Eugene I. wrote: ↑Sun May 08, 2022 3:54 pm
This is a very good question, Cleric, and I do not know the answer, but it's one of the questions on my "to find out list" once I get out the body.
This has been gone through many times but it's precisely this tendency to wait for death in order to find the supposed truth there, which supports the duality of non-duality and the pseudo veil (see my
last post). This is like NASA scientist deciding to first launch the rocket and only then begin figuring out the orbit. But we know that the place, time, launch path are all critical for a successful rendezvous with the ISS, for example. If we have negligently launched into polar orbit, changing that into equatorial while in space, would require impossible amounts of fuel. Similarly we shouldn't underestimate our Earthly state because if we neglect to develop our spiritual organs now, we'll be launched after death in a crippled orbit.
Eugene I. wrote: ↑Sun May 08, 2022 3:54 pm
That's why I used to keep asking you how is that the phenomena that we experience always follow the constraint of the Schrodinger equation? What is the nature of this constraint mechanism, how exactly does is work, where did it originate from? We can ask the same question about any other constraints, for example the one you mentioned about four hands.
I've wrote an essay some months ago but felt that it should be posted in the proper context.
The difficulty is that people expect to understand the Schrodinger equation
in itself, they expect some intellectual knowledge that will fit everything and say "Aha, now I get it". But understanding the equation and all of science for that matter, demands that we lift our investigations a level higher.
What have scientist been doing from the time of Galileo onwards? They have been
thinking about the canvas of perceptions. They were seeking the thoughts (mostly mathematical) whose thought out dynamics would correlate with the dynamics of perceptions. The Schrodinger equation was the result of seeking this quantification of perceptions further and further. It is similar to painter who tries to replicate the appearances of Nature through more and more precise paint strokes. Scientists art through math. They distill more and more refined math relations, whose dynamics mirror the perceptual content.
In the Schrodinger equation we're doing something akin to Fourier analysis of the perceptual world. Perceptions are thought of as matter waves and the equation basically filters out only that sum of elementary waves, which fit the energy constrains. We do something similar in Fourier analysis where from the infinite possible frequencies, we filter out only those whose sum yields the desired waveform.
So science practically develops a glorified math-painting algorithm. Does this mean that scientific equations have nothing to do with reality, just like a blob of paint has nothing to do with the real and living Mona Lisa? Now this is the tricky part because the question in itself secretly suggest a very specific mode of thinking about reality. Unless we recognize that we need to alter the way we see and think about reality, it will be very difficult to get intuition of what science is doing.
As said, scientists in the last few centuries have been
sculpting thoughts about perceptions. Today we are at a very interesting threshold where we should recognize that this thought-sculpting activity is the
actual process of reality. So far, the default intuition has been that we're enclosed soul spheres, which arrange puzzles of thoughts about reality-in-itself (that which is beyond the personal sphere). We imagine that the 'real' laws of the Universe work outside consciousness and our thoughts are only their symbolic replicas. The challenge today is to realize that our flow of states, which we can most easily be conscious of when we focus on how through our thinking we meaningfully transition from 'frame to frame' of existence, is the actual first-person perspective law of the Universe. Our first-person willed spiritual activity is in itself a limited aperture of the spiritual force which arts reality and not a side-effect which presents opaque intellectual pictures of reality-in-itself.
When we see things in this way, we begin to realize that through our scientific endeavors so far we've been unknowingly accumulating 'experimental data'. We've been blindly flowing with the activity of the Cosmos, which projected an opaque intellectual picture of itself. Now the Cosmos realizes that that which it has been modelling through intellectual puzzle pieces is the objectified and deadened precipitation of the actual first-person process of reality. So the Cosmos has been precipitating thoughts as nails and hair shed from a living body. Now the "I" of the Cosmos realizes that true reality is the activity which has been secretly weaving behind this shedding process. This process can no longer be modelled but must be
lived.
For this reason, the Schrodinger equation and all other equations have so far been secretly informing us about the dynamics of the living spirit which has been thinking them. In certain sense all scientific thinking has been the build up of helping wheels, of a rigid scaffold, which has the potential to awaken us to our living spiritual activity. If we continue to ask questions like "How come the Schrodinger equation describes reality so well?" it simply means that we implicitly support the dualism between the mental picture of reality-in-itself and the first-person experience of that reality, which is its living law.
Clearly, we shouldn't imagine that this realization will suddenly put the Cosmos which experiences itself as an "I" within us, in position to unleash its imagination and begin to override all the lawful rhythms we observe.
There's actually only one law which determines the constrains of our unfoldment of states. Habitually we imagine that we exist as independent observer of reality who is forced to comply to its laws. We imagine that we can think, feel and will anything but the constraints of the world limit us (we imagine these constraints as the laws of the physical world or interference with other spiritual beings).
In reality there are
no constrains to what our next state of being might be. The only constraint is that whatever that next state might be, it should be felt as if the previous states are embedded within it (memory). This is the principle of
continuity of consciousness and the experience of time in the most general sense.
This is something so simple, yet so elusive when we approach it with our 15th century intellectual habits, that it deserves an attempt to explain.
Eugene I. wrote: ↑Sun May 08, 2022 3:54 pm
Also, the reality avoiding stagnation is not about "boredom", but about the fundamental dynamic force intrinsic to the nature of reality that keeps it ever moving and evolving and evading stagnation into monocultural and perfect state.
We can use the above as a point of departure. What is the main characteristic of science (which shapes how we think of reality)? That it models a
state of the universe which is transformed from frame to frame through certain laws. We've spoken many times that in order to avoid the Kantian trap we should think of this state not as some supposed reality-in-itself on the opaque side of consciousness but as a state of being - a snapshot of spiritual existence. This is what we all can be certain of after all. We live in constant metamorphosis of states of being. Whether it's a dream, whether there's an opaque material-energetic world on the opaque side, we can't tell but most certainly we live in a flow of inner states of being (here inner is used only to underline that we're talking about the spiritual experience of be-ing - all that we ever know - and not to imply that there's an opaque side).
It is very tempting to imagine these states of being in some kind of phase (configuration) space. We can do that to an extent but it's a very thin ice and we should never forget that there's no such third-person perspective which can see some states of being spread out in front of it. Anytime we speak of a state of being, we should immediately picture a
first-person spiritual state - an unique configuration of conscious phenomena - color, sound, warmth, feelings, thoughts, meaning, etc.
We always experience only one state of being but it contains within itself the fractal reverberations of all previous states of being. This is what gives us a sense of flow through time. At any point we have the background intuition that we have lived up until this moment. This intuition is in the now. This is actually more easy to appreciate through materialistic thinking. Imagine that the physical Universe has never existed and in some strange way becomes assembled
directly into the state we find it today. Then the 'play' button is pressed. Would we ever be able to tell if the universe has just popped into existence and that all our memories of a life since our birth are actually fabricated experiences into the now? Can we tell apart that something has
really happened in the past or it may have never happened but the universe has been just assembled in such a clever way that it
feels like it has gone through temporal development?
With this example I aim to show that no matter if there's really a time flow or reality is created anew at each instant from scratch, the sense of continuity in time comes from the fact that in the now we have the intuition that there are many other states of being which are somehow related to our current and this relation feels as if we've reached this moment through temporal development. Another way to speak of this relatedness is to speak of states as being
self-similar. For example, the states of our life seem self-similar in that there's certain overlap, there's some overarching phenomena which persist. For example if we have the states of an hour long experience, at every instant the thought content may be different but there may be an overarching mood which is more or less the same through the whole hour. Similarly, there's some experiential phenomena which make all states of our life to seem self-similar and this justifies us to say that they all happened to us (the self-similarity is that all states are imbued with the same quality of "I"-ness). There's no need to imagine these overarching phenomena as some separate category, it's only that they are common to all states, they are like ever expanding context which embeds states.
If we make a thought experiment we can imagine this process continuing to infinity where we encounter states from whose perspective more and more other states seem self-similar. Asymptotically, this state would be something which we can metaphorically depict as something like the Sierpinski triangle.
This could be imagined to be the Absolute state of being. It's such that all other infinitely many conceivable states are experienced as self-similar to it. Not only 'our' states but states of any conceivable being at any phase of development. Or in other words it's a state which feels that every conceivable state is present within it as
memory. That absolute state would feel that there's something of it in every other state. Of course the geometric fractal is only a symbol. In practice we should imagine that all states of being are
concentric, just like our memories of past states are concentric to our current "I"-state.
And here we come to the challenging part. This is not the first time this absolute state is mentioned here but still, every time it has been met with misunderstanding, objecting that it's nonsensical that such a state could be the attracting point of evolution because this would only lead to stagnation, boredom and the end of life. These objections fail to grasp what is here being depicted. I'll make one more attempt.
Let's imagine that we've somehow reached the perfect state. When it is objected that this will be felt as stagnation it is only because one forgets to include his own temporal states of being into the wholeness. In other words, one continues to think completely along linear time without realizing that he has split himself from the supposed state of perfection and his consciousness continues to tick along linear time completely independent of what he observes.
The above picture illustrates the failure to include one's own progression of states of being into the idea of the absolute state. One remains completely blind about his own flow of existence and imagines that with that flow he stands as an independent observer/experiencer of the absolute state. Stated otherwise, one imagines the perfected state of existence as something that confronts consciousness, while the latter stands outside of that state ticking along a separate Newtonian (linear) clock and having memory of this flow.
Let's think about this vividly in stop-motion-like manner. Let's pretend we're experiencing the contents of the absolute state. We can imagine this as all conceivable states of being superimposed on one another, something akin to white light. Yet without noticing we actually place ourselves outside this state - in the red state above. In the next instance we move to another state - the green state which is self-similar to the red and embeds it within itself. In practice this means that we feel we have spent some time while beholding the absolute state - formerly we were in the red state, now we're in the green state which contains within itself fractally embedded the red state as memory. Then we have the blue state which nests within itself the green and the red. Now we feel we have spent even more time. From the standpoint of the blue state we feel that in the past we were in the green state and even further in the past in the red. And so on.
This is as explicit as I can get about this. My goal is to illustrate that when people think of the absolute state, the perfect self-similar fractal of states of being, they forget to account for their continuing progression of states (even if mystical states). From this standpoint it seems as stagnation to be limited to behold that perfect state. But this seems so only when again and again we fail to include our own states in the perfect self-similar fractal.
This in itself means that the absolute state can never be experienced as something through time. Remember - linear time is not an absolute law of the Cosmos but more like a
relative effect of states that seem to implode as memory integration. So the absolute state is more like an asymptotic limit (as seen from our temporal perspective). The difficult thing to imagine (it requires some meditative effort) is that the more we approach the absolute state, the more linear time loses significance. All potential past and future states approach eternal simultaneity
but without some external time from which we can observe that simultaneity! And now if this feels as stagnation, I can only point once again to the above drawing and remind that one once again splits himself and blindly feels himself to be some outside consciousness ticking along its own time and integrating its own memory.
Now to return to the one law of existence. We can experience as temporal evolution only such states which seem to gradually integrate self-similarly. In other words, we can experience as our next state only that which embeds self-similarly the previous (felt as memory). This is not really some arbitrary law. It's similar to the
anthropic principle. We take that from the facts, it simply can't be otherwise. If our next state isn't self-similar to the previous ones (it doesn't embed them as memory) it simply won't feel as 'next' state. It will feel as some completely different flow of being with its own history. For example if my next state is that of John Smith that I don't even know, this would never feel as stream of existence proceeding from my current state. For this to happen, John Smith's state should have within itself something of my current state as memory. This would allow me to say "I was following my world line of states previously but then suddenly teleported into the state of John Smith" (actually I'll feel as a new being, a merger of two world-lines and I won't be able to tell if it's me who has overtook John's memory, which will be included in my state or I'm John who experiences the addition of my world-line. This is given only as an illustration and not to suggest that this particular type of merging actually happens). But notice that there should be something self-similar in the new modified John Smith's state which contains the reverberation of my previous world line. Without this I would simply become John Smith and I'll feel that I have always been following his world line of memory integration. In other words, all this is fully consistent with the understanding that there's no such special entity which carries some identity. All feeling for identity is contained in any given state as the reverberation of self-similar states which are felt as memory of a world-line of integration.
Another question may be "Why can't I make my next state
any future state I want? For example, when I'm waiting on a line I may want to jump directly to the state where it's my turn." Let's think this through. Let's imagine that we indeed do that and we shortcut directly to a future state. But this state would be self-similar to other states which will 'fill the gaps' and will feel like the memory world-line which has led us to our future state. In fact, we would never be able to tell if we have really experienced the gap of states or we simply teleported. So we should be clear that such questions demand something specific. They say "I want to teleport to a future state but I don't want to simply fast-forward to there but to explicitly have the memory that I have skipped a whole line-segment of states." It will be left for another time, but we can gain an intuition of why such an artificial state can never integrate properly with the past states.
Think about this: at this moment are you sure you were 'there' when you clicked on the link leading to this post? Most people would reply "Of course, I vividly remember, I know that I experienced this moment. I was 'there'." But what is this past moment besides a conscious memory phenomenon within the
now moment? If we think this through we'll see that all moments actually can be thought to exist
simultaneously. It's only their relative self-similar nature that makes them feel as proceeding from each other. So temporal evolution is really the experience of rhythmic integration of states of being towards the absolute state where all states are nested into a self-similar eternal now. The more we approach the absolute state, the more simultaneous existence becomes.
Seen in this way, existence consists in experience of temporal world-lines that integrate towards the absolute state. Here one may object once more "But I don't want to approach the absolute state. I want to explore fragmented states forever." But this is exactly what we're doing! The Cosmos experiences the infinite ways of integrating from highly differentiated states of being into the absolute and in this process experiences infinite variety of states. This requires some stretch of mind to grasp. We should cease thinking about evolving towards the absolute state as approaching the last train station of a journey. The journey itself is integration of states of being which give the feeling of linear time but the more self-similar the states become (macrocosmic) the more the notion of sequential progression of states loses its significance. From that perspective the journey has never even started.
The simple reason these things are difficult to approach seriously is not other but the intellectual ego which seeks to preserve its lineralized existence. This is the actual self-test especially for those non-dualists who insist that the ego is an illusion. What is it if not the ego, which is worried that it's existence will end? Only that which is locked in the temporal progression can fear eternity. If it helps, we can think of the absolute state not simply as the end of evolution but also as that which contains all possible
beginnings. Beginnings and ends are simultaneous in the absolute state. This is also the reason we shouldn't worry about the stagnation of evolution towards the absolute state. As explained, this fear can exist only when we imagine that all existence ends as we approach it and moreover - that we will somehow (and quite paradoxically) be conscious that all life has ended in stagnation. But as said, the more we approach it, not only that we don't find the end of existence but also all its possible beginnings which are waves of new world-lines that will experience temporal evolutionary arcs through the absolute potential.
When we get a good feeling for all this, we'll also understand that all laws of nature actually depict the one law of integration of memory. From the infinite possible states we can experience as our next only those which embed our current. This also explains the mystery of the arrow of time which bewilders physicists. This is mysterious only as long as we imagine that reality exists in itself independent of our experience. When we realize that there's no other reality than the integration of states of being, we understand that this is the only way we can experience time. Think about it - would we be able to speak of existence if every our next state had less and less memory? Clearly this does happen in rhythmical manner, such as the dimming of consciousness every night but overall, consciousness continues to integrate on the next day. If we never wake up we'll also not know that consciousness has dimmed. We only know that because we wake up in a new state which embeds within itself the states of dimming down on the previous night.
These are the real constraints of existence. It's not an artificial law created by some god, it's the self-evident impossibility to be in any other way.
All conceivable states can be considered to be equally possible for our next state but the vast majority would never feel as proceeding from our current, thus the continuity of consciousness would be broken. This can be explored even further through the rhythmic time waves which is connected with the Schrodinger equation and why perceptions seems to be decomposable onto matter waves of different frequencies but that will be a topic for another time. For now it's enough to consider that from the relative perspective of a state, all other states seem to interfere within it either constructively or destructively. In this sense, our current state of being is one where those states which we call our past life, interfere constructively, while all other states (not only 'ours' but
any conceivable state of any being) interfere destructively and thus seem non-existent. In this sense, the absolute state is one which sees the whole infinite potential as constructive interference.
