Silence (Part Six) - Musings and Meditations

“The total number of minds in the Universe is one.”

Erwin Schrödinger (1887-1961), one of the 'founders of quantum physics - 20th century

“That which is the source of the sun

And of every power in the cosmos, beyond which

There is neither going nor coming, 

Is the Self indeed. For this Self is supreme!”

The Katha Upanishad, c. 1500 BC

“I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”

Max Planck (1858-1947), one of the founders of quantum physics, 20th century.

“Realize that which pervades the Universe and is 

Indestructible; no power can affect this unchanging,

Imperishable reality. The body is mortal, but

That which dwells in the body is immortal and

Immeasurable.”

The Bhagavad Gita, c. 1000BC

Full moon and clouds above a country road,  Mártely, Hungary. July 2013

Audio version of this musing, read by me.

Dear friends,

In my previous musings on silence, I talked about the different aspects of silence and how silence is anything but 'empty', but on the contrary, is full of energy and potential, just like the apparent emptiness of space. Without empty space there would be no stars, without darkness there would be no light, without silence there would be no... yes, what does silence make possible? What are all the phenomena that need silence like stars need empty space? Without silence there are no sounds, no music, no words, no meaningful connections of words to sentences... no series of sentences that can in turn convey meaning and value. Without silence there is no thinking, no feeling, no introspection or intuition, no probing into the depths of our consciousness for whatever wants to emerge from the fullness that is silence.

Quantum physics teaches us that what we call 'matter' is actually different states of a field, and that elementary particles are not small 'chunks' or 'balls' made of some kind of 'stuff'. If we subject matter to further investigation at the subatomic level, we do not encounter anything truly tangible at any level, only patterns of energy and potential, relationships and different states of a field. As physicist Hans-Peter Dürr put it: “Matter does not consist of matter.” Or quantum physicist Niels Bohr: “Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be considered real.”

In the same way, if we let silence do its work and, for example during meditation, subject the contents of our consciousness to closer examination, we cannot find anything solid or tangible in any way. The series of thoughts and emotions that we usually say constitute 'me' seem to spontaneously arise and disappear again in the space that makes them possible, just like protons or electrons. Focusing our attention on our thoughts and emotions and how they appear and disappear in something that resembles a vacuum is something that many people do not really want to do or spend much time on. It can seem terrifying or a useless waste of time. We do have to keep an economy going here, don't we?

But what is that vacuum, that 'empty space' that makes the contents of our consciousness possible? If the three dimensions of physical space plus the dimension of time make it possible for stars to exist, and if darkness makes it possible for those stars to give light, then what is the 'ground' or the 'space' in which our thoughts and emotions can arise?

In the third musing on silence, I talked about meditation and the many benefits it can bring us. I also mentioned that people who meditate gradually learn to let go of their identification with the contents of their consciousness, something that can initially seem terrifying: isn't there just emptiness left, and boredom or restlessness or a dangerous abyss we would rather not look into? If we allow the busy voices in our head that chatter and babble day in day out to fall silent, what can remain?

People who meditate a lot do not so much try to suppress their thoughts, because they know that is impossible. Rather, they learn to simply observe the chatter in their head without judgment, and to keep bringing their attention back to something outside of those thoughts. Breathing, for example, or a mantra. And by persevering with this process for a long time, a gradual shift will take place from focusing attention on the contents of consciousness to consciousness itself: the observer, that which or who that observes everything that arises and disappears in consciousness. And that beingness has its own energy, a quality that gradually becomes clearer as the voices in the head fade and grow silent. The quality of energy in which thoughts and emotions and all the contents of consciousness arise gradually becomes the ground in which the meditator finds his or her true home, rather than in the endless chatter of the mind. It is the silence from which everything that fills our consciousness can arise, but it is a silence that is not empty in itself, but just like the vacuum, is full of energy.

I will talk about how far that process can go and what the great yogis and swamis can experience in that field of endless energy and potential another time. But for now I can tell you that what remains when we let go of all thoughts and emotions is perhaps the actual subject of 'A Biosphere Project'. It is not without reason that the caption in the logo reads 'Consciousness and The Living Planet'.

Silence is therefore also an aspect of what we call 'consciousness', since consciousness in itself has no content or form: no thoughts, no emotions, no internal monologue, no fears or worries... it is a silent energy that exists outside of time and space.

And just like silence, consciousness seems elusive and difficult to define. Just like silence, it seems easier to determine what it is not. The old masters from the time of the Upanishads (circa 1500 BC) said “Neti Neti”,  “not this - not that”.  By continually emphasizing what consciousness, or the Self, is not, they wanted to bring their students to a deeper understanding of what it is, an understanding that ultimately had to be wordless, since that understanding cannot be captured in language. As the Tao also teaches: “The Tao that can be spoken of is not the true Tao”.

And because everything we perceive and experience is perceived or experienced through the phenomenon of consciousness, we easily forget that it is there at all.

A fish that is born in the water and spends its entire life there has no idea what water is; it (or she) takes it for granted, and as a result no longer even notices it. I may be exaggerating the knowledge I have about the consciousness of a fish, and if so, I hereby apologize to the entire family of fish species. But it is no different for people: what is always present, we will no longer notice over time. That is one of the things I have learned in three decades of teaching drawing and painting from observation. And just as that fish has no idea what it is like not to be in the water, it also has no idea that the water is there at all or what that water is. Because it has always been there and is the only tangible reality, it is no longer even noticed.

However, all that lives and moves in that water is indeed noticed: other fish, plants, crabs, sharks, and so on. But the water itself is not something the fish actually perceives. It is the same with our consciousness: we only have eyes or ears for the contents of our consciousness, but not for the phenomenon of consciousness itself. And that can change after long-term meditation: an experienced meditator can gradually allow attention to rest in consciousness itself, after every identification with thoughts, emotions and ultimately the body itself is released. And that is an experience that must be quite extraordinary. I have never reached that stage myself, but I have caught glimpses of it. What those yogis actually do is to boldly go where no (wo)man has gone before, but unlike the heroes of Star Trek, they do not explore the endless space out there, but the endless space within. And it is not as if no (wo)man has ever gone there before: meditation and yoga are thousands of years old, and many, many people have gone before us on this voyage of discovery into consciousness. And what those yogis and meditators report from the boundaries of our individual consciousness is always the same: that our individual consciousness is part of one all-encompassing universal consciousness.

The feeling of merging with that is perhaps the ultimate mystical experience, and is called Samãdhi in India and Satori in Japan. I have already mentioned the mystical experience in the musing 'The Overview Effect', in which I related the story of Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, who had such a Samãdhi experience on his way back from the Moon to Earth, unannounced and 'out of the blue', without meditation. This experience was life-changing for him (as it is for everyone who experiences it) and led him to found the Institute of Noetic Sciences, or IONS, which has been conducting scientific research into the nature of our consciousness for decades. With quite spectacular results (see the musing 'Five Sigma').

As I said, consciousness seems elusive and difficult to define. Whenever you want to subject it to further investigation, it seems to retreat behind a curtain of fog , as if it does not want to reveal itself. Our consciousness is like a flashlight that allows us to perceive things in front of us, and it is very difficult to detach our attention from what we see in the beam of light coming from our flashlight and to focus our full attention on the beam itself, or on the flashlight itself.

It takes sustained intention and attention to focus our gaze on consciousness itself, on that silence in which our thoughts, emotions and perceptions arise.

And actually, we still do not know what consciousness actually is. It is not tangible, not measurable, and no instrument can perceive its existence.

According to current scientific theories, it simply does not exist: it is merely an illusion caused by electrochemical activity in the brain (which we can observe). So we currently assume that matter is the only thing that truly exists, and that our consciousness does not truly exist.

Contrary to what is generally believed, however, this proposition has not been proven at all. There is abundant evidence of correlation, not of causation. In other words, we see things happening in the brain when we do things in our consciousness, but that does not prove that the brain causes those things, only that they are connected. And as philosopher Bernardo Kastrup has repeatedly and aptly pointed out, the causal relationship can even run in the other direction: that what we do in our consciousness causes the observable processes in our brains. I have already discussed this in more detail in the musing 'Five Sigma' and 'A Wondrous Afternoon With an Extraordinary Scientist, Gentleman and Visionary', and the blog posts 'Science and the Emerging New Paradigm' and 'The Scientist, the Monk and the Philosopher'. I will therefore not go into too much detail about this complex issue in this musing, and I would like to refer you to these previous blog posts as an introduction to this different view of consciousness and matter.

But in the coming musings I will gladly take you on a further journey of discovery through new ideas about consciousness, ideas that are being endorsed by more and more scientists. Almost all physicists who developed quantum physics in the 20th century were convinced of the proposition that consciousness is the basis of reality, and not matter.

And at the same time these ideas are ancient: in the Eastern world view it was postulated thousands of years ago that our individual consciousness is part of the one universal consciousness that underlies our observable universe. See the quotes from the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita at the beginning of this musing, texts from India from the second millennium BC that are among the oldest writings of humanity.

In the blog post 'The Scientist, the Monk and the Philosopher', I mentioned that quantum physicist David Bohm proposed renaming the vacuum of space the 'plenum', or the 'fullness'. We usually see space as something that is actually nothing, a void in which elementary particles and atoms whirl around like little 'balls'. But Bohm argued that we can turn this around and see the vacuum of space as the actual 'fullness', in which elementary particles are more like 'holes' than spheres. The vacuum of space is not empty at all, but full of energy and information.

I also think we can arrive at a similar reversal in relation to our consciousness; that we can start to see the silence in which our thoughts, emotions and perceptions arise as the true fullness, the true reality, within which the illusions of our thoughts and emotions come and go.

This perspective is what just about all Eastern wisdom traditions have been proposing for millennia, and in this they are increasingly being met with new perspectives in science.

In the coming months, I will share a number of interviews in the Musings section with scientists who advocate a thorough paradigm shift in our thinking about consciousness and what we call 'reality'. Quantum physicists, neuroscientists, biologists, mathematicians, doctors, neuropsychiatrists, systems thinkers, philosophers and pioneers of computer science, who all have one thing in common: they see consciousness as the basis of reality, as an 'ontological primitive', as it is called in philosophy. That does not mean that you are primitive, so do not feel offended. It does mean, however, that your consciousness is more fundamental than the body in which it currently resides. And that is good news.

And what does all of that have to do with ecology, you might wonder. What good does it do us to muse about this while the world around us seems to be on the verge of collapse, while horrific wars rage, while the entire ecosystem of our biosphere, our Earth, seems out of balance, while the climate seems to be derailing and while countless species disappear from our planet every day?

Well, in my opinion it has everything to do with it, and that is also why the caption under the logo of A Biosphere Project reads: “Consciousness and the Living Planet”.

Because what we do and don't do on our planet has everything to do with what we believe about the world and about ourselves. The sum total of everything we believe can be called a world view or a paradigm, and a paradigm works a bit like an operating system: it gives direction ánd limits to what we allow ourselves to believe or not to believe, and what we do or don't do. And as Donella Meadows, one of the authors of the groundbreaking 1972 work 'Limits to Growth', put it, that is the level at which we perhaps need to intervene above all. In her words:

“The ancient Egyptians built pyramids because they believed in life after death. We build skyscrapers because we believe that space in the center of cities is enormously valuable. (Except for the vacant lots, often near the skyscrapers, which we believe are worthless). Whether it was Copernicus and Kepler who demonstrated that the earth is not the center of the universe, or Einstein who hypothesized that matter and energy are interchangeable, or Adam Smith who postulated that the selfish actions of individual players in markets miraculously accumulate to the common good, people who have succeeded in intervening in systems at the level of paradigms have achieved a leverage effect that totally transforms systems.

You could say that paradigms are more difficult to change than anything else in a system, and therefore this point should be lowest on the list, not second highest. But there is nothing physical or lasting or even slow about the process of paradigm change. It can happen in a millisecond for a single individual. All that is needed is a click in the mind, the scales falling from the eyes, a new way of looking at things."

Donella Meadows saw as early as the early seventies, at the time of the Club of Rome report, that our current trajectory (which is hurtling like an fast train towards self-destruction) is a logical consequence of everything we believe about ourselves and about the world. And she drew the correct conclusion in my opinion: that we must change our way of thinking and completely reboot what we believe about the world and about ourselves. But to do that, we first need to become consciously aware of what it is we believe, because like water for a fish, our worldview is often invisible to us because it functions in the background as our 'road map', our plan, our certainty that we never question and that passes for 'common sense'. Donella Meadows also saw that a paradigm shift that changes personal experience or even the world can take place in a single moment, like a “click in the mind”. And that is exactly what many people have already experienced, with or without meditation. Like the aforementioned astronaut Edgar Mitchell, or Michael Singer, who I mentioned in this previous musing on silence, or some of the scientists I would like to bring to the stage in the coming months. A flash of insight and a perspective that changes forever in a single click. It seems like a small thing, a shift in perspective, but it can have incalculable consequences. That is also why many prominent scientists and physicists (David Bohm,  Hans-Peter Dürr , Amit Goswami, David Suzuki, Dean Radin, Ervin László, Vandana Shiva, and many others) were or are also very committed to ecology and activism. This became almost inevitable from the point of view they gradually adopted and from the shift in world view that resulted. Hence once again: a change of perspective and world view is not only relevant, it could well be a condition for real change.

Thát is what I want to contribute to with A Biosphere Project: a shift in the way we all look at reality and what we believe about that reality. And that is of course also in line with my work as a visual artist, something I also want to explore more deeply in the near future.

Hence the caption under the logo, and hence also the sentence on the website's homepage that A Biosphere Project will also be an exploration into consciousness. This will also be a common thread in the travel project and the book.

And if what the Indian Upanishads have been telling us since around 1500 BC is correct, namely that there is no substantial difference between our individual consciousness and universal consciousness, then the coming paradigm shift that is already being heralded in science promises to be one that will be mind boggling.

I would like to take you on a journey through the emerging landscape of new (and ancient) ideas that, if you really allow them, can profoundly change your view of yourself and the world.

First in line will be Fredericco Faggin.

Fredericco Faggin is an Italian physicist and inventor, and not one of the least: he developed the very first microprocessor and is therefore one of the ‘fathers’ of all contemporary computers and smartphones. He also invented the touchscreen and the trackpad, so you can largely thank Fredericco Faggin for the fact that you can read all this on your computer and smartphone. And as if that were not enough, he also developed the first neural nets, which form the basis of all contemporary A.I. processes, so he can also be called one of the the fathers of Artificial Intelligence. Something he is anything but enthusiastic about: he sees artificial intelligence as something rather limited, which will never develop consciousness because consciousness in Faggin's eyes - you guessed it - is not a result of material or computational processes.

To be continued, with two particularly fascinating interviews with this extraordinary Italian scientist, who is also a beautiful person with a warm heart.

To conclude, I would like to invite you to a short meditation, as I did at the end of the previous musing. For experienced meditators it will be child's play, but if you have never meditated before it may feel a bit uncomfortable at first. But don't make a big deal out of it: just explore it playfully.

I would like to ask you to briefly become aware of the chair you are sitting on; of your feet on the floor, of your bottom on the chair, of your head and of your entire body. Make sure you can sit comfortably and that there are no distractions.

Allow a moment of silence and observe what happens in your consciousness: are there thoughts, do you feel nervous, or are there other emotions present in your space?

Try to observe what arises without judgment. Do not try to suppress or change it.

Then try to shift your attention from what you are perceiving to the act of perceiving itself, the energy of the silence in which those thoughts and emotions emerge and disappear. It is a bit like shifting your attention from what is emerging in the beam of the flashlight to the light of the flashlight itself. Can you perceive the silence within which the thoughts emerge?

As I said, don't make a big deal out of it, just try to feel the energy within which the thoughts and emotions arise. It's also not a problem if you don't succeed. Maybe you'll just catch a glimpse of something, and that may be enough for now.

If you have never meditated before, I would like to refer you to the third musing in this series on silence, in which I explain how beneficial meditation has been for me since I started meditating daily in 2010. And why I wholeheartedly recommend that you also start meditating if you are not already doing so.

This was the last musing on silence for the time being, but who knows, I may return to it again, because silence seems to be a subject that, like inner space ánd interstellar space, seems to have no end. Silence as the ground in which everything can arise, both within us and outside us, with that image I will say goodbye for now.

Thank you for reading, and until the next installment,

All the best to you,

Filip

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