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 kindand 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 of the former. The known has a new or added existence in the knower.

135

Mind and Matter

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 twin-lobed activity. We must take our laughter seriously. It is one of Nature's most effective medicines. A body full of laughter can experi-ence 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 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

136

Mind and Matter

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-in-one 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 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.

137

Mind and Matter

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, gramma- tically 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. 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.

138

Mind and Matter

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 You-otherself in her womb. The growing brain of the latter is not yet sufficiently evolved to reciprocate such psychical co-consciousness, 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 and-or externally. Words are the spaced time representations of ideas and are the sight-sound signs with which a self relates 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

139

Mind and Matter

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, 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

140

Mind and Matter

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. 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 other-self 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

141

Mind and Matter

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, 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.

142

Mind and Matter

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 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 considera-tion. 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 cud-chewing process. We must reflect on personal superficial knowledge in order to experience, in the inner senses of our

143

Mind and Matter

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 meaning-fulness 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. 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 NatureComputer brain, to senses' data wed,

receives, records, digests, feeds back what's fedto source and sink. Its ovoid twin-lobed womb

perceives again new seed, conceives new bloomand gestates mute. In birth-pained laboured thought

self's mind reflects new insights, learns, is taught.

The knower names what sense perceptions gleanfrom matter's radiant splendour. Word-signs mean

144

Mind and Matter

what conscious mind defines each structured fenceenclose 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 word-processing 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 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 wave-particle duality. Under some circumstances matter seems to

145

Mind and Matter

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 electro- magnetic 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 self-sustaining. 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 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 self-sustaining. 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 pheno- mena 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 concep- tually distinct, must embrace and become part of each other

146

Mind and Matter

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 Litera-ture. Words are food for the mind to digest and store in the memory of its cerebral computer to be used later for self-other communication.

The Electromagnetic SpectrumWavelength (cm)

Frequency(sec-1)

Photon Energy(eV)

Cosmic rayphotons

3x10-22

3x10-20 1032

1030 4x1017

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

Ultraviolet- visible light

3x10-6 1016 40

Infrared 3x10-4 1014 0.4

Microwaves 3x10-2 1012 4x10-3

147

Mind and Matter

Radar 3 1010 4x10-5

UHF, VHF, FM 3x102 108 4x10-7

Shortwave, AM radio

3x104 106 4x10-9

Longwave radio 3x106

3x108 104

102 4x10-11

4x10-13

[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.] 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. Particle-states 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

148

Mind and Matter

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 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 confine-ment 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 so-called 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

149

Mind and Matter

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. 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 inter-connected, 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 antagon- istic. 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

150

Mind and Matter

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.

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 self-other 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-in-oneness 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,

151

Mind and Matter

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 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

152

Mind and Matter

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 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

153

Mind and Matter

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 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 other-illuminated. 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

154

Mind and Matter

relations, is named "I". Self, as the object, is named "me". Nothing is becoming of the knower-I except through its known-me. Conscious reflection gives evidence of personal individu-ality. Self's spaced time knowledge of its own self in self-consciousness 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 mine-knowing-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 self-centredness 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 I-self 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 but other-dependent and there is both positive and also negative

155

Mind and Matter

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 mirror-symmetry 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 electro-magnetic 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. 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

156

Mind and Matter

problems about the real nature of extraordinary self-functioning-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 conscious-ness, 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 HERE-NOW 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-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.

157

Mind and Matter

The evolution of human cerebral self-consciousness takes place in matter which grows to know, through self-functioning other-dependence, the indwelling Aseity who in-forms 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 self-images in ovoidal spaced time. Everything comes from an egg, programmed simultaneously inside the psychical inner other space withinness of Aseity's archetypal Ego-Egg.

158