An Obscure Desire:

Reflections on Basarab Nicolescu’s‍ ‍“From Modernity to Cosmodernity: Science, Culture and Spirituality”

my attempt at drawing Horse in Motion

Humans are torn between an obscure desire for cosmic unity, a belief they are made in the image of a unique God, and a more or less firm belief in their absolute realization that they are individual units.

Maybe when I don’t dream I can’t write because dreaming and writing are wholly entangled processes for me, like spirituality and political action.

Or maybe I have been, and still am, immersed in a text that I cannot comprehend in its own first language:

Galileo elevated mathematics – an artificial language different from natural languages – to the rank of a common language between God and humanity.

This leaves me both helpless and suspicious when I encounter theologians and psychologists who try to translate quantum events into psychological processes, because I can’t speak God’s special language at all, not at all. I am innumerate and always have been. I’ll never know if they are using metaphors from other dimensions accurately, or if those metaphors even translate into the thin sliver of reality that our brains and sense organs are designed to perceive.

Too much poetry offers its own dangers.

Yet, ever since I read A Wrinkle in Time over and over each year from second grade on, since sitting wide-eyes in front of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, devouring his books and dressing as him in a burgundy wool turtleneck and a corduroy blazer for Hero Day in middle school, since attempting to build a tesseract with my friend Jen out of stolen lunch straws from Taco Bell in the Student Government Office in high school – I have always wanted to understand anything I could about  microcosms and the macrocosms.

a cross stitch of a cubed cube

About quantum particles that are also wavy processes, maybe even vibrating wrapped strings, all the invisible dimensions wrapped around our three, the vast internal-external externalities.

I have tried to comprehend all I can about vacuums and quantum fluctuations, and the beginning of time and the time before that. I dove into all the kind, popular and generous physics and cosmology communicators who try to explain such things to those of us who cannot hear easily or at all, but who want to know.

I dove in again deeper after my then seven-year-old son, more Charles-Wallace-like than I deserved or could keep up with, came out of his room after piano practice and said: 

“I know what the fourth dimension is:  It’s music! The first dimension is a note, the second dimension is an interval, the third is a chord and the fourth dimension is MUSIC.”

That I could understand, and the music of the spheres and Hildegard’s singing stars, and quantum vibration even more sacred.

So here, in this text – Nicolescu is not using physics to make a spiritual point, he is using spiritual and psychological metaphors to help people like me feel into a small whiff of concepts that I could otherwise never grasp.

And I’ve had a strange experience reading it. A paragraph I cannot understand at all, followed by some history of physics where I recognized the names of the various heroes and the popular nicknames of their theories. Followed by more paragraphs I do not understand and then…

A discussion of eternity, of non-duality, of inseverable entanglement and complexity, the illusion of continuity, the delusion that the local causality we can perceive is the only kind of causality.

I breathe in deeply in the presence of such truths.

Duality is a function of only a single layer of reality.

A contemplation on Being and Non-Being and Included Thirds: Oh! I realize this is Richard Rohr’s Holy Spirit, the Included Third, the point which is neither this nor that, neither Created or Creator, neither Self nor Other. It is the something in-between, a transcendent function, the wave of a particle, a mixed-up midpoint that is simultaneously neither and both, which pries open all systems trapped in dualities into continuums and links all opposites and contradictions to each other.

The panentheism, or panatheism of unifying theories – whichever you prefer

Everything is in everything.

I am because you are, and you are because I am. We are inseparable whether we like it or not. We breathe the same air. We are diverse and entangled.

A particle is what it is because all other particles exist at the same time.

We are open systems, dependent upon and continually interacting with other systems.

The opening of the system through its interaction with other systems is what prevents its degeneration, its death by the inevitable degradation of energy, by the growing disorder.

 This way, systems of systems can be put together in order to build up the full diversity of the world in a perpetual universal exchange of energy, in a vast and ceaseless nonseparability. A real rescue for the lives of systems.

And therefore:

Totalitarian societies with their homogenizing tendency are built on a belief in absolute actualization, on the willingness to transform the contradictions into opposites. These societies do not know they are doomed to death from the very beginning.

What we earthlings imagine is reasonable and natural does not apply to Nature in all its dimensions, or on the micro or macro levels. We must make respectful space for the unreasonable, the irrational and non-rational, the impossible and incomprehensible and respect their reality and power in the universe.

As above, so below – there is a unity that exists between the quantum scale and cosmological scale that just seems to skip our thin layer of material reality.

What is, is always hidden.

From us, at least.  

The universe, the cosmos, does not unfold according to earthly notions of fact and causation. You are not the center of the universe. There is a real that exists beyond anything that any of us can ever comprehend. We can contemplate vast diversity of truths even when they seemingly contradict each other. There is a place beyond either/or.

And then, finally, after a delay between potentialization and actualization, after a period of steeping myself in what is impossible fore me, and a bout of writer’s block and a period of dreamless sleep, I dream about what I know and cannot know.

I am touring a public building, maybe a history or science museum. The tour guide leads us into a small auditorium with carpeted risers to sit on. This guide is a keeper of secret, privileged information, but also a science communicator who is trying to educate the public about quantum theory and its relationship to 3D +Time that we perceive.

She calls our attention to a scrim on the far side of the room, floor light shine on up onto it when she speaks. The scrim is opaque and then very slowly from left to right, famous early images of a running horse, a series of sequential still shots called The Horse in Motion by Eadweard Muybridge appear on the screen. They scroll more quickly until the still images are flashing fast enough that the horse appears to be running across the bottom of the scrim.

my drawing of the horses running across the bottom of a screen with lights below

The tour guide asks if we know what might be projecting it.

“A carousel! A calliope!” I call out – but I know that this isn’t quite right

“It’s similar to a carousel…” she says, and the lights of the scrim switch off, and lights go on behind the scrim revealing a massive wooden mechanism, spinning slowly, creaking like the inside of a tower clock or giant mill works. It is so large that the scrim reveals only a small portion of the whole – it feels as though the space behind the scrim and the giant contraption extends both infinitely below and above and left to right.

There is a low echoey sound of air and gears moving slowly through a vast deep, wide and high space. The size and scale and energy is both awesome and frightening. Gears, towers, pullies unfolding in all directions, rigged so precisely that it has been spinning and moving time forward since the beginning of time itself

I can’t understand or explain it all, but I can feel it a little bit, I can dream it.

Sometimes we need to stand on the tips of our toes, at the edge of what is known and knowable. We are sometimes required, by reality itself, to face what is incomprehensible. Or listen for the entangled waves in strings of being and not being, the sound of wheels turning within wheels, a few faint notes of cosmic music.