Punctum Saliens

You may ask — you are bound to ask me now: What, then, is in your opinion the value of natural science? I answer: Its scope, aim and value is the same as that of any other branch of human knowledge. Nay, none of them alone, only the union of all of them, has any scope or value at all, and that is simpluy enough described: it is to obey the command of the Delphic deity … know yourself.

– Erwin Schrödinger, Nature and the Greeks and Science and Humanism, p. 108

If consciousness is created by embracing the tension of the opposites — paradox — and faith is also the tension of the opposites, what is the connection with the superposition of states in quantum physics? Take the most common example of the electron existing as a particle and a wave. These two states seem mutually exclusive, paradoxical, yet the electron exists as both/and in a superposition. It is only with observation that the electron collapses to one of the two states — that is, “becomes” either a particle or a wave. Faith and creating consciousness can be described as the superposition state where multiple possibilities exist; attachment and identification is then the collapsed state where only one possibility exists.

Perhaps the “real” world is the world of superposition and the “concrete” world is the world of collapsed states as we experience it with our senses. Perhaps the goal is to not be attached to the single, collapsed state but embrace the paradox of the superposition. I’ll have to ponder this more but I think there is something there.

Have you thought about this? Can you help me find what I think is out there waiting to be found?

Anyone? Anyone? Bueler? Bueler?

My wife has started to help me count calories. She has a nifty computer program that she has used for a while. Today was the first day following “the plan” and all I can say is, “I’m Starving!”

I did not eat poorly before but I never thought about calories. What I thought was a reasonable day’s food turned out to be 2700 calories! Not an ideal situation for losing the 13 pounds I’m shooting for.

Basically, to lose weight, you need to be hungry All The Time!

This got me thinking about being “filled with the Spirit.” Should we really be filled or is that a final goal to be realized in the future? If we get filled with food, we get lazy and fat and go to sleep. Is it the same with the Spirit?

What do you think?

In thinking about my recent post on ritual, it occurred to me that my problem with ritual is that I’m intellectualizing it too much. I am trying to force onto the ritual a meaning which, when absent, leaves me empty. Instead, perhaps, I should be just experiencing the ritual experience — as I said in my post: Just for the hell of it.

Intellectual knowledge and experiential knowledge are two very different beasts. Carl Jung, when talking about using amplification in dream analysis (the process of pulling in collective symbols — mythology, religious, &c.) says that it cannot be done by head-knowledge but only by someone with long experience.

When I was a child, I had all the head knowledge about Christianity. I was the best at Bible drills, could memorize scripture, had all the right answers. But, I had no experience — my personal Christian life was in shambles. My intellectual knowledge allowed me to fool everyone but there was nothing really there.

In The Eight Upanishads it says:

Of these, the lower [knowledge] comprises the Rig Veda, Yajur Veda, Sama Veda, Atharva Veda, the science of pronunciation, &c., the code of rituals, grammar, etymology, metre, and astrology. Then there is the higher [knowledge] by which is realized the Immutable.

(What a great word to describe God: The Immutable.)

With the Bible as with the Upanishads, the real, higher meaning is not learnt from reading, studying the texts, memorizing, &c. The real meaning is learnt by practice, by experiencing God and not by reading about God. The intellectual part is all too simple and all too public and allows us to deceive others all too easily.

God made sense turn outward, man therefore looks outward, not into himself. Now and again a daring soul, desiring immortality, has looked back and found himself.

– The Ten Principal Upanishads, p. 33

According to Vedanta, self knowledge comes not from looking at external things nor even from delving into our minds. Self knowledge comes from finding that which is aware of the mind; becoming aware of the knower.

A very recent post on You Are Dreaming talks about this very thing — finding the “I” that is your true self, the “I” that

remains unchanged throughout the day. What remains unchanged as the thoughts and feelings come and go like the clouds? What remains unchanged as the body moves around, typing, clicking the mouse, shifting in the chair? What is the factor or principle that is steady and unshaken as the appearances of hands and thoughts wiggle around?

Knowing your true self, your unchanging “I”, the knower is not becoming aware of an object because there would always be another knower of that object which would have to be perceived. So, if the knower is not an object, then what is it? What is aware of your mind, never changes, and is not an object that can be perceived? Sounds a little bit like God, to me!

Furthermore, to know the knower is to realize that you are the knower. Jesus says as much in John 10:30 –“I and the Father are one.” It doesn’t get much clearer than that.

But wait … if the knower is God and you are the knower, then, are you God? Well, Jesus says so in John 17

… that they may all be one; even as Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee, that they also may be in Us … And the glory which Thou hast given Me I have given to them; that they may be one, just as We are one; I in them, and Thou in Me, that they may be perfected in unity, that the world may know that Thou didst send Me, and didst love them, even as Thou didst love Me.

There certainly are a lot of parallels between Jesus and “them.” They are in God and Jesus, they are one just as God and Jesus are one, Jesus is in them and God is in Jesus, God loves them just as God loves Jesus.

God is not something “out there,” totally separate from us. If he were, he would be an object that we can perceive and know and, therefore, not God. God is in us, God is that part of us that is unchanging, God is our “I,” our knower, our true self. And the way to know God is to look within. To look for what in us does not change; what in us says “I.”

Some day I’ll get back to my series on Edinger’s The Creation of Consciousness, but until then I’ll just leave you with this thought:

Ram Dass agrees with Jung and Edinger that the creation of consciousness is our goal (or should be, at least). From The Only Dance There Is:

Consciousness does not mean attachment to polarity, at any level. It means freedom from attachment. And once you see that the highest mother is the most conscious mother, the highest student, the highest therapist, the highest lover, the highest anything is the most conscious one, you begin to see that the way you serve another human being is by freeing him from the particular attachment he’s stuck in that turn him off to life.

Non-attachment to polarity is Jung’s “tension of the opposites.” Dealing with polarity, paradox, incongruency and not flip-flopping from one side to the other is the process of creating consciousness. “Freedom from attachment” is the middle way that leads to conscious living and an increase in the sum total of consciousness in the universe.

I’m not big on ritual. I like the idea of ritual but my idea has always been based on the ritual meaning something. A bit vague, I realize, but …

Growing up, once a month or so we would “celebrate” the Lord’s Supper, a.k.a. take communion. We would drink our grape juice and eat our cracker niblets while sitting in our pew. (Yes, the good ol’ Protestant version of the Eucharist sans kneeling, walking, Latin, &c.) This could have been ritual — should have been a ritual what with the “do this in remembrance of me” and all — but it wasn’t because I was always stuck on the part that came before. I was stuck on the “do not partake unworthily” which, to me, meant “have no unconfessed sin in your life” so I spent the whole time sitting there confessing every sin I could think of. So, this mother (or father) of all rituals was not really a ritual; it was a time to focus on saving my ass from the unpardonable sin (I was a bit naive back then).

We always prayed before most meals but that, too, was a chore to say the “right” words and never “came from the heart.” It was just something we did that embarrassed me when we were out in public. I remember our assistant pastor would do the “long” Sunday morning prayer and mention all the prayer requests: the sick, the missionaries, &c. I would often time his prayers and always giggled to myself when he used the word “unction,” which he did quite frequently. So prayer was never a ritual for me.

Lately, I’ve tried other rituals: journaling in the morning, keeping a paper checkbook, writing my poems and blog posts on paper instead of on the computer. But none of them lasted very long. It was always “easier” to go back to the old habits.

I think my problem has been that I’ve always expected the ritual to mean something and none of these things did. They were meaningless things that I tried to do just for the sake of doing them. But, now I’m starting to think that that’s exactly what a ritual is — a meaningless thing we do just for the hell of it (more or less).

Ram Dass, in The Only Dance There Is, says the ritual, itself, is an offering. The act is an offering. It has nothing to do with my getting something out of it just like an offering is not about receiving but about giving. The ritual is something we give to God. But, he continues, once we realize that I, as the one performing the ritual, and the offering itself and the one to whom the offering is made are all part if “it all,” that it’s like

“[I am] pouring energy into energy for a matter of energy in honoring energy. So big deal, so nothing’s happened. Certainly knocks a hole in orality to start to see the universe that way. What are we doing? Nothing. How could you ever do anything, it’s all here?”

So, I think I need to rethink ritual and try a few new ones on for size — with a new attitude about them.

How about you? What rituals do you regularly do and why?