with other parts of the embodied universe. In that way something new emerges. Something like fabric created from weft and warp of individual fibres – each in turn spun from plaited ropes of our individualities.

Maybe a way then to think about this is imagining our individual candyfloss combined into a rope or plait with others?

Sitting by the Well

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Marion Woodman, a Canadian Jungian Analyst, was a source of deep and accessible wisdom. She recorded a series of talks as “Sitting by the Well”. These are compelling listening. They offer entrancing insights into the wisdom to be gained by listening to and through our body.

“The body has a wisdom of its own. However, slowly and circuitously that wisdom manifests, once it is experienced it is a foundation, a basis of knowing that gives confidence to the ego. To reach its wisdom requires absolute concentration: dropping the mind into the body, breathing into whatever is ready to be 
released, and allowing the process of expression until the negative dammed up energy is out, making room for the positive energy, genuine Light, to flood in” Marion Woodman

https://videopress.com/v/QdvIjsjg?resizeToParent=true&cover=true&preloadContent=metadata&useAverageColor=true

She points out that the word – matter – shares a common root with – mater ; which of course means mother. In the years before her death in 2017 she talked technological evolution as matter itself coming to consciousness. This echos the work in the 1950’s by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin for instance within the “Phenomenon of Man”.

”Matter is spirit moving slowly enough to be seen”. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Others also focus on embodiment as the intersection of spirit and world – for instance David Bohm, TS Eliot and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. What distinguishes Marion Woodman is that in her talks and writing she grounds this into easily understood and practical steps.

I really recommend anyone to listen to Sitting by the Well, . Most audible book services offer a free trial period, within which you can hear them…

Self and Reincarnation

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I understand that the “illusion of self” is a central tenet of Buddhism? It seems to me that this (the self) is an appearance of stability and boundary that arises out of continuous flow. This is borrowed directly from David Bohm ( “Wholeness and the Implicate Order”). John Dewey put it like this ;“The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action” .

Why then, and on what basis do Buddhists conceive of re-incarnation. What is being re-incarnated? No soul, no self. What then keeps coming back? This seems to me to be a fundamental inconsistency which arises out of focus on boundary rather than wholeness.

Surely, if self is an illusion – then this is a release from self, itself?! Indeed a release from death. What is not there in the first place cannot presumably cease thereafter?

Teilhard de Chardin would have it that all of matter is evolving toward consciousness. Separately he has it that there will be an “Omega Point” where each realises that we are all-in-all to each other – and that all energy is Love and God.

In that case surely our “self” is an illusion. We are already part of what Martin Buber would call the “eternal Thou”. We only have to realise it. Put another way, for Buber our “I” does not exist except in relation to “Thou” – with a reality of “I-Thou” that opens us to our relationship with the “eternal Thou” (I think I have that right?). In that case our “self” doesn’t exist. Indeed ignoring the “Thou” only gets you to a kind of Freudian thinking – “I-It” materialism –  the self-reflective dead end of narcissism.

So. I am attracted to Buddhism, but don’t buy their take on reincarnation; or at least I don’t understand it. More work to be done!

The mystic number 2

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The first question for me is this. “Is there meaning?” This is of course just a way of phrasing – “Why?”, “Is there purpose at all?”. Surely, this underlies all of living for each of us. Sometimes we confront it, sometimes avoid it – but it’s always there. Since we are INSIDE existence, and have no rational external reference point, there can be no rational answer. Personally though, it seems obvious to me that the answer is yes; but that is in the end just an article of faith ( although underpinned by set of extraordinary “coincidences” in physics that make life possible).

Let then take the existence of meaning as a truth. Where does it lie?

It seems to me that purpose isn’t to be found in “self” – our obsession since Freud. At least not in a physical self. My body at death will dissolve and the molecules will be taken up into infinite new forms, just as the body I currently inhabit is made up of atoms that have been part of infinite others – including all of those I have known – my mother, father, brothers, wife etc. (“ the dust inbreathed was a house, the wall the wainscot and the mouse”(Eliot)

I don’t believe that either that meaning lies solely within the material world. In fact the more that science uncovers of the “how” of quantum mechanics – the less concrete materiality really appears ..

It seems to me that the frantic search for meaning within things – dialectic materialism – is a dead end or distraction. On the other hand the material world must surely be a part of meaning. But part of what?

Part of a whole”. All is one. Indeed that is what “universe” means. One thing. Another way of looking at it could be that meaning is in process – the flow of matter and energy. Perhaps – “the whole flow of energy and matter”. How though do we break that down to something we can get our arms around or understand?

Maybe another way of looking at it is that material is part as in partnered with.. (mind? Spirit? Antimatter?)

That, for me, is where Martin Buber and David Bohm come in. They each talk about meaning lie within “relation” or “dialogue”. What lies “between”. Buber’s amazing semi-poetic meditation – I and Thou – (Ich und Du) – has been transformative for me. I would encourage everyone to read at least the first 2 pages, where he defines the “primary words” as I-It and I-Thou – as opposed to I, Thou, or It alone.

I therefore have two building blocks in my search. First. There is meaning. Second. The place to look for it is relationship.

And that’s where number arises for me..

My daughter, as a teenager told me she thought that an incredibly important concept was “boundary”, and I’ve been assimilating that ever since. Without boundary nothing can be known. You NEED the “other” to understand yourself.

I wrote this some years ago .

“From zero to hero, the world is born with the appearance of 1. The archetypal boundary is right there in the change from nothing to all. But, one is one and all alone and ever more shall be so. From 1 to 2, consciousness is possible. Granularity and separation. We can understand existence because we have edge. A within and without. Quantum mechanics shows that everything exists only as a cloud of possibility – until observed. It is the act of knowing that crystallises out reality from potential. Deliberately to mix language – it is witness that causes wavefunction collapse. It is consciousness that creates reality, and that is only possible when edge is born with the advent of the number 2. Duality appears to be a fundamental property of existence. Energy is the flip side of matter (e=mc2), everything is wave and particle simultaneously. Yin is nothing without Yang. Ich and Du embrace and the world unfolds.”

That is why – for me – the “mystic number” is 2. With that comes a consciousness of existence and the possibility of relation and dialogue which Buber and Bohm so eloquently place at the core of meaning.

I conclude then. There is meaning. It lies in relation, and boundary is key to that. Hence the importance of the number. 2

The Wolff in Buber’s Forest

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Milo Wolff proposes that all “matter” in the universe is in fact made up of a mesh of scalar waves – whose nodes are points of convergence of waves. (Do I have that right Tim?). Read more at

http://www.quantummatter.com/beyond-point-particle/

If so, then all is connected. We all perceive all together instantaneously.

In my last blog I referred to a passage by Martin Buber in which he cites reality in relation to a tree. I complete that passage – because it seems especially to speak to our potential perception of this..

 I consider a tree.

I can look on it as a picture: stiff column in a shock of light, or splash of green shot with the delicate blue and silver of the background.

I can perceive it as movement: flowing veins on clinging, pressing pith, suck of the roots, breathing of the leaves, ceaseless commerce with earth and air – and the obscure growth itself.

I can classify it in a species and study it as a type in its structure and mode of life.

I can subdue its actual presence and form so sternly that I recognise it only as an expression of law – of the laws in accordance with which a constant opposition of forces is continually adjusted, or of those in accordance with which the component substances mingle and separate.

I can dissipate it and perpetuate it in number, in pure numerical relation.

In all this the tree remains my object, occupies space and time, and has its nature and constitution.

It can, however, also come about, if I have both will and grace, that in considering the tree I become bound up in relation to it. The tree is now no longer IT. I have been seized by the power of exclusiveness.

To effect this it is not necessary for me to give up any of the ways I consider the tree. There is nothing from which I would have to turn my eyes away in order to see, and no knowledge I would have to forget. Rather is everything, picture and movement, species and type, law and number indivisibly united in this event.

Everything belonging to the tree is in this: its form and structure, its colours and chemical composition,its intercourse with the elements and with the starts, are all present in a single whole.

The tree is no impression, no play of my imagination, FL;#no value depending on my mood; but is bodied over against me and has to do with me, as I with it – only in a different way.

Let no attempt be made to sap the strength from the meaning of the relation: relation is mutual.

The tree will have a consciousness then, similar to our own? Of that I have no experience. But do you wish, through seeming to succeed in it with your self, once again to disintegrate that which cannot be disintegrated? I encounter no soul or dryad of the tree, but the tree itself.

 

 

Seeing the forest or the tree?

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Is a forest properly represented by each of the trees that comprise it? On the other hand, can the forest be comprehended without experiencing the trees that together constitute it?

The first verse of Dante’s Comedy reads – in translation..

“Midway upon the journey of our life

I found myself within a forest dark

For the straightforward pathway had been lost”

 

I don’t speak Italian, but the cadence of language matters I believe. If you read aloud the original, even without understanding, you get a musical sense of the meaning..

“Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

mi ritrovai per una selva oscure

che’ la diritta via era smarrita”

A part, possibly the majority, of the meaning has been lost in the translation. But for those who don’t read Italian – you need that translation to understand the intellectual sense.

It happens that I have first hand experience, not just of Dante’s mid-life crisis, but of different understanding through language. My family moved to Germany in 1958 when I was tiny. I learned German at kindergarten, and moved back to England when I was 4 years old. Now I can’t understand the books I read or wrote as a 3 year old. I don’t speak or understand German “intellectually”. However strangely I do “get” the meaning of much of German that is spoken even though I don’t have the vocabulary. I know this because much of my working life has dealt with German companies. I suppose I am understanding the language as a 3 year old would. I understand, but emotionally, not rationally.

Which leads me, circuitously, to my point. An idea, person, place – anything and everything – can be understood on many levels and in many ways. The meaning does not lie wholly, or even mainly, in the intellectual rational plane.

We need to be intensely careful of judgement. Very often we do not understand that which we judge, but instead project out our own concerns and meanings to clothe the outward idea or person – and then utter condemnation or approval.

Returning to the theme of trees. Here is a stanza from Buber’s Ich und Du…

 

“I consider a tree.

I can look on it as a picture: stiff column in a shock of light, or splash of green shot with the delicate blue and silver of the background.

I can perceive it as movement: flowing veins on clinging, pressing pith, suck of the roots, breathing of the leaves, ceaseless commerce with earth and air – and the obscure growth itself.

I can classify it in a species and study it as a type in its structure and mode of life.

I can subdue its actual presence and form so sternly that I recognise it only as an expression of law – of the laws in accordance with which a constant opposition of forces is continually adjusted, or of those in accordance with which the component substances mingle and separate.

I can dissipate it and perpetuate it in number, in pure numerical relation.

In all this the tree remains my object, occupies space and time, and has its nature and constitution.

It can, however, also come about, if I have both will and grace, that in considering the tree I become bound up in relation to it. The tree is now no longer IT. I have been seized by the power of exclusiveness.”