This post is a fragment of pieces of thoughts from various writers in search of a comprehensive way of understanding consciousness, spirituality, and ultimately, reality. As I have been posting the ICYMI series posts for the past month, I have been reading. The selections below are from some of the authors that I am reading.
The Beginning Notion
Not long after I graduated from college, a thought crossed my mind.
My university education whether by intention or circumstance had tried to convince me that everything exists in isolation from every other thing. Atomistic is a term that can be used in this instance. From this perspective, all reality is reduced to its smallest essential form. We study history separate from physics, math separate from religion, and business separate from medicine, and education separate from life.
I don’t think this way. I am incapable of doing so. I see the world as a whole, and where it isn’t, I see it broken and fragmented. I realized that my orientation to learning included that which was excluded, the idea that all things are in relationship to one another. And because of this relational perspective, all things have meaning. And all things have meaning because of, not inspite of, its relationship to all other things.
This emerging awareness of the world affected how I viewed people. If we are all in relation, then every person has something to contribute that is meaningful and valued. This particularly came to light as I spent four years serving as an urban community minister. My perception of people changed. They were not objects for study, for philanthropic guilt relief, or to be exploited to advance my social justice cause. They are people to be known, served, learned from, and ultimately to befriend in a shared engagement in the experience of life.
At that point in time, I had read very little about science. The natural sciences were totally separate from the social sciences when I went to school. I had to learn about the philosophy and history of science on my own. As today, I look into the void of my third-half of life, I wonder if I need to study advanced mathematics. I keep finding references in the things that I read as an alien language that I should have learned fifty years ago.
Fields of knowledge are like networks of relationships. There is an inexhaustible range of possibilities for learning and connecting.
As I have thought about all of this over the years, I also came to realize that this idea of the centrality and integralness of relationships was born in the Sunday School lessons of my childhood. We learned that the God of the Bible was the Trinity of Father, Son, and Spirit. That God was three persons in one made no logical sense to the limitations of a child’s mind. In my later years, it began to make sense, but only if you were able to see the world as something beyond the material world that we know. My childhood and then my education had conditioned my thinking not only to see relationships but also wholeness as the context of reality. The more I study to gain a more comprehensive picture of the world, the more a realize that the absence of God from scientific discourse is an intentional limitation on what is possible to know.
When I speak of God in this instance, I not talking about applying some dogmatic theological perspective. I am simply suggesting that without the possibility of a divine being or a consciousness beyond what we can fully discover, we will always end up missing other things. I say this because as an outsider to the scientific enterprise, who seeks to understand it, I find it highly self-limiting to exclude a perspective that has had such influence on the advancement of knowledge.
These questions and ideas are background to my seeking to understand The Order of Reality, and by extension, consciousness, human life, and community, and how its denial has come to have such an important impact, not only on science, but society at large.
The following are quotes from a variety of sources that are guiding my research. This idea of The Order of Reality as an order of relationship, consciousness, spirituality, and meaning is the focal point of the book that I am presently working on.
Spirituality without Order
“Spirituality being the individual subject it is, I think you should know where this reporter is coming from. There is a Buddha in my backyard, a Mexican santo on my mantel and a yoga mat in my bedroom. But my heritage is definitely Protestant: My father’s father was a Congregational minister, my great-grandfather on my mother’s side a Presbyterian minister, and regular church attendance was a given in our household. I myself joined the church at 13 but became a skeptic in college and renounced organized religion as hypocritical. Yet I returned to the fold a few years later when I thought that I — my two children — could use spiritual support. The community of my big-city church, the opportunity to interact with people from many walks of life and different races, nourished me immensely. Now I am churchless again. I grew tired of being preached to. Instead, I follow my own path — relying on messages from many traditions instead of the doctrine of any one religion. I practice yoga and look to its ethics for guidance, but I do not consider myself given over entirely to any one way. I believe I can grow in understanding — as long as my mind and heart are open.”
from Self magazine, December 1997, p. 134.
The Transformation of How We Know
“ What (Sir John) Eccles has in mind throughout is the impasse create by what Schrodinger called the ‘exclusion principle’, the impossible and tragic distortion of our efforts to give an account of the world when we leave out ‘the primary reality’ of our conscious experience; but he also has in mind the effect upon science itself of taking the experiencing subject fully into account. While this way of thinking involves at least ‘two kinds of reality - namely the primary reality of our conscious experience and the secondary reality of all the world revealed by perceptual experience - it necessarily rejects any disjunction between them, for it develops a concept of the universe as structured in various levels of reality which does not permit the reduction of one level to determination solely in terms of another level. And so Eccles writes: ‘It can be predicted that, when developments of science have been brought about by its rebuilding, science itself will have been completely transformed, so the present dogmatism of reductionism has no relevance or meaning. The revolution of science that must come about in order to account for the existence of matter in a world of conscious experience will result in an understanding so far transcending our present inadequate concepts that our present science, even its most sophisticated aspects, will appear as primitive and native.’
Behind these old views now being superseded lies the dualist bifurcation of nature which has resulted not only in the extremes of objectivist positivism and subjectivist idealism, materialist verificationism and existentialist detachment from externality, but therein an approach to science which is unable even to formulate properly the basic problems that now challenge us. “
from “The Integration of Form in Natural and in Theological Science”, by Thomas F. Torrance in Transformation & Convergence in the Frame of Knowledge: Explorations in the Interrelations of Scientific and Theological Enterprise, 1984.
What is the Relation of Consciousness to the Material World?
“‘The existence of consciousness is both one of the most familiar and one of the most astounding things about the world’, writes the philosopher Thomas Nagel. ‘No conception of the natural order that does not reveal it as something to be expected can aspire even to the outline of completeness.’ I agree on both counts. And when we ponder the relationship between matter and consciousness, our thoughts naturally turn to that between the brain and mind. …
The intimacy of the relationship between two parties has in itself nothing whatever to say about its nature. In the history of the cosmos, matter might give rise to mind, or mind to matter; or each might equally give rise to the other interdependently; of they might run in parallel, perhaps because they are different aspects of some ultimately unified phenomenon. When it comes to the brain, the intimate relation between brain activity and states of mind cannot in itself help distinguish between theories of emission, transmission, and permission as its basis. In other words, the same findings are equally compatible with the brain emitting consciousness, transmitting consciousness, or permitting consciousness. …
I am going to argue that it is the last of these possibilities -permission - that is the most convincing. The prejudice in favour of the most bizarre - the emissive option - in which consciousness is some form of secretion of the brain, stems from the mistaken belief that, while we may not understand consciousness, we do at least understand matter. But we don’t. Even if we did, this would be a quite astonishing conjuring trick, since no-one has the slightest idea of a mechanism by which consciousness could emerge from unconscious matter; in any case matter evanesces as we look at it more closely and turns out to be every bit as inscrutable as consciousness itself. …
It is clear that we cannot continue to consider matter as straight-forward in any way that helps us ground reality in its apparently comforting tangibility. … F.C.S. Shiller wrote that ‘the connection of the scientific conception of matter with the hard matter of common experience has become fainter and fainter, as science is compelled to multiply invisible, impalable and imponderable substances in the “unseen universe”, by which it explains the visible.’
The great neurophysiologist and Nobel Laureate Sir Charles Sherrington reflected on mind and matter:
‘For myself, what little I know of the how of the one does not, speaking personally, even begin to help me toward the how of the other. The two for all I can do remain refractorily apart. They seem to me disparate; not mutually convertible; untranslateable the one into the other.’
Like many a profession of unknowing … this statement carries with it a tincture of positive knowledge. It is already an important perception that the difference lies in the how, not the what. As soon as we escape the spell of thingness, and see that what we are dealing with is different modes of being, rather than different entities, we have begun to make an inroad into unknowing.
Faced with Sherrington’s feeling of incommensurateness of mind and matter, which I think we must all, to some extent, share, we have several options. These can be roughly stated as: (1) to deny the existence of consciousness; (2) to deny the existence of matter; (3) to accept that they each exist but are totally distinct; (4) to assert that they each exist but are the same; or (5) to entertain the possibility that they are distinct phenomena that reflect different aspects of a nonetheless importantly indivisible reality. …
If it is true that consciousness is ‘the fundamental given fact’, it clearly follows that it cannot be reduced to something more fundamental. But is consciousness - the experiential - fundamental? Schrödinger thoughts so: ‘Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.’ And others, as we shall see, were with him.
I am not inclined to demur.
from Chapter 25: Matter and Consciousness, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, by Iain McGilchrist, Perspectiva Press, 2021.
What is Order?
Very few people realize, I think, how much the present confusion which exists in the field of architecture is would up with our conception of the universe.
I have come to believe that architecture is so agonizingly disturbed because we – the architects of our time – are struggling with a conception of the world, a world-picture, that essentially makes it impossible to make buildings well. I believe this problem goes so deep that it even makes it extremely difficult to build the most modest, useful building in an ordinary way.
What exactly do I mean by the mechanistic-rationalistic picture of the world? What I mean, roughly, is the 19th century picture of physics. That is, a picture of a world made of atoms which whirl around in a mechanistic fashion: a world in which it is assumed that all the universe is a blind mechanism, whirling on its way, under the impact of the “laws of nature.” These laws are, essentially, those mechanistic laws which explain how the atoms and the structures made of these atoms proceed on their way, under the influence of forces and configurations. Coupled with this picture there is a larger picture of weather, climate, agriculture, animal life, society, economics, ecology, medicine, politics, administration, and even family life – all understood in more or less mechanical fashion. Even though we would admit that the precise laws and mechanisms may not be known, we assume that underlying our ignorance there are some laws, not quite formulated, which do account for how things work, even in these everyday surroundings. Thus we carry forward a blithe and rather simple mental assurance that it is all created by the pushing and pulling of events, very much the way we also understand the pushing and pulling of 19th century atoms.
Of course, there are relatively few people alive today who wholeheartedly believe that the world really is such a place. Physicists – especially the great physicists – have a more humble and wondering attitude about the nature of the universe. So do many non-scientists. Architects are, at least explicitly, rarely concerned with such a mechanistic picture. On the surface architects appear to be concerned with deeper questions – artistic and social questions – that are often more mysterious and more interesting.
However, in trying to probe the nature of the puzzle surrounding the collapse of architecture, I have slowly become convinced that many architects – especially those who have become famous in recent years and whose work now forms the model for the work of young architects – are in the grip of such a mechanistic conception, even if they do not know it. I have reached the conclusion that the strange fantasies, the private in-house language about architecture, the strange nature of 20th century gallery art, deconstructionism, postmodernism, modernism, and a host of other ‘ism,” all of which affect our physical world hugely, are created because of an entanglement between the nature of architecture, the practice of architecture, and the mechanical conception of the universe.
Thus, I believe that there is, at the root of our trouble in the sphere of art and architecture, a fundamental mistake caused by a certain conception of the nature of matter, the nature of the universe. More precisely, I believe that the mistake and confusion in our picture of the art of building has come from our conception of what matter is.
The present conception of matter, and the opposing one which I shall try to put in its place, may both be summarized by the nature of order. Our idea of matter is essentially governed by our idea of order. What matter is, is governed by our idea of how space can be arranged; and that in turn is governed by our idea of how orderly arrangement in space creates matter. So it is the nature of order which lies at the root of the problem of architecture. …
What is Order?
What is order? We know that everything in the world around us is governed by an immense orderliness. We experience order every time we take a walk. The grass, the sky, the leaves on the trees, the flowing water in the river, the windows in the houses along the street – all of it is immensely orderly. It is this order which makes us gasp when we talk our walk. … But this geometry which means so much, which makes us feel the presence of order so clearly – we do not have a language for it.
And what should we do to create order? Even the smallest building has order of great complexity. In the course of laying out and making the volume of the building, the filigree of structure, floors, windows, doors, and ornament – we face a dazzling task. What is the order we should infuse it with? In large projects, especially, we can easily get muddled. More is at stake, so the nature of the order we put in is especially crucial. We rely more on intellectual conceptions. So then, our assumptions about order begin to enter in explicitly. It is not only a single brick, or door, or roof. It might be a whole neighborhood – millions of dollars of construction – perhaps the living environment for hundreds of people at a time. How do I do this? What kind of order should it embody, to make sure it is a success? …
In facing any one of these tasks, I come up against this question right away: What exactly do I mean by order? ...
In a sense, everyone knows what order is. But when I ask myself “what is order – in the sense of deep geometric reality, deep enough so that I can use it, and so that it is able to help me create life in a building – then it turns out that this “order” is very difficult to define. …
Complex patterns generated by interacting rules are more interesting, and raise the possibility of seeing all order as the product of a computable generative process. This could give us a general view of order as any system produced by interacting generative morphological rules. …
… physicist Lancelot Whyte … tried to develop a view of all biology as a science of asymmetrical ordered structures. The theory of catastrophe, which tries to describe the birth of configurations out of chaos, has been developing in recent years and is considered by many to be promising. Perhaps one of the clearest statements so far has been expressed by the physicist Dave Bohm. Bohm tried to outline a possible theory in which order types of many levels exist and are built out of hierarchies of progressively more complex order types.
But none of this, suggestive as it all is, is directly useful to a builder. Even the most advanced of these ideas is still not deep enough or concrete enough to give us practical help with architecture, where we actually try to create order everyday. …
What, indeed, is that thing we intuitively feel as order in all these different cases?
Order as Mechanism
In the 20th century, we have had the illusion that all the order we see around us in the world can be explained by science – mainly, we assume, by physics. But physics and the other sciences tend to represent certain things for us as mechanisms. This gives us a partial picture of some kinds of order. That is all. We may take, for instance, the structure of a leaf, the structure of a bridge, the structure of an atomic nucleus. In each of these cases we have a well-worked-out conception of the mechanical order which is there. The stems of the leaf support its membranes, which hold the cells, which receive sunlight, and transform the energy of the sunlight, and transform the energy of the sunlight into materials from which the leaf can grow. The members of the bridge are conceived as elements in a certain pattern of forces which develops inside the bridge in response to a given pattern of loads, trucks and cars passing over it, wind forces, stresses and strains caused by thermal expansion, and so on. Even in the picture we have of the atomic nucleus, the order is conceived essentially in relation to forces. The particles of which the atom is made are themselves seen as carriers of forces which hold the nucleus together and which, under particular conditions, may also cause it to fly apart.
What is the order which physics helps us talk about in each of these cases? It is only the mechanical order. The order is always describe – and even invented – in relation to the way the thing works as a mechanism. Within our current scientific world-picture, each of the three examples I have given is conceived of as a little machine that produces certain kinds of results when pushed, prodded, squeezed, or bombarded. So, in the present scientific world-picture, the order which we see in the thing, the way we describe it to ourselves, is essentially the order of a machine which has a certain mechanical mode of operation – or which, at any rate, has a certain kind of mechanical behavior as a result of the arrangement of its parts.
But what of the order itself? The order itself … a harmonious coherence which fills us and touches us – this order cannot be represented as a mechanism. Yet it is this harmony, this aspect of order, which impresses us and moves us when we see it in the world.
It is almost impossible to view a Mozart symphony as a machine which has certain kinds of behavior. … if I want to make something of comparable beauty – it is useless to conceive it as a mechanism, because the beauty and order which I see in it, and yearn for, cannot be expressed in any way that can be understood mechanically. So, in works of art, the mechanistic view of order always makes us miss the essential thing. Although 20th century science gives us a way of seeing order as a producer of effects – in particular because the scientific view of things shows us the geometry of matter as if it were part of a machine, a machine which can do things – we still do not have a way of seeing the order of a thing which simply exists. We do not have a way of seeing the order … of the harmony within a wonderful building.”
from The Phenomenon of Life, Book One of The Nature of Order: An Essay of the Art of Building and The Nature of the Universe, by Christopher Alexander, published by The Center for Environmental Structure.
Happiness and the Gift of Love
"A happiness that is sought for ourselves alone can never be found: for a happiness that is diminished by being shared is not big enough to make us happy."
"There is a false and momentary happiness in self-satisfaction, but it always leads to sorrow because it narrows and deadens our spirit. True happiness is found in unselfish love, a love which increases in proportion as it is shared. There is no end to the sharing of love, and, therefore, the potential happiness of such love is without limit. Infinite sharing is the law of God's inner life. He has made the sharing of ourselves the law of our own being, so that it is in loving others that we best love ourselves. In disinterested activity we best fulfill our own capacities to act and to be."
"Yet there can never be happiness in compulsion. It is not enough for love to be shared: it must be shared freely. That is to say it must be given, not merely taken. Unselfish love that is poured out upon a selfish object does not bring perfect happiness: not because love requires a return or a reward for loving, but because it rests in the happiness of the beloved. And if the one loved receives love selfishly, the lover is not satisfied. He sees that his love has failed to make the beloved happy. It has not awakened his capacity for unselfish love."
"Hence the paradox that unselfish love cannot rest perfectly except in a love that is perfectly reciprocated: because it knows that the only true peace is found in selfless love. Selfless love consents to be loved selflessly for the sake of the beloved. In so doing, it perfects itself."
"The gift of love is the gift of the power and the capacity to love, and, therefore, to give love with full effect is also to receive it. So, love can only be kept by being given away, and it can only be given perfectly when it is also received."
From: No Man Is An Island, by Thomas Merton.
A Transcendent Reality of Peace
Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your request be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. Keep on doing the things that you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, and the God of peace will be with you.
Philippians 4:4-9