67 - Ring Out the Old, Ring In the New

            The very turn of the season beckons upon us to turn a chapter in our lives. A change of tack is a precious instant because it is in a condition of unstable equilibrium that the slightest impulse will cause the largest effect - the creative instant. This is where hope has its chance, hence the custom of making New Year resolutions. The only way for your New Year to be Happy is to make it Happy.

            The solstice is a singularity - that it an exceptional conjunction in space and time in the elliptical orbit of our Planet. It marks a special though annually recurrent, transitional configuration in the rapport between our Planet and its environment: the solar system, in which the equator is farthest removed from the sun. Conditions of precarious equilibrium are favorable to change.

            Since the time of Jesus, the inhabitants of the Northern Hemisphere of our Planet have enjoyed a grand-stand look out upon the constellations of our galaxy around Capricorn. Now our perspective is shifting towards Sagittarius. This shift is due to the precession of the equinoxes: the axis of our Planet traces a complete circle around the center of the Earth's ecliptic orbit every 25,800 years. It is at the precise instant of the sunrise at the vernal equinox (around Easter - March 21st) that the precession of the equinoxes is established. (Of course it could be calculated from the winter solstice.)

            A parallel between the zodiacal houses and the advent of new religious outlooks or prophetic messages reveals the influence of astrological constellations and major shifts in history, in the spiritual evolution of humanity. In the prehistory of Egyptian Mythology, the sun rose at the vernal equinox in the zodiacal house of Gemini, hence the cult of Shu (the sky) and Tefnu (the earth), obviously Gemini. In the ancient empire in Memphis, between the years 4380 and 2200, it was the cult of Apis, the bull, (in Asia Mithra). From 2200 till the time of Christ it was the cult of Amon, the Ram, epitomizing Aries. With the advent of Christianity, Pisces, the fish which indeed we find in medieval symbols. As the year 2000 approaches, we are gradually moving into the Aquarian age - a time presaging abundance, the horn of plenty, the many-splendored gift of the bounty we have arrived at in our civilizations which is what we would be enjoying if it were not for our quarrels, crimes and wars. Incidentally, we need to consider that the period of 26,000 years is divisible in 4 decades. This explains the advent of Buddhism 7 centuries before Christ and Islam 7 centuries after Christ.

            These powerful zodiacal influences account for the tremendous shifts in motion in our civilizations, the dramatic political, social, and technological reorganizations, including the spiritual awakening in our time, plagued with the shocking decadence and uncertainty about the fate of our beautiful Planet. Transitional conjunctions favour spectacular progress providing that the inhabitants of the Planet take advantage of these conditions to pledge themselves to join in common action, otherwise it can lead to a catastrophe. Quite apart from the environmental problems, our social problems can only untangle if we discover a spirituality in keeping with our time, freed from beliefs and observances but soaring on the wings of awakening, the discovery of meaningfulness, mutual respect, kindness, world service.

            At the personal level, the change of tack of the Planet on its course at the solstice bids us a unique chance of turning a new leaf by making a pledge. Life keeps relentlessly luring us forward. If we do not honor in ourselves that creative forward thrust of life straining on the lead in ourselves, we will be pushed out of the race and lose our very reason d'etre.

            To extricate ourselves from the stalemate which we may well have maneuvered ourselves into, owing to a faulty strategy in the game of life, or from the rut into which we may have inadvertently stranded ourselves by taking things for granted, we need to rethink our lives. To achieve this, we need to hoist our vantage point from the commonplace narrow range of the immediate environment and look at things in a wider context. This is where some of the skills of meditation can prove helpful. It is somewhat like witnessing how different a familiar landscape looks when flying over it in a helicopter or suspended from a hang-glider. Doing this, we realize that our assessments of our life-situations change with the altitude as it were, and furthermore that they are function of our values which manifest the higher levels of our being - and monitor our motivations. Moreover we realize that our sense of personal inadequacy or our pessimistic judgement in our assessment of a situation were due to our mind's having gotten entrapped in a way of thinking from which we failed to see a way out. Yes, one can get trapped in one's thinking and ascribe the prison to one's fate. The bind is in the mind.

            To escape from this prison takes two things: a flash of insight and resolve. How do we trigger off the flash of insight? We need to first ask ourselves: what if my assessment of my life situations, (or of people around me), upon which I have relied all this time and which I have always taken for granted was wrong? What is more, if this is true, any new assessment we might convince ourselves of at this point stands an equal chance of proving later erroneous. If we therefore forego not only previous assessments, but any attempt at a reassessment, then, faced with the collapse of our opinion, we find ourselves hopelessly groping our way in the dark night of understanding. Bereft of any crutches, a different mode of understanding dawns upon us. Imagine that, walking in pitch dark, suddenly you were able to see the auras of people and that the features of their real countenance would be revealed to you in contrast with the features of their faces.

            It takes courage to let go of all that one has built up over the years without any guarantee that a new light will dawn upon one's horizon. But we find ourselves sometimes confronted with the choice between situations which progress gradually like a bud unfurls, or where things remain at a stand-still or run the chance of reversing into decay, or where nature proceeds by leaps and bounds. There are situations which one cannot change in their outer circumstances, but will change by one's changing oneself or by a new way of handling them. In exceptional cases - perhaps the most meaningful -, there is no slow transition from one perspective to the other, the transit is sudden. Here lies the difference between the moment of time where there is an overlap between past and future and the instant where there is a sudden and irreversible break of continuity.

            These rare conditions called singularities in astro-physics occur in our lives and in our thinking. They may be illustrated by a sunrise or sunset, or solar or lunar eclipse, or the equinoxes or solstices where there is an alignment in space between two luminaries at a given time called a syzygy. Let us bear in mind that the coincidence is only meaningful from our vantage point, therefore relates the objective world to our subjective dimension.

            A particularly rare coincidence between two numbers, illustrated in mathematics by an algorithm, illustrates our mind's ability to grasp coherence of a sudden where two mental constructs seemed previously to be irreconcilable. More generally what we mean by our sense of meaningfulness is our mind's ability to click when it grasps a correspondence between two thoughts which had hitherto appeared unrelated. The grasp of congruence sparks our being with delight because it gives us a sense of thinking in sync with the thinking of the universe and feeling in resonance with the emotion of the cosmos, and hence makes us aware of our holistic connectiveness with the totality which we call God, not just at the physical level, but at all levels.

            At the moment of birth, two worlds meet: all that we have cumulated in our descent through the spheres and that which we have inherited from our ancestors.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

            We are ourselves hybrids, born of the alchemical betrothal between heaven and earth. Moreover we can rebirth ourselves by going through the steps that led us to our present state, altering them willfully and consciously. Here we witness in ourselves the very task we have investigated so far: conjugating in our very personality our celestial and ancestral inheritance so that they actually click.

            C. G. Jung spent much ponderous enquiry upon this paradoxical conjunction between our psyche and the physical world. In paradoxical cases, rather than it be a perception or an event that impacts our psyche and gets processed by our psyche, it is our psyche that triggers off the event. He called it synchronicity. He defines these rare and surprising cases that one would normally explain away as situations which cannot be causally determined as: the simultaneous occurrence of two meaningful but not causally connected events. Yet he still strived to grasp the mystery behind occurrences that could not be connected in a chronological sequence where one occurrence could have triggered off the other; rather they seemed to be causally connected in a network irrespective of the arrow of time.

            The connections of events may in certain circumstances be other than causal and requires another principle of explanation. Then it occurred to him that rare events (like a syzygy or singularity) cannot be governed by the same laws that apply to statistics, for example. Indeed the conjunctions that take place in an instant of time are rare events as compared with the gradual transformations where at each moment, the past overlaps with the future.

            Probability theory is able to predict with uncanny precision the overall outcome of processes made up out of a large number of individual happenings, each in itself is unpredictable.

Arthur Koestler

            Of course granted is that our minds can affect our body functions:

           You see the deep changes of meaning is a change in the deep material structure of the brain; we already know that certain meanings can greatly disturb the brain, but other meanings may organize it in a new way.

David Bohm

            But how does a grasp of meaning affect the outer physical world? (Incidentally this is what it meant by psycho-kinesis). After years of painstaking research in psycho-kinesis, Dr. J. B. Rhine arrived at conclusions that throw some light on the problem. For Rhine space and time are dependant upon psychic conditions and therefore can be reduced to almost a vanishing point

            A parallel with David Bohm is called for here, but there is still a mental pole at every level of matter..and eventually if you go to infinite depths of matter, we may reach something very close to what you reach in the depth of the mind.

            We are touching upon a most important point: space-time is only meaningful regarding physical reality. Indeed for the psyche, space is only meaningful where one is reminiscing physical occurrences or the mind functions creatively in the act of imagination. Yoga distinguishes where the mind adopts as it were the form of that which is perceived or reminisced (Nirvetarka), from the state where the mind absorbs the quintessence of the perceived irrespective of form (Nirvecara), and at some point the mind looses notions of space altogether (Asmita) and a further point at which the mind looses the sense of time (Asamprajnata Samadhi). For Speiser, at a certain level of our thinking, our psyche touches upon a level prior to causality.

            It is an initial state which is not governed by mechanistic law, but is the pre-conditioning of law, the chance substrate upon which law is built.

Andreas Speiser

            Compare with Bohm:

            The mind has two-dimensional and three-dimensional modes of operation. It may be able to operate directly in the depths of the implicate order where this timeless state is the primary actuality. Then we could see the ordinary actuality as a secondary structure.

            Indeed our commonplace concepts of causality are based upon our concept of time as being uni-dimensional: the event that we infer having been causated by another one, followed it in a sequential order. In our ordinary thinking, we also assume that an event causes another if they are related in space either by electro-magnetic forces that extend in space or gravity that also extends in space (including the strong and weak forces between sub-atomic particles) . But modern physics questions the mechanistic theories of their predecessors, replacing them with acausal, non-local laws.

            If everything in the cosmos is connected with everything else as in the holistic paradigm, then location in space is irrelevant in the determination of events: it is simply easier for our minds to see the connection between the motion of a billiard ball and that of the one it has hit, then to see how the surge of a wave we think is in the Pacific could influence that of a wave which we think is in the English channel. Yet, as Dr. David Bohm points out, a wave in the ocean is not caused by the previous one, but each wave is introjected back into the whole ocean and it is the whole ocean that projects itself in the next wave. A form emerges or is creatively projected from the whole, then it influences the whole, or is injected back into it; in the implicate order, it resonates with similar forms and then is projected back into the explicate order.

            However, long before the holistic paradigm envisioned by General Smuts revolutionized science, the Sufis saw the insufficiency in reducing causality to the dimension of time which we call the process of becoming. One needs to account for at least another dimension of time moving from transcendence to transiency and vice-versa.

            The Sufi Shihabuddin Suhrawardhi felt that beyond the sidereal empyrean, other universes would be found in a hierarchical sequence of spheres of light of increasing subtlety . The higher ones precede the lower ones and enjoy a hierarchically higher value (precellence) and consequently sovereignty (prevalence); the lower ones proceed from the higher ones in a causal order in a different time order that the commonplace arrow of time - a kind of exponential order. This so called vertical hierarchy which he refers to as the 'world of mothers' then splits up in a lateral order where equality takes over from dominance. Here we find the prototypes of the species. It is at this level that our ordinary notions of the process of time take effect.

            But it is in the conjunction between a physical phenomenon and a spontaneous thought that was not triggered off by an actual occurrence that our delight reaches a degree of intensity such that it could spark our creative faculties - whether of a work of art or of our personality. One could define creativity as the act of exploring unchartered regions of the mind while grasping a correspondence between the mental constructs thus gleaned and a form or configurations or scenarios in the fabric of matter. Creativity is a congruent conjunction between the timeless and the transient, the heavenly and the earthly.

            We could say that our action toward the whole universe is a result of what it means to us . . . In the long run only those meanings that allow changes that tend to bring about accord between us and the rest of the universe will be possible.

David Bohm

            We shall sooner or later have to give up many of our old habits of thought and adopt new ones: habits that are better adapted to life in a world that is living in the presence of the past - and is also living in the presence of the future, and open to continuing creation.

Rupert Sheldrake

Books relating to the subjects:

Bohm, David, Unfolding Meaning, Ark 1985
Burckhardt, Titus, Mystical Astrology according to Ibn 'Arabi, Beshara, 1950
Corbin, Henri, Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth, Bollingen Series, Princeton Un., 1977
Corbin, Henri, Oeuvres Philosophiques et Mystiques de Shihabuddin Yahya Sohrawardi, '52
Costa de Beauregard, La seconde dimesnion du Temps. Seuil.
Gribbin, In Search of Shrodinger's Cat, Bantam, 1984
Grof, Stanislov, Beyond the Brain, State University of New York Press
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan, The Soul Whence and Whither, Cf Complete Works
Hujwiri, Kashf al Mahjub, tr.R.A.Nicholson, Gibb Memorial, Luzac, 1911
Jung, C.G., Synchronicity, Bollingen Series, XX, Princeton University, 1973
Koestler, Arthur, The Roots of Coincidence, Vintage Books, Ny.,1973
Mircea, Eleade, Yoga, Immortality and Freedom, Bollingen, Princeton Un. 1969
Penrose, Roger, The Emperor's New Mind, Oxford University Press, 1989
Prigogine, Ilya, From Being to Becoming, 1980
Schwaller de Lubicz, Le Roi dans la theocracie Pharaonique, Champs,Flammarion, 1961
Sheldrake, Rupert, The Presence of the Past, Times Books, (Random House) 1988.
Speiser, Andreas, Uber die Freiheit
Weber, Renee, Dialogues with Mystics and Scientists, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986
