73 - Human Understanding  -  Divine Meaningfulness

There is geometry in the humming of the strings; there is music in the spacing of the spheres.

Pythagoras

            The pilot of our being, our mind-brain that extends throughout our body to our whole nervous system, right into the nuclei of each cell, needs a wide scope of understanding and stimulation to reach a state of fulfillment.

            Imagine, it took fifteen billion years of the cataclysmic convulsions in the birth pangs of umpteen cosmic galaxies to fashion the hundred million trillions of atomic particles constituting the fabric of our bodies. It took that amount of time to coordinate them to the point that they may, in their cooperation, offer a support system to the mind of the universe that we call the mind of God customized into what we call our thinking!

            The very structure of our cells and organs and the organization of our body functions illustrate laws of harmonic resonance. It bears the stamp of the thinking of the universe that evolves as its material support systems become more elaborate. Reciprocally, the support system perfects itself as it evolves, just as our brain (and body for that matter) develops latent faculties as our thinking brightens and we exult in our grasp of meaningfulness. Our thinking perfects itself as our brain (and its extension as the nervous system) gets activated. Yes, the nuclei of our body cells are endowed with a degree of pragmatic understanding greatly enhanced by their cooperation.

            In turn, by virtue of our tacit covenant with the universe of which we are a part, the cosmic mind, called the mind of God, delegated to our minds gains vistas, albeit latent in the domain of responsibility assigned to us to ensure the orderliness of that divine sovereignty. By so doing, we foster the mutation of the software of the universe, fluctuating it by our personal incentive. 

For tonight the teeming world gives birth to the world everlasting.

Rumi

            Since the divine mind (or mind of the universe) is the matrix of our mind, it can never be the object of our cognizance. Yet we can invite more of its bounty to percolate as our thinking. To do this, we need to extirpate the mental restrictions we impose upon our thinking by our very notion of ourselves as a fraction of the totality and by the same token as 'other than God'. That is the very principle of the Islamic Shahada:

Thou art not thou: thou art He, without thou; not He entering into thee, nor thou entering into Him, nor thou proceeding forth from Him or Him proceeding forth from thee.

Ibn 'Arabi

            Our limited way of thinking evidences our having failed in our commonplace thinking to make the step in the evolution of human thought landmarked by the holistic paradigm  -  and beyond this even, realizing, that, while the fraction of a hologram functions like the whole hologram, it functions less effectively, but acquires a uniqueness that makes for variety and cooperation in the interest of the whole which would not occur if everything were undifferentiated.

Know whereby you are God and whereby you are not God.

Ibn 'Arabi

            The functioning of our minds is illustrated most pertinently by the DNA. Each cell organizes the fabric of the environment absorbed in its tissue on the model of the blueprint of the universe, which ensures that the cells differentiate to cooperate in the interest of the whole body. Similarly every human psyche is formatted by the software of the cosmos, albeit each psyche customizes the principles governing that software in its own unique way and thus processes the environment differently from its neighbor. Thus the complex structure of our body serves as the support system for that very intelligence configured in the cosmic blueprint, by turning certain genes on and others off. Even so with our minds, although they carry potentially the mind of the universe, they are diversified, thereby restricted by their vantage points and their specializations.

            Karl Pribram showed: the brain functions jointly as a hologram and as a network of circuits  -  may I add; ensuring both the transpersonal and the personal dimensions of our motivations. The more transpersonal, the more the holistic mode of our thinking prevails over our personal opinion. This is what is meant in mysticism by awakening to God consciousness. It is as though one were de-scotch-taping one's personal constraints to one's understanding of meaningfulness, more precisely one's personal interpretation of situations and problems which is exactly what is meant by maya.

            But the exhilarating aspect of the whole marvel of which we are a contributing part is that the spring-head behind its superb alacrity is sheer excitement! The brain needs stimulation; the mind needs the joy of discovering ideas; and the psyche needs ecstasy.

            Dr. Alfred Tomasis, a physiologist, found that our brain requires three thousand million stimuli a day to keep awake. These include of course light and sound, smell, taste and tactile impressions. These sensorial stimuli are translated by the brain as energy pulses stimulating the mitosis of nerve cells. We know that our body cells, particularly our nerve cells absorb light from the environment that catalyses their powerhouse, freeing their electrons from their initial constraint for a split second of spree into a degree of freedom, and that they are picking up and communicating sound messages. Hence the importance of music as fuel for our brain, also for our communication with the physical environment which is nothing less than a communion of light between the light fluoresced by the environmental objects, the sun, the stars; and is of the light thrust by our brain through the optic nerves and retinas into the environment.

            But contemplate now the degree of excellence attained with the extraordinary variety of frequency resonances in the already complex atomic configuration of vocal cords, guts, wood and metals of musical instruments, already reflecting the orderliness of the blueprint of the universe, may be further configured by the mind of God when funneled by the human as in symphonies and choruses of our civilizations! Or when the latticework of the internal fabric of stones and glass and ceramic are assembled into a statue or cathedral. Or the gossamer film of paints which in many ways are of the nature of liquid crystals already so splendid in themselves are blended into a painting!

            Paint, like sound, is a noble expression of the software of the universe and does not need to be fashioned to copy perceived objects like the paintings of old, or like Beethoven's description of a thunderstorm in the 6th Symphony, or Honneger's imitation of a train puffing along. Albeit the form of a flower, or the countenance of a human face, figure at the prow of the evolution of divine thought configured as form and the soul-searchings, the aspirations, the misgiving, the compassion, the wit, erupt in human emotions. These are described for example by Brahms, who dramatizes the mutations incurred by the divine being in the existential condition. The mutations represent a progress in comparison with the sounds of nature in mineral or plant life sometimes depicted in the dehumanized austerity or exuberance of some of our modern music.

            When these media are fashioned to express our creative thinking, they enrich the software of the universe. Our thinking that customizes the divine thinking, having projected itself into matter that already carries the hallmark of thinking at the cosmic level, is recycled into the cosmic thinking. Our minds and emotions delight when carried beyond the trite commonplace by the inspiration of poets, rearranging the divine thinking in unexpected ways! We discover new horizons of meaningfulness evidencing the splendor seeking to transpire through the appearance of things. Our mind-brains feast at the banquet offered by the creative geniuses who have conceived our great civilizations. We are thereby enriched and transformed.

            What of the light that we awaken ourselves (probably as phosphorescence) by our visualizations as has been demonstrated by Dr. Motayama's experiments with meditators in light-proof cells equipped with photoelectric sensors? Can we imagine the delight of composers improvising musical themes emerging from inside as it was projecting an inner mandala in a visible or audible structure? Like a Toccata and Fugue of Bach or a Prelude of Chopin or a Sonata of Brahms! Most all of us have that uncanny ability as we hum randomly, yet it gains incomparably in excellence when cultivated.

According to Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan, as we turn within in meditation, we discover our ability of awakening the sound of the universe, the audiosphere. May I add this sound is written right into the fabric of our body cells. They carry not only the memory of the sonic outbursts accompanying the birth and demise of the nebulae, whose star-dust has coagulated into the atomic fabric of our body cells, but the present resonance of the subatomic structures of our cells that are affected by our psychological attunements. What a miracle is the human skill which translates this ubiquitous symphony of the spheres into music meaningful to humans!

            Further Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan points out the way to arouse the light within that flares like a flame. The ebullient incandescence that burst out of the cataclysmic conflagration of the big bang is stored in the very fabric of our bodies. It is released as phosphorescence whereby we transform the atomic structure of our body cells into light  -  a capacity found in the glow worm and which we also possess, and can be released by dint of the appropriate visualizations.

            It is not just the energy of stimuli which charges the powerhouse of our brains, but the meaningfulness of the universal blueprint conveyed by these stimuli. There are configurations, of the atomic structure of the fabric of the environment and of our very flesh that our minds grasp because they are modeled on the mind of the universe. Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan adds: it is not light or that sound spells awakening, but the vistas that they trigger off in our intelligence. Every 'aha' moment triggers off a peak experience  -  a tidal wave of delight. The spring-head of the whole phantasmagoria that we perceive as the universe, divine nostalgia, spills over into our psychological attunements as we discover the intention behind it all written right into our deep motivations. But this only happens when we reach beyond our limited thinking, limited vantage point, and limited self-image. Imagine: our psyche is garnished with our misassessments of the physical and psychological environment!

            Consider the impact upon the brain cells (and similarly upon the whole body) of our mind's ability to reach beyond its middle-range and of our emotions reaching into the many-splendored shimmering gamuts of cosmic ecstasy! This is precisely what we achieve with our meditation skills, in Samadhi practices, Vipassana, Kabala, the theology of Aquinas, the Sufi dhikr. A major aspect of meditation consists in learning how to think beyond the commonplace syllogism. P. D. Ouspensky announced in Tertium Organum the advent of a super-logic surpassing the simplistic syllogism: Men are mortal; Socrates is a man, ergo, Socrates is mortal.

Our ordinary logic helps us to gauge only the relations existing in the phenomena world. ... We must come to the conclusion that separateness and combination are not opposites in the real world, but exist together and at the same time without contradicting each other.

Ouspensky

What worlds mysterious roll within the vast,

The all-encompassing ocean of the mind!

Rumi
