Contemplations During Down Time #1

3/17/15

Once every few months I consider the following: A single, Universal force responsible for creation and destruction. Nothing in the physical world is truly in an inert state. Slowly, everything is being "destroyed," breaking down, to make room for new creations. If Einstein was right and matter at the speed of light turns into energy, and energy cannot be created or destroyed, then matter, in death, must transforming into something else. Let's first associate this idea with the seasons, as the concept is evident or can be theoretically applied to various, natural processes. Let's look at the natural purposes of the seasons beginning with Winter. Agriculturally, winter is a time of gestation. It is the season in which the earth prepares for the birth of Spring. The earth is essentially pregnant with life.  However, this is also a time of "death" in which "life" breaks down, returning to a sort of beginning.  I'm reminded of winterizing plants. Leaves fall, stalks "die" and everything returns to a moot state.  Yet with many plants, the seed or bulb remains, and will be ready to exert the energy needed to grow in the season of Spring. Various conditions in Winter can affect the harvest in the Autumn.  So we see the process of a sort of destruction which is needed for future "creation." Smaller, personal examples of destruction and creation are apparent in common phrases, such as, "Something must end (death) for something new to begin (life)."

Even in literal creation, as in sexual reproduction, destruction must take place on a physical and psychological level. An egg must be destroyed to grow into a fetus, as a must a sperm be destroyed, dead in its original form, but transformed into something else. This process of the sperm penetrating the egg is characteristic of the male sexual organ penetrating the vagina. This is a holographic process. The same process happens in plants. I think it is highly amusing to recognize that plants have sex! And the characteristics of this process stem back to the myth of the cosmic egg - creation of matter in space. Are individual objects born of the "Big Bang" enacting a cycle, perpetuating an energy that is responsible for the creation of matter itself? Psychologically, for a time, the parents must also "die" as individuals to rear a child that is half mother, half father, yet entirely unique in itself, in the same way that a fetus is not just half sperm and half egg, though sperm and egg both retain their initial identities in the early stages of the fetus before transforming together into something else entirely. This idea would render positive space masculine, penetrating the feminine, negative space. Conversely, negative space also exists within matter. For me to scratch wood off of this desk, there must be space in-between particles, allowing the desk to be altered, "destroyed" of its original identity. This notion, though approached through observed phenomenon, is the theory of the Yin Yang. And all things, though they have been through the process of destruction and creation, retain an element of original form. Therefore, a person always retains the masculine (sperm) and feminine (egg), though one more than the other determines his or her physical sex.

Similarly, a tree is cut down and destroyed, cut into planks to make this desk. It is no longer a tree.  But the material and apparent, natural wood grain suggests its origins. Consider the holograph, which is cut in half again and again. Slowly, the image of a car becomes a blur, yet some of the information from the original image must be retained for the blur to continually appear. However, the blur is no longer identifiable as an image of a car. If everything contains a sort of "memory" of what it was before it transformed into something else entirely, then that "memory" must also contain its own memory of what it was prior to its "memory" state. Theoretically, nothing is lost, and therefore everything contains within it the whole, before it became separate, different "things." If everything contains its original state, and/or a memory of its creation from energy into matter (essentially, a memory of the Big Bang), then the process of which things came to be must constantly be happening within everything for transformation to occur.  Essentially, the Big Bang didn't happen, it is happening. This is theoretical physics from the phenomenological viewpoint of a non-scientist.  These questions and ideas came from the exploration of my personal habits of creation and destruction, observing them first within and recognizing them without.

One year, I had cultivated a hanging garden. I was shocked and impressed by the carnage enacted by Mother Nature. One of my plants was infested with aphids. Every day I had attempted biological warfare with Neem oil, to no avail. I had read that the best solution was green lacewings. The idea of growing and hatching my own army of bugs to defeat the enemy was highly amusing to me. It struck me that to I was attempting to create and maintain beauty at the hands of suffering. Soon after my infestation of aphids, I noticed caterpillars devouring the same plant. I had seen a hornet land on this plant and turned my head, while eating breakfast on the porch one day, to a loud thud. The hornet had captured a large caterpillar and their weight together had dropped them to the porch floor. After some initial struggle, the hornet, now positioned a top the caterpillar, began devouring the creature, (and quite rapidly too!), until it was completely gone! Yet still, as humans, we are terrified of our own destructive nature, the part of the very thing needed for our survival.

When I was a small child, my father, (where I get my interest in physics from) had excitedly drawn my attention to a similar scene inside of the garden. I remember the feeling, but not the image, as I was too young not to feel horrified and block the image from my mind.  A garden snake slowly swallowing an unsuspecting toad. After seeing the hornet and the caterpillar, I understand now, first hand, my father's then fascination. As I grew older, specifically into a teenager, I, for many reasons I assume, became what I feel is imbalanced in the manifestation of this primal process of creation and destruction. Though, at times I "created" images of destruction, sadness and solitude, anger and evil, rather than enacting them (though to be fair I did enact them at times) I had denied the creative force that is love and thus became a sort of harbinger of destruction. This is an extreme label of course.  But I wonder how my conscious denial and suppression of love unconsciously affected the manifestation of this primal destructive force. Anti-biotics commonly cause yeast infections because they deplete "good" bacteria, causing an overgrowth of yeast. So we see here - too much of anything in the microcosm of the body acts or creates an imbalance which creates illness and destroys the body. Creation and destruction in unison create the "whole" - an order in which creation and destruction work together to grow and evolve all that exists.

The origins of the universe are within everything. I had once thought love was a weakness and cursed my desire to create (as I was compelled to paint, it never felt like a choice). Only when I had accepted love did I begin to feel lucky I had the desire to create, and was good at it! I realized that I was not limited to paint on a canvas, but that I had the desire and strength to create my own life. This seems to be the same/similar experience individuals have with God, but I'm suggesting here that there is no divide, that God is science, and all dissenting viewpoints are merely people saying the same thing in different languages, assuming that the lack of understand is an augment in the content.

Contemplation of a Forest

This morning I understood some things that had been brewing in my mind for quite some time.

Repetition of form is hidden by color, the shape of negative space, light and shadow, and the process of time; time, which renders some shapes more aged and malformed than others.  Because of the interplay of differentiated and complicated shapes, we ironically tend to ignore the geometry of nature and call it organic.  An organic form is generally conceived of as an amorphous form, like an amoeba, rather than a geometric one, which a maple leaf is exemplary of.  A forest, then, is made up of limited forms in various states of existence according to time.  Trunks and branches are essentially the same, branches being like smaller trunks. These trunks and branches have, in time, broken and fallen to the floor.  They exist on the forest bed with fallen leaves, which have also been altered through time.  This creates the foundation of the forest.  Visually, it is a mess of decomposing forms with a sort of brownish, red color.  Conceptually, it is a vision of the future, while the branches and leaves on the trees create a vision of the past.  Furthermore, we see how the foundation, the future, creates the past, (the decomposition of such material which feeds  new growth) and how also, the past creates the future.  We could learn from this, possibly, that there is no time, or rather, that all things exist in all states - always.  Hence, time is not an illusion, but functions cyclically and not linearly.  Returning to the discussion of forms…

If you ask a child to draw a leaf, a flower, or a school bus, the visual response that will often manifest is not of a leaf, a flower, or a school bus.  Rather, it is of a shape, a symbol, that represents a leaf, flower or a school bus.  Here, the brain, through memory (created by the passage of time), is accessing the general form of these things because they are part of a system of shapes.  All flowers have centers and petals.  Most leaves are oblong in shape.  A school bus is a large vehicle, in the shape category of vehicles, and more specifically in the shape category of trains, trucks and buses.  In the vein of a question explored in a prior blog entry, do we perceive existing order, or do we create order?  Do we perceive symbols and shapes that already exist with a message?  Or do we create meaningful symbols out of a physical world that is meaningless?  Perhaps it is the former.

Back to the forest.  This morning I recognized that what I was looking at was a repetition of the same few shapes, like a kaleidoscope.  What made my vision appear organic was the three-dimensional quality, the placement in space, of these shapes.  What was organic about the composition of the forest was not the way the leaves were arranged (this too was very geometric and fractal-like) but the amorphous shapes the leaves made out of negative space (here we are reminded that the essence of a cup is its empty space, and not the thing itself). These shapes in space felt chaotic, and so should they be, as space is without form, (when we break a cup, it loses its form.  It no longer contains.  What might have been held by the essence of the cup has gone wild, become amorphous.  We call it a mess.  This is chaos).  Yet, it was only looking through space (space, the essence, that in which form exists and makes use of) that I was able to see the geometric composition of the forest.  If one meditates on an area for some time, yet allows their mind/brain to also ingest the whole of what they are seeing, peripheral vision and all, then the geometry of the composition becomes apparent.  By this I mean, you can actually see it, the fractals, the tiny shapes that create the larger shapes that are repeated throughout the vision.  Honing this practice, a sort of visual meditation, may actually enable us to see the three-dimensional world in the second dimension, if only for a second, where we may actually become aware of the patterns that create the physical environment, that are hidden by color, light, space, and time.

I have learned many of these ideas by contemplation of nature, but also by my personal creation of art.  It is because of artistic creation that I am able to apply what I have learned in painting, to life itself.  And it works!  Continually creating helps the artist perfect the order that lay in their unconscious, that is the universal web (we can totally call it The Matrix!) that contains us all.  It is the concept of the Yin Yang in Eastern thought that manifests in all of creation, and moves even, throughout the mind.  In Psychoanalysis it is called the unconscious. 

The artist, then, has an unconscious duty to provide a visual for how nature functions.  Sight is merely a sense.  When we close are eyes, are we expected to believe that everything disappears?  Of course not. This should tell us that things exist regardless of our senses.  What does this mean?  This means that how things are presented to us are clues to how the universe functions.  Through our senses, we paint a picture of existence itself.  And in painting this picture, we do not create it, but we provide for existence a form that is only as complete as our understanding of it.  Why then madness?  Lack of understanding.  The primary characteristic of madness is narcissism.  This means a great deal of information about reality is being ignored, and the "mad" individual is focusing mostly on his or her own personal existence and experience, rather than existence itself.  This is not a bad thing, but indicates a developmental level that must, in time, be surpassed.

The physical world is an illusion in the same way that art is a lie.  But art is not a lie.  This is a misconception.  Art and the physical world are abstractions, manifestations of Truth.  Both are paths to be explored.  Everything physical is slave to a process that alters it in time.  Everything is constantly being destroyed and created anew to either move us toward creation (evolution) or destruction (extinction).  Though we cannot avoid destruction, we can maneuver our tendency toward destruction to evolve us, rather than destroy us.  What we literally perceive in the physical world, as well as in dreams and visualizations, is the source of scientific discovery.  Hence, we can learn about the way we act as individuals, and as humanity, by understanding nature through all of our senses.

The Possible Meaning of Myth

The Possible Meaning of Myth

The belief in symbols as real is not necessarily a habit of the insane, or the simple minded.  Believing in a man named God in an actual place in the sky called Heaven, a unified field theory, or various religious scriptures, all represent the same thing in different languages of the unconscious.  Which symbolic language a person subscribes to depends largely on that person’s individual life experience.  With the current conditions of the world that this division has created, it is necessary to explore and expose the possible function of religion and myth through scientific exploration, 
that this exploration may reveal the patterns of mind responsible for their creation.  Perhaps embarking on this journey may move humanity forward in the attempt to achieve greater peace in the world.

As a culture with the predominating religion being Christianity, we so often forget that what we regard now as myth was once believed as truth.  Greek civilization had a host of mythical beings and a comparable amount of stories involving these beings, all of which enacted the soap opera spun by humanity. 

In addition to the aforementioned duel nature of god in Christianity, many religious and mythological parables, as well as modern myths, (genre fiction, whether written or in film: i.e. sci-fi/horror, and comic book narratives) deal with the battle between good and bad.  Star Wars come to mind as a popular example, although a favorite of mine is a Russian film and its sequel, Night Watch and Day Watch.  The plot line deals with a group of humans with supernatural powers, known as The Others.  The Others are divided into two groups, the forces of Darkness and the forces of Light.  First at battle with each other, the Lord of Light recognizes that to prevent them annihilating one another, he must offer a truce to the forces of Darkness.  For many centuries, both forces exist peacefully with one another.

In addition to modern myth portrayed in pop culture, there are a plethora of mythological beings that have emerged in various cultures throughout history, that also represent good, bad, or display a complex, duel nature. 

What we believe to be fairies today, small benevolent beings with wings, often wish-granting and nature conscious, find their roots in ancient Christianity or Paganism.  In Ireland, the “good people” (the Irish called them this for fear the beings would be offended by the term “fairies” – which is hypothesized to be a derivative of fata, referring to fate) were believed to be angels who revolted against God.  After the revolt, God closed the gates of Heaven and Hell, leaving the rogue angels trapped on Earth.  Many cultures have their own versions of fairies: the Jinn in Middle Eastern cultures, or the Kijimuna of Okinawa, Japan.  Both cultures ascribe good and bad traits to these fantastic races.  The reason for this could be because these beings are projections of mankind itself.  Projecting the experience of being human outward in the creation of symbolic beings may facilitate mankind’s exploration of its own duel nature. 

Many myths of similar races from around the world, involve tales of abduction by these beings, stories that seem oddly coherent with demonic possession and belief in alien entities from space.  A curious aspect of these myths is that it is often the habit of these cross-cultural entities to sit upon the chest of a person at night, causing them inability to breathe (we are reminded of the painting by Henri Fuseli The Nightmare).  Though some cultures consider the good aspects of these beings, it is typical to associate these entities with the realm of evil, encompassing witches, vampires, ogres, banshees, etc., created to represent real psychological, currently inexplicable phenomena. 

It is sensible that these terrifying creatures commonly reside in darkness.  Fear of the unknown is the paramount fear; one could say it is the only fear, as all subsequent fears (fear of spiders, fear of heights, fear of driving) can be traced back to it.  It is the fear of death, and death is the ultimate unknown.

The study of myth reasons its creation as a way for man to explain the existence of the world.  The study of comparative myth delves a bit further.  It reveals similarities cross-culturally to find the sociological and psychological meaning behind them, for the purpose of finding the origins of their existence, be it psychological (The Hero’s Journey representative of psychic growth), anthropological (a myth that may have been passed on and altered by other cultures, from nomadic races) or environmental (myths representing the behavior of the sun).  But my question does not necessarily refer solely to what myth does.  Not only do I wish to understand the purpose of paranoia and its relationship to myth, I wish to understand why we create these symbols – specifically symbols that represent our psychic experience.  Furthermore, aside from a defense against anxiety (and other emotions), why do we, as a species, seem to have an innate habit of tying together various symbols, applying stories to them, and as a result create entire realms of myth, and consequently religion?

Theory on How A Symbol Functions

We do not create symbols for things that already exist.  Why would we need a symbol for a turtle, a building or a human?  These things already exist physically.  We can create a symbol that looks like a bird that refers to a bird.  Therefore, we can say, “This is a bird symbol,” yet to make a symbol in the shape of a bird would serve the purpose of creating a message.  Perhaps it means, “bird watching” or “bird sanctuary.”  Animals themselves are also used as symbols to represent characteristics of a human, or to relay messages to humans based on the traits of the animal.  The totem is a good example of this.  A silhouette of a woman and man together often means, “This is where the restrooms are.”  The silhouette of a deer on a deer crossing sign does not simply mean, “deer.”  It is a symbol telling us to watch out for deer, and this message exists in the realm of thought – an immaterial realm. 

Employing symbols is a way for us to understand processes that are not material.  To recognize the existence of what is immaterial could be impossible for the human mind to grasp, in the same way that colors are unimaginable for those who are unable to see them.  To make a symbol one must take an immaterial force, (such as gravity or light) or concept and put it into a pseudobody.  It has to be born or conceived in the physical realm before we can fully recognize its existence and understand it.  This pseudobody is the symbol, a container for the meaning.  The meaning is immaterial.  The reason that symbolism is necessary is because humans only know what it is like to live physically, possibly in conjunction with a spiritual outlook, and definitely with at least a consideration of the immaterial forces that move through physical life.  

 A process itself implies the transformation of the physical.  What is immaterial and difficult for us physical beings to understand is applied to the physical.  It is possible that this is wired in our nature because in the physical world the immaterial needs corresponding things to exist.  “But the universe doesn't only contain matter; it also contains forces that act upon that matter. The standard model has given us more insight into the types of matter and forces than perhaps any other theory we have.” Jonathon Attebery (2012, Pg. 2) The Higgs field is a theorized force much like the concept of ether, that is diffused the physical world and also responsible for the physical world via the Higgs Boson particle.  With enough energy, the Higgs Boson is theorized to emerge from the Higgs field.  If it is necessary for immaterial forces to have a physical counterpart - for space to contain a physical object, perhaps the psyche, which encompasses thought and emotion, must also have objects attached to it.  Perhaps we are simply applying what we know about how nature functions, to our mental processes. 

It is possible environmental forces are being employed by the mind, and that these forces can be explored through the avenue of human behavior.  The following is interesting, relative to this idea:  “Paintings from Van Gogh’s periods of psychotic agitation behave remarkable similar to fluid turbulence.  His self portrait from a pipe, from a calmer period in Van Gogh’s life showed no sign of this correspondence.” (Natalya St. Clair, 2014)

In our current paradigm, we have created a system of symbols, the alphabet, to convey messages.  Though the alphabet is a system of visual symbols, it has replaced an important vault of information that is downloaded early on into our psyches, before we learn to speak.  This vault contains all that we experience through sight.

The physical world is the first alphabet, which we not only project meaning onto, but glean meaning from.  Because our intuitive ability to glean meaning from and project meaning onto something is relative to one’s individual experience, we all develop our own visual alphabet.  This visual alphabet contains not twenty-six symbols, but thousands, downloaded into our psyche, each containing either a meaning projected upon it from a specific experience related to it, or gleaned from it.  For example, having the experience of being beaten by a stick renders a stick a weapon, though it is not in and of itself a weapon.  And like the same letter may yield a different sound depending on its context or cultural association, so may a visual symbol contain multiple meanings depending on its context and the way an individual interprets it. We can also glean universal meanings from the symbols presented to us by the physical world.  A flower, for example, represents beauty and order.   

Because we do not experience anything without the conduit of our physical body, we must understand thoughts, emotions, and processes, by employing a set of symbols that give these concepts bodies.  And because change is constant, we must have these symbols enact stories.  We are left with external representations of our own psychic reality and development.  The Odyssey, the Biblical parable of the prodigal son, and Dante’s Divine Comedy are all examples of this.  Nonspecific bodies would include beings like angels, demons, sirens, aliens, skinwalkers, etc. that do not have stories in and of themselves, but appear in various narratives to represent specific ideas.

Image - Ferdinand Lured By Ariel - John Everett Millais