Preface & Introduction
DYNAMICS & CHAOS THEORY IN TRANSMODERN ALCHEMY
by Iona Miller
by Iona Miller
PREFACE
“The interaction of our mind and consciousness with the quantum vacuum links us with other minds around us, as well as with the biosphere of the planet. It "opens" our mind to society, nature, and the universe. This openness has been known to mystics and sensitives, prophets and meta-physicians through the ages. But it has been denied by modern scientists and by those who took modern science to be the only way of comprehending reality.” -Ervin Laszlo
"Quantum Tantra" attempts to blaze a new pathway for science by incorporating previously discarded and marginal ways of thinking into a new synthesis. Two non-mechanistic, non-separatist traditions are of particular interest for this purpose: Western alchemy and Eastern tantra. Alchemy is based on the notion of a partially psychic chemistry in which the mind of the alchemist merges with the material cooking in his alembic. Tantra teaches that the universe is not mere motion of dead matter but the sexual play of two divine beings and seeks techniques to directly participate in that holy play. The goal of "Quantum Tantra:" is to initiate an entirely new direction of research by approaching quantum theory and its paradoxes as if they were incomplete fragments of a "successor science" based on tantric and alchemical principles.” –Nick Herbert
Esoteric Futures
We name our eras for the spirit of the times, but though the latest terms supersede the old ones, they don't overwrite the past. Eras overlap as we strive to catch up with our own futures conceptually, philosophically and practically. We nostalgically fall back into old ways of talking, thinking, being and belief -- even when we know they are false. Some cultural pioneers will be ahead of the curve, while others remain firmly attached to the visions and values of by-gone eras.
Turbulence is the hallmark of the Transmodern era and the hallmark of chaos. Globalized culture has been called “integral culture,” but we are far from integration, far from equilibrium. More accurately we still inhabit a postmodern mash up of conflicting cultures and ideologies, often in hot turmoil.
Seeing irony in the fact we can't coexist harmoniously is certainly no solution. Each of us has to help ourselves navigate the complex environment with all its dimensions and meaning. We can find some of that meaning within ourselves, within the transformative process that mirrors nature's way. Inner knowing becomes the locus of authority. But we also must cautiously remember we can be self-deluded.
Chaos and order pulsate in an intermingling way at each and every locale. What happens in one place has rippling effects throughout the entire planet. But nonlocal complex changes don't trickle down to remote locales. They rip through the biosphere at lightspeed, morphing the culture and nature. The virtuously instantaneous arrival of the future is like psychic electroshock.
Not everyone has arrived at a new cultural, intellectual and scientific outlook. What we see is a spectacle of hypercharged transmutation that is ubiquitous. We are a global culture in massive transition, left without a solid ground of reliable spiritual, cultural or mundane authority.
We have not learned how to flow together as a planetary species. But at the same time we are in the inexorable process of turbulent interpenetration. We have exchanged dreams of utopia for dreams of liquid mutability and unprecedented electronic communications.
We have crossed many boundaries, and in some cases there is no going back. Each generation has the task of making gold of the lead of human history. The word current means right now, but it also means the hot charged flow of electricity...of potential. Our social organisms can become works of art meaning as much or more than the rising tide of images impinging upon us from all media.
Lifestyle Choices
In Chaos Theory, turbulence has certain qualitative characteristics. It isn't governed by politics and eCONomics but by conceptual and mathematical attractors, including totally unpredictable strange attractors as likely to create order as chaos. We cannot know what the critical nexus points of our spinning future will bring -- breakdown or breakthrough. Will we find our hidden fractal order? Can culture truly become a thing of beauty?
Ultimately, “transmodernity” is a meme, a mental category by which we benchmark cultural change. It attempts, though doomed to failure, to encapsulate the emerging zeitgeist of the new millennium. We have exchanged utopian ideals for dysphoric visions of post-apocalyptic breakdown and the liquid mutability of virtuality. Persistent deep change and confrontation of perspectives are the hallmarks of this era. But what happens once the opposites unite? Jung called that transcendence.
We must look further to find our way through the chaos of regression that opens us to the emergence of new self-organization. Old ways break down before new ways emerge and stabilize. Beyond the spectacle of breakdown lies the Unknown and we must remain optimistically open to it. Alchemy is not metaphysical but transphysical. It is an eternally renascent Philosophy of Nature.
We now realize we have to create our own Matrix of being without imploding from accelerating change, falling prey to utopianism or the myth of progress. Conversely, wallowing in narcissism, nihilism, victimization or irony won’t get us anywhere, since they are inherently oppositional. We also don't need to emulate superheroic conquerors of by-gone eras, especially in vain attempts to "conquer" ourselves.
Less stressful orientations naturally lead to greater well-being, to natural healing. Alchemy and the natural dynamics of change describe alternative approaches for transforming. Premodern wisdom helps us transcend and transmute modernity, postmodernity and any fantasy we currently conceive to model our times. It holds secrets of transubstantiating gross materiality into spirit.
Process & Alchemy
Mystics, including the Renaissance magi, often live beyond the boundaries of their era, or foresee trends and knowledge which doesn't manifest publically for centuries. The word mysticism implies a special kind of insight, deriving from the Greek meaning “to see.” In this case, being such a visionary means seeing through the alchemical framework.
In alchemy, methodology merges with revelation. It is a self-revealing process when followed to its eternally reiterating conclusions. It is a process-goal that actually never ends. It isn’t occult or hidden, except to the degree that one has inherent capacity to experientially see through its metaphors to the core of reality. It requires some reflection. The revelation is the brilliant potential of contemporary science and ancient mystical knowledge becoming congruent -- they mirror and compliment one another.
The esoteric philosophy alchemy is a creative art rooted in the life of the soul (Anima Mundi) wed to Spirit and Body. Our eyes are opened by esoteric training and direct experience of the fruits of that practice. Transmodern alchemy is a hypercultural fusion of cross-cultural and interdisciplinary practices. New consciousness emerges gradually and suddenly, based on the principle of health, not self-interest or the disintegration of indulgence.
Yet we still suffer from mankind’s bane of alienation and separation. In the past, seemingly paradoxically, the retrieval of the soul and healing the scars of separation has been in developmental terms of finding an integral ‘Self,’ but we need to find more than our Selves for true healing. We need to connect with the true nature of our being, beyond the human artifacts of theology, philosophy and technology that bind us because we are outgrowing them.
Just as we are finding new areas of cultural integration in the Transmodern paradigm, we can extend our philosophical ideas in areas as yet unknown but that can be mapped out as we inhabit our transformed futures. Sometimes we have to be shocked out of our old ways of thinking and being, seized by the new zeitgeist, by the image of what was considered utterly alien.
In this way we claim the unknown parts of ourselves. We cannot have known our “Transhuman” nature earlier even though some philosophers hinted at it. It depends utterly on the technological gestalt of the day, including emergent transgenetic options. The new outlook includes the perpetual futureshock of deep change as we become transhuman, whatever that comes to mean in practical terms.
The mechanistic clockwork universe has unwound itself. We are more than the sum of our parts. Old patriarchal notions of the industrial era have led us to the edge of societal and ecological suicide. We keep trying to review and retrieve the knowledge of the past to see where we went wrong, but mostly we compulsively repeat these old memes in ways called ‘new’ that simply aren’t.
We will only understand where we have failed when we find what truly works NOW. The new philosophies of nature include ancient wisdom and modern science. The new mentality transcends and transforms modernity beyond the consumer ethic toward a paradigm that builds toward well-being for all, leaving both modern and postmodern mindsets behind.
Transcendent understanding and well-being for all may be too ambitious. But at least we can formulate our worldview in terms that include a comprehensive consideration of contemporary scientific and spiritual knowledge within an intelligent understanding. Art in the future means that the potential of genius will flow unhampered by its chosen medium.
Ultimately, the alchemists tell us that spiritual and physical reality are inseparable. Our confidence in scientific inquiry has given way to holistic vision. Consciousness, from ordinary to anomalous experience, is the proving ground of reality. The most unusual phenomena teach us the most about ourselves.
Lightness of Being
Alchemy recognizes living systems as the root science. Science has revealed that what mystics have claimed for Millennia is true - the core of our existence and all existence is living light. Turbulent light is the 5th dimension of reality, the virtual vacuum fluctuation at the core of each and every particle.
The living DNA of our bodies projects our manifestation through coherent light and sound. This is holography "without strings." We are quantum bioholograms -- hyperdimensional beings. As embedded holograms, we are hyperconnected to the whole cosmos and carry that same universe within us. We are intimate with the cosmos but often simply don't realize it.
The groundstate of nature is the heart of matter. Our nature is radiant scalar energy, the nonobservable yet roiling cosmic ocean of vacuum fluctuation, the disassembled roots of all being, the true primordial soup. The Heart Sutra claims that all form is nothing but Void and quantum physics agrees.
Our subatomic quantum nature guides and regulates our electromagnetic and chemical being, which influences our minds and emotions, forming a reciprocal feedback loop with all objects and living forms in our environment. In the right circumstances, we can respond to one another like resonating coupled oscillators. Our whole body flickers in and out of existence at an astounding rate, and each of those quantum re-creations is an opportunity to transform utterly.
If we drop down another whole domain of observation from the juicy “wetware” described by chemistry and atomic structure, we enter the subatomic realm of quantum physics. At this level the behavior of matter, both organic and inorganic, is governed not by classical notions of cause and effect or even complex dynamics, but by those of quantum probability.
“Something” appears to emerge from virtually “nothing” which physicists describe as a sea of infinite potential. They call it quantum foam, vacuum potential, or zero-point energy – we can call it the vacuum substructure. Subatomic particles wink in and out of existence on a continuous basis, like some subatomic froth. This “something” appears paradoxically in wave/particle form. This world is not transcendent to matter, but underlies it as a coherent unity, much like ecology underlies biology.
Light and Sound
In this dynamic model there are no “things”, just energetic events. Everything is one dynamic process. Light and sound (acoustic cymatics) modulate all matter. This “holoflux” includes the ultimately flowing nature of what is, and all possible forms.
All the objects of our world are three-dimensional images formed of standing and moving waves by electromagnetic and nuclear processes. This is the guiding matrix for self-assembly, and manipulating and organizing physical reality. It is how our DNA creates and projects our psychophysical structure.
DNA functions in a way that correlates with holographic projection. The code is transformed into physical matter guided by light and sound signals. DNA projects a blueprint for the organism that is translated from the electrodynamic to the molecular level. Further, research strongly suggests DNA functions as a biocomputer. This DNA-wave biocomputer reads and writes genetic code and forms holographic pre-images of biostructures. We are more fundamentally electromagnetic, rather than chemical beings. (Gariaev)
DNA and the genome have been identified as active “laser-like” environments. Roughly speaking, DNA can be considered a liquid crystal gel-like state that acts on the incoming light in the manner of a solitonic lattice. A soliton is an ultra stable wave train that arises in the context of non-linear wave oscillation. Oscillations are set up when DNA acts as a rotary pendulum kindling other oscillations.
Chromosomes can transform their own genetic-sign laser radiations into broadband genetic-sign radio waves. This is the main information channel of DNA, the same for both photons and radio waves. Superposed coherent waves of different types in the cells interact to form diffraction patterns, first in the acoustic domain, then in the electromagnetic domain. The quantum hologram is the matrix of the translations between acoustical and optical holograms. The human biocomputer can be modeled through the marriage of quantum mechanical and complex dynamics.
Scalar energy has a direct effect on nerve cells and cell membranes. Scalar energy in the body can cause changes in brain states. Scalar energy can modulate the basic biochemical communication between nerve cells mediated by neurotransmitters. (Rein) Our brains mathematically construct ‘concrete’ reality by interpreting frequencies from another dimension. (Pribram) This pre-geometric information realm of meaningful, patterned primary reality transcends time and space.
Embedded Holograms
Holograms contain all the information needed to reconstruct a whole image. Holograms contain many dimensions of “compressed” information in a subtle network of interacting frequencies. Thus, shining a coherent light (reference beam) or laser through the fuzzy-looking overlapping waves of a 2-dimensional hologram can create a virtual image of a 3-dimensional figure.
The gist of the holographic paradigm is that there is a more fundamental reality. There is an invisible flux not comprised of parts, but an inseparable interconnectedness. The holographic paradigm is one of reciprocal enfolding and unfolding of patterns of information. All potential information about the universe is holographically encoded in the spectrum of frequency patterns constantly bombarding us.
Thus, the brain is an embedded hologram, interpreting a holographic universe. (Miller, Webb, Dickson, 1973) All existence consists of embedded holograms within holograms and their interrelatedness somehow gives rise to our existence and sensory images. (Bohm, 1980) When we consciously embody this intimate wisdom, our bodies become temples of the living spirit. We supercharge our potential.
Interference patterns of waves can be visualized interacting like ripples on a pond. At the quantum level they create matter and energy as we perceive them as lifelike 3-dimenional effects. Consciousness and matter share the same essence, differing by degrees of subtlety or density. There is a strong correlation between modulations of the brain’s EM field and consciousness (Persinger, 1987; McFadden, 2002). Our psychophysical being is embedded in the universe as a continuously evolving, interactively dynamic hologram.
Chaos Theory
New physics, chaos theory, synergetics, and information theory describe our existence as complex dynamical systems. Entropy can only occur in a system that is absolutely closed so no energy from outside can be fed into it. But the mindbody is an open system, which exchanges energy and information with its environment and can be negentropic.
We can also have a negentropic influence on one another (Gladwell), perturbing, enlarging, and creating new pathways and possibilities. Theoretically, behavior can ripple outward until a critical mass or "tipping point" is reached, changing the world. Gladwell's thesis that ideas, products, messages and behaviors "spread just like viruses do" is a metaphor akin to memes. Highly sociable or connective people often become revolutionary leaders, bringing others together with a new perspective, a broadened worldview. This is also the cultural role of shamans.
Do we live in a persistent delusion of separateness? Only that concept limits us from constantly realizing the depths of our primordial fusion. We are all nonlocally connecting and diverging in an ill-defined yet tangible way at the subatomic, individual, group and global level.
Psychic energy or libido is a psychosomatic phenomenon analogous to the paradoxical nature of energy/matter or wave/particle. The human body is not an object in space, but seamlessly welded to spacetime. We are not merely a phenomenal body of flesh, but one of awareness, of consciousness, a living interface of inner and outer field phenomena.
We all experience visceral or gut reactions and know instinctively how our mental states affect our physical vitality, and vice versa. But often we loose the intimate relationship with our mindbody, with the source of our being, our aliveness, our passions, our self-expression, essence and healthy self-image. If we experience this flow at all, it ebbs and flows away. Our individual and collective creative potential remains largely unrealized.
Soma Sophia - Body Wisdom
How often do we pay attention to those vital signs, the innate wisdom of the body, inhabiting our minds rather than our flesh? We are increasingly not instinctual, but cultural, and we choose many of our behaviors for good or ill. Most of us are, indeed, "sick and tired" of the way things are, but what do we do to change them and ourselves?
We can learn simple techniques for self-care and self-regulation, such as biofeedback, yoga, and meditation. Creativity, as an activity in several fields, brings many intrinsic health-promoting rewards. We can create new habits to help us cope with technocratic society that tone or recalibrate our systems and change our physical state. We all have to learn how to deal with personal and/or global catastrophe whether we want to or not.
This dance is a harmonic continuum from the smallest to the largest scales, permeating all domains of assembly and observation: subquantum, quantum, molecular, chemical, even cultural, global, and cosmological. The evolution of our dynamic system obeys universal laws. Likewise our behaviors flow into manifestation from our beliefs, thoughts and emotions, including our self-image, generated by our interaction with the environment from the womb forward.
By opening to system dynamics we can reorganize away from the entropic, reductionistic, destructive habit patterns that plague our species. We can make stress-reducing negentropic choices for structural and psychological adjustment, which improve our quality of life. Integration is a synergistic process rooted in primordial bodymind consciousness.
Field Body
The brain is not confined to our skull, but permeates our whole being through the intracellular matrix and sensory system, as well as the strong EM fields generated by the beating heart. Research suggests activities in the brain may be pre-conditioned by the DC field of the organism (Oschmann; Becker). Our molecular system extends beyond the nervous system and is the bedrock of intuitive, subconscious and unconscious processes.
Turning our attention deep within ourselves we find the Voice of the Silence speaking back. Our felt-sense is our wise intuitive response if we but listen. It brings meaning and value to life. What is your body trying to tell you? The body has a mind of its own and speaks that mind in gut reactions, body language, dreams, psychosomatics, and literal symptoms.
Both the alternative health fields and mindbody psychologies such as the humanistic, Jungian and transpersonal psychologies have sought the triple union of body, soul, and spirit much like the medieval alchemists. But only a fusion of those approaches can manifest the union of opposites in the golden flesh. We can learn to care for our mindbodies in new ways from the inside out, conceptually and experientially.
Creativity and Healing
We can return to Nature and our own nature, collectively preparing a paradigm shift for a new shared reality and trajectory that integrates physical, emotional, cognitive and spiritual coherence. The silent frictionless flow of living intelligence is beyond words and conceptual constructs.
We are a process of recursive self-generation. The groundstate is our creative Source, directly discoverable in the immediacy of the emergent embodied moment. We are continuously in the deep embrace of the physical universe. It not only interpenetrates but is the very fabric of our being.
The healing response includes behavioral, mental and spiritual shifts or transformations. Health is the natural outcome of a meaningful life, not just absence of symptoms. It means a connection with and comprehension of the complexities of life that is deeper than the conventional worldview of cause and effect. Many researchers view consciousness as the foundation of reality. We do not exist independently from the Universe; we are fused with it. But the exact nature of that seamless connection is unknown.
How we Know What We Know
A radically empirical phenomenological approach includes subjective experience as primary data and addresses the totality of experience. We are not mere observers of consciousness and cosmos but interacting in fluid interpenetration.
We need to recognize even unconventional or paradoxical metaphors that help us order our experience and knowledge, including metaphors of consciousness. Alchemy, dynamics and physics are rich in such metaphors that speak to our direct experience. The influence of the unconscious on how we experience ourselves and our environment is far greater than we realize.
Science itself must be thoroughly re-assessed in the light of this pervasive influence of the unconscious mind. We must reassess challenging evidence, contemplate alternative conceptual frameworks and metaphors, scientific interests and disinterests, and scientific judgment. We must accept the presence of unconscious processes and contents, not as minor perturbations, but as a potentially major factor.
Changing our relationship with the world is both a psychological and political act. The ailments we perceive in the world are as much in ourselves. Through remembering our interdependence, we can experience the power of our individual actions to influence the whole.
DYNAMICS
Transmodern Alchemy can be revisioned as a revolutionary dynamic process in terms of Chaos Theory and its related sciences. There are analogies between spiritual psychology, holographic paradigm, chaos theory and alchemical processes, some of which are more than metaphorical.
Whether alchemy can perform a causal transformation of metals to gold or not, it certainly has the capacity for creatively stimulating the imagination and the kind of divergent thinking that leads to discovery. Dynamics is a universal tool, a novel practice which helps us grasp the processes of emergence, self-organization and nonlinear development in ourselves, in nature, in our world and the cosmos.
Dynamics is a synthesis of recent scientific theories: system dynamics, living systems, general systems, chaos, edge-of-chaos, complexity, emergence, self-organization, complex adaptive systems, quantum gravity, quantum cosmology, attractors, and homeodynamics.
CHAOS: In Greek myth, Chaos is the original dark void from which everything else appeared. In science, chaos describes the behavior of certain dynamical systems – with states that evolve with time and exhibit dynamics that are highly sensitive to initial conditions (butterfly effect). This sensitivity manifests itself as an exponential growth of perturbations in the initial conditions. So, the behavior of chaotic systems appears to be random.
These systems are deterministic, meaning that their future dynamics are fully defined by their initial conditions, with no random elements involved. This behavior is known as deterministic chaos, or simply chaos. Systems that exhibit mathematical chaos are deterministic and thus orderly in some sense; this technical use of the word chaos is at odds with common parlance, which suggests complete disorder. Chaotic systems show a strong kind of unpredictability not shown by other deterministic systems. Quantum chaos theory studies systems that follow the laws of quantum mechanics.
EDGE-OF-CHAOS: Describes a phase transition of behaviors. In the sciences in general, the phrase has come to refer to a metaphor that some physical, biological, economical and social systems operate in a region between order and either complete randomness or chaos, where the complexity is maximal. In some systems evolution is maximized near the edge of chaos.
COMPLEXITY: In science, a field of study devoted to the process of self-organization. The basic concept of complexity is that all things tend to organize themselves into fractal patterns, including human bodies and cultures. The more complex a task the harder it is to think about and the steeper the learning curve. Complex systems are characterized by unpredictable behavior, existing in a state somewhere between order and chaos. Things that are complex in nature exhibit characteristics like cycles of growth, mass extinction, regeneration and evolution.
Natural forces tend to bring complex systems to a halt, suddenly and unexpectedly. This is related to chaos theory and the general rule that small changes to a system, may bring a dramatic change in the future. Complexity looks for the mathematical equations that describe the middle ground between equilibrium and chaos (nonlinear dynamics).
EMERGENCE: Spontaneous Order. In philosophy, systems theory and science, emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions. Emergence is central to the theories of integrative levels and of complex systems.
SELF-ORGANIZATION: a process of attraction and repulsion in which the internal organization of a system, normally an open system increases in complexity without being guided or managed by an outside source. Self-organizing systems generally display emergent properties.
ATTRACTORS: An attractor is a set to which a dynamical system evolves after a long enough time. That is, points that get close enough to the attractor remain close even if slightly disturbed. Geometrically, an attractor can be a point, a curve, a manifold, or even a complicated set with a fractal structure known as a strange attractor. A trajectory of the dynamical system in the attractor does not have to satisfy any special constraints except for remaining on the attractor.
COMPLEX ADAPTIVE SYSTEMS: They have common attributes:
GENERAL SYSTEMS: Systems theory is an interdisciplinary field studying the nature of complex systems in nature, society and science. More specifically, it is a framework by which one can analyze and/or describe any group of objects that work in concert to produce some result. Systems theory serves as a bridge for interdisciplinary dialogue between autonomous areas of study as well as within the area of systems science itself.
SYSTEM DYNAMICS: An aspect of systems theory, System dynamics is a powerful methodology and computer simulation modeling technique for framing, understanding, and discussing complex issues and problems. It deals with internal feedback loops and time delays that affect the behavior of the entire system. What makes using system dynamics different from other approaches to studying complex systems is the use of feedback loops, stocks and flows. These elements help describe how even seemingly simple systems display baffling nonlinearity. The basis of the method is the recognition that the structure of any system — the many circular, interlocking, sometimes time-delayed relationships among its components — is often just as important in determining its behavior as the individual components themselves. Examples are chaos theory and social dynamics. Because there are often properties-of-the-whole which cannot be found among the properties-of-the-elements, in some cases the behavior of the whole cannot be explained in terms of the behavior of the parts.
LIVING SYSTEMS: A general theory about the existence of all living systems, their structure, interaction, behavior and development; open self-organizing systems that have the special characteristics of life and interact with their environment. James Miller's work "formalized" the concept of life.
HOMEODYNAMICS: Dynamical alternative to homeostasis. A living system theory, one of many that have emerged in recent years - which promise to open up new ways of thinking about and understanding our world and ourselves.
SCALAR PHYSICS: Vacuum fluctuation and Zero Point Energy (ZPE) are also relevant for describing emergence and drawing back the Mystic Veil on nature's processes. We come from, are sustained by and are returning to the light of our mass, radiant energy.
The quantum vacuum is a dynamic massless scalar field. A scalar is a vector characterized by magnitude and time. Scalar waves (virtual particle flux waves) in the virtual state massless charge flux do not breach the quantum level to become observable, yet they are real. They are harmonic oscillations of the stress energy tensor of the vacuum. They cross the threshold of manifestation only briefly before they vanish.
Buckminster Fuller's metaphorm of Vector Equiibrium represents the self's initial real=I-zation both inwardly and outwardly from the beginning of being "betweenness"; maximum inbetweenness. Push/pull; convergence/divergence; gravity/radiation
Zero pulsation in the V.E. is a metaphorm of eternity and God: the zero-phase of conceptual integrity inherent in the + and - asymmetries. V.E. is important because all the nuclear tendencies to implosion and explosion are reversible and always in exact balance. V.E. is the anywhere, anywhen, eternally regenerative, event inceptioning and evolutionary accommodation that is never seen in any experience.
At zero-point, waves pass through waves without interfering with one another. Vectoral phase or zone of neutral resonance occurs between outwardly pushing wave propagation and inwardly pulling gravitational coherence. Emptiness at the Center: all 4 planes of all 8 tetrahedra are congruent in the four visible planes passing through a common V.E. center, the cosmic terminal condition and nature's most economical lines of energy travel.
The Crown of Creation
There is a virtual replica (VR) of all matter, including living organisms, in the vacuum. Resonance and oscillation is accompanied by modulation of virtual particle/antiparticle pressure waves. We come from, are sustained by and are returning to the light of our mass, radiant energy. It is the mass-free, force-free form that energy takes in space before its interaction with mass creates force.
The most we can say about our so-called physical existence is that we are standing wavefronts in spacetime. To truly live from that place is to identify ultimately with a superluminal massless body of light, the Diamond Body. That is the true nature of the vehicle of our consciousness, our essence.
Virtual particles are the unseen energetic medium, the dynamic energy matrix of the Universe, riddled with virtual pressure waves. Bidirectional EM wavepairs are the hidden scalar potential. These infolded electrodynamics describe subspace or higher dimensions, depending on how you model it mathematically.
Kozyrev described spinning or twisting “torsion fields” and/or “torsion waves” as the spiraling flow of “time energy”. Lt. Col. Tom Bearden, calls them “scalar waves.” Their spiraling nature is simply an impulse of momentum that travels through the medium of the aether/ZPE/physical vacuum, without electromagnetic qualities.
Torsion fields, like gravity or electromagnetism, are capable of moving from one place to another in the Universe at “superluminal” speeds, meaning that they far exceed the speed of light. An impulse that moves directly through the “fabric of space-time”, travels at super-luminal velocities and is separate from gravity or electromagnetism, is a significant breakthrough in physics – one that demands that a “physical vacuum”, “zero-point energy” or “aether” must really exist.
“Once we establish that all force fields such as gravity and electromagnetism are simply different forms of aether/ZPE in motion, then we have an active source for gravity and a straightforward reason for why it would exist. We see that every molecule in the entire body of a planet must be sustained by an ongoing in-flow of aetheric energy. The same energy that is creating the Earth is also creating and flowing into us.
Our bodies cannot travel through solid matter, but the current of aetheric energy certainly can – and this is one of the many things that Keely, Tesla, Kozyrev and others demonstrated. A star or planet must continually draw energy from its environment in order to “stay alive.” Kozyrev had made very similar conclusions about our Sun back in the 1950s, concluding that stars acted as “machines that convert the flow of time into heat and light.”
The active vacuum is active spacetime. The vacuum potential is the pervasive source of all matter/energy or “massergy,” rooted in the cosmic acceleration. Its first observable manifestion is photonic and biophotonic Light. A photon is composed of both spatial and time-energy, even though it is massless. The vacuum potential is raw, untranslated spacetime. Massergy (dynamic structure) is rooted in the unfolding time-charged potential of electromagnetic fields.
The pure vacuum potential, without its zero-point fluctuations decomposes into a harmonic set of bidirectional longitudinal EM phase conjugate wave pairs. Thus EM energy flows between the imaginary plane of time domain and manifest 3-space when the four-fold symmetry is broken with any dipolarity or potential, such as logitudinal or scalar (time) polarization of the photon.
"Quantum Tantra" attempts to blaze a new pathway for science by incorporating previously discarded and marginal ways of thinking into a new synthesis. Two non-mechanistic, non-separatist traditions are of particular interest for this purpose: Western alchemy and Eastern tantra. Alchemy is based on the notion of a partially psychic chemistry in which the mind of the alchemist merges with the material cooking in his alembic. Tantra teaches that the universe is not mere motion of dead matter but the sexual play of two divine beings and seeks techniques to directly participate in that holy play. The goal of "Quantum Tantra:" is to initiate an entirely new direction of research by approaching quantum theory and its paradoxes as if they were incomplete fragments of a "successor science" based on tantric and alchemical principles.” –Nick Herbert
Esoteric Futures
We name our eras for the spirit of the times, but though the latest terms supersede the old ones, they don't overwrite the past. Eras overlap as we strive to catch up with our own futures conceptually, philosophically and practically. We nostalgically fall back into old ways of talking, thinking, being and belief -- even when we know they are false. Some cultural pioneers will be ahead of the curve, while others remain firmly attached to the visions and values of by-gone eras.
Turbulence is the hallmark of the Transmodern era and the hallmark of chaos. Globalized culture has been called “integral culture,” but we are far from integration, far from equilibrium. More accurately we still inhabit a postmodern mash up of conflicting cultures and ideologies, often in hot turmoil.
Seeing irony in the fact we can't coexist harmoniously is certainly no solution. Each of us has to help ourselves navigate the complex environment with all its dimensions and meaning. We can find some of that meaning within ourselves, within the transformative process that mirrors nature's way. Inner knowing becomes the locus of authority. But we also must cautiously remember we can be self-deluded.
Chaos and order pulsate in an intermingling way at each and every locale. What happens in one place has rippling effects throughout the entire planet. But nonlocal complex changes don't trickle down to remote locales. They rip through the biosphere at lightspeed, morphing the culture and nature. The virtuously instantaneous arrival of the future is like psychic electroshock.
Not everyone has arrived at a new cultural, intellectual and scientific outlook. What we see is a spectacle of hypercharged transmutation that is ubiquitous. We are a global culture in massive transition, left without a solid ground of reliable spiritual, cultural or mundane authority.
We have not learned how to flow together as a planetary species. But at the same time we are in the inexorable process of turbulent interpenetration. We have exchanged dreams of utopia for dreams of liquid mutability and unprecedented electronic communications.
We have crossed many boundaries, and in some cases there is no going back. Each generation has the task of making gold of the lead of human history. The word current means right now, but it also means the hot charged flow of electricity...of potential. Our social organisms can become works of art meaning as much or more than the rising tide of images impinging upon us from all media.
Lifestyle Choices
In Chaos Theory, turbulence has certain qualitative characteristics. It isn't governed by politics and eCONomics but by conceptual and mathematical attractors, including totally unpredictable strange attractors as likely to create order as chaos. We cannot know what the critical nexus points of our spinning future will bring -- breakdown or breakthrough. Will we find our hidden fractal order? Can culture truly become a thing of beauty?
Ultimately, “transmodernity” is a meme, a mental category by which we benchmark cultural change. It attempts, though doomed to failure, to encapsulate the emerging zeitgeist of the new millennium. We have exchanged utopian ideals for dysphoric visions of post-apocalyptic breakdown and the liquid mutability of virtuality. Persistent deep change and confrontation of perspectives are the hallmarks of this era. But what happens once the opposites unite? Jung called that transcendence.
We must look further to find our way through the chaos of regression that opens us to the emergence of new self-organization. Old ways break down before new ways emerge and stabilize. Beyond the spectacle of breakdown lies the Unknown and we must remain optimistically open to it. Alchemy is not metaphysical but transphysical. It is an eternally renascent Philosophy of Nature.
We now realize we have to create our own Matrix of being without imploding from accelerating change, falling prey to utopianism or the myth of progress. Conversely, wallowing in narcissism, nihilism, victimization or irony won’t get us anywhere, since they are inherently oppositional. We also don't need to emulate superheroic conquerors of by-gone eras, especially in vain attempts to "conquer" ourselves.
Less stressful orientations naturally lead to greater well-being, to natural healing. Alchemy and the natural dynamics of change describe alternative approaches for transforming. Premodern wisdom helps us transcend and transmute modernity, postmodernity and any fantasy we currently conceive to model our times. It holds secrets of transubstantiating gross materiality into spirit.
Process & Alchemy
Mystics, including the Renaissance magi, often live beyond the boundaries of their era, or foresee trends and knowledge which doesn't manifest publically for centuries. The word mysticism implies a special kind of insight, deriving from the Greek meaning “to see.” In this case, being such a visionary means seeing through the alchemical framework.
In alchemy, methodology merges with revelation. It is a self-revealing process when followed to its eternally reiterating conclusions. It is a process-goal that actually never ends. It isn’t occult or hidden, except to the degree that one has inherent capacity to experientially see through its metaphors to the core of reality. It requires some reflection. The revelation is the brilliant potential of contemporary science and ancient mystical knowledge becoming congruent -- they mirror and compliment one another.
The esoteric philosophy alchemy is a creative art rooted in the life of the soul (Anima Mundi) wed to Spirit and Body. Our eyes are opened by esoteric training and direct experience of the fruits of that practice. Transmodern alchemy is a hypercultural fusion of cross-cultural and interdisciplinary practices. New consciousness emerges gradually and suddenly, based on the principle of health, not self-interest or the disintegration of indulgence.
Yet we still suffer from mankind’s bane of alienation and separation. In the past, seemingly paradoxically, the retrieval of the soul and healing the scars of separation has been in developmental terms of finding an integral ‘Self,’ but we need to find more than our Selves for true healing. We need to connect with the true nature of our being, beyond the human artifacts of theology, philosophy and technology that bind us because we are outgrowing them.
Just as we are finding new areas of cultural integration in the Transmodern paradigm, we can extend our philosophical ideas in areas as yet unknown but that can be mapped out as we inhabit our transformed futures. Sometimes we have to be shocked out of our old ways of thinking and being, seized by the new zeitgeist, by the image of what was considered utterly alien.
In this way we claim the unknown parts of ourselves. We cannot have known our “Transhuman” nature earlier even though some philosophers hinted at it. It depends utterly on the technological gestalt of the day, including emergent transgenetic options. The new outlook includes the perpetual futureshock of deep change as we become transhuman, whatever that comes to mean in practical terms.
The mechanistic clockwork universe has unwound itself. We are more than the sum of our parts. Old patriarchal notions of the industrial era have led us to the edge of societal and ecological suicide. We keep trying to review and retrieve the knowledge of the past to see where we went wrong, but mostly we compulsively repeat these old memes in ways called ‘new’ that simply aren’t.
We will only understand where we have failed when we find what truly works NOW. The new philosophies of nature include ancient wisdom and modern science. The new mentality transcends and transforms modernity beyond the consumer ethic toward a paradigm that builds toward well-being for all, leaving both modern and postmodern mindsets behind.
Transcendent understanding and well-being for all may be too ambitious. But at least we can formulate our worldview in terms that include a comprehensive consideration of contemporary scientific and spiritual knowledge within an intelligent understanding. Art in the future means that the potential of genius will flow unhampered by its chosen medium.
Ultimately, the alchemists tell us that spiritual and physical reality are inseparable. Our confidence in scientific inquiry has given way to holistic vision. Consciousness, from ordinary to anomalous experience, is the proving ground of reality. The most unusual phenomena teach us the most about ourselves.
Lightness of Being
Alchemy recognizes living systems as the root science. Science has revealed that what mystics have claimed for Millennia is true - the core of our existence and all existence is living light. Turbulent light is the 5th dimension of reality, the virtual vacuum fluctuation at the core of each and every particle.
The living DNA of our bodies projects our manifestation through coherent light and sound. This is holography "without strings." We are quantum bioholograms -- hyperdimensional beings. As embedded holograms, we are hyperconnected to the whole cosmos and carry that same universe within us. We are intimate with the cosmos but often simply don't realize it.
The groundstate of nature is the heart of matter. Our nature is radiant scalar energy, the nonobservable yet roiling cosmic ocean of vacuum fluctuation, the disassembled roots of all being, the true primordial soup. The Heart Sutra claims that all form is nothing but Void and quantum physics agrees.
Our subatomic quantum nature guides and regulates our electromagnetic and chemical being, which influences our minds and emotions, forming a reciprocal feedback loop with all objects and living forms in our environment. In the right circumstances, we can respond to one another like resonating coupled oscillators. Our whole body flickers in and out of existence at an astounding rate, and each of those quantum re-creations is an opportunity to transform utterly.
If we drop down another whole domain of observation from the juicy “wetware” described by chemistry and atomic structure, we enter the subatomic realm of quantum physics. At this level the behavior of matter, both organic and inorganic, is governed not by classical notions of cause and effect or even complex dynamics, but by those of quantum probability.
“Something” appears to emerge from virtually “nothing” which physicists describe as a sea of infinite potential. They call it quantum foam, vacuum potential, or zero-point energy – we can call it the vacuum substructure. Subatomic particles wink in and out of existence on a continuous basis, like some subatomic froth. This “something” appears paradoxically in wave/particle form. This world is not transcendent to matter, but underlies it as a coherent unity, much like ecology underlies biology.
Light and Sound
In this dynamic model there are no “things”, just energetic events. Everything is one dynamic process. Light and sound (acoustic cymatics) modulate all matter. This “holoflux” includes the ultimately flowing nature of what is, and all possible forms.
All the objects of our world are three-dimensional images formed of standing and moving waves by electromagnetic and nuclear processes. This is the guiding matrix for self-assembly, and manipulating and organizing physical reality. It is how our DNA creates and projects our psychophysical structure.
DNA functions in a way that correlates with holographic projection. The code is transformed into physical matter guided by light and sound signals. DNA projects a blueprint for the organism that is translated from the electrodynamic to the molecular level. Further, research strongly suggests DNA functions as a biocomputer. This DNA-wave biocomputer reads and writes genetic code and forms holographic pre-images of biostructures. We are more fundamentally electromagnetic, rather than chemical beings. (Gariaev)
DNA and the genome have been identified as active “laser-like” environments. Roughly speaking, DNA can be considered a liquid crystal gel-like state that acts on the incoming light in the manner of a solitonic lattice. A soliton is an ultra stable wave train that arises in the context of non-linear wave oscillation. Oscillations are set up when DNA acts as a rotary pendulum kindling other oscillations.
Chromosomes can transform their own genetic-sign laser radiations into broadband genetic-sign radio waves. This is the main information channel of DNA, the same for both photons and radio waves. Superposed coherent waves of different types in the cells interact to form diffraction patterns, first in the acoustic domain, then in the electromagnetic domain. The quantum hologram is the matrix of the translations between acoustical and optical holograms. The human biocomputer can be modeled through the marriage of quantum mechanical and complex dynamics.
Scalar energy has a direct effect on nerve cells and cell membranes. Scalar energy in the body can cause changes in brain states. Scalar energy can modulate the basic biochemical communication between nerve cells mediated by neurotransmitters. (Rein) Our brains mathematically construct ‘concrete’ reality by interpreting frequencies from another dimension. (Pribram) This pre-geometric information realm of meaningful, patterned primary reality transcends time and space.
Embedded Holograms
Holograms contain all the information needed to reconstruct a whole image. Holograms contain many dimensions of “compressed” information in a subtle network of interacting frequencies. Thus, shining a coherent light (reference beam) or laser through the fuzzy-looking overlapping waves of a 2-dimensional hologram can create a virtual image of a 3-dimensional figure.
The gist of the holographic paradigm is that there is a more fundamental reality. There is an invisible flux not comprised of parts, but an inseparable interconnectedness. The holographic paradigm is one of reciprocal enfolding and unfolding of patterns of information. All potential information about the universe is holographically encoded in the spectrum of frequency patterns constantly bombarding us.
Thus, the brain is an embedded hologram, interpreting a holographic universe. (Miller, Webb, Dickson, 1973) All existence consists of embedded holograms within holograms and their interrelatedness somehow gives rise to our existence and sensory images. (Bohm, 1980) When we consciously embody this intimate wisdom, our bodies become temples of the living spirit. We supercharge our potential.
Interference patterns of waves can be visualized interacting like ripples on a pond. At the quantum level they create matter and energy as we perceive them as lifelike 3-dimenional effects. Consciousness and matter share the same essence, differing by degrees of subtlety or density. There is a strong correlation between modulations of the brain’s EM field and consciousness (Persinger, 1987; McFadden, 2002). Our psychophysical being is embedded in the universe as a continuously evolving, interactively dynamic hologram.
Chaos Theory
New physics, chaos theory, synergetics, and information theory describe our existence as complex dynamical systems. Entropy can only occur in a system that is absolutely closed so no energy from outside can be fed into it. But the mindbody is an open system, which exchanges energy and information with its environment and can be negentropic.
We can also have a negentropic influence on one another (Gladwell), perturbing, enlarging, and creating new pathways and possibilities. Theoretically, behavior can ripple outward until a critical mass or "tipping point" is reached, changing the world. Gladwell's thesis that ideas, products, messages and behaviors "spread just like viruses do" is a metaphor akin to memes. Highly sociable or connective people often become revolutionary leaders, bringing others together with a new perspective, a broadened worldview. This is also the cultural role of shamans.
Do we live in a persistent delusion of separateness? Only that concept limits us from constantly realizing the depths of our primordial fusion. We are all nonlocally connecting and diverging in an ill-defined yet tangible way at the subatomic, individual, group and global level.
Psychic energy or libido is a psychosomatic phenomenon analogous to the paradoxical nature of energy/matter or wave/particle. The human body is not an object in space, but seamlessly welded to spacetime. We are not merely a phenomenal body of flesh, but one of awareness, of consciousness, a living interface of inner and outer field phenomena.
We all experience visceral or gut reactions and know instinctively how our mental states affect our physical vitality, and vice versa. But often we loose the intimate relationship with our mindbody, with the source of our being, our aliveness, our passions, our self-expression, essence and healthy self-image. If we experience this flow at all, it ebbs and flows away. Our individual and collective creative potential remains largely unrealized.
Soma Sophia - Body Wisdom
How often do we pay attention to those vital signs, the innate wisdom of the body, inhabiting our minds rather than our flesh? We are increasingly not instinctual, but cultural, and we choose many of our behaviors for good or ill. Most of us are, indeed, "sick and tired" of the way things are, but what do we do to change them and ourselves?
We can learn simple techniques for self-care and self-regulation, such as biofeedback, yoga, and meditation. Creativity, as an activity in several fields, brings many intrinsic health-promoting rewards. We can create new habits to help us cope with technocratic society that tone or recalibrate our systems and change our physical state. We all have to learn how to deal with personal and/or global catastrophe whether we want to or not.
This dance is a harmonic continuum from the smallest to the largest scales, permeating all domains of assembly and observation: subquantum, quantum, molecular, chemical, even cultural, global, and cosmological. The evolution of our dynamic system obeys universal laws. Likewise our behaviors flow into manifestation from our beliefs, thoughts and emotions, including our self-image, generated by our interaction with the environment from the womb forward.
By opening to system dynamics we can reorganize away from the entropic, reductionistic, destructive habit patterns that plague our species. We can make stress-reducing negentropic choices for structural and psychological adjustment, which improve our quality of life. Integration is a synergistic process rooted in primordial bodymind consciousness.
Field Body
The brain is not confined to our skull, but permeates our whole being through the intracellular matrix and sensory system, as well as the strong EM fields generated by the beating heart. Research suggests activities in the brain may be pre-conditioned by the DC field of the organism (Oschmann; Becker). Our molecular system extends beyond the nervous system and is the bedrock of intuitive, subconscious and unconscious processes.
Turning our attention deep within ourselves we find the Voice of the Silence speaking back. Our felt-sense is our wise intuitive response if we but listen. It brings meaning and value to life. What is your body trying to tell you? The body has a mind of its own and speaks that mind in gut reactions, body language, dreams, psychosomatics, and literal symptoms.
Both the alternative health fields and mindbody psychologies such as the humanistic, Jungian and transpersonal psychologies have sought the triple union of body, soul, and spirit much like the medieval alchemists. But only a fusion of those approaches can manifest the union of opposites in the golden flesh. We can learn to care for our mindbodies in new ways from the inside out, conceptually and experientially.
Creativity and Healing
We can return to Nature and our own nature, collectively preparing a paradigm shift for a new shared reality and trajectory that integrates physical, emotional, cognitive and spiritual coherence. The silent frictionless flow of living intelligence is beyond words and conceptual constructs.
We are a process of recursive self-generation. The groundstate is our creative Source, directly discoverable in the immediacy of the emergent embodied moment. We are continuously in the deep embrace of the physical universe. It not only interpenetrates but is the very fabric of our being.
The healing response includes behavioral, mental and spiritual shifts or transformations. Health is the natural outcome of a meaningful life, not just absence of symptoms. It means a connection with and comprehension of the complexities of life that is deeper than the conventional worldview of cause and effect. Many researchers view consciousness as the foundation of reality. We do not exist independently from the Universe; we are fused with it. But the exact nature of that seamless connection is unknown.
How we Know What We Know
A radically empirical phenomenological approach includes subjective experience as primary data and addresses the totality of experience. We are not mere observers of consciousness and cosmos but interacting in fluid interpenetration.
We need to recognize even unconventional or paradoxical metaphors that help us order our experience and knowledge, including metaphors of consciousness. Alchemy, dynamics and physics are rich in such metaphors that speak to our direct experience. The influence of the unconscious on how we experience ourselves and our environment is far greater than we realize.
Science itself must be thoroughly re-assessed in the light of this pervasive influence of the unconscious mind. We must reassess challenging evidence, contemplate alternative conceptual frameworks and metaphors, scientific interests and disinterests, and scientific judgment. We must accept the presence of unconscious processes and contents, not as minor perturbations, but as a potentially major factor.
Changing our relationship with the world is both a psychological and political act. The ailments we perceive in the world are as much in ourselves. Through remembering our interdependence, we can experience the power of our individual actions to influence the whole.
DYNAMICS
Transmodern Alchemy can be revisioned as a revolutionary dynamic process in terms of Chaos Theory and its related sciences. There are analogies between spiritual psychology, holographic paradigm, chaos theory and alchemical processes, some of which are more than metaphorical.
Whether alchemy can perform a causal transformation of metals to gold or not, it certainly has the capacity for creatively stimulating the imagination and the kind of divergent thinking that leads to discovery. Dynamics is a universal tool, a novel practice which helps us grasp the processes of emergence, self-organization and nonlinear development in ourselves, in nature, in our world and the cosmos.
Dynamics is a synthesis of recent scientific theories: system dynamics, living systems, general systems, chaos, edge-of-chaos, complexity, emergence, self-organization, complex adaptive systems, quantum gravity, quantum cosmology, attractors, and homeodynamics.
CHAOS: In Greek myth, Chaos is the original dark void from which everything else appeared. In science, chaos describes the behavior of certain dynamical systems – with states that evolve with time and exhibit dynamics that are highly sensitive to initial conditions (butterfly effect). This sensitivity manifests itself as an exponential growth of perturbations in the initial conditions. So, the behavior of chaotic systems appears to be random.
These systems are deterministic, meaning that their future dynamics are fully defined by their initial conditions, with no random elements involved. This behavior is known as deterministic chaos, or simply chaos. Systems that exhibit mathematical chaos are deterministic and thus orderly in some sense; this technical use of the word chaos is at odds with common parlance, which suggests complete disorder. Chaotic systems show a strong kind of unpredictability not shown by other deterministic systems. Quantum chaos theory studies systems that follow the laws of quantum mechanics.
EDGE-OF-CHAOS: Describes a phase transition of behaviors. In the sciences in general, the phrase has come to refer to a metaphor that some physical, biological, economical and social systems operate in a region between order and either complete randomness or chaos, where the complexity is maximal. In some systems evolution is maximized near the edge of chaos.
COMPLEXITY: In science, a field of study devoted to the process of self-organization. The basic concept of complexity is that all things tend to organize themselves into fractal patterns, including human bodies and cultures. The more complex a task the harder it is to think about and the steeper the learning curve. Complex systems are characterized by unpredictable behavior, existing in a state somewhere between order and chaos. Things that are complex in nature exhibit characteristics like cycles of growth, mass extinction, regeneration and evolution.
Natural forces tend to bring complex systems to a halt, suddenly and unexpectedly. This is related to chaos theory and the general rule that small changes to a system, may bring a dramatic change in the future. Complexity looks for the mathematical equations that describe the middle ground between equilibrium and chaos (nonlinear dynamics).
EMERGENCE: Spontaneous Order. In philosophy, systems theory and science, emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions. Emergence is central to the theories of integrative levels and of complex systems.
SELF-ORGANIZATION: a process of attraction and repulsion in which the internal organization of a system, normally an open system increases in complexity without being guided or managed by an outside source. Self-organizing systems generally display emergent properties.
ATTRACTORS: An attractor is a set to which a dynamical system evolves after a long enough time. That is, points that get close enough to the attractor remain close even if slightly disturbed. Geometrically, an attractor can be a point, a curve, a manifold, or even a complicated set with a fractal structure known as a strange attractor. A trajectory of the dynamical system in the attractor does not have to satisfy any special constraints except for remaining on the attractor.
COMPLEX ADAPTIVE SYSTEMS: They have common attributes:
- The number of parts (and types of parts) in the system and the number of relations between the parts is non-trivial – however, there is no general rule to separate “trivial” from “non-trivial;”
- The system has memory or includes feedback;
- The system can adapt itself according to its history or feedback;
- The relations between the system and its environment are non-trivial or non-linear;
- The system can be influenced by, or can adapt itself to, its environment; and
- The system is highly sensitive to initial conditions.
GENERAL SYSTEMS: Systems theory is an interdisciplinary field studying the nature of complex systems in nature, society and science. More specifically, it is a framework by which one can analyze and/or describe any group of objects that work in concert to produce some result. Systems theory serves as a bridge for interdisciplinary dialogue between autonomous areas of study as well as within the area of systems science itself.
SYSTEM DYNAMICS: An aspect of systems theory, System dynamics is a powerful methodology and computer simulation modeling technique for framing, understanding, and discussing complex issues and problems. It deals with internal feedback loops and time delays that affect the behavior of the entire system. What makes using system dynamics different from other approaches to studying complex systems is the use of feedback loops, stocks and flows. These elements help describe how even seemingly simple systems display baffling nonlinearity. The basis of the method is the recognition that the structure of any system — the many circular, interlocking, sometimes time-delayed relationships among its components — is often just as important in determining its behavior as the individual components themselves. Examples are chaos theory and social dynamics. Because there are often properties-of-the-whole which cannot be found among the properties-of-the-elements, in some cases the behavior of the whole cannot be explained in terms of the behavior of the parts.
LIVING SYSTEMS: A general theory about the existence of all living systems, their structure, interaction, behavior and development; open self-organizing systems that have the special characteristics of life and interact with their environment. James Miller's work "formalized" the concept of life.
HOMEODYNAMICS: Dynamical alternative to homeostasis. A living system theory, one of many that have emerged in recent years - which promise to open up new ways of thinking about and understanding our world and ourselves.
SCALAR PHYSICS: Vacuum fluctuation and Zero Point Energy (ZPE) are also relevant for describing emergence and drawing back the Mystic Veil on nature's processes. We come from, are sustained by and are returning to the light of our mass, radiant energy.
The quantum vacuum is a dynamic massless scalar field. A scalar is a vector characterized by magnitude and time. Scalar waves (virtual particle flux waves) in the virtual state massless charge flux do not breach the quantum level to become observable, yet they are real. They are harmonic oscillations of the stress energy tensor of the vacuum. They cross the threshold of manifestation only briefly before they vanish.
Buckminster Fuller's metaphorm of Vector Equiibrium represents the self's initial real=I-zation both inwardly and outwardly from the beginning of being "betweenness"; maximum inbetweenness. Push/pull; convergence/divergence; gravity/radiation
Zero pulsation in the V.E. is a metaphorm of eternity and God: the zero-phase of conceptual integrity inherent in the + and - asymmetries. V.E. is important because all the nuclear tendencies to implosion and explosion are reversible and always in exact balance. V.E. is the anywhere, anywhen, eternally regenerative, event inceptioning and evolutionary accommodation that is never seen in any experience.
At zero-point, waves pass through waves without interfering with one another. Vectoral phase or zone of neutral resonance occurs between outwardly pushing wave propagation and inwardly pulling gravitational coherence. Emptiness at the Center: all 4 planes of all 8 tetrahedra are congruent in the four visible planes passing through a common V.E. center, the cosmic terminal condition and nature's most economical lines of energy travel.
The Crown of Creation
There is a virtual replica (VR) of all matter, including living organisms, in the vacuum. Resonance and oscillation is accompanied by modulation of virtual particle/antiparticle pressure waves. We come from, are sustained by and are returning to the light of our mass, radiant energy. It is the mass-free, force-free form that energy takes in space before its interaction with mass creates force.
The most we can say about our so-called physical existence is that we are standing wavefronts in spacetime. To truly live from that place is to identify ultimately with a superluminal massless body of light, the Diamond Body. That is the true nature of the vehicle of our consciousness, our essence.
Virtual particles are the unseen energetic medium, the dynamic energy matrix of the Universe, riddled with virtual pressure waves. Bidirectional EM wavepairs are the hidden scalar potential. These infolded electrodynamics describe subspace or higher dimensions, depending on how you model it mathematically.
Kozyrev described spinning or twisting “torsion fields” and/or “torsion waves” as the spiraling flow of “time energy”. Lt. Col. Tom Bearden, calls them “scalar waves.” Their spiraling nature is simply an impulse of momentum that travels through the medium of the aether/ZPE/physical vacuum, without electromagnetic qualities.
Torsion fields, like gravity or electromagnetism, are capable of moving from one place to another in the Universe at “superluminal” speeds, meaning that they far exceed the speed of light. An impulse that moves directly through the “fabric of space-time”, travels at super-luminal velocities and is separate from gravity or electromagnetism, is a significant breakthrough in physics – one that demands that a “physical vacuum”, “zero-point energy” or “aether” must really exist.
“Once we establish that all force fields such as gravity and electromagnetism are simply different forms of aether/ZPE in motion, then we have an active source for gravity and a straightforward reason for why it would exist. We see that every molecule in the entire body of a planet must be sustained by an ongoing in-flow of aetheric energy. The same energy that is creating the Earth is also creating and flowing into us.
Our bodies cannot travel through solid matter, but the current of aetheric energy certainly can – and this is one of the many things that Keely, Tesla, Kozyrev and others demonstrated. A star or planet must continually draw energy from its environment in order to “stay alive.” Kozyrev had made very similar conclusions about our Sun back in the 1950s, concluding that stars acted as “machines that convert the flow of time into heat and light.”
The active vacuum is active spacetime. The vacuum potential is the pervasive source of all matter/energy or “massergy,” rooted in the cosmic acceleration. Its first observable manifestion is photonic and biophotonic Light. A photon is composed of both spatial and time-energy, even though it is massless. The vacuum potential is raw, untranslated spacetime. Massergy (dynamic structure) is rooted in the unfolding time-charged potential of electromagnetic fields.
The pure vacuum potential, without its zero-point fluctuations decomposes into a harmonic set of bidirectional longitudinal EM phase conjugate wave pairs. Thus EM energy flows between the imaginary plane of time domain and manifest 3-space when the four-fold symmetry is broken with any dipolarity or potential, such as logitudinal or scalar (time) polarization of the photon.
Introduction
CHAOS THEORY & DYNAMICS IN
TRANSMODERN SPIRITUAL ALCHEMY
By Iona Miller 5/2009
"Nonexistence is eagerly bubbling in the expectation of being given existence....For the mine and treasure-house of God's making is naught but nonexistence coming into manifestation." ~Rumi
“We are waves whose stillness is non-being; We are alive because of this, that we have no rest.” ~ Abu-Talib Kalim
“Unless bodies lose their corporeal state and unless bodies assume again their corporeal state, that which is desired will not be attained.” ~ Byzantine fragment, The Philosophical Egg
“The interaction of our mind and consciousness with the quantum vacuum links us with other minds around us, as well as with the biosphere of the planet. It "opens" our mind to society, nature, and the universe. This openness has been known to mystics and sensitives, prophets and meta-physicians through the ages. But it has been denied by modern scientists and by those who took modern science to be the only way of comprehending reality.” ~ Ervin Laszlo
Alchemical Dynamics
Alchemy is a tradition of participatory wisdom. Medieval alchemy was couched in the archaic language of its time, but we are not limited to that, nor to theological, Hermetic, Masonic, Theosophical, New Age jargon, or even obsolete scientific theory. Philosophies and sciences evolve in articulation, theory and practice. New discoveries and statements of meaning inform our practice at all levels. In many cases, alchemy anticipated them. Particles are not single dots or points and neither are we. We are primordially entangled with Cosmos.
Our worldview has evolved to include quantum physics and dynamics in our models of reality. In the 20th Century, Carl Jung described alchemy in terms of depth psychology and shed new light on an old science. But that discipline continues to redefine itself. Jung's notions of a heroic, striving Self have been superseded with concepts beyond self -- imaginal, nonlinear models of consciousness, archetypes as strange attractors and healing fictions. Can we expect any less from 21st century alchemy itself?
Alchemy is a multidisciplinary pursuit focusing on life sciences, metallurgy, chemistry, dynamics and physics. We can take a revolutionary view of today's alchemy as dynamic process in terms of Chaos Theory and its related sciences. There are analogies between contemporary practice of sacred psychology, chaos theory, quantum theory, scalar physics and alchemical processes, some of which are more than metaphorical.
Dynamics is a universal tool, a novel practice which helps us grasp the processes of emergence, self-organization and nonlinear development in ourselves, in nature, in our world and the cosmos.
Dynamics is a synthesis of recent scientific theories: system dynamics, living systems, general systems, chaos, edge-of-chaos, complexity, emergence, self-organization, complex adaptive systems, quantum gravity, quantum cosmology, attractors, and homeodynamics. Chaos theory describes open-systems, far from equilibrium.
Chaos is integrated in the new paradigm, whether one pursues it in the alchemical laboratory or in the psychophysical retort of the human energy body. It leads to new understanding of the process of trans-mutation and trans-formation. Chaos is the prima materia and ultima materia, the beginning and end of the Great Work. Chaos is the universal solvent, the catalyst and healing balm. We can now describe in contemporary language what these analogies mean in alchemical process.
Alchemy is unbound. In the Transmodern union of opposites, the real and the unreal are no longer opposed. The concept of reality emerges, no longer bound to the material world but turned into fiction because of it. Reality and existence are no longer synonymous – it is a type of reality that continues to “be” even when it may not “exist” and does not comply with the simple status of simulacrum, i.e., the virtual is the true reality.
Time is no longer a flow, projection or hope. It accelerates at overwhelming speed, turns back on itself and becomes compressed and plays itself out. Instantaneously, everything takes place before us simultaneously, including retrievals of the past and projections of multiple futures. We have a greater understanding of deep time, earthly cycles and cosmic process than ever before. We communicate at light speed. We talk of supraliminality -- faster than light potentials.
Eternity has come a bit closer to the mundane world. Our scientific and mystical understanding of the primordial groundstate becomes clearer as we draw back nature's mystic veil. The transmodern world is not in progress nor beyond history. This instantaneous world means time quickens to the breathtaking speed of an eternally updated present. Beyond the hierarchy which has lost divine legitimacy and beyond anarchy, integrated chaos represents our very own dynamic momentum of innovation.
Alchemical transmutation is likewise virtually instantaneous, because its potential exists in each and every nanosecond, at the bottom of each breath. We only hallucinate our separation from cosmos. But the alchemical process begins in alienation and depression, until we separate out and discard our outworn mode of being for more fluid models.
There is plenty going on in the non-material void, the plenum that is the core of our being. The void is not devoid. The gist of the holographic paradigm is that there is a fundamental reality that is an invisible flux not comprised of parts, but an inseparable interconnectedness. The holographic paradigm is one of reciprocal enfolding and unfolding of patterns of information. All potential information about the universe is holographically encoded in the spectrum of frequency patterns constantly bombarding us.
Transubstantiation
What does the soul want? Do we actively value our psychic well-being, our totality, psyche and substance? Are we living soulful, artful lives? Do we nourish our whole selves with self-love? Do we take the time to care for our body or deny it, drive it relentlessly like our servant, or treat it like a machine? Do we attend to our inner world of waking images and dreams? Can we come to our senses, deepening the quality and intensity of embodied experience?
To truly nourish ourselves holistically we have to address the manifest needs of physical, emotional, mental and spiritual well-being. Consciousness may have a direct effect on the subatomic particles of the body, especially those within the brain. A tiny change within the open system of the brain, for example, can result in a vast change to the overall health of the body because of amplification through feedback loops. Nonlinearity exists at many scales.
We can use the wisdom of the bodymind to face stress, pain, loss, illness, even catastrophe. Creative transformation of our instinctive reactions produces the alchemical "gold", whether we call that essence health, creativity, art, flow, inspiration or wisdom. Lifeforce is found within; psychic sustenance is found within. Once the mindbody connects with Source, all of our self-expression becomes soulful. We truly embody spirit.
Transubstantiation has escaped its theological roots as more than a change of meaning. Alchemy is about a primordial change in the elements. The essence of an object can change while the form remains the same. Substance is not what it used to be. Our very substance is manifestly divine in its eternal potential, the invisible part of our whole being.
What becomes important is participation in the transformative event, a mystical consecration. All matter shares the same quintessential nature that is substantially if not physically present. We can return to Nature and our own nature, collectively preparing a paradigm shift for a new shared reality and trajectory that integrates physical, emotional, cognitive and spiritual coherence.
Divine life is dispensed to us in every instant. "This is my body" is a direct realization. Character is utterly changed in that holy moment of sacramental union. The silent frictionless flow of living intelligence is beyond words and conceptual constructs.
We are a process of recursive self-generation. This continuum, which is our groundstate or creative Source, is directly discoverable in the immediacy of the emergent embodied moment. We are each a consecrated temple of living light. It is up to us to realize our full potential by redeeming and realizing the lost parts of ourselves.
Creative solutions arise from chaotic circumstances by more openly receptive awareness of potential. Alchemy’s protocols, in the context of art instigate some imbalance to facilitate discovery of enriching solutions to this chaos. Were we wiser in the past? What if we collapse the notion of past, present, future in the ever-present NowHere?
Laszlo (2004) has suggested there is a subquantal coherent field of pure "in-formation," different from the zero-point field. He calls it the A-field, or Akashic field, known by its real effects but as yet without a mathematical description. It propagates nonlocal coherence across all domains, an all-encompassing medium that underlies and becomes all things.
This vacuum hologram carries information in distributed form as interfering wavefields that propagate throughout the universe instantly without attenuation. These "cosmic holograms" link or "in-form" all things with all other things, remembering what has been, sustaining what is, and propagating what will be.
Transmodern Alchemy
Transmodernity is the synthesis of modernity and postmodern philosophy, reflected in alchemical notions of transcendence, transformation and transmutation. So what might a chaos-informed Transmodern Alchemy look like? First and foremost our existential state space is in flux. The nation-state no longer dominates space in globalist society. Phenomena no longer correspond with old-paradigm frameworks.
Trans- is the prefix that guides the vision of reality as virtual and fluctuating. At the subquantal range of virtual photon flux, this is literally true and the metaphysical substrate of manifestation. At the virtual level, the fiction of ‘reality’ as substantive is revealed and the transparent veil is ripped away. Self-organizing dynamic transactions combine the positive momentum of the modern philosophy with the emptiness of the Postmodern, the longing for unity of the former and the fragmentation of the latter.
Our comprehension of the physical world has been transformed. We are wavefronts in local space, undergird by the vacuum fluctuation of absolute space. Material reality, as formation, atom, mass, power, space, time, etc. is an outworn concept that brought order to a Newtonian universe.
The theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, waves, chords, uncertainty, gravitational lines, the temporalization of space, etc., an entire fuzzy logic brought physics to the edge of metaphysics. We have alchemically synthesized the actual and ethereal in our transmodern cultural worldview.
Reality is no longer limited to the movement of aggregates of atoms (objects), but also quanta of information transmitted in real time. Space is no longer the site of transformation, nor the alleged place of secularization multiplied in n dimensions. It becomes irrelevant and ceases to exist, as a limit never reached before. The speed of light, takes on the form of everyday instantaneity.
The spirit, soul, reason, the subjective, objective and absolute was the main protagonist of modernity, although progressively undermined by scientific materialism, it became a mere metaphor of itself as a dynamic driving force and shared form of rationality.
Behind it all we are left with the body, fragmented, joyful, lustful, a form of moral subversion and doomed flesh. Nowadays the remaining organic matter seems more like a primitive burden, the mind plays with its transformation and turns it into a guinea pig for genetic engineering or expands it with technological prostheses. We are already mutants connected to the net, cyborgs that proclaim the era of the postcorporal and the transhuman.
The ultimate alchemy is performed on ourselves as we head into a vast epochal shift. The dawn of a transgenic age fills us with both hopes and fears. Even the body reaches out, externalizing its nervous system, to unite the biological and mechanical: chips, implants, dialysis, assisted reproduction, cloning, technological gadgets developed to extend our senses. The cyborg model embraces the metaphor of a mutating transhuman body, just as transsexuality has dislodged and paved the way for a vast array of possible genders, desires and identity beyond the dichotomy of masculine and feminine.
“Reality becomes constant transformation. Its actual conditions are transcended to become part of an interconnected whole that is infinitely readjusted on a global level. In the end, the Total does not bring us back to a religious or supernatural power, nor to the noumenal kingdom of Metaphysics or Absolute Logic. The transcendental that used to be beyond and yet close to empirical reality has now become the hyperreal empirical reality itself, i.e., virtual transcendency.” (Magda)
The contemporary phase space is criss-crossed by all trends, memories, possibilities. It is both transcendental and apparential, and is voluntarily syncretic in its ‘multichrony’. Transmodernity is a fiction: our reality, the copy that supplants the model, eclecticism both mean and angelical.
Transmodernity is postmodernity without its innocent rupturism, the museum display of Enlightenment reason, not forgetting history which has died to avoid ending up in barbaric cybernetic or mass media domestication. It is proposing values as stops or as fables, but without forgetting, because we are wise, because our past was wise.
Transmodernity takes up and recovers the vanguards, sampling and branding them, but meanwhile it remembers that art has had, and has, an effect of denunciation and experimentalism -- that is, not everything goes. It breaks down the distance between elitism and mass culture and reveals the connections between them. Transmodernity is image, series, baroque fugue and self-reference, catastrophe, loop, fractal and inane reiteration. It is the entropy of what is obese, the clumsy inflation of dataglut, the aesthetic of what is full and of what has disappeared, entropic, toxic, fatal.
The key to it is not what comes after, the rupture, but the trans-substantiation and overlapping of paradigms. The worlds that penetrate each other and end up as soap bubbles or as images on a screen. Transmodernity is not a desire or a goal. It is just there, like a complex, random, imposed strategic situation. It is neither good nor bad, beneficial nor unbearable… and it is all of these things together… It is the abandonment of representation, it is the reign of simulation, of simulation that knows it is real.
Transmodernity, as an open stage and the designation of our present, goes beyond a random denomination and aims to cover the inheritance of the challenges of Modernity after the collapse of the illustrated project. If we do not renounce Theory, History, Social Justice and the autonomy of the Subject, accepting post-modern criticism, we are limiting the possible horizon for reflection getting away from nihilism without committing ourselves to outdated projects but not forgetting them.
Accepting pragmatism as a basis does not mean we have to deny that human action is guided by regulatory ideals that are the basis for argument and rationality. But these regulatory ideals which, after modernity, refused to be based on theology or metaphysics, can still not, after post-modern criticism, be legitimized by the illustrated project. We have weakened their vigor but not the logical and social need for them, and this gives us the notion of pragmatism.
Such regulatory ideals represent operational simulations legitimized by rational perfectibility, which criticism and consensus constantly renew. Non-universal but universalizable public values find their sphere not in intuition, common sense or tradition but in the theoretical effort to create conceptual paradigms that will help increase social and individual wellbeing.
We are therefore talking about social transformation, the transcendence of mere practical management, of compromise, of lines of questioning that cross through rational enquiry, changing and being changed. (Rosa María Rodríguez Magda)
Creativity
Whether alchemy can perform a causal transformation of metals to gold or not, it certainly has the capacity for creatively stimulating the imagination and the kind of divergent thinking that leads to discovery about oneself, the world, and the primal nature of reality.
Alchemy recognizes its own creative role as an art based on the life of the soul (Anima Mundi) in relation to Spirit and Body, and as a healing fiction, using certain symbols and images. Spontaneous healing is a stated goal of alchemical process. It supercharges natural healing factors.
Healing occurs on many levels, including radical holistic self-organization from the deepest chaotic level. Psychology works through fictions which contribute to the healing of the psyche and heal our ideas about fiction being false. Healing fictions are fundamental to creative imagination and thereby thinking itself. It is a self-correcting process, like science.
Alchemy is a form of magic facilitating acausal qualitative change of substance – transmutation, including that of the soul. In this aspect, it is a spiritual technology based in the metaphysics of a primordial chaos or the void. Seeming ‘miracles’ happen in the gaps in consciousness. For example, art has a way of wordlessly heralding the future, in general terms, symbolism and sometimes in specifics. We are momentarily freed of enslaving ideologies.
Alchemy, like the Philosopher’s Stone, can take on the projections of modern science theories from psychology to life sciences to physics. Complex systems emerge from simple systems whose parts do not predict such transformations. Yet things can and do transform into other things. We are left holding our breath in suspended animation at the paradox, the moment of despair or bliss when we are engulfed in unsolvable Mystery — riddles wrapped in enigmas, half-truths disguising lies, faulty theories explaining nothing.
Soul is a perspective not a substance. Differentiating this middle ground, we find ourselves in Chapel Perilous, a way of being in the world between thinking and perceiving, a conspiracy (seeing with) of Eros and its laws of attraction that reason alone cannot nourish. The word ‘resolve’ echoes the alchemical maxim of “Solve et Coagula,” the liquification and reintegration of essentially frozen psychic energy.
We dream into the world while we are awake - coincidence theories, perceptual theories, alchemical theories. Confusion arises when your rational view is irreparably broken. Paradoxically, as “the poison is the cure.” It might lead to breakthrough, insight or spiritual healing. We make soul by pro-actively living life not by retreating into spiritual discipline. Emphasizing the inner soul at the expense of the outer soul fosters the decline of the actual world – alchemy’s One World. We can be that hyperdimensional crossroads, that strange attractor, that archetypal probability cloud.
Unseen Order
We struggle to connect the dots. In relentless speculation multiple mind-blowing streams of thought completely shatter preconceived notions of perception, time and space. It is as true in physics as cultural engineering. It is difficult to grasp without solipsism that everything we experience is a virtuality.
It is difficult for any of us to free ourselves from our enculturated, a priori beliefs about existence. When we firmly believe what we say, we sell others a confabulation of our own truths and lies. It is hard to view anything from outside of our own fundamental philosophical, spiritual, and psychological perspectives.
But it is possible to persuade others and many speakers have staked their careers on it. These theories, dogmas, and experiences condition how we perceive reality. Their influence may be so subtle we fail to notice where our position originated, when the shift occurred. Our viewpoint is relative to our position.
When old defenses no longer work, you must develop new coping skills for developmental challenges. But this initiatory way includes many “deaths” and rebirths. Nigredo, the blackening, isn’t always the first stage, but may be one of relapse, eclipse or another incubation stage.
Nigredo is a recurrent cycle of desire and frustration with no real beginning. Your energies are sucked from the outer world and turned in on themselves. Normal life is radically disrupted. When you are paralyzed by life there is nothing to do but let go of your control fantasies. An eclipse of the ego offers a way into the deeper energies of the unconscious.
The Art of Alchemy
Alchemy begins and ends in the quest for eternal life. It is a spiritual technology of rebirth using natural methods that in their effect transcend nature by amplifying that which is immortal within us. It does not exist in nature but must be prepared by Art. Art is a form of manifesting, making and objectifying the world - spiritual physics.
Artists and mystics are aware of their own internal space and thus able to enter it, playing the mindbody like a musical instrument. Looking inside, they see the true nature of reality and can express that literally and symbolically. We all possess the creative potential. All creative acts are a marriage of spirit and matter, reaching down into the body as the source of our essential being and becoming.
Today, we might describe this resonance as accessing energy that regenerates the mindbody. Healing is an aspect of creativity; nature is within and without us. The Magus does not dominate reality but develops embodied psychophysical equilibrium, clarity, wisdom and compassion.
Creative work originates in the body and is projected out into the world. The projections are then internalized into awareness. The bodymind of the artist is an alchemical vessel containing the creative flux during the process of transformation. Awareness and consciousness form a continuous alchemical movement. The creative gold is generated and embodied in the alembic of the mindbody. The mindbody is the same substance as the Cosmos and contains and reveals its mysteries.
QUANTUM META-SYN LIGHT Metaphysical Basis of Life
Formerly secret forces in the universe have been revealed by modern research. Alchemy reduces all to the first state, the ground state of being -- original experience that is timeless, infinite. The classical Void, the quantum vacuum is a carrier of information.
The energy body or the quantum field body connects us with the negentropic potential of the zero-point field. Radiant light literally emerges from this mystic void. Primordial structuring processes are common to both psyche and matter, working in the gap or empty interval between intention and action.
Light is a universal system and a general property of all plant and animal life. A photon is a quanta of light. We are photon-emission systems of low-level luminescence which differs from bioluminescence which is a chemical reaction. Even rocks, liquid and solid crystals, diamonds and inorganic materials emit photons or plasma discharge. Decay of these emissions, which are quantum events, function as clocks revealing their age. Gamma rays are electromagnetic radiation from photon emission.
Quantum optics (quantum optical coherence) is the basis of life. Endogenous light produced by living systems is called biophotons. Light is produced by our own cells and connects us non-materially to the environment. We are self-tuning resonating systems of oscillating field, coupled nonlocally, tunable to a broad range of frequencies and polarizations.
We are electromagnetic, essentially human antennas. Ultraweak photon emission is the quintessence of our being. A coherent radiation field which permeates and envelops the solid body is emitted by the organism as a whole. Transmitting at the speed of light, it regulates and controls all life. Material structures function as antennae for absorption and emission.
Emitting matter forms a biological laser. DNA in each cell nucleus stores and modulates light emission (non-classical light, non-monochromatic, squeezed states). DNA/RNA projects its code into 3-d manifestation via highly coherent biological laser light and sound vibrations. Below the chaotic threshold, between coherent and incoherent oscillation, light sources decouple and function separately, dominated by the overall absorption of light.
The field/solid body is a holographic field of standing waves. These ultra-stable waves can superimpose to order living tissue, coupled by a coherent radiation field. DNA uses frequencies to transmit and coordinate coded information and feedback through waves. Rogue frequencies can be retuned to normal oscillations.
DNA stores light and emits it when unzipped. In our brains, neuronal activity of light information bits creates a feedback system of holographic thoughtforms. Biophotons are related to both metabolism and pathologies. During death emissions increase up to a thousand-fold and fall to zero upon death of the organism. (Bischoff)
Health is a measure of subatomic communications. We are light-sensitive at the level of single photons. We suck up light from our environment and re-emit it, according to our functional state. Wave resonance or entrainment is the mechanism that allows us to exchange photons and even potentially influence one another, psychophysically, even at a distance.
“Biophoton emission reflects, (i) the left-right symmetry of the human body; (ii) biological rhythms such as 14 days, 1 month, 3 months and 9 months; (iii) disease in terms of broken symmetry between left and right side; and (iv) light channels in the body, which regulate energy and information transfer between different parts. The results show that besides a deeper understanding of health, disease and body field, this method provides a new powerful tool of non-invasive medical diagnosis in terms of basic regulatory functions of the body.” (Cohen, Popp, 2003)
Spontaneous ultra-weak photon emission from human subjects can be measured. The biophoton field is almost fully coherent and strongly linked to all physiological functions, cell division, morphogenesis, growth and differentiation, and regulatory activity. Information of local influences on the body is transferred by a biophotonic communication channel to other places of the body. Biophotonic emission also correlates with electrical parameters of the skin.
Biophotons are the ideal communication system for any organism. Complex organisms emit fewer photons than less complex ones. Related to nonlocal effects, holistic function, biological rhythms, stress, adaptogens, health and disease, biophoton emission is the spontaneous emission of ultraweak light emanating from all living systems, including humans.
Regulatory activities of the body are not stable functions of the electromagnetic fields within the body, but subjects of permanent rhythmical, oscillatory and coherent field amplitudes. Cancer causing substances are light scramblers. Light is going out of sick or stressed individuals in an attempt to restore homeostasis. (Popp)
Emission is linked to mental states, blood flow and the endogenous production of excited states within the living system. The detection and characterization of human biophoton emission has led to suggestions that it has potential future applications in medicine. Meditation may conserve biophotonic reserves by slowing free-radical activity (Van Wijk)
Dark Biology
So, alchemy refines the way the mindbody generates and processes inherent light as medicine. It refines the aspirant's ability for tapping and amplifying Medicine Light. This primordial state is the luminous ground of our being, hidden deep in the heart of things.
It remains undemonstrated, but we may also have dark biology counterparts, an invisible self coupled to the visible human body, of massless, zero-charge dark matter and dark energy. There are some theoretical indications that biophoton emission may be the result of interactions of Dark Matter particles with the visible particles.
In alchemy, all other goals are subordinate to the transformative prime directive which includes meditative techniques for continuing consciousness after death. This Philosopher's Stone is also the Universal Medicine (meta-syn), the regenerative Elixir of Life. The greatest mystery is the LIFE IN DEATH: we don't die but continue in transcendent form. This is the virtual secret of man and nature.
“I suddenly realized that in the language, or at any rate in the spirit of the Glass Bead Game, everything actually was all-meaningful, that every symbol and combination of symbol led not hither and yon, not to single examples, experiments, and proofs, but into the center, the mystery and innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge. Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical or artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment, if seen with truly a meditative mind, nothing but a direct route into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth, between Yin and Yang holiness is forever being created.” (Hesse, Magister Ludi)
Process Arts
In chaos, science and art draw closer to one another. Alchemical art is full of fractal-like “reflectaphors” that speak to the human condition throughout the ages. Art can be meta-syn -- therapeutic, both in the process of creation and for the viewer who reacts from personal associations. The future ceased to function as the predominant sphere of reference, and the past turned into a storehouse of images, lifestyles and ideas for us to recycle.
Alchemy is not a religious, metaphysical. nor ethical pursuit. It looks on the play of the powers of the Soul from a purely cosmological point of view, treating the soul as a ‘substance' to be purified, dissolved and crystallized anew. Each alchemist, with a will to be interconnected, is an intellectual and spiritual pioneer who enters unknown territory realizing the groundstate is non-substantial.
Only the frame distinguishes an empty set.. From pre-history onward, humans have tried to make sense of their observations by framing of the natural world even while experiencing the world as essentially chaotic. We like our doses of reality in bite-sized chunks. We chunk science into domains according to the scale of phenomena. There is a strong relationship between chaos and fractals, which describe the edge of chaos where patterns repeat regardless of scale.
Good art also strives to incorporate the elements of self-similarity although this is generally done subtly. In a great work of art each image must related to the others in terms of its geometry and metaphorical themes. Artists and sculptors have always been inspired by the complex forms of nature, seeking to imitate, outdo them, distort or recontextualize them.
Cymatics, wave patterns produced by vibrations, visibly demonstrates how form is related to process. Poetic ideas and metaphoric notions have reflections in all fields from the wave/particle duality of quantum physics, to oscillations within the nervous system to the oscillations and distinctions that we make at every moment of our lives. Complexity and self-organization emerge from disorder as the result of simple processes and intersecting dynamic networks.
A fiercely lived life is an artform -- illumination in action, based on discipline, practice and service. Symbolism resonates between the visionary and social spheres. The specific "Art" is alchemical, a merger of inner and outer reality in One World. Art bares the soul, and provides a container for unbridled self-expression. Lack of causal specificity is no argument against the process when the proofs are in the result.
For example, science has revealed a mathematical chaos present in the chaos of the drip paintings of Jackson Pollack. Such intuitive works emerged in the context of his struggle for salvation in the retort bottles of alcoholism. Who can say how his random process managed to embody such an intrinsic aspect of nature, which is far more than chance or training could predict.
Was this the gift that the ‘fire-water’ [displacement of the Elixir] gave him which was more than metaphorical? His sense of aesthetics guided his apparent freeform motion toward ineffable Truth which took decades more for science to find. His works didn’t require any metaphysical commitment prior to execution. They simply flowed forth from his essential, yet trained being. He mined his subconscious for creative potential. This potential of emptiness is the hidden ground of our experience of the stream of consciousness.
“Pollock denied "the accident"; he usually had an idea of how he wanted a particular piece to appear. His technique combined the movement of his body, over which he had control, the viscous flow of paint, the force of gravity, and the absorption of paint into the canvas. It was a mixture of controllable and uncontrollable factors. Flinging, dripping, pouring, and spattering, he would move energetically around the canvas, almost as if in a dance, and would not stop until he saw what he wanted to see.” [Pollack wikipedia]
“When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It is only after a sort of 'get acquainted' period that I see what I have been about. I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.”
High synergy is a differentiating characteristic of the nonagressive and secure. Beyond synergy is negentropy, the flow of creative connection with Source. Non-objective art is about flow and the feedback process between artist and creation. When the constructed forms which hold personality together are voluntarily relinquished, consciousness "liquifies" and rapidly moves toward the unconditioned state.
Chaos is the universal solvent. Though easy to say, it is sometimes difficult to achieve such liberation from the mental-conceptual activity of the nervous system. When we do, the quiescent nervous system is open and receptive to the conscious recognition of pure energy transforms with no interpretations. Solutio implies the liquification of consciousness through the dissolution of rigidities which inhibit free flow.
In reducing all to pure water, the prima materia and the ultima materia become synonymous. That primal consciousness state, that creative and chaotic consciousness is the beginning of the operation of "water", and its ultimate realization. It becomes easy to see why the operation of water is the "root of alchemy." Through consciousness journeys which liquify our rigid notions of self and world, we re-create the adventures of the hero or heroine. The theme is the loss and recovery of identity.
Symbolic art has both an emotional and cognitive content. Metaphysical art draws on the multicultural iconography, not only of the globe, but of the Beyond. At its best it embodies and reveal the indomitable human Spirit.
We need a new cultural proving ground, a new paradigm for the potential of the bodymind and the culture for which it is the ground. In our culture, the body and our fantasies about it, have come to represent the lost Feminine element. We have lost touch with our primal femininity, the animating principle (nature, body, instinct). We have become estranged from the body through the Cartesian mind/body split, which is also non-relativistic. We talk a good game about ‘wholeness’ but don’t really connect as much as nostalgically yearn for it.
There is a way that joins spirit and body through the spontaneous imagery of soul. It seeks neither to solve our troubles (pathologies) nor “save” our souls. It suggests direct engagement with images for soul-making or deepening through personal experience. We can see through the nature of apparent reality for ourselves, if we but try. Then we develop our own philosophy, apart from consensus. When it comes to questions of speculation on the unknown, we can either accept what others have said, or look for ourselves.
We seek the lost soul primarily because of the intense degree of wounding in our modern consciousness. This wounding has “opened” us to transformation. We can embody soul by seeing-through appearances to an acute awareness of the archetypal, subjective perception of our experience.
REFERENCES
Bischoff, “Biophotons: the light in our cells,” www.international-light-association.eu/PDF/Biophotons.pdf
Rosa María Rodríguez Magda GLOBALIZATION AS TRANSMODERN TOTALITY http://transmodern-theory.blogspot.com/
Eduard P.A., Heike Koch, Saskia Bosman, Roeland Van Wijk. The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. January/February 2006, 12(1): 31-38. doi:10.1089/acm.2006.12.31.
S.Cohen and F.A.Popp: Biophoton emission of the human body. Journal of Photochemistry and Photobiology B 40 (1997), 187-189.
COHEN, S. ; POPP, F. A. ; Indian journal of experimental biology 2003, vol. 41, no5, pp. 440-445 [6 page(s) http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=14713190 LASZLO, Ervin, (2004/2007), SCIENCE & THE AKASHIC FIELD: An Integral Theory of Everything, Richester, Vermont; Inner Traditions.
TRANSMODERN SPIRITUAL ALCHEMY
By Iona Miller 5/2009
"Nonexistence is eagerly bubbling in the expectation of being given existence....For the mine and treasure-house of God's making is naught but nonexistence coming into manifestation." ~Rumi
“We are waves whose stillness is non-being; We are alive because of this, that we have no rest.” ~ Abu-Talib Kalim
“Unless bodies lose their corporeal state and unless bodies assume again their corporeal state, that which is desired will not be attained.” ~ Byzantine fragment, The Philosophical Egg
“The interaction of our mind and consciousness with the quantum vacuum links us with other minds around us, as well as with the biosphere of the planet. It "opens" our mind to society, nature, and the universe. This openness has been known to mystics and sensitives, prophets and meta-physicians through the ages. But it has been denied by modern scientists and by those who took modern science to be the only way of comprehending reality.” ~ Ervin Laszlo
Alchemical Dynamics
Alchemy is a tradition of participatory wisdom. Medieval alchemy was couched in the archaic language of its time, but we are not limited to that, nor to theological, Hermetic, Masonic, Theosophical, New Age jargon, or even obsolete scientific theory. Philosophies and sciences evolve in articulation, theory and practice. New discoveries and statements of meaning inform our practice at all levels. In many cases, alchemy anticipated them. Particles are not single dots or points and neither are we. We are primordially entangled with Cosmos.
Our worldview has evolved to include quantum physics and dynamics in our models of reality. In the 20th Century, Carl Jung described alchemy in terms of depth psychology and shed new light on an old science. But that discipline continues to redefine itself. Jung's notions of a heroic, striving Self have been superseded with concepts beyond self -- imaginal, nonlinear models of consciousness, archetypes as strange attractors and healing fictions. Can we expect any less from 21st century alchemy itself?
Alchemy is a multidisciplinary pursuit focusing on life sciences, metallurgy, chemistry, dynamics and physics. We can take a revolutionary view of today's alchemy as dynamic process in terms of Chaos Theory and its related sciences. There are analogies between contemporary practice of sacred psychology, chaos theory, quantum theory, scalar physics and alchemical processes, some of which are more than metaphorical.
Dynamics is a universal tool, a novel practice which helps us grasp the processes of emergence, self-organization and nonlinear development in ourselves, in nature, in our world and the cosmos.
Dynamics is a synthesis of recent scientific theories: system dynamics, living systems, general systems, chaos, edge-of-chaos, complexity, emergence, self-organization, complex adaptive systems, quantum gravity, quantum cosmology, attractors, and homeodynamics. Chaos theory describes open-systems, far from equilibrium.
Chaos is integrated in the new paradigm, whether one pursues it in the alchemical laboratory or in the psychophysical retort of the human energy body. It leads to new understanding of the process of trans-mutation and trans-formation. Chaos is the prima materia and ultima materia, the beginning and end of the Great Work. Chaos is the universal solvent, the catalyst and healing balm. We can now describe in contemporary language what these analogies mean in alchemical process.
Alchemy is unbound. In the Transmodern union of opposites, the real and the unreal are no longer opposed. The concept of reality emerges, no longer bound to the material world but turned into fiction because of it. Reality and existence are no longer synonymous – it is a type of reality that continues to “be” even when it may not “exist” and does not comply with the simple status of simulacrum, i.e., the virtual is the true reality.
Time is no longer a flow, projection or hope. It accelerates at overwhelming speed, turns back on itself and becomes compressed and plays itself out. Instantaneously, everything takes place before us simultaneously, including retrievals of the past and projections of multiple futures. We have a greater understanding of deep time, earthly cycles and cosmic process than ever before. We communicate at light speed. We talk of supraliminality -- faster than light potentials.
Eternity has come a bit closer to the mundane world. Our scientific and mystical understanding of the primordial groundstate becomes clearer as we draw back nature's mystic veil. The transmodern world is not in progress nor beyond history. This instantaneous world means time quickens to the breathtaking speed of an eternally updated present. Beyond the hierarchy which has lost divine legitimacy and beyond anarchy, integrated chaos represents our very own dynamic momentum of innovation.
Alchemical transmutation is likewise virtually instantaneous, because its potential exists in each and every nanosecond, at the bottom of each breath. We only hallucinate our separation from cosmos. But the alchemical process begins in alienation and depression, until we separate out and discard our outworn mode of being for more fluid models.
There is plenty going on in the non-material void, the plenum that is the core of our being. The void is not devoid. The gist of the holographic paradigm is that there is a fundamental reality that is an invisible flux not comprised of parts, but an inseparable interconnectedness. The holographic paradigm is one of reciprocal enfolding and unfolding of patterns of information. All potential information about the universe is holographically encoded in the spectrum of frequency patterns constantly bombarding us.
Transubstantiation
What does the soul want? Do we actively value our psychic well-being, our totality, psyche and substance? Are we living soulful, artful lives? Do we nourish our whole selves with self-love? Do we take the time to care for our body or deny it, drive it relentlessly like our servant, or treat it like a machine? Do we attend to our inner world of waking images and dreams? Can we come to our senses, deepening the quality and intensity of embodied experience?
To truly nourish ourselves holistically we have to address the manifest needs of physical, emotional, mental and spiritual well-being. Consciousness may have a direct effect on the subatomic particles of the body, especially those within the brain. A tiny change within the open system of the brain, for example, can result in a vast change to the overall health of the body because of amplification through feedback loops. Nonlinearity exists at many scales.
We can use the wisdom of the bodymind to face stress, pain, loss, illness, even catastrophe. Creative transformation of our instinctive reactions produces the alchemical "gold", whether we call that essence health, creativity, art, flow, inspiration or wisdom. Lifeforce is found within; psychic sustenance is found within. Once the mindbody connects with Source, all of our self-expression becomes soulful. We truly embody spirit.
Transubstantiation has escaped its theological roots as more than a change of meaning. Alchemy is about a primordial change in the elements. The essence of an object can change while the form remains the same. Substance is not what it used to be. Our very substance is manifestly divine in its eternal potential, the invisible part of our whole being.
What becomes important is participation in the transformative event, a mystical consecration. All matter shares the same quintessential nature that is substantially if not physically present. We can return to Nature and our own nature, collectively preparing a paradigm shift for a new shared reality and trajectory that integrates physical, emotional, cognitive and spiritual coherence.
Divine life is dispensed to us in every instant. "This is my body" is a direct realization. Character is utterly changed in that holy moment of sacramental union. The silent frictionless flow of living intelligence is beyond words and conceptual constructs.
We are a process of recursive self-generation. This continuum, which is our groundstate or creative Source, is directly discoverable in the immediacy of the emergent embodied moment. We are each a consecrated temple of living light. It is up to us to realize our full potential by redeeming and realizing the lost parts of ourselves.
Creative solutions arise from chaotic circumstances by more openly receptive awareness of potential. Alchemy’s protocols, in the context of art instigate some imbalance to facilitate discovery of enriching solutions to this chaos. Were we wiser in the past? What if we collapse the notion of past, present, future in the ever-present NowHere?
Laszlo (2004) has suggested there is a subquantal coherent field of pure "in-formation," different from the zero-point field. He calls it the A-field, or Akashic field, known by its real effects but as yet without a mathematical description. It propagates nonlocal coherence across all domains, an all-encompassing medium that underlies and becomes all things.
This vacuum hologram carries information in distributed form as interfering wavefields that propagate throughout the universe instantly without attenuation. These "cosmic holograms" link or "in-form" all things with all other things, remembering what has been, sustaining what is, and propagating what will be.
Transmodern Alchemy
Transmodernity is the synthesis of modernity and postmodern philosophy, reflected in alchemical notions of transcendence, transformation and transmutation. So what might a chaos-informed Transmodern Alchemy look like? First and foremost our existential state space is in flux. The nation-state no longer dominates space in globalist society. Phenomena no longer correspond with old-paradigm frameworks.
Trans- is the prefix that guides the vision of reality as virtual and fluctuating. At the subquantal range of virtual photon flux, this is literally true and the metaphysical substrate of manifestation. At the virtual level, the fiction of ‘reality’ as substantive is revealed and the transparent veil is ripped away. Self-organizing dynamic transactions combine the positive momentum of the modern philosophy with the emptiness of the Postmodern, the longing for unity of the former and the fragmentation of the latter.
Our comprehension of the physical world has been transformed. We are wavefronts in local space, undergird by the vacuum fluctuation of absolute space. Material reality, as formation, atom, mass, power, space, time, etc. is an outworn concept that brought order to a Newtonian universe.
The theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, waves, chords, uncertainty, gravitational lines, the temporalization of space, etc., an entire fuzzy logic brought physics to the edge of metaphysics. We have alchemically synthesized the actual and ethereal in our transmodern cultural worldview.
Reality is no longer limited to the movement of aggregates of atoms (objects), but also quanta of information transmitted in real time. Space is no longer the site of transformation, nor the alleged place of secularization multiplied in n dimensions. It becomes irrelevant and ceases to exist, as a limit never reached before. The speed of light, takes on the form of everyday instantaneity.
The spirit, soul, reason, the subjective, objective and absolute was the main protagonist of modernity, although progressively undermined by scientific materialism, it became a mere metaphor of itself as a dynamic driving force and shared form of rationality.
Behind it all we are left with the body, fragmented, joyful, lustful, a form of moral subversion and doomed flesh. Nowadays the remaining organic matter seems more like a primitive burden, the mind plays with its transformation and turns it into a guinea pig for genetic engineering or expands it with technological prostheses. We are already mutants connected to the net, cyborgs that proclaim the era of the postcorporal and the transhuman.
The ultimate alchemy is performed on ourselves as we head into a vast epochal shift. The dawn of a transgenic age fills us with both hopes and fears. Even the body reaches out, externalizing its nervous system, to unite the biological and mechanical: chips, implants, dialysis, assisted reproduction, cloning, technological gadgets developed to extend our senses. The cyborg model embraces the metaphor of a mutating transhuman body, just as transsexuality has dislodged and paved the way for a vast array of possible genders, desires and identity beyond the dichotomy of masculine and feminine.
“Reality becomes constant transformation. Its actual conditions are transcended to become part of an interconnected whole that is infinitely readjusted on a global level. In the end, the Total does not bring us back to a religious or supernatural power, nor to the noumenal kingdom of Metaphysics or Absolute Logic. The transcendental that used to be beyond and yet close to empirical reality has now become the hyperreal empirical reality itself, i.e., virtual transcendency.” (Magda)
The contemporary phase space is criss-crossed by all trends, memories, possibilities. It is both transcendental and apparential, and is voluntarily syncretic in its ‘multichrony’. Transmodernity is a fiction: our reality, the copy that supplants the model, eclecticism both mean and angelical.
Transmodernity is postmodernity without its innocent rupturism, the museum display of Enlightenment reason, not forgetting history which has died to avoid ending up in barbaric cybernetic or mass media domestication. It is proposing values as stops or as fables, but without forgetting, because we are wise, because our past was wise.
Transmodernity takes up and recovers the vanguards, sampling and branding them, but meanwhile it remembers that art has had, and has, an effect of denunciation and experimentalism -- that is, not everything goes. It breaks down the distance between elitism and mass culture and reveals the connections between them. Transmodernity is image, series, baroque fugue and self-reference, catastrophe, loop, fractal and inane reiteration. It is the entropy of what is obese, the clumsy inflation of dataglut, the aesthetic of what is full and of what has disappeared, entropic, toxic, fatal.
The key to it is not what comes after, the rupture, but the trans-substantiation and overlapping of paradigms. The worlds that penetrate each other and end up as soap bubbles or as images on a screen. Transmodernity is not a desire or a goal. It is just there, like a complex, random, imposed strategic situation. It is neither good nor bad, beneficial nor unbearable… and it is all of these things together… It is the abandonment of representation, it is the reign of simulation, of simulation that knows it is real.
Transmodernity, as an open stage and the designation of our present, goes beyond a random denomination and aims to cover the inheritance of the challenges of Modernity after the collapse of the illustrated project. If we do not renounce Theory, History, Social Justice and the autonomy of the Subject, accepting post-modern criticism, we are limiting the possible horizon for reflection getting away from nihilism without committing ourselves to outdated projects but not forgetting them.
Accepting pragmatism as a basis does not mean we have to deny that human action is guided by regulatory ideals that are the basis for argument and rationality. But these regulatory ideals which, after modernity, refused to be based on theology or metaphysics, can still not, after post-modern criticism, be legitimized by the illustrated project. We have weakened their vigor but not the logical and social need for them, and this gives us the notion of pragmatism.
Such regulatory ideals represent operational simulations legitimized by rational perfectibility, which criticism and consensus constantly renew. Non-universal but universalizable public values find their sphere not in intuition, common sense or tradition but in the theoretical effort to create conceptual paradigms that will help increase social and individual wellbeing.
We are therefore talking about social transformation, the transcendence of mere practical management, of compromise, of lines of questioning that cross through rational enquiry, changing and being changed. (Rosa María Rodríguez Magda)
Creativity
Whether alchemy can perform a causal transformation of metals to gold or not, it certainly has the capacity for creatively stimulating the imagination and the kind of divergent thinking that leads to discovery about oneself, the world, and the primal nature of reality.
Alchemy recognizes its own creative role as an art based on the life of the soul (Anima Mundi) in relation to Spirit and Body, and as a healing fiction, using certain symbols and images. Spontaneous healing is a stated goal of alchemical process. It supercharges natural healing factors.
Healing occurs on many levels, including radical holistic self-organization from the deepest chaotic level. Psychology works through fictions which contribute to the healing of the psyche and heal our ideas about fiction being false. Healing fictions are fundamental to creative imagination and thereby thinking itself. It is a self-correcting process, like science.
Alchemy is a form of magic facilitating acausal qualitative change of substance – transmutation, including that of the soul. In this aspect, it is a spiritual technology based in the metaphysics of a primordial chaos or the void. Seeming ‘miracles’ happen in the gaps in consciousness. For example, art has a way of wordlessly heralding the future, in general terms, symbolism and sometimes in specifics. We are momentarily freed of enslaving ideologies.
Alchemy, like the Philosopher’s Stone, can take on the projections of modern science theories from psychology to life sciences to physics. Complex systems emerge from simple systems whose parts do not predict such transformations. Yet things can and do transform into other things. We are left holding our breath in suspended animation at the paradox, the moment of despair or bliss when we are engulfed in unsolvable Mystery — riddles wrapped in enigmas, half-truths disguising lies, faulty theories explaining nothing.
Soul is a perspective not a substance. Differentiating this middle ground, we find ourselves in Chapel Perilous, a way of being in the world between thinking and perceiving, a conspiracy (seeing with) of Eros and its laws of attraction that reason alone cannot nourish. The word ‘resolve’ echoes the alchemical maxim of “Solve et Coagula,” the liquification and reintegration of essentially frozen psychic energy.
We dream into the world while we are awake - coincidence theories, perceptual theories, alchemical theories. Confusion arises when your rational view is irreparably broken. Paradoxically, as “the poison is the cure.” It might lead to breakthrough, insight or spiritual healing. We make soul by pro-actively living life not by retreating into spiritual discipline. Emphasizing the inner soul at the expense of the outer soul fosters the decline of the actual world – alchemy’s One World. We can be that hyperdimensional crossroads, that strange attractor, that archetypal probability cloud.
Unseen Order
We struggle to connect the dots. In relentless speculation multiple mind-blowing streams of thought completely shatter preconceived notions of perception, time and space. It is as true in physics as cultural engineering. It is difficult to grasp without solipsism that everything we experience is a virtuality.
It is difficult for any of us to free ourselves from our enculturated, a priori beliefs about existence. When we firmly believe what we say, we sell others a confabulation of our own truths and lies. It is hard to view anything from outside of our own fundamental philosophical, spiritual, and psychological perspectives.
But it is possible to persuade others and many speakers have staked their careers on it. These theories, dogmas, and experiences condition how we perceive reality. Their influence may be so subtle we fail to notice where our position originated, when the shift occurred. Our viewpoint is relative to our position.
When old defenses no longer work, you must develop new coping skills for developmental challenges. But this initiatory way includes many “deaths” and rebirths. Nigredo, the blackening, isn’t always the first stage, but may be one of relapse, eclipse or another incubation stage.
Nigredo is a recurrent cycle of desire and frustration with no real beginning. Your energies are sucked from the outer world and turned in on themselves. Normal life is radically disrupted. When you are paralyzed by life there is nothing to do but let go of your control fantasies. An eclipse of the ego offers a way into the deeper energies of the unconscious.
The Art of Alchemy
Alchemy begins and ends in the quest for eternal life. It is a spiritual technology of rebirth using natural methods that in their effect transcend nature by amplifying that which is immortal within us. It does not exist in nature but must be prepared by Art. Art is a form of manifesting, making and objectifying the world - spiritual physics.
Artists and mystics are aware of their own internal space and thus able to enter it, playing the mindbody like a musical instrument. Looking inside, they see the true nature of reality and can express that literally and symbolically. We all possess the creative potential. All creative acts are a marriage of spirit and matter, reaching down into the body as the source of our essential being and becoming.
Today, we might describe this resonance as accessing energy that regenerates the mindbody. Healing is an aspect of creativity; nature is within and without us. The Magus does not dominate reality but develops embodied psychophysical equilibrium, clarity, wisdom and compassion.
Creative work originates in the body and is projected out into the world. The projections are then internalized into awareness. The bodymind of the artist is an alchemical vessel containing the creative flux during the process of transformation. Awareness and consciousness form a continuous alchemical movement. The creative gold is generated and embodied in the alembic of the mindbody. The mindbody is the same substance as the Cosmos and contains and reveals its mysteries.
QUANTUM META-SYN LIGHT Metaphysical Basis of Life
Formerly secret forces in the universe have been revealed by modern research. Alchemy reduces all to the first state, the ground state of being -- original experience that is timeless, infinite. The classical Void, the quantum vacuum is a carrier of information.
The energy body or the quantum field body connects us with the negentropic potential of the zero-point field. Radiant light literally emerges from this mystic void. Primordial structuring processes are common to both psyche and matter, working in the gap or empty interval between intention and action.
Light is a universal system and a general property of all plant and animal life. A photon is a quanta of light. We are photon-emission systems of low-level luminescence which differs from bioluminescence which is a chemical reaction. Even rocks, liquid and solid crystals, diamonds and inorganic materials emit photons or plasma discharge. Decay of these emissions, which are quantum events, function as clocks revealing their age. Gamma rays are electromagnetic radiation from photon emission.
Quantum optics (quantum optical coherence) is the basis of life. Endogenous light produced by living systems is called biophotons. Light is produced by our own cells and connects us non-materially to the environment. We are self-tuning resonating systems of oscillating field, coupled nonlocally, tunable to a broad range of frequencies and polarizations.
We are electromagnetic, essentially human antennas. Ultraweak photon emission is the quintessence of our being. A coherent radiation field which permeates and envelops the solid body is emitted by the organism as a whole. Transmitting at the speed of light, it regulates and controls all life. Material structures function as antennae for absorption and emission.
Emitting matter forms a biological laser. DNA in each cell nucleus stores and modulates light emission (non-classical light, non-monochromatic, squeezed states). DNA/RNA projects its code into 3-d manifestation via highly coherent biological laser light and sound vibrations. Below the chaotic threshold, between coherent and incoherent oscillation, light sources decouple and function separately, dominated by the overall absorption of light.
The field/solid body is a holographic field of standing waves. These ultra-stable waves can superimpose to order living tissue, coupled by a coherent radiation field. DNA uses frequencies to transmit and coordinate coded information and feedback through waves. Rogue frequencies can be retuned to normal oscillations.
DNA stores light and emits it when unzipped. In our brains, neuronal activity of light information bits creates a feedback system of holographic thoughtforms. Biophotons are related to both metabolism and pathologies. During death emissions increase up to a thousand-fold and fall to zero upon death of the organism. (Bischoff)
Health is a measure of subatomic communications. We are light-sensitive at the level of single photons. We suck up light from our environment and re-emit it, according to our functional state. Wave resonance or entrainment is the mechanism that allows us to exchange photons and even potentially influence one another, psychophysically, even at a distance.
“Biophoton emission reflects, (i) the left-right symmetry of the human body; (ii) biological rhythms such as 14 days, 1 month, 3 months and 9 months; (iii) disease in terms of broken symmetry between left and right side; and (iv) light channels in the body, which regulate energy and information transfer between different parts. The results show that besides a deeper understanding of health, disease and body field, this method provides a new powerful tool of non-invasive medical diagnosis in terms of basic regulatory functions of the body.” (Cohen, Popp, 2003)
Spontaneous ultra-weak photon emission from human subjects can be measured. The biophoton field is almost fully coherent and strongly linked to all physiological functions, cell division, morphogenesis, growth and differentiation, and regulatory activity. Information of local influences on the body is transferred by a biophotonic communication channel to other places of the body. Biophotonic emission also correlates with electrical parameters of the skin.
Biophotons are the ideal communication system for any organism. Complex organisms emit fewer photons than less complex ones. Related to nonlocal effects, holistic function, biological rhythms, stress, adaptogens, health and disease, biophoton emission is the spontaneous emission of ultraweak light emanating from all living systems, including humans.
Regulatory activities of the body are not stable functions of the electromagnetic fields within the body, but subjects of permanent rhythmical, oscillatory and coherent field amplitudes. Cancer causing substances are light scramblers. Light is going out of sick or stressed individuals in an attempt to restore homeostasis. (Popp)
Emission is linked to mental states, blood flow and the endogenous production of excited states within the living system. The detection and characterization of human biophoton emission has led to suggestions that it has potential future applications in medicine. Meditation may conserve biophotonic reserves by slowing free-radical activity (Van Wijk)
Dark Biology
So, alchemy refines the way the mindbody generates and processes inherent light as medicine. It refines the aspirant's ability for tapping and amplifying Medicine Light. This primordial state is the luminous ground of our being, hidden deep in the heart of things.
It remains undemonstrated, but we may also have dark biology counterparts, an invisible self coupled to the visible human body, of massless, zero-charge dark matter and dark energy. There are some theoretical indications that biophoton emission may be the result of interactions of Dark Matter particles with the visible particles.
In alchemy, all other goals are subordinate to the transformative prime directive which includes meditative techniques for continuing consciousness after death. This Philosopher's Stone is also the Universal Medicine (meta-syn), the regenerative Elixir of Life. The greatest mystery is the LIFE IN DEATH: we don't die but continue in transcendent form. This is the virtual secret of man and nature.
“I suddenly realized that in the language, or at any rate in the spirit of the Glass Bead Game, everything actually was all-meaningful, that every symbol and combination of symbol led not hither and yon, not to single examples, experiments, and proofs, but into the center, the mystery and innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge. Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical or artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment, if seen with truly a meditative mind, nothing but a direct route into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth, between Yin and Yang holiness is forever being created.” (Hesse, Magister Ludi)
Process Arts
In chaos, science and art draw closer to one another. Alchemical art is full of fractal-like “reflectaphors” that speak to the human condition throughout the ages. Art can be meta-syn -- therapeutic, both in the process of creation and for the viewer who reacts from personal associations. The future ceased to function as the predominant sphere of reference, and the past turned into a storehouse of images, lifestyles and ideas for us to recycle.
Alchemy is not a religious, metaphysical. nor ethical pursuit. It looks on the play of the powers of the Soul from a purely cosmological point of view, treating the soul as a ‘substance' to be purified, dissolved and crystallized anew. Each alchemist, with a will to be interconnected, is an intellectual and spiritual pioneer who enters unknown territory realizing the groundstate is non-substantial.
Only the frame distinguishes an empty set.. From pre-history onward, humans have tried to make sense of their observations by framing of the natural world even while experiencing the world as essentially chaotic. We like our doses of reality in bite-sized chunks. We chunk science into domains according to the scale of phenomena. There is a strong relationship between chaos and fractals, which describe the edge of chaos where patterns repeat regardless of scale.
Good art also strives to incorporate the elements of self-similarity although this is generally done subtly. In a great work of art each image must related to the others in terms of its geometry and metaphorical themes. Artists and sculptors have always been inspired by the complex forms of nature, seeking to imitate, outdo them, distort or recontextualize them.
Cymatics, wave patterns produced by vibrations, visibly demonstrates how form is related to process. Poetic ideas and metaphoric notions have reflections in all fields from the wave/particle duality of quantum physics, to oscillations within the nervous system to the oscillations and distinctions that we make at every moment of our lives. Complexity and self-organization emerge from disorder as the result of simple processes and intersecting dynamic networks.
A fiercely lived life is an artform -- illumination in action, based on discipline, practice and service. Symbolism resonates between the visionary and social spheres. The specific "Art" is alchemical, a merger of inner and outer reality in One World. Art bares the soul, and provides a container for unbridled self-expression. Lack of causal specificity is no argument against the process when the proofs are in the result.
For example, science has revealed a mathematical chaos present in the chaos of the drip paintings of Jackson Pollack. Such intuitive works emerged in the context of his struggle for salvation in the retort bottles of alcoholism. Who can say how his random process managed to embody such an intrinsic aspect of nature, which is far more than chance or training could predict.
Was this the gift that the ‘fire-water’ [displacement of the Elixir] gave him which was more than metaphorical? His sense of aesthetics guided his apparent freeform motion toward ineffable Truth which took decades more for science to find. His works didn’t require any metaphysical commitment prior to execution. They simply flowed forth from his essential, yet trained being. He mined his subconscious for creative potential. This potential of emptiness is the hidden ground of our experience of the stream of consciousness.
“Pollock denied "the accident"; he usually had an idea of how he wanted a particular piece to appear. His technique combined the movement of his body, over which he had control, the viscous flow of paint, the force of gravity, and the absorption of paint into the canvas. It was a mixture of controllable and uncontrollable factors. Flinging, dripping, pouring, and spattering, he would move energetically around the canvas, almost as if in a dance, and would not stop until he saw what he wanted to see.” [Pollack wikipedia]
“When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It is only after a sort of 'get acquainted' period that I see what I have been about. I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.”
High synergy is a differentiating characteristic of the nonagressive and secure. Beyond synergy is negentropy, the flow of creative connection with Source. Non-objective art is about flow and the feedback process between artist and creation. When the constructed forms which hold personality together are voluntarily relinquished, consciousness "liquifies" and rapidly moves toward the unconditioned state.
Chaos is the universal solvent. Though easy to say, it is sometimes difficult to achieve such liberation from the mental-conceptual activity of the nervous system. When we do, the quiescent nervous system is open and receptive to the conscious recognition of pure energy transforms with no interpretations. Solutio implies the liquification of consciousness through the dissolution of rigidities which inhibit free flow.
In reducing all to pure water, the prima materia and the ultima materia become synonymous. That primal consciousness state, that creative and chaotic consciousness is the beginning of the operation of "water", and its ultimate realization. It becomes easy to see why the operation of water is the "root of alchemy." Through consciousness journeys which liquify our rigid notions of self and world, we re-create the adventures of the hero or heroine. The theme is the loss and recovery of identity.
Symbolic art has both an emotional and cognitive content. Metaphysical art draws on the multicultural iconography, not only of the globe, but of the Beyond. At its best it embodies and reveal the indomitable human Spirit.
We need a new cultural proving ground, a new paradigm for the potential of the bodymind and the culture for which it is the ground. In our culture, the body and our fantasies about it, have come to represent the lost Feminine element. We have lost touch with our primal femininity, the animating principle (nature, body, instinct). We have become estranged from the body through the Cartesian mind/body split, which is also non-relativistic. We talk a good game about ‘wholeness’ but don’t really connect as much as nostalgically yearn for it.
There is a way that joins spirit and body through the spontaneous imagery of soul. It seeks neither to solve our troubles (pathologies) nor “save” our souls. It suggests direct engagement with images for soul-making or deepening through personal experience. We can see through the nature of apparent reality for ourselves, if we but try. Then we develop our own philosophy, apart from consensus. When it comes to questions of speculation on the unknown, we can either accept what others have said, or look for ourselves.
We seek the lost soul primarily because of the intense degree of wounding in our modern consciousness. This wounding has “opened” us to transformation. We can embody soul by seeing-through appearances to an acute awareness of the archetypal, subjective perception of our experience.
REFERENCES
Bischoff, “Biophotons: the light in our cells,” www.international-light-association.eu/PDF/Biophotons.pdf
Rosa María Rodríguez Magda GLOBALIZATION AS TRANSMODERN TOTALITY http://transmodern-theory.blogspot.com/
Eduard P.A., Heike Koch, Saskia Bosman, Roeland Van Wijk. The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. January/February 2006, 12(1): 31-38. doi:10.1089/acm.2006.12.31.
S.Cohen and F.A.Popp: Biophoton emission of the human body. Journal of Photochemistry and Photobiology B 40 (1997), 187-189.
COHEN, S. ; POPP, F. A. ; Indian journal of experimental biology 2003, vol. 41, no5, pp. 440-445 [6 page(s) http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=14713190 LASZLO, Ervin, (2004/2007), SCIENCE & THE AKASHIC FIELD: An Integral Theory of Everything, Richester, Vermont; Inner Traditions.