Our Lives are the Metaphor

Hello, dear friend 🌷

Here we are in the month of Mars ❤️‍🔥 nearing the end of the first quarter of this Year of Action.

Perhaps it’s a good moment to take a beat, aaand deep breath in – – – – – hold – – – – – and out – – – – – 🌬️

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From the Piscean depths, whence our beloved anglerfish arose, I come bearing gifts.

I’ve been indulging in contemplations on consciousness like a kid with unrestricted access to the cookie jar. When I began writing this newsletter, sparkly ideas & connecting-dots lured me in with their simplicity.

But trickster intuition had other plans.

Humbled once again by the act of trying to squeeze beautiful, iridescent, fractals of understanding into the two-sizes-too-small pair of jeans of verbal language.

So without further ado, and with as much succinctness as this run-on sentence-lover can muster, here is why you should care about the nature of consciousness; and how integrating our understanding of it is critical to our resistance against fascism & our return from exile back to earth.

Out beyond right-doings & wrong-doings, there is a field… of consciousness, and we’re it

I recently listened to this hour-long interview with Federico Faggin, physicist, inventor, & engineer.

While on a family vacation at Lake Tahoe many years ago, awake in the middle of a winter’s night, he had an inexplicable and sudden experience of unconditional love. In this moment, light poured out from his heart and he felt distinctly connected to a great knowing beyond his own.

In his subsequent quest to understand what this was, he abandoned his materialist view of the universe to explore the quantum field. In so doing, he developed a new understanding of the nature of consciousness. It is this theory he presents throughout the interview.

The main concepts he puts forth absolutely delight me.

Much like how a single qubit represents all possibilities, I see clearly how his theory is reflected in more than a few ancient understandings of existence—as well as my own experiences with music, mysticism, & magic.

The four key points from this interview that feel most compelling for this newsletter are:

1. Consciousness is not something that emerges from our brains or nervous systems, but is a quantum field that we observe, that observes us, & that is us.
2. Free will is expressed as a desire to know something beyond ourselves.
3. Out of a desire to know itself, Consciousness causes waveforms to emerge as “separate” entities to study.
4. These waveforms collapse back into the field once they have been observed.

Imagining for the moment that this theory is close enough to the Truth, “how many countless waveforms have we created & abandoned?” and “how can we facilitate their collapse?” are the questions that occupy the rest of my inquiry below.

Retrieving the goddess through selfless witnessing*

Demon kings are terrorizing all of creation and the gods are useless to stop them. In desperation, they’ve come to the goddess Durga seeking her help. From Durga’s brow, Kali emerges.

Using her appetite for destruction, Kali sweeps across the world killing the demon kings. But now, herself lost to her own appetite, she begins devouring everything else as well. The gods feel sick with dread and send her husband Shiva to soothe her.

Shiva cries out to her in fear, pleading with her to stop. No response.

He dances around her to try and change her mood. No response.

At last, in a final attempt to save the world, Shiva succumbs to his unknowing.

He lays down on the ground just in front of Kali, belly to the sky, so that she has no choice but to tread on him. It’s in this moment, stepping on her beloved, that Kali sees his face beholding her in all her beauty & terror, sacrificing his own existence for the sake of witnessing her completely. She snaps out of it and her appetite for destruction abates.

The waveform collapses.

Desire & doubt: two ways to seek to know the self

In a Cartesian sense, we could say that Consciousness’ desire to know itself might be expressed as a kind of self-doubt. What Descartes was trying to say with this oft decontextualized quote, was that doubting one’s existence is proof that the one doubting must exist.

This is the same spirit-logic that suggests our desires reveal to us what we already have (or had), for how else could we know the feeling of its having?

We doubt we know ourselves. So a knowing-doubter must exist.

We desire to know ourselves. So a having-desirer must exist.

In one case, the experience likely feels fraught & desperate. In the other, the experience likely feels compelling & delightful.

Like desire, doubt creates a waveform, and that waveform collapses once, and only once, it has been observed. The trouble is, doubt tends to send us into feedback loops confirming our not-rightness, abandoned waveforms multiplying without observation.

If I feel lonely, that feeling may spur a story of rejection, which could in turn, cause me to reject others in order to feel in control of that rejection and my sense of loneliness. More on this in a moment.

Retrieving the goddess through compassionate witnessing**

Inanna, goddess of Heaven & Earth, descends into the Underworld to attend the funeral of her sister’s husband. Her sister, Ereshkigal, goddess of the Underworld, is suffering terribly. One might say, like Kali, she has lost herself.

Upon Inanna’s arrival, Ereshkigal kills her for the crime of not honoring a power greater than her own (i.e. Death). She then hangs her corpse up on a hook.

In an effort to save Inanna, Enki, god of Wisdom, sends two humble & empathetic servants, down to Ereshkigal. When they arrive, she is crying out in pain. They begin to mirror her cries.

“Oh my eyes!”
“Oh your eyes!”
“Oh my sides!”
“Oh your sides!”

…and so on and so forth until they have reflected back to her, their compassionate witnessing of all her pains. She returns to herself.

The waveform collapses.

In a gesture of gratitude, Ereshkigal offers them any gift. They request the body of Inanna, and with a drop of the elixir of life, they return her back to the world of the living.

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Bearing witness to an energetic vibration creates the conditions for its collapse. In the materialist world, this is a very real phenomenon of the physics of sound. It is exactly how your noise-cancelling headphones work.

The act of observing changes the very nature of the thing observed.

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Modern-day polarization & abandoned waveforms

So what can these Hindu & Sumerian myths reveal to us of our current-day plight? What can this proposed theory of consciousness provide us when it comes to beating back fascism & building a society re-attuned to the earth?

I want to return to the idea that doubt causes waveforms to emerge.

Imagine living your life so fully entrenched in self-doubt, that you define yourself almost entirely by what you are not. Rather than embracing an unknowing that would allow for growth & connection, you cling to any certitude, even if that certitude further isolates you & disconnects you from source. Imagine how you might begin to hate anything that you are not because it unconsciously reminds you of how isolated & out of touch you really are. Imagine how what-you-are-not is now felt as a threat to who (you think) you are.

This is seriously spiritual stuff here. Without the grace of faith — and I mean real faith; a faith that demands your unknowning, and doesn’t guarantee you access into any kind of afterlife — without that kind of faith, the intensity of our life force is unbearable.

Our material bodies literally cannot weather the constant onslaught of information that exists in the quantum’s Possible.

I cannot, and will not attempt to empathize with the sociopaths who lead the charge of our disconnection and destruction. But I refuse to cast out those who follow them, compelled by their own existential loneliness. We share the same loneliness.

There is a vast spectrum of dissonance here and each of us is at the frontline.

I’ll ask again:

How many countless waveforms have we created & abandoned?
How can we facilitate their collapse?

To begin to answer the first, where is there too much self-doubt (often masquerading as cocksure contempt for the other side!)? Where is there not enough faith in letting things be unknown (so they can be truly observed)? Which waveforms do we actively resist witnessing within ourselves? Within others?

To begin to answer the second, start where you are. Throw your body underfoot, and fully, honestly bear witness to the energies moving through the world.

Can you imagine? What if our waveforms were a resonant dance of desires instead of a maelstrom of clashing doubts? This is the world I know exists because it’s the world I desire.

Our lives are the metaphor

Let me back up for a moment.

Please, and of course, do this for yourself first. And be kind.

Witness your life. Integrate your experience. Engage in the art of forgetting so that you can collapse back into the collective consciousness and be reborn. To truly [un]know ourselves, we must attend a thousand of our own funerals over the course of our lifetime.

Once at home within our body, we develop compassion for our process. The natural consequence of this practice is to offer it to others because we hear within them, our own selves.

To flip Ram Dass’ quote around, only that in me which is you can hear what you’re saying.

And we’re all of it, baby.

Make art. Give it away.
Make love. Let it go.
Digest the ego. Empty the emotional body.

The less you are or I am, the more we are.

How’s that for some Piscean punctuation on the season?

From abstraction to action, I believe in us.

Collapsing waveforms & dancing myself clean…

with love,
heather 💜