I had some background in the world of particle physics—in fact, that’s where I used to work when I was recruited by Sophie—so I thought I’d question the Other about some strange results coming out of that world:
‘Physicists have known experimentally, since the 1980s, that the reality we perceive with our five senses isn’t really definite and concrete until we observe it. Before observation, it consists of vague, ambiguous possibilities that we’ve come to call the “quantum world.” I have thought long and hard about this in light of the insights I had during our previous dialogues, but I haven’t been able to make sense of it. The metaphysics you shared with me seems to explain the definite, classical world we ordinarily experience, but not the vague, ambiguous quantum possibilities that lie at the root of reality.’
‘Remember the evanescent ideas and feelings in the beginning of creation?’ he asked, referring to the cosmology he’d laid out during our previous session together. ‘I compared them to bubbles in a fizzy drink: they arise out of nothing and then dissolve into nothing.’
‘Yes, I remember that.’
‘Very well. Now recall that time is just a device to describe cognitive structure, not a standalone reality. Therefore, the beginning of creation isn’t really in the past; it’s happening right now. The bubbles are arising and dissolving right now, in very deep layers of cognition; layers in which self-referential loops of associations aren’t present.’
‘Right, I get that. And I think I already know where you are going with this…’ But the Other explained it anyway, as if to help me give words to my insight:
‘Because the cognitive activity in those foundational layers hasn’t formed stable tangles yet, it doesn’t obey deterministic causal laws or belief systems. It hasn’t yet congealed into concrete, stable realities, remaining in the realm of imagined possibilities, vague and ambiguous. Nonetheless, the activity in those foundational layers still infiltrates the layers of cognition above. It releases ambiguous ideas and feelings that can be captured in stable tangles higher up.’
He was basically replacing temporal thinking with spatial thinking to make his point, which he could do since both time and space are just imaginary devices. Instead of talking in terms of past and present events, as he chose to do in our previous encounter, he was now talking in terms of the activity in lower and higher layers of cognition. These were entirely equivalent ways to explain the same thing. I was fully with him and so concluded the thought myself:
‘These vague, ambiguous ideas and feelings are a kind of wave of possibilities that percolates upwards through our cognitive structure, getting filtered according to the expectations and beliefs in higher layers. Then, whatever possibility survives the filtering congeals in the form of a concrete, classical reality at the level of clusters.’
‘Precisely,’ the Other confirmed. ‘This wave of possibilities is the source and fuel of universal creativity and originality. Without it, the cognitive activity in higher layers would grind to a halt. There would be no novelty feeding it from below. How this wave gets filtered and then congeals into one particular reality—a process that your quantum physics calls “wave function collapse”—depends on the belief system running in those higher layers. Once again, thus, the reality you experience is a function of your deeply ingrained belief system.’
‘I get this. But how is it that we can still detect this quantum activity through instrumentation? How can mere machines looking at photons and electrons allow us access to the deepest layers of our own cognition?’
‘Remember that all is in mind, so machines are also the images of mental processes. And so are photons and electrons. As such, that machines can help you punch through layers of your cognition is no more surprising than that your thoughts can penetrate your emotions.’
‘Right, I remember that,’ I acknowledged. It’s amazing how even our strongest, most compelling insights can still get obfuscated after only a few months of exposure to the reigning cultural narrative.
‘What these machines are doing,’ the Other continued, ‘is piercing through the cognitive layers of expectations and beliefs that condition what you call classical reality. Because the subatomic realms are so far removed from ordinary experience, they escape the reach of expectations, hence revealing the unbound creative activity of mind-at-large prior to the formation of stable tangles.’
‘Of course…’ I mumbled, rather to myself.
This visit to the Dome felt like a relaxing conversation with a friend in a café, after work. I was positively impressed with what the team had achieved with the new Recipe setup. I felt no pressure and no discomfort of any kind. In fact, at this point in the conversation—to continue with the happy-hour metaphor—I would have taken a sip of wine and lazily processed what we had just discussed. After some introspection, I offered:
‘And we all experience the same classical reality because the filtering of the wave of possibilities happens at the level of tangles, which unify all the individual clusters corresponding to living beings. In other words, we all expect the same basic things.’
‘Yes, exactly. The filtering and congealment of a reality happens in cognitive layers shared by all living beings in that particular reality.’
Another long pause ensued, as if we were both munching on some imaginary nuts.
‘How ironic…’ I thought out loud. ‘You’ve just casually solved the so-called “measurement problem” in Quantum Mechanics, as if it were nothing…’
‘Some questions don’t need to be answered,’ he argued. ‘They simply disappear when you look at them from a different perspective.’
I sighed. A few more imaginary nuts and sips of wine were in order.
Perception as symbol
‘You know, there is something else I’ve been contemplating,’ I continued. ‘You said that we, living creatures, have an inside-out perspective of the universe, while the non-collapsed segment of mind-at-large has the inverse, outside-in perspective. This made me think of the Amduat, a religious myth from Ancient Egypt in which the world of the dead is portrayed as the reverse image of the world of the living. Indeed, it seems to me that an implication of what you explained is that the universe we perceive is, as it were, the reverse side of mind-at-large’s imaginings. Or, to say the same thing in a different way, what God experiences is the reverse side of the world we see around us.’
‘Right,’ he confirmed. ‘The deeper layers of mind-at-large do not experience the world the way you do. The experience of sense perception—vision, hearing, smell, taste, touch—is unique to the inside-out perspective. As such, God cannot see or hear the sun, the planets, mountains, rainbows, thunderstorms, etc. He does experience something corresponding to the visible sun, the planets, etc., but in a way qualitatively very different from yours. Indeed, God’s perspective entails experiential categories incommensurable with sense perception. As you put it, He experiences the reverse side of the universe; that which is behind perception.’
‘I think I understand this conceptually but I don’t have a felt intuition of it. Perhaps it isn’t possible for a person to intuit this…’
‘Oh yes, it is,’ he surprised me. ‘There are small-scale instances of this very same cosmic configuration in your everyday life, which you can directly relate to: when you look at another person’s brain activity through your Telemetry, you see the reverse side of that person’s inner life. The person’s inner life is behind your perception of her brain activity. Pause for a moment and think about it.’
After a brief silence, the Other continued:
‘The direct experience of the person’s inner life is qualitatively incommensurable with the brain scan you perceive. For instance, the direct experience of anxiety during a trip doesn’t feel at all like a beautiful, complex pattern of firing neurons, does it? Nonetheless, you know that there is a correspondence between the two: one is the reverse side of the other. God’s inner life is the reverse side of the universe in much the same way that a per
son’s inner life is the reverse side of her brain activity (in fact, of her entire metabolism, but let’s not complicate things for now). Put in another way, the universe is the scan of God’s brain; except that you don’t need the scanner: you’re already inside God’s brain so all you have to do is to look around. Your perceptions of the sun, rainbows, thunderstorms, etc., are as inaccessible to God as the patterns of firing neurons in your brain—with all their beauty and complexity—are inaccessible to you in any direct way. Can you intuit the analogy?’
‘Yes, I can… And I feel that this is extremely important in a way I cannot quite pin down yet. There is a sense in which the reverse perspective of something somehow implies the obverse one, as the backside of embroidery implies its front side.’
‘I’d rather say that the universe suggests God’s inner life,’ he corrected me, ‘instead of implying it. Implication requires that all information present in one side be also present—albeit in a different way—in the other. This is not the case when it comes to the universe; or to brain scans, for that matter.’
‘Right, I understand. We cannot assume that one side can be fully reconstructed based only on the other.’
‘Exactly.’
‘But still,’ I insisted, ‘if the ordinary world around us suggests its reverse side—that is, God’s perspective—then the world is a symbol of something transcendent. It points to what God thinks and feels when conceiving the universe into existence.’
‘That’s a fair way to put it, yes. So why is this extremely important?’ Obviously this was a rhetorical question. He was stimulating me to elaborate further on my insight.
‘Because it brings a new dimension of significance into everything,’ I explained. ‘Take the sun, for instance: it isn’t just the sun; it isn’t just a massive ball of glowing gas. It is a symbol of unfathomable ideas and feelings in God’s mind; the reverse side of divine cognitive activity inconceivable to us, mere mortals.’
‘That’s right. Go on.’
‘Well, that’s basically it. The sun has rich symbolic meaning. It represents something beyond its perceivable self. It’s a window into transcendence. The same applies to everything else: the planets, moons, thunderstorms, volcanoes, rocks, even specs of dust. They are all symbols of transcendence. The romantics were right!’
‘Yes,’ the Other concurred. ‘The inanimate universe is a collection of symbols pointing to imaginings incommensurable with perception; to feelings and ideas beyond your intellectual comprehension. But if you can tune into these symbols using your intuition and imagination, you can read them and unveil their meaning. The world around you is a book waiting to be deciphered. Figuring out how to do it—that is, finding a suitable hermeneutics of the universe—has been the quest of poets, artists, shamans, mystics and philosophers since time immemorial. Only modern Western science, plagued by its materialist metaphysics, has chosen to dismiss the universe’s symbolic significance.’
‘The whole universe a symbol… What an extraordinary idea…’
‘Yes, and it is so on two levels, not only one. The symbols you call the world point to yet other symbols!’
‘How come?’ I asked, somewhat confused. ‘We just agreed that the inanimate universe points to God’s experiences.’
‘Yes, but what are God’s experiences?’ he challenged me.
‘Well, excitations or vibrations of mind-at-large, as you explained before.’
‘Exactly! Now think about it. Knowledge is an experience. Therefore, all mind-at-large can know of itself are its own vibrations. But what is it that vibrates? What is the intrinsic nature of mind-at-large before it begins to vibrate? It can’t be known directly, since only the vibrations can be experienced. Do you see?’
‘Oh, I see… The vibrations of mind-at-large are themselves symbols of its own intrinsic—but forever elusive—nature. They reflect that which vibrates, as the notes produced by a guitar string reflect the intrinsic nature of the string.’
‘There you go!’ he confirmed enthusiastically. ‘A complete hermeneutics or interpretation of the universe must address both levels of symbolism. Your emotions, for instance, are not entities of the inanimate world. As such, they only have symbolic meaning on the second level: they are vibrations of mind-at-large within your cluster, not the reverse side of God’s imaginings. What do your emotions symbolize about your intrinsic nature as mind-at-large?’
The Other’s question here was meant simply to stimulate my thoughts and intuition. It didn’t require an answer. So another long, silent pause ensued. I was captivated by this discussion but confess that the second level of symbolism seemed a little too abstract to me. I couldn’t help but stay stuck at the first level: What did the entities and phenomena of the empirical world point to, as far as the ideas and feelings of God? Lost in my reveries, a question eventually slipped:
‘So what does the sun represent, as far as God’s inner life?’
‘It cannot be put in mere words. As is the case with any true symbol, the symbol itself is the only way to evoke its full meaning. Experience the sun and allow it to speak to your heart; that’s the way to decipher its meaning. I could help you more by directly inducing certain insights in your mind, as I’ve done before, but your new Recipe setup prevents me from going that far. So all I can say to get you started is this: the sun represents an outpouring of universal love, the mental energy that moves the world.’
‘Yet the sun can also burn and kill,’ I dared to cynically add.
‘Love nurtures but also smothers, depending on the dose and perspective. And death is part of the dynamics that keep the universe unfolding. The “perfect,” deathless world your ego fantasizes about would be a world in which nothing truly evocative happens, like a movie without a villain. Luckily for you, egos don’t run the universe; they just observe and question it.’
This seemed to hint at a solution for what Christians call ‘the problem of evil:’ the question of why evil exists in a universe supposedly governed by a god of pure good. Another sip of imaginary wine and some silent contemplation was needed…
Death
‘This brings me to the question of death,’ I finally said. ‘In fact, making sense of this question was the original motivation of the project that brought me here.’
‘Humanity’s perennial question…’ The Other sighed in apparent resignation.
‘Yes. What is death?’
‘You are being lazy,’ he fired. I was taken aback a little but he continued before I could interject: ‘You can easily derive the answer to this question from what you already know. There are, in fact, at least two complementary answers. So you tell me: What is death?’
This new Recipe setup seemed to put too much of the onus on me. I wasn’t sure anymore whether I liked it that much.
‘Well,’ I hesitated, ‘if time isn’t really real, then this future event we call death should, in principle, never come…’
‘Good. That’s indeed the first answer. There is only now and, in the now, there’s no death. You simply choose to unfold aspects of your timeless cognition along the imaginary arrow of time, in order to make their structure visible to the intellect. Death is a symbol of one such aspect of your cognition, which you place in an imaginary future. Your death will never come, because the future never comes. You are only ever in the now.’
‘But wait,’ I objected. ‘In practice people die every day. I can go to a hospital now and see them die.’
‘Have you ever noticed that only other people die, never you?’
‘What?!’ I exclaimed with indignation. This sounded preposterous to me.
‘You have never experienced your death—the end of your primary sense of being—have you? And neither have you experienced other people’s deaths from their perspective, which is the only perspective that counts. In the now there is no death. Are you dead or alive right now? This is the only question that matters. Everything else is just stories you tell yourself.’
‘I do have some
vague intuition about what you are trying to suggest, but I can’t reconcile it with what I know empirically about nature. It seems to me that you are glancing over undeniable empirical facts.’
‘You’re trying to fit everything into a model,’ he continued, ‘which is limiting but nonetheless valid. So here is where the second answer to the question of death can be helpful: you already know that a living being is a protrusion of a segment of mind-at-large into its own imaginings. From this perspective, you tell me: What is death?’
‘The withdrawal of this protrusion?’ I offered tentatively.
‘Exactly. The image of the protrusion is a metabolizing biological organism, brain activity and all. When the corresponding segment of mind-at-large pulls out of the dream, the image immediately begins to unravel, reflecting this withdrawal. It no longer has the focused mental energy necessary to sustain itself. Electrical activity stops immediately, metabolism grinds to a halt and, eventually, the entire body decomposes. Indeed, a dead body without metabolism is just an echo of the earlier protrusion.’
‘You are suggesting that death is just an event of the dream, within the dream…’
‘Indeed!’ he answered. ‘It only exists from the perspective of those segments of mind-at-large still inside the dream.’
‘This immediately raises the question of what death feels like from the perspective of the dying…’
‘You tell me,’ he challenged me again.
‘Right. Well, if entering the world means a change of perspective from conceiving to dreaming, then exiting it must entail the opposite change: from dreaming to conceiving.’
‘Very good! The direct experience of death is akin to waking up from a dream. One realizes that one was making the whole thing up all along. Moreover, one begins to experience the universe from the reverse side: instead of the sun, one feels the corresponding outpouring of love; instead of a thunderstorm, one feels what the thunderstorm had been symbolizing all along; and so on.’
More Than Allegory Page 21