Wednesday 20 August 2008

Pic of the day: The human mind can travel to worlds where our body cannot reach. Some of them we create, some of them we discover.

Higher & lower worlds

Arguably the most important thing I have learned over the last couple years is the existence of higher and lower worlds. I mean of course worlds accessible to the human mind, not the body. The entire physical universe where we live along with our furry friends, is really just one of many levels; but the rest are only reached by the mind. This is obviously true, and I shall prove it in a few sentences. But even though we all take this for granted, we don't consciously think about it. It is only thanks to the conservative blog One Cosmos that I came upon this way of thinking. And even then, I made my own metaphors for it.

Lower worlds are the worlds we create; higher worlds are the worlds that create us. Lower worlds are malleable but short-lived; higher worlds are unyielding but durable.

You already know of these from experience, if you are a normal human. The best example of a lower world is the daydream. I believe this is the lowest level easily reached by the healthy human mind. In it, you can change pretty much any aspect of the world to your liking, but most likely it is forgotten the next day. This is obviously a world you create. So let us go another extreme, mathematics. Even though the laws of mathematics have been figured out by human minds, we cannot possibly have created them. Pi had its value before the first spherical body took form in the early cosmos, and will surely be the same when the last atom dissolves. The abstract realm of maths cannot be touched, and you can never go there with your body to wander among the constants and stumble over a square root. Even so, it is obviously real - in fact, it must be more real than the physical world, since it was necessary for the formation of this world that we know.

As an aid for the mind, I present to you the concept of "grainy reality". If there are different levels of reality, and some are more real than others, we can visualize them as grains or particles. Each such grain has the same content of reality or "realness", but their size varies with the height. Higher worlds have small grains, which pack a lot of reality into a small space, making them extremely hard, solid and durable. On the other hand, lower worlds have big grains. Because they have little realness in each grain, they are soft and malleable but also prone to collapse, like loose sand, while the higher worlds are more like flint. Obviously this is just a metaphor, but it helps us put into words and pictures these things that cannot be seen except in the mind's eye.

***

Many people are materialists and proud of it, but they are still intimately familiar with daydreams on one hand and maths or physics on the other. In a sense they are hypocrites, not living according to their philosophy. If matter is all there is, then there are no laws governing nature, for laws are not made of atoms. If you gain access to the original manuscript of the Constitution and you study the fibers of its paper and the chemical properties of its ink, you come no closer to understanding its meaning. Likewise with nature, even the most intense study of nature will not yield any meaning unless you accept that there IS a meaning. Nature does not make sense to nature, only to humans, and then only to our minds. This sense or understanding can be conveyed in various means from one human body to another, so it does clearly not depend on the specific atoms in that particular brain. Of course, destroying the human brain will destroy that particular instance of the understanding, just like burning a copy of the Constitution will destroy that particular instance of it, but not the value of it, which resides in a higher domain.

Just as there are higher realities from which flow the arrangement of matter, there are higher realities from which flow the arrangement of thoughts and feelings. Religions are not exactly these higher realities, but can be likened to access ramps that lets humans approach higher realities with our minds. As such, religions must necessarily begin right down here where we live, thus the many mundane regulations that are found in every religion but often in varying forms. This lower part of the access ramp will vary from culture to culture, of course, but it absolutely necessary to maintain because the ordinary mortal cannot just jump up to the higher level and partake in the more durable truths. On the contrary, even with a gentle learning curve, it is very hard to progress upward, while it is embarrassingly easy to dig downward into the worlds of fantasy. My regular readers will know that I speak from experience here...

I believe it is not by accident that the pyramid (or before that, step pyramid) is one of the oldest and most universal religious symbols. It reflects the general organization of the mind universe: Each higher world is reflected into potentially many lower worlds. To take an example, my sims live in a lower world that is a fairly straightforward reflection of our own, but much simpler. Even though it is much simpler, it is unlimited. There are tens of thousands of players, each creating their own small worlds. Even if all humans on Earth played Sims 2, each of their countless worlds would be unique and yet a reflection of the same single higher world. This is a very straight- forward projection of a higher world into a lower; usually it is not so simple. But the fact remains that for each higher step, there is a broader potential lower step. If you follow each step upward, they seem to become smaller, but this is because they are more compact. As I mentioned, reality becomes denser, harder, more fine-grained, unyielding and permanent as you move upward.

Just as an American and a Russian studying cosmology will arrive at the same mathematical formula, so a Christian and a Hindu or Taoist will also arrive at gradually more convergent observations as they practice their religion. This is not to say that all religions are equal, merely that one effect of all the religions of the Great Civilizations is that the practitioner becomes able to share the experiences of certain higher worlds, intermediate worlds between the animal life and the Absolute.

When it comes to further details about these things, they have no room in an entry such as this, but I will reserve them for white entries, if at all. I may even prefer to write about these things elsewhere, where there is an interest in such things. For now, I am content to prove to the casual reader that the world of the mind is indeed vertically layered. The world of the body, in which our furry friends probably live their entire lives, is not like that. And until some 65 000 years ago, even humans were not free to travel vertically, by all accounts, though there seems to have been some early explorers. What we now do with this freedom varies. But to understand this basic framework is necessary to understand how I see my life, and the way I will report on it from here on.