Mind and Matter
Chapter Five
Mind and Matter
The Nature of Knowledge
The ability to question in wonder is not an attitude that
is acquired nor can it be taught. It is a basic manifestation
of emerging consciousness. Little children live in a world
that is for them still a wonderland, and they ask questions
continually, often to the point of being tiresome and even
annoying.
They ask questions of their elders fully expecting that
there are answers. Where do they and other babies come
from? How and why do they begin to exist? Far too often it
is a pretended prudence that gives them the misleading
replies of popular convention and convenience and they are
left frustrated in enforced ignorance. The scandal thus done
to little ones by placing obstacles in the path of their quest
for becomingness deserves punishment by submersion in
the sea, necklaced with a millstone. The blind continue to
lead those whom they have blindfolded.
Maturity is reached when humans become childlike again
in their questioning, but grown-up and experienced enough
to know that, though their questions may seem to concern
absolute things and values, the complete answers must
forever remain in patterned webs of relativities. The human
self is consciously knowledge-able. It is not agnostic by
nature but only by circumstances. It has an intuition of
truth, but more often than not self-interest has resort to a
stand-over approach in its regard, rather than trying to
under-stand where and how truth is to be found.
To know is to become self’s other kind
and love wills self’s becomingness in mind.
To know is to become intentionally identified with self’s
other. Through and with and in knowledge, the self becomes
now more than what it was before. The I-self becomes
intentionally identified with its complement, the known
otherself. Something of the latter becomes inside the being
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of the former. The known has a new or added existence in
the knower.
The sensory display unit of the self's cerebral computer
perceives the otherness of the conceived information whose
data is stored and processed in the brain's hardware. Such
other-self-ness may be either a personal other or it may be
just an impersonal thing, with or without life. Self's being
wills to grow in becomingness through self-functioning
iterative feedback other-dependence.
Within Aseity’s “I AM – You are” selflife, there is seen a
marvellous system of systems within other systems.
Distinction and union unite in abounding diversity. Nature
seeks order in her unity whilst abhorring any sterile
uniformity that would turn her fertile womb into a barren
waste or lifeless tomb. The act and art of her drama of an
evolving cosmic love-affair knows elements of both comedy
and tragedy.
Distinction and union figure in all psychic processes, not
the least being that of laughter. Persons count and persons
laugh and a fount of humour is blessed ambiguity. We are
amused by expressions admitting several possible and quite
different comical interpretations. Entertainers rely to a great
extent on the double-meaning joke. In a singular unit of
word or phrase, we perceive a plural distinctioning of
meanings and we laugh at this seeming contradiction or
paradox. The two-in-oneness of this psychical positioning or
novel interpenetration brings comic relief to the brain's twinlobed activity.
We must take our laughter seriously. It is one of Nature's
most effective medicines. A body full of laughter can experience a very profound cleansing and healing. It is in the
analysis of why we laugh that mirth's two-in-oneness spree
becomes a symbol and leading theme opening up and
revealing patterns which give added meaning and unity to
human activity.
We laugh at absurd situations. Among the greatest in the
world of entertainment are the Circus clowns. They make
little children laugh. It is in the comic association of seeming
opposites and contrasting situations when things by nature
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apparently incompatible, are found together in spite of their
rugged differences, that the self enjoys itself become both
at once. Such is the actual nature of knowledge.
The reflexive self is both the reflecting subject and
reflected object of its own conscious self-activity. Absolute
truth is known only in the quiet, still depths of the self's
inner consciousness, where its true other self speaks in
silence. A self's witness to integration's real and consistent
becomingness is true, is truth. Disintegration is unbecoming
and self's willed acceptance of such bears an untrue witness.
Consistency demands freedom from all contradiction while
any real becomingness implies positive growth. The latter is
made evident by a togetherness-change in our human
species of spaced time and which itself is the great cosmic
mystery in which all our selflife is confined.
Two terms are needed to form a relation, namely, a first
or alpha term, the term from which the relationship begins,
and a second or omega term, the term to which the
relationship is directed or ends. The two terms are not the
relation but the things related. The relation is really a third
term, being the specific oneness or togetherness link (or
modification of it) between the distinct terms and is
positioned by the unifying activity of the mind. It is the
conscious self that looks for and discovers relations between
distinct things through personal identification with both at
once.
Another name for two-in-one is biune, and for three-inone triune; their abstractions follow as biunity, and triunity
or trinity. On Page 165, in considering the relations of
freewill there will be introduced four-in-oneness as a
quaternity. In a biune relation, two ones, i.e., a one and a
one, become a one two. Two unit atoms of hydrogen join
together to become one unit hydrogen molecule. In and
through their unity, a new one proceeds. The two related
terms remain distinct but unified and a third one emerges.
Three ones are now involved, the two ones we started with
and the one these two become. Every biune relation is by its
very nature also triune. Every biunity is also a triunity or
trinity. The trinity of knowledge comprises three terms, the
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knower, the known and the knowing-act of the knower
becoming the known.
Knowledge is a relation of a special sort. Inasmuch as it is
basic to the very nature of psychical existence, it might well
be called a self↔other existential relation whose simple
harmonic functioning may be reflexive or transitive or both.
All thought's act and art proceed in a self-other-functioning
feedback system whose identity can be expressed as an
infinite set where self ≡ {self, otherself}. Cognition is the
two-in-one-ness of a conscious being and its becomingness,
the biunity of the soleself “I” and its notself or otherself. The
conscious surfacing of this psychical conception is expressed
verbally in what is termed an idea or concept.
I am conscious of my “I am” self as oneself, grammatically a first person, the person speaking. When I become
aware of an other self inside or outside of my own “I am”, I
acknowledge this otherself as “Thou art”. “Thou” and “you”,
being the person or persons spoken to, are said to be in the
category of the second person. Though this objective
outside otherself may be physically distinct from me the
subject self, nevertheless when I knowingly accept its
reality, it is because it has become a psychical unit in
intentional union within my psychical existence.
In the practice of the natural virtue of religion, people
pray in faith to their various deities. Where is the person
they are praying to? They pray to visual representations of
them. They have Eucharistic encounters. They pray and bow
down to “Abba” or to “Allah” up in the sky somewhere. They
are really praying to their “I am’s” other self, their own
“Thou art”. They are in actual fact talking to themselves.
They are dialoguing in the womb of the self-other relativity
of the ever-pregnant Divine Aseity.
The object of knowledge takes on a new dimension of
existence when it is known by the knower. The knower and
the known both subsist in the Existential Relativity of human
self-other-consciousness. Is it possible to have such a
relationship of this nature with an otherself within one’s own
inner space?. Children gain much pleasure and satisfaction
in dialogue with an imaginary other-dimensioned otherself.
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One of the most intriguing situations of this nature to
contemplate is that of the relationship of a pregnant woman
and her offspring in her womb. What is the nature of this
self-other-life shared in human pregnancy’s “I am - Thou
art”? Its biunity or two-in-oneness of self-other relativity is
expressed verbally “We-Us-Ours”. It is unique, beyond
men’s natural conscious experience and comprehension.
The foetus is physically consubstantial with its mother. It
breathes with its mother’s lungs. Its blood flows through two
hearts and two heads. They are not merely joined by the
umbilical chord, but the sense of withinness is ingrained in
the mindset’s data of both. Without being consciously aware
of it, the cerebral binary computer and memory of the
foetus is already programmed with its mother’s genes and
programmed too with an otherself’s soporific rhythmic
iambic heartbeat as well as its own. It experiences the
coziness of being immersed and floating in a warm friendly
space. The I-Mother can monologue with the gestating Youotherself in her womb. The growing brain of the latter is not
yet sufficiently evolved to reciprocate such psychical coconsciousness, but the dual lobe circuitry is already being
established whereby the relativity of self and other, of “I
am” and “Thou art” can eventually function.
With our eyes open or closed, we can link the inhaling
and exhaling of breath with the reflexive and transitive act
of dialogue. We breathe in “I am”, pause a little, and then
we breathe out “Thou art”. We can consciously act out in a
simple harmonic oscillatory psychical motion, both terms of
the biunity of self and otherself in a make believe mimed
pregnancy. We can relive creatively the experience of
rebirth, of reflexively being once again in a mother’s womb
and also transitively having an otherself “you” within the
womb of our own self’s consciousness. We can reverse the
cutting of the umbilical cord and return, implosively, in our
minds to experience the oneness of love’s “We-Us-Ours”
togetherness of self-other existential relativity.
Experiences may or may not be verbalized internally andor externally. Words are the spaced time representations of
ideas and are the sight-sound signs with which a self relates
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to an other. All language takes place in the psychical
continuum of a self's word-womb consciousness. It is both
relativistic and quantized, being made up of discrete
particles, namely words, and continues to evolve. New
words are coined to stamp new experiences and new
meanings are associated with old words and their
combinations.
Meaning itself is an elusive thing to define. Like
knowledge with which it is associated, it is a relation, the
relation between words and a self's experience of its known
becomingness. Each self's experience and knowledge is
unique and is conditioned by the selective programming of
its brain’s cerebral computer. Genetic inheritance, parental
influence, formal instruction, education, environmental
factors, cultural milieu, all leave their software imprint
stored in the brain's hardware memory. Hence different
shades of meaning become associated with different ideas
and words. Many words now exhibit a plurality of meanings,
and ambiguity can be both a real blessing and also a curse.
At times, selves achieve a more effective communication
of their inner experiences by means of literary devices which
make use of a play on words to stimulate psychical activity,
as in the pun, paradox and various other figures of speech
like rhyme and alliteration. Of special importance is the
metaphor. In metaphor, a word or phrase in common use
and literally denoting one kind of object or idea, is used by
way of suggesting a likeness or model for new depths or
heights of experience. Poetry makes extensive use of
metaphor. Prose too can be made more imaginative by it. In
the language of metaphor, this book is the author's
brainchild, conceived years ago and after a long gestation
finally come to birth.
Underlying the use of metaphor and conjoined with the
very nature of meaning itself is that special kind of relation
between experiences brought about by what are called
symbols. Symbols are things, physical or psychical, which
suggest something other than their mere selves by reason
of relationships, associations or conventions. They may be in
the form of words, ideas, actions, pictures, sounds, dreams,
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anything. They serve the self well as models and catalysts
for a more profound sounding of levels and richness of
meaning. They speak, by insinuation, for our unconscious
and subconscious activity. They help stimulate and perfect
conscious communicative relations between persons, often
with meanings which are known only to the initiated, as the
fish symbol for the early Christians. Myths are cultural
symbols of cosmic realities.
Symbols are more than mere signs. A sign just denotes
the object to which it is assigned, as does a badge, a
trademark, or an abbreviation. Mathematics uses signs. The
numerals 1, 2, 3, 4 and so on, are signs of numerical
experiences called numbers. Symbols act intuitively without
and beyond the grasp of reasoning and motivate and
channel self's being into the becomingness of something
other. Religion, Art, and Science make extensive use of
symbols: indeed they would be completely impoverished
without them. Symbols catalyse and fertilize, begetting new
meanings and enabling a self to transcend its own limiting
singularity by simulating and suggesting an enriched
plurality of experiences.
There are degrees and types of knowledge. There is
simple sensory perceptual knowledge. This is intuitive, i.e.,
without any conscious process of reasoning. Through our
senses we become linked with the physical world by virtue
of the complex psychical images in our image-in-action,
which as a sensory display unit, is a necessary adjunct to
the brain's cerebral computer. This faculty must not be
confused with the ability of the imagination to fantasy and is
what human beings have in common with all animals and
living things which enjoy sense perceptions.
A higher type of human knowledge is meditative and
conceptual with ascending levels of understanding and
abstraction. Conscious reasoning forms part of this and the
conclusions arrived at are the results of both deductive and
inductive processes. Meaning is linked with understanding
and experience. Often plausible new meanings like scientific
models are conceived, not as arising from laboured manly
reasoning, but as flashes of womanly intuition.
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Finally, there is contemplative experiential knowledge.
The self listens, hears, sees, feels and knows its distinction
of being in the phase of becoming an implosive union with
all other. Not only does the self know, but it knows that it
knows. It is here in self's mothering queendom within that
words are made flesh afresh and Aseity’s indwelling otherself grows in wisdom and stature, full of grace and truth.
Contemplation is not just the name for a peculiar type of
thinking as practised by the initiates of some esoteric cult.
In the traditional and technical sense of both Eastern and
Western Cultures, and as used in this book, it is contrasted
with discursive meditation. Both words are equally at home
in secular as well as in sacred contexts. Both deal with
modes of thought and types of knowledge. Meditation is
active, transitive, ratiocinative, reductionist, concerned with
analysis and the multiplicity of parts as parts. It tries to
distinguish the various instruments of an orchestra; it hears
the different sounds that each produces; it appreciates the
technique of composer, conductor and player. It is
preoccupied transitively with the external differentiation of
parts. Symbolically, it has overtones of left-lobed masculine
activity.
Contemplation is more passive, reflexive, intuitive,
holistic, concerned with synthesis or the building of a whole,
a unity of parts, a oneness of togetherness. Contemplation
enjoys the unique aesthetic experience of total music. It
becomes absorbed reflexively in internal integration. It has
inner tones of right-lobed feminine artistry.
In meditation, one looks at the individual pieces of a
jigsaw puzzle, their shape and colour and multiplicity. In
contemplation they are all put together as a unified or
melded whole. Matter's particle-wave duality finds its
reflection here. Meditation deals with discrete particles.
Contemplation, on the other hand, tries to capture reality as
a continuum, an all-at-once whole, a unity of distinct units.
Contemplation perfects and transcends meditation. In the
Western tradition, what is now popularly called TM,
Transcendental Meditation, is really a type of contemplation
and modern meditation movements, in an historical sense,
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are misnomers.
The act of contemplation involves a unique experience of
wholeness in the unity of the alpha-self's “I am” with its
complement, the omega-other-self, not merely as a surface
concept, but as an acted in-depth or volumed perception as
well. By its inner personal nature this unique implosive
awareness of unity is not communicable. It cannot be
directly shared with another person. The discursive fruits of
surface meditation can be shared verbally, but the act of
contemplation is different.
It can only be described symbolically, in a roundabout
and suggestive way with analogy, metaphor and paradox.
Some techniques to dispose the mind and body for its
development can be explained and useful background
factual knowledge can be assimilated.
Though some simple kind of direction may be useful, it is
not absolutely necessary, since it remains up to the virgin
self to follow the serpentine path of enlightenment, through
contemplation, as a lone traveller. Because it involves the
self in a new, redeemed, liberated, higher or more intense
state or level of consciousness, progress in it can only be
achieved by the self's systematic and assiduous practice of
it. Under the guidance of an inner other, the self teaches
itself how to use a Do-it-yourself Kit.
Figuratively speaking, in meditation one swims, in
contemplation one floats. In meditation one rows, but in
contemplation one sails. Though vastly different, yet they
are not opposites in the sense of having conflicting interests.
They are complementary. True meditation is not an end in
itself. Its left-lobed, cerebral father-activity is meant to be
as a passing fertilizing factor and to be transcended slowly
as a step-by-step ladder serving to scale the heights of
contemplation. The latter's grand finale is acted out on the
stage of the redeemed and resuscitated self's ascended
experience to right-lobed, maternal brain activity, whence
all things are conceived again and born anew.
It is in the psychical realm of developing and perfecting
the self and its consciousness in inner space that evolution
is still inexorably proceeding. In continues in this only with
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both the active and passive cooperation of each individual
self, freely involved and dedicated to its consummation.
All human endeavours should be directed primarily to this
end. Physical well-being, sensual satisfaction, knowledge,
whether factual, fictional, scientific or philosophical are only
means to this objective and merit but secondary consideration. Not growth in external personal possessions, but the
possession of internal personal growth, should motivate and
direct all truly worthwhile human ambition. All personal
growth is still self-functioning but also other-dependent.
The learning process requires the assimilation of
knowledge. Food for our bodies must be chewed, swallowed
and digested before it can become part of our physical
being. In a similar way what is presented to our minds as
food for thought must be subject to a kind of similar cudchewing process. We must reflect on personal superficial
knowledge in order to experience, in the inner senses of our
being, a more profound perception of what we already know
only conceptually.
This is what understanding really means. When we try to
under-stand something we try to make sense of it within
ourselves through recollection and reflection, and not just
content with factual information. Chewing our psychical cud
enables symbolism to extend and deepen the meaningfulness of our existing ideas. In discursive meditation, we
try to enlarge our factual conceptual knowledge about
things. In intuitive contemplation we know things by
experiencing them gestatingly in their psychical actuality
within our own whole physical selves. The difference is
simply like knowing about another person by hearsay or
through reading, and then meeting such a person in the
flesh. It is like reading a play or watching a stage
performance of it and then being an actual performing actor
on stage creatively interpreting the role.
It must be insisted that the act of contemplation, which
perceives and conceives all being and becoming as a lovable
whole, a togetherness or unity of units, is the goal of
biological and psychical evolution and climaxes human
cultural development.
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Voluminous love wills the self-other becomingness of
surface thought. Contemplation is the perfection and highest
level of personal knowledge and experience. It is the act-art
of self making love to its other, perceptually, within the
inner spaced time of the human mind. The human psyche
experiences the beatific vision of the Oneness of Divine
Togetherness.
The Knowledge of Nature
Computer brain, to senses' data wed,
receives, records, digests, feeds back what's fed
to source and sink. Its ovoid twin-lobed womb
perceives again new seed, conceives new bloom
and gestates mute. In birth-pained laboured thought
self's mind reflects new insights, learns, is taught.
The knower names what sense perceptions glean
from matter's radiant splendour. Word-signs mean
what conscious mind defines each structured fence
enclose of spaced time's selves' experience.
Thought's concepts word flesh-furrowed knowledge life,
becomingness of being's husbanded wife.
Already in this book, use has been made of the
grammatical distinction of personal pronouns from the point
of view of speech. The First Person is the person speaking
“I”, “We”. The Second Person is the person spoken to
“Thou”, “You”. The Third Person is the person or thing
spoken about “She, He, It”, “They”.
The acronym IT from Information Technology is
fascinating in as much as it sums up also what Grammar’s
Third Person pronoun it verbally expresses in the wordprocessing of the human cerebral computer. The art of
contemplation, or the human mind’s verbal intercourse or
dialogue with the ever pregnant Mother Self of the Cosmos,
is perfected through being on personal speaking terms with
Aseity’s Selflife named pronominally “We Us Ours”.
The physical world and the psychical realm are
existentially related and complement each other. It is
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convenient to refer to them as matter and spirit or mind and
matter. They have structures in common, at least we so
interpret them that way. They both exhibit hierarchical
complexity and a multiplicity of dimensions.
We simulate and draw analogies between operations. It is
the self which perceives these similarities. We both name
and also call the tunes to which we think and say Nature
dances. In intuitively reflecting on the external world we
create models which on further reflection help better our
understanding of ourselves. We breathe in and out, inhale
and exhale. The heart pumps blood out and in. Self-other
consciousness makes us aware of psychical activity that is
both immanent and transeunt, reflexive and transitive,
implosive and explosive, distinction and union.
Whilst all language takes place in the continuum of a
self's consciousness, it is also relativistic and quantized,
being made up of discrete particles, namely letters or
characters and word-signs. A set, as a unity or oneness of
distinct ones in a one-continuum, epitomizes the waveparticle duality. Under some circumstances matter seems to
behave like sets of discrete particles and under other
circumstances like continuous waves.
Light, radio, television, x-rays and so on, exhibit wave
properties. They are part of the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation. The latter, as its name suggests, is a
biunity of two distinct fields or types of force, namely
electric and magnetic. A continually changing or pulsing
electric field generates at right angles to itself a pulsing
magnetic field. This new latter pulsing magnetic field
regenerates again at right angles to itself the original
pulsing electric field. Once a first pulse is initiated,
electromagnetic radiation is truly self-propagating or selfsustaining. The process would go on forever, until the same
self-sustaining burst of radiation or radiant energy is taken
in by some other entity.
The Universe is pregnant with invisible force fields, with
waves of radiation and also sets of discrete particles, atoms
and molecules: some are radioactive and others simply like
fundamental sub-atomic particles. Any part of our World can
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be made present to us, by sight and-or by sound and almost
instantaneously, with the touch of a computer key.
It is not enough there should be light which distinctions
day from night and enables our eyes to see. We are either
blind or walk in the dark if we do not perceive the awesome
revelation of the light of this world. Its propagation is selfsustaining. It is self-regeneration through the generation of
an other. It is being and becoming, self and other,
distinction and union, evolving existential relativity begotten
by Mother Nature’s reciprocating self ↔ other life in her
physical Cosmos.
Quantum Theory
Several times in this book, allusions have been made to
Quantum Theory’s great enigma of wave-particle duality. It
is relevant not only to the physical realm but is even more
demanding for the understanding of the psychical phenomena of the human mind.
It is a convenient, though deceptive simplification to
separate mind and matter. The simple mathematical logic of
distinction and union has already been outlined to present a
consistent theory of unity. Self and other, though conceptually distinct, must embrace and become part of each other
in intentional union, in order to effect the oneness of
togetherness in Existential Relativity.
The human mindset is a unity or continuum of discrete
word units, namely the sight-sound signs of speech. These
are related existentially to their respective waveforms
operative in seeing and hearing. Information Technology is
all in the Mind’s Word Womb. Sight and Sound are both
waveform and particulate. Just as photons which are
discrete particles or quanta of light can superimpose on each
other and be responsible for the interference patterns of
their wave continua, so also words can be multi-meaning.
Their ordered combinations construe the wealth of Literature. Words are food for the mind to digest and store in the
memory of its cerebral computer to be used later for selfother communication.
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The Electromagnetic Spectrum
Wavelength
(cm)
Cosmic ray
Photon
Energy(eV)
1032
4x1017
10
30
4x1015
3x10-18
1028
4x1013
3x10-16
1026
4x1011
3x10-14
1024
4x109
3x10-12
1022
4x107
Gamma Rays
3x10-10
1020
4x105
X-rays
3x10-8
1018
4x103
Ultravioletvisible light
Infrared
3x10-6
1016
40
3x10-4
1014
0.4
Microwaves
3x10-2
1012
4x10-3
Radar
3
1010
4x10-5
UHF, VHF, FM
3x102
108
4x10-7
Shortwave, AM
radio
Longwave radio
3x104
106
4x10-9
3x106
104
4x10-11
3x108
102
4x10-13
photons
3x10-22
Frequency
(sec-1)
3x10
-20
[In observing the Electromagnetic Spectrum, the Velocity
of Electromagnetic Radiation is calculated by the formula:
Wavelength X Frequency = 3x108 m. sec-1. As Wavelength
decreases and Frequency increases, wave-functioning gives
way to particle behavior.]
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Quantum Theory echoes self-other relativity. A teasing
example of such is seen in Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle
which states that it is not possible to determine at the same
time with perfect accuracy both the position and momentum
of an atomic particle, like an electron, because the very
process of making the measurement alters the path of the
particle. The observer and the observed interact in an
existential relation.
Randomness intrigues the would-be definers of particle
movement and interferes with their techniques. Particlestates are better understood, not as chaotic disorder, but as
un-order or complete freedom from all constraints. Such
freedom finds a resonant chord in the human mind’s
quaternity of choice relations as outlined already. The
contents of our mindsets, their ideas and word signs, often
behave in an un-ordered manner unless restrained or
directed to meaningful relations in their complex if…then…
implications.
Which came first, mind or matter? In our species of
spaced time, their togetherness is an infinite self-evolving
manifestation of existential self-other relativity.
Existential Self-Other Relativity ≡ {Mind, Matter}
Matter’s quantized mass may be interpreted as the
discrete differentiations of Selflife’s continuum with respect
to spaced time. The scientific mind projects itself onto and
into matter. In spaced time, it eventually comes to discover
that the mind of the pregnant Mother Self of the Cosmos is
already there animating mater matter. The Metaphysics of
Holography rings true. The part is in the whole and the
whole is in each part – just like a pregnant woman.
There are some further interesting observations and
aspects of unity in the subatomic world. The more a particle
is restricted in space, the faster it moves around as if
reacting to confinement. Hence the closer an electron in its
orbiting comes to the nucleus of an atom, the faster it
moves with velocities of the order now of 1000 kilometers
per second. Normally a designed balance or equilibrium
prevails between the electrostatic nuclear attraction and the
natural kinetic reluctance to being confined. The amount of
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solid space stuff in an atom is very small, but because of the
high velocities of electrons the atom appears as a rigid
body.
Almost all the atomic mass is concentrated in the nucleus,
which however, only occupies the tiniest fraction of the real
space of the whole atom. The actual particles which occupy
the nucleus itself, i.e. the nucleons, respond to their confinement by moving with such high velocities as to approach the
speed of light. Distinction and union are maintained by the
nuclear glue, an extremely powerful, yet short range
attraction force, which only acts when particle separation is
two or three times their diameter. When their separation is
less they repel each other and a dynamic kinetic equilibrium
results.
The former hard and indestructible atoms of Democritus
are no longer relevant to Nuclear Physics, which has
completely revised the idea of elementary particles being
the basic constituents of matter. Most physicists today
believe that none of the far more than two hundred socalled elementary particles known to exist actually merit this
name.
Instead the latter present us with the strange paradox of
both destructibility and non-destructibility. With sufficient
kinetic energy, two of these particles in collision can break
themselves up, but only into similar particles of the same
kind and no different from their originals. The energy of
smashing recreates the same kind of particle. We can divide
matter over and over again in high energy collision
processes, but we never obtain smaller pieces, because we
continue to create particles out of the very energy that we
put into the processes.
Mutability is a property of matter. Transmutation of
particles from one sort to another can be accomplished in
the laboratory. They can creatively materialize from energy
and can disappear too back into energy. To subdivide the
quasi-infinitely small particles of matter, we need to make
use of quasi-infinitely large amounts of energy, and then
only to be frustrated. All such reductionist thinking seems to
end with self-other existential relativity.
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In the subatomic world, the classical ideas of an
elementary particle as some material substance or an object
in isolation, no longer apply in their ordinary meanings.
Nature exhibits here a dynamic matrix web of interconnected, interdependent, inseparable energy patterns and
relations.
Relativity Theory pictures the interactions between
particles resulting from the force of their mutual attraction
or repulsion as due to the exchange of still other particles.
The two concepts of force and matter are unified by linking
the forces between the constituents of matter to the
properties of yet other constituents of matter. They are thus
now seen to have their common genesis in the dynamic
patterns of subsistent relativity called particles. The fact that
the latter interact through the exchange of other particles is
even further reason why the subatomic world cannot be
decomposed into further ultimate constituent parts, but
must always be accepted holistically and researched as a
complex web of subsistent relations now integrated into a
cosmic polyphonic unity.
The author would like to comment here on the use of the
words particle and anti-particle. To his way of thinking, they
would be better described as complementary, not antagonistic. They are mutually attractive and their love-making
climaxes in the begetting of quanta of radiant energy.
A new mentality is emerging in Science which no longer
sees the individual parts as coming together in time to form
a whole, but rather that the real entity is the necessary
whole-self-set and that the parts are merely contingent
subset forms, relatively independent, yet at the same time
interdependent and inseparable from the matrix-whole which
gives them birth. The metaphorical lifeblood of the selflife of
the Cosmos is energy whose life, and only seeming death
dance, is responsible for all the rhythmic movements and
harmonic oscillations of the Universe. We humans cannot
escape participation in this drama, but we are not mere
static observers. Nature's programmed revelation of the
pregnant Mother Self of the Cosmos has us in a dual role.
We are both the spectator and also the actor.
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The Inner Space of Consciousness
Ovoidal quaternity means much more to this author than
any archetypal four-foldedness did for Jung. In his own early
manuscripts on Mathematics the author had noted,
‘Mathematical language is literally figurative and selfother descriptive. It serves not just to express the complex
contents of the mind but insinuates and explains by such
expressions how the mind actually works. Differentiation
and integration are mathematical processes because first
and foremost they are psychic processes, subsisting in and
forming the very substrate of being and becoming. The
language of Mathematics and Science speaks for its self who
experiences their meaning within its volumed whole which
knows levels of personal consciousness ranging from surface
concepts to not true, not self inner contradictions. The
quaternity of terms of the ovoid - two foci, surface and
volume - sum up the basic spaced time relativities of
physical reality’.
For the “I AM” self who IS, time always IS, without
beginning or end, eternally the ever-present tense of now.
We cannot separate, but only distinguish time and space.
The three dimensions of self's outside space and the one
dimension of self's inside time are a quaternity, a four-inoneness continuum. Spaced time is a deliberate ambiguity.
The spaced can refer to the divisibility of time and also to
time's association with space. The divisibility of our notional
time depends on its association with space.
Above the entrance to Plato's Academy in ancient Athens
was an inscription which read "Let none without Geometry
enter here." Similar advice, though for a different purpose,
applies here. The concepts we have of space outside us
serve as starting points for our intuitive perception of the
nature of the inner space within our conscious being.
Thrown or kicked, a rounded ball serves well as a
plaything. As an object of study, it can make sport for the
conceptualizing mind. For the ancient Greeks, the circle was
the secret of beauty in design: the sphere was the shape of
perfection. To have a sphere we need a first term or alpha
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point with which to begin. From this point, by reason of a
radial relation of fixed distance, there is begotten a second
or omega term. In doing so, the two terms are now named
centre and surface. The centre spatially begets its surface.
From the biunity of the one centre and the one surface
proceeds another term, a third one, the volume, their
embracing togetherness in existential relativity.
It is one thing to play mathematical games in the mind
with the concepts of these three distinct but mutually
interdependent terms, centre, surface and volume. It is
quite another experience to close our eyes, curl our bodies
up physically and imaginatively turn ourselves into a human
ball, simulating the foetus in the womb, and acting out in
mime a unique inner sense perception of our own one self,
now become a three-in-one, an inner spaced trinity of
centre, surface and volume.
The relations of the physical sphere suggest possible
analogues in the psychical. In the psychical sphere, the
reflexive centre-self "I" begets its transitive surface-self
"me" as the conscious expression and becomingness of its
own being. This takes place in the unity of the volume-self's
"mine" inner complexity of self-conscious and unconscious
activity.
The sphere is not a geometrical shape in its own right. It
is the limiting position of the egg-shaped ovoid or ellipsoid.
Oval-shaped footballs can usually be kicked just as far as
round ones, but it requires more skill and understanding.
The ovoid is more basic and only seemingly more complex
than its spherical counterpart. In two dimensions we can
make a comparison between a circle and an ellipse. Both are
plane sections through a cone.
A circle can easily be drawn by taking a piece of string,
fixing one end to a point functioning as centre and fixing the
other end to some marking device, such as a pencil, which
now moves around keeping the string taut. The path thus
generated is the circumference of a circle. The two
dimensional space thus proceeding from the biunity of the
centre point and the curvilineal circumference we call area.
Thus our trinity is complete. We go at the same time both
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around and in, in a circuminsession. Circular motion, like
swinging a stone in a sling, requires a going around as well
as a pulling in towards the centre. Whenever the centripetal
force is relaxed, the stone flies off at a tangent.
To draw an ellipse, we take the same piece of string, but
now whilst keeping it quite loose we fix each end to a
separate point called a focus. The string is then stretched
out and made taut with a pencil which now moves around,
always keeping the string extended, and generates a curved
path which is such that for each point on the curve, the sum
of its distances from the two foci is constant. The oval shape
thus generated is called an ellipse: in three dimensions the
egg-shape is called ovoid or ellipsoid.
As the two foci get closer to each other the oval shape
becomes more circular. When they are about to coincide or
become a two-in-one, we obtain the limiting position of an
ellipse which is a circle.
When the two foci repel each other to their maximum
separation, a straight line becomes their limiting position.
With the ovoid, the archetypal trinity becomes a quaternity
of two focal terms, a surface term, and a volume term.
Mother Nature has a predilection for her egg-shape and
for ovoid relations. In the physical Solar System of outer
space, all the planets revolve around the sun in elliptical
orbits with the sun at one focus.
In our understanding's trying to make sense of the
psychical realm of our mind’s inner space conscious activity
we can have resort to the ovoid's analogue terms. At the
self’s primary focus is the now conscious I-self subject. The
actual perceptioned object of its self-reflection, the me-self,
is transitively at the secondary other focus. Their surface
continuum implosively envelopes the integral volume of
mine-self's inner spaced time unity of self-consciousness.
Mirrors and the images that they produce are very
meaningful likenesses of psychic processes. When I look into
a plane mirror, I do not see my self, but only an external
image of it in imaginary spaced time.
Technically in Optics, the image that the eyes see is only
virtual. It is not real. Strictly speaking, when I face a plane
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mirror, there is no up and down change, nor is there a real
directional sideways change, but only a front to back
reversal. The observer self and its mirror image otherself
stand face to face. The image goes as far behind the mirror
in the opposite direction as the object does in front and the
imaginary image faces the opposite direction now to the
face of the observer.
There are also other sorts of mirrors or reflecting
surfaces. There is the parabolic mirror as used in spotlights,
searchlights and reflecting telescopes. All parallel rays which
strike it are reflected to a single point, its focus, and a light
at this focus has all reflected rays parallel.
By far the most intriguing mirror for both simulating and
stimulating psychic reflection is the oval shaped or
ellipsoidal reflecting surface. A light at one focus has a real
image of itself on a screen placed at the other focus. It is
not a virtual imaginary image as in a plane mirror, but a real
image, unchanged in any direction. The rays of light
emanating from the focal source actually converge again at
the focal image, which is not self-luminous but otherilluminated.
A thin strip of metal can be bent into the shape of an
ellipse and immersed in shallow water. Ripples, when
generated at one focus, converge at the other, which then
proceeds to regenerate the original ripples and the process
would repeat itself over and over again were its energy not
soon dissipated. One can only speculate on such iteration in
a frictionless field continuum.
An essential characteristic of psychical activity is the
ability to reflect in processes analogous to the physical
reflection of light. What light is to the eye of the body
enabling it to see both real images in ovoid mirrors and
virtual ones in plane mirrors, so reflexive knowledge is to
the image-forming realm of the psyche, enabling its I-self at
one focus to beget and become its reflected true living
image me-self at the other focus. In this queendom within, I
do not see I-to-I with my self. I see I-to-me. Self, when the
subject of relations, is named "I". Self, as the object, is
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named "me". Nothing is becoming of the knower-I except
through its known-me.
Conscious reflection gives evidence of personal individuality. Self's spaced time knowledge of its own self in selfconsciousness involves three terms as a trinity. One subject,
the I-knower-self, and one object, the me-known-self,
become one unity or being-set now in the possessive mineknowing-self. Ovoidally, maiden self mothers her twin foci,
the alpha-I-self and the omega-me-self. Though the latter
are self-functionally distinct in spaced time, their act does
not engender a distinction of persons. "I-me-mine" is self's
first person, the person speaking.
This unity of knowledge admits only a logical precedence
of the spaced time knower to the known. Each brings the
other into existence. There cannot be a knower without
something known, just as there cannot be a parent without
a child. Begetting its child-other, the self becomes a parent
to it. The two become one relation.
The sphere is the limiting shape of the ovoid. As the two
foci of the latter get closer together, the spherical shape is
revealed. We should remember that, considered this way, at
the centre of the sphere there is the superpositioning of two
real but spatially coincident or conjugate points.
When we talk of the psychical sphere and human selfcentredness we are speaking figuratively and to maintain a
logical sequence we must remind ourselves of the dual-foci
ovoid-nature of consciousness. I can try to bend my own
consciousness, psychically and physically back on itself, on
its self, in a reflexive relation. I can be introverted and
introspective to the point of insanity, but I can never isolate
and comprehend what is at the centre of my own alpha Iself or of what it is made. I can never know my I-self in its
act of being a factual subsistent "I", but only in its spaced
time act as becoming an actual existent "me". In knowing
its omega-me, the self knows its alpha-I, for they are one in
a real existential relation. The "I" is one with and in the
"me" and the "me" is one with and in the "I".
A spaced time expanding and evolving universe exhibits
the becomingness of growth. All growth is self-functioning
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but other-dependent and there is both positive and also
negative growth, good and evil. Good positive growth
proceeds forward from the true unity of distinction and union,
when one system and another complement each other in
their respective self-other-functioning altruistic negative
feedback systems. Evil negative growth or regression results
when one s-f-f-s selfishly tries to ignore its others, or cheats
on them in its singular one-self's all for only just its own little
one-self-functioning positive feedback system. Egoistically, it
stagnates to entropy's maximum disordered energy.
The existential relativity of actual time or of fields of
spaced time is implicit in all growth functioning. The
becomingness of growth makes time visible or perceptible.
We only observe and measure changes which involve
distinction or asymmetry, and all real changes take place in
some field of spaced time. Spaced time makes the physical
world possible and makes possible its study in Physics. It is
the most basic and mysterious intuition in human science.
There are interactory forces of quite different strengths in
the observations of physicists of the subatomic realm. One
interesting aspect of the weak interaction forces is that they
are involved in phenomena which violate the once sacred rule
of the conservation of parity. The latter would have had us
accept that in Nature there is a never-changing mirrorsymmetry which implies a lack of bias for left or right in its
basic laws. The Law of Conservation of Parity does not
require that mirror images of asymmetric structures or
moving systems exist in equal quantities. It merely asserts
that there is nothing in Nature's laws to forbid the existence
of both real types of handedness. In nuclear and electromagnetic interactions the conservation of parity had been
well established.
In late 1956 and early 1957, Madame Wu, in her
experiments with weak interactions, demonstrated that in
them Nature reveals an intrinsic left handedness. In neutron
decay, for example, the emitted electron is always found to
be left polarized. It would seem that in some rather minor
avenues Mother Nature has definite leanings towards the left.
The Latin word for left is sinister.
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The question as to whether our universe is finite or infinite
occupies the minds of cosmologists. There are valid
arguments to demonstrate its physical finiteness. Yet
problems about the real nature of extraordinary selffunctioning-feedback-systems are always present. In a
curved space it is conceivable that a voyager could set out on
a supposed straight line course and finish back at the starting
point. The questionable situation remains enigmatic as long
as we conceive the infinite as the endless addition of parts on
other parts externally outside ourselves.
Understanding infinite Selflife's cosmological reality as an
extraordinary
self-other-functioning-feedback-system
of
existential relativity brings the concept of immanence or
iterative within-ness into a realm presided over in most past
and present religious traditions by some hypothetical outside
divine male transcendence called god..
Self-Other Existential Relativity proclaims an archetypal
pregnant mother or goddess-with-child, a self-reproducing
other-self-within-self. A spaced time of infinite dimensions
can be better conceived and perceptually experienced, as an
eternal implosive fertile growth sequence of parts within
parts of a self-other-containing whole, rather than as an
external physically explosive endless series of parts outside
other parts in an otherwise empty space or void. We conceive
implosive black holes in outer space because we perceive
such implosiveness within our conscious self's ovoidal inner
space.
There is only one Self-Unity or Field Self in Aseity whose
Alpha-Being is the one reflexive act of Self-Self consciousness, of Self as possessor, of Self as possession and of Self
as possessing, i.e., as the Trinity of the singular Self, {I-Self,
Me-Self, Mine-Self}. The Alpha Self is eternal, not in the
sense of always being in the past and never ending in the
future, but in the reality of simply always being the HERENOW of the ever-present tense of "I AM".
The Alpha Self IS. In its begotten Omega other-self, it
knows also the infinite fertility of iterative transitive spaced
time there-and-then becomingness. In as much as it is the
ultimate reality and first principle and sustainer of all self-
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being and other-becoming, it is apposite for Natural
Philosophy to endow it with the attribute of divinity. It is not
supernatural, but rather should be understood as the
quintessence of natural pregnant mother-functioning being in
the Cosmos.
The evolution of human cerebral self-consciousness takes
place in matter which grows to know, through selffunctioning other-dependence, the indwelling Aseity who informs it and shares becoming knowledge with it. Mute
programmed matter mimes voiced metaphor. The climax of
all self-other divine-human co-consciousness is perceptually
experienced in the blissful contemplation of the personal and
plural Self-Other-Unity, the pronominal Divine Quaternity
{We, You, Us, Ours}
The inner reflecting twin-foci egg-shaped elliptical mirror
and the self-propagation of electromagnetic radiation reveal
Aseity's Act-Art of Existential Relativity. Nature witnesses her
reflexive-transitive self-other wave-projection and self-other
regeneration through the complex numbering of real selfimages in ovoidal spaced time. Everything comes from an egg,
programmed simultaneously inside the psychical inner other
space withinness of Aseity's archetypal Ego-Egg.
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