A Beautiful Yogic Bone

A new enlightened paradigm for the western mind to counter its scientific materialist conditioning: this is what I appreciate about Young’s ‘Reflexive Universe.’ The mind may hear the Tao that can be spoken is not the real Tao, but it still thinks it hears the ground when it falls on it.

(Speaking of which, is there a better said description of the unsaid than what Nisargadatta says:

In reality there is only the source, dark in itself, making everything shine. Unperceived, it causes perception. Unfelt, it causes feeling. Unthinkable, it causes thought. Non-being, it gives birth to being. It is the immovable background of motion. Once you are there you are at home everywhere.

Beautiful.)

Like I replied in a comment: i find something like this to be a beautiful yogic bone thrown to the western scientific mind that's always in the background barking incessantly about the material universe it thinks it knows in order to keep it somewhere in a corner chewing at it contentedly and quiet. While we listen to the light.

As for the seventh stage in that heroic journey of light, Consciousness: I thought Wilber’s ‘Atman Project’ would supply the key, but after further review, and although it may do so for the early psychological stages, it fails to truly understand the turn involved in what must be the crucial egoic fourth substage: disillusionment and suffering.

Wilber follows the western psychological belief in an integrated ego without questioning the possibility of integrating anything into an insane dream state. Rather, after the self, or consciousness, passes through the membership phase of its social conditioning, and the so-called ego becomes entrenched, something called suffering and disillusionment occurs. That is the critical turn for consciousness.

It has condensed out of the material aduality, only to identify itself with the body, then the mind, and then an image supplied by its conditioning: three prisons of the seventh stage. Now it begins to see and feel that’s something is entirely wrong. And I would posit that the seeking phase becomes the aftermath of that turn. And what it seeks, of course, is itself.

And it’s in the fifth substage, if it ever gets there in this lifetime, that the yogas of wisdom, love, and being, introduced to itself by itself, will begin to vaporize that egoic fog and its social conditioning, leading inevitably towards, after the subsequent awakening stages rid it of the remaining twin bondages of mind and body, the Light that it always has been.

Consciousness to Consciousness

Arthur M. Young built a helicopter and in so doing came to an understanding of process and evolution. That’s the short story. Science and the laws of nature become a longer one. Purpose: an even longer one. In the end, he came to an understanding with the number seven in creation mythologies. And then there was light.

Evolution is a purposive process, with a reflexive shape. The first half is a fall into material determinism. Then there is a turn. And the second half is the return to freedom. Rather than laws, there is this freedom. Rather than statistics, there is individuation. Rather than objects, there is action!

The seven stages are: Light, Nuclear, Atomic, Molecular, Vegetable, Animal, Dominion. That first stage, Light, is completely free. Since light travels naturally at the speed of light, it’s outside of space and time, and has no mass. Spirit needs no church; consciousness is its own god. Its power is Potential.

The second stage, Nuclear, loses one element of freedom, and things are Binding. There is substance; there is force. But there is also the fog of probability. Wave? Particle?

Next, Atomic, loses another element, and Identity is gained. There is center, order, property. Chemicals have moved in. Hydrogen. Oxygen. Iron. Oh my!

Then, in the midpoint, the Molecular has zero degrees of freedom; Combination has been attained. There appears to be determinism. Classical physics lived here. Not to mention DNA: the holy book of life appears in its final act.

A lengthy interlude:

“The seventh substage, DNA…requires cells for the completion of its function, and cells belong in the next higher kingdom. It will be found that all seventh substages require the next higher kingdom to function. For example, the flowering plants depend on insects for pollination.

…What would this mean to the dominion kingdom? Since it is already the highest kingdom for the solar universe, we are led by this and other evidence to expect yet higher stages - a super arc which deals in galactic evolution. In other words, the dominion kingdom requires something beyond itself, which may help to explain why all human cultures, with the possible exception of modern man, depend on a belief in higher orders of beings, gods.

This dependence of seventh substages on the next higher stage is one of the most difficult concepts to accept because it suggests that process, at the seventh substage at least, anticipates its own future.

But there’s a turn in the molecular, at the fourth substage, with functional compounds, the organic chemicals, important to life. And sex hormones. Separation has occurred. Freedom will return.

Then, in the Vegetable, there is Growth, Organization. Reproduction. Negative entropy! Flowers. A rose is a rose is a rose.

Next, in the Animal, there’s Mobility, action, satisfaction, seeming choice. The nervous system makes it appearance. Turn it up! Also, in addition to DNA, now there is the animal soul. The birds in planetary flight and the importance of the queen bees will attest to that.

And then appears the individual soul, Atman. On that stage of the Monad, the actor we call Human Being, there’s Dominion. And the road to Consciousness.

Finally, Atman is Brahman.

The Reflexive Atman

I wish to write some words concerning two books that I’m in the process of reading: ‘The Reflexive Universe” by Arthur M. Young and “The Atman Project’ by Ken Wilber.

Young’s book considers the manifested universe as a reflexive process of light manifesting into the material and then ascending back to light. It is a seven stage process, each stage incorporating seven stages.

Each stage itself is one of four states of freedom, each stage on the descent becoming less free, and each stage on the ascent becoming more free, the fourth (no freedom) stage, the molecular, containing the all-important turn.

Light is Consciousness. It is timeless and not of the manifested world. Therefore it is nondual. Our mind, though, sees a material universe. In that vein, and understanding that duality is an illusion created by the mind, the entire process still can be seen as one great metaphor for consciousness knowing itself.

Wilber’s book can be viewed as the process of consciousness waking in the human being. It too is reflexive, in that there is an outward arc and an inward arc. Wilber incorporates the insight of psychology with that of the wisdom traditions in tracing the human being from birth to self-realization.

Before I begin, I’d like to place some caveats here. Although Young’s book is brilliant, it is not transcendent, in that Young’s analysis of the seventh and final stage, that of the human being, or what he refers to as the monad, appears to me to be limited by his own limited realization.

This is where Wilber’s book comes in: as a substitute for Young’s seventh stage. But one caveat here as well. I’ve never been a big fan of Wilber; he appears too cerebral in instances. But this book is, to this point, although dense sometimes, and sometimes overly technical, eminently understandable, and possibly transformational, but definitely emblematic.