Two hundred plus years before Nietzsche, Isaac Newton, following up on the notion of Platonic Ideals, stated that there was no doubt that:
And Newton also conceived Space as being:
For Newton the Absolute existed "without regard to anything external"? Sounds to me like the Absolute has some Absolute Autonomy, doesn't it? It exists "in and from its own nature", "always similar and immovable". I guess that would make the Absolute fully individuated, eh? Of course Sir Isaac's Absolute was shot out of the sky by Einstein's theories of relativity. In the early part of the 20th Century we were alerted to the fact that Space and Time are not Absolutes after all; that they conform themselves in relation to the perspective of the observer. Depending upon the relative speed and position of the observer, spacetime curves, spacetime dilates, spacetime expands, spacetime collapses. Sorry Dear Isaac, there is no Absolute Space or Time as previously conceived by you and your kind.
Plato's twist on metaphysics was to apply the combined Pythogorean- Euclidean discoveries of geometrical forms and turn these into a new religion of ratios. For Plato there were certain languages that best conveyed these absolute Ideas, namely mathematics and geometry. Tarnas continues, at length this time:
Holy cow! Triangles and circles are numinous and transcendent entities! I guess we have been worshipping the wrong gods all along! Surely, it is quite obvious that Plato assumed the languages of geometry and mathematics to most closely embody and convey the Ideas of the Eternal. For Plato it was not about "projection" at all, but direct apprehension. And it is this direct apprehension of his that I take issue with. For as we noted above, the "direct apprehension" of Reality may not be possible at all. Consciousness is an interpretator and simulator of the directly apprehensible. Plato, and others of like disposition, assumed that they could directly "see", irrespective of translative filters. Again, this may not be at all possible. And the assumption that it is otherwise paints a quite graphic historical picture; where all manner of curves and edges in the temporal have to be chopped off and leveled so as to more closely embody and reveal the archetypal forms of the Pure. We are talking psyche and soul, body and home, kin and country, land and love. None of the above can match the significance that Plato and his followers have attributed to the Transcendentally Pure Forms that all here is just a shadow cast in the Light of. It is not a great leap of faith from being convinced of Plato's metaphysics and seeing the necessity of doing away with all shadows and less than "pure" forms in the hope of a New Jerusalem, a Zion, a Third Reich. American poet A. R. Ammons tells the story in a rich language in Tape for the Turn of the Year:
Plato did increasingly begin to see certain geometrical forms and numbers as undergirding the whole of Creation. Plato took these forms and numbers not to be his own "projections", but the "direct apprehension" of the transcendent-eternal Itself; just as my friend took his paranoid fears as a "direct apprehension", and not as his own "projection". In this way, then, Plato may have started to absolutize his relative interpretation, making of that relative state and condition of interpretion, a new religion of rationality; one which was based on his transcendent leap of faith which turned geometrical forms into absolute Ideas that always applied --- always --- eternally. Specifically, why would I say that Plato absolutized the realtive? Simply because so many cultures and nations have long lived, existed, and prospered without awareness of Plato's "absolutes". Sure, platonists and neoplatonists alike can say that these cultures were just unconscious of these absolutes that Plato uncovered; that they still function, albeit below the level of consciousness, much as archetypes do. But isn't this just another unverifiable rationalization that keeps the game going? To attribute these absolute truths as being in the unconscious, still functioning regardless of awareness or not, signifies what? That they are involuntary mechanisms of existence? That they do not need consciousness, as such, in order to exist? It would seem that this is exactly what Plato was saying. And that, furthermore, our reality here is not as "Real" as those involuntary archetypal functions which sustain our shadowy existence here on Earth. But how do we know this? Do we just become conscious of what we have not been conscious of so far? Meaning, those Pure Forms? Are those "numinous entities" all around us right now? An atmosphere awash in numbers and geometrical forms? Or is this all just another way to interpret the "raw data" of the world: that we can train oursleves to intepret the world according to Platonic metaphysics? Plato says these Forms are "there". We just have to learn to become conscious of them. Then we will see for oursleves. But can we just be conscious of that which has so far been unconscious? If it is and has been unconscious until now, then how does it suddenly become conscious? Tor Norretranders points out in The User Illusion that there "...is a very good rule of thumb that one should try to remember whenever one considers the notion of consciousness: Only the conscious is conscious." In order to be aware of something we must be conscious of it in that moment. And in order to be aware of this we may have to discard that. From a conscious awareness persepective, discarding information and possibilities is part of the gig, for a time at least. Thus, the very process of being conscious creates unconsciousness!! Which means that Full Consciousness is really a New Age Myth and Fantasy. For us to be conscious is for us to be unconscious. Twist it all you want, consciousness, that is --- it makes no difference. For the very process of being conscious creates being unconscious. To know this right now I have to forget that first. To be conscious I must limit. Pick a channel and stick with it. Norretranders continues:
Again, being conscious creates being unconscious. This is not only implied, it is also an experiential fact and truth of our very existence as self-aware Bodies. Choices to become conscious create the chosen, which implies the unconscious, or that which was unchosen. And what goes unchosen, that is, discarded, becomes and remains unconscious. It is not that the unconscious is not, it is just that the unconscious is for the conscious being an unconscious reality... a non-aware of now but still existing possibility. It is like the Internet, the World Wide Web. We go on-line and consciously access a certain web-site that we become conscious of. Our doing so does not render all the other web-sites --- those that also exist --- as obsolete. No, they are still there, still mutually penetrating each other on the matrix of the Net, still fully accessible. They still exist for us, and we can suddenly chose to become conscious of those sites in any moment. This is much the same in realtion to what we choose to become conscious of in our own personal process of dealing with Reality. When we choose to become conscious of one web-site we do not negate the other web-sites from existing as such, but we do omit them from "our own consciousness" at that exact moment. Again, the choice to be conscious creates and implies that which will have to remain unconscious for us to be conscious of this, that, or the other thing. We cannot be conscious of it all at any one moment in time... not in any dramatic detail or fullness, not in any justified sense at all. It is indeed a Myth that it is at all possible; just like Absolutes, simply another figment of our own imaginations and not so secret longings. In the sense of consciousness we are channel-flippers. We can consciously chose to go into greater detail on one channel, while skimming over others. When we hit a channel that we want to become more intimate with we are turning our conscious awareness onto that site (more or less). And when we hit a site that we do not want to become more intimate with, then we just gloss over it --- we do not bother to become more conscious of it in greater detail and intimacy. And once again, this does not negate that site, that reality, that realm of involvement. It is just that we have no interest there, no desire to be more conscious of that site or process. So, for us it will remain unconscious, as we turn our awareness to that which we do have a desire or a will to become more intimate with, thus more conscious of. So, contrary to new age belief and high hopes for consciousness raising --- the more conscious we become, in the particular sense, will also be the more unconscious we are in the general sense. It is simply unavoidable (at leats at this time in our present configuration). The very process of being conscious creates what we call the "unconscious". Zeroing in, consciously speaking, leaves much behind, unconsciously speaking. We just cannot seem to escape a certain monofocality that is both one of our greatest gifts and also one of the greatest challenges for us all to deal with. For instance, in order for me to be conscious right now of this writing process, I must, to a certain degree, discard other possibilities. And it is not so much that those other possibilities are less true, less authentuic, less real. It is merely a fact that to focus in on one area is to not-focus in on other areas, thereby rendering them for the moment as the unconscious ground of the conscious growth. Norretranders helps us out again:
In other words, consciousness is what is left over after all the extraneous has been tossed out, left behind, discarded. What is not important to us, in the moment, gets to be called "unconscious", and that unconscious is vast in comparison to what is actually conscious. It is now quite apparent where many of our disagreements and troubles in life stem from: we expect ourselves and others to be more conscious than we actually are! Hello folks! We are not all on the same channel at the same time. Maybe my "conscious" is your "unconscious"; while his "conscious is her "unconscious". I do know that what I am conscious of right now is not what you are conscious of. In this way, my "consciousness" is your "unconsciousness", and vice versa. We are, at present, not negating each other's "consciousness expereince", not in any way whatsoever; and we are also not having the same "consciousness experience" in any way whatsoever (Hwa Yen Buddhist "mutual penetration" once again). The important point is that my "consciousness" in no way devalue or denigrate your "consciousness", and vice versa. It is not a matter of authenticity so much as it is a matter and issue of what we have each discarded, left out, just so as to have a "consciousness experience". One doesn't need to know every magic trick in the book in order to be a magician. But it does pay to know a few tricks so as to capture the audience with the fancy of illusion. Magicians, in their own way, know all about the limitations of consciousness. In fact, magicians use those very limitations to their own 'magical' advantage: because those very limits on consciousness that we have been discussing are precisely what allow for the appearance of magic. Period. If we were all conscious of the illusions of the magician, then there would, rightly speaking, be no magic in our lives. But because of those "consciousness limitations" that we have, magic and illusions do capture our fascination. "How did that happen?" we ask. Well, it happened below the level of consciousness. The illusion, that is. The tricks of the magician are concealed in the blind spots of consciousness that we all have, simply by being conscious. Remember --- the very process of being consciousness creates unconsciousness, and it is that unconsciousness which the magician takes advantage of in not so magical ways. How? Well, first off, our attention must be captured. We become conscious, as we have seen, only within a certain range. To be conscious is to limit and confine what we are able to focus upon. Thus consciousness can be used by the magiciain to distract us. As we become conscious within a certain range, or sphere of activity or data, we are in effect dismissing other data that lies outside of our range, of our consciousness limits. This is exactly what the magician will use to his or her advantage: that when our attention is focused we can be fooled --- in the blind spots created by focusing consciousness. So, the magician captures our attention, keeps us trance-fixed on an object or objects, simply so that we do not see or notice what else is taking place apart from that object or those objects. Thus, the very ability of consciousness now serves as a distraction; as our conscious attention is directed to this here, we are unconscious of that there --- so we get slipped a mickey! We blot out the smoke and mirrors. The Mind can't capture the Body. The Hand is quicker than the I. Consciousness is deceptive; manufacturing illusions through its ability to be conscious.
Whole bodily we are able to receive approximately 11,000,000 bits per second of sensorial influx, or information (according to Norretranders numbers). Yet, we are only able to make "conscious" sense of anywhere from 16 to 45 bits of information per second (depending on the studies one refers to). Whether it is 16 or 45 --- or even 100 bits per second --- it is still an astronomical fall from 11,000,000 bits of information to what the little conscious simulator renders. According to the scientific data that these results are taken from, it appears by all intents and purposes that we owe well over 99% of our existence to unconscious factors and forces (this is in no way meant to imply that the remaining 1%, or whatever it turns out to be, is meaningless. In fact, that 1% could be the whole rudder of a quite large and magnificent sailing vessel!). It is quite obvious that from the way we process and digest food, to the way that nutrients are taken up in the body --- even to the way that we are unconsciously programmed to be able to rise and walk, run and play, laugh and cry, sweat and sing --- that we do indeed owe most, if not nearly all of our shared existence to the less than conscious processes that intelligently sustain us from moment to moment. Over 99% unconscious folks! Amazing, isn't it? So, who's really been fooling who all these years!?!
So we can't! We can't be conscious of it all...all the time! And besides that, we may end up getting involved in domains that are best left to function autonomously and involuntarily. For we have seen what a mess we can make of things wehen we "think" we know exactly what we are doing! Thus, bringing all of life to conscious awareness and control is not at all possible, nor even beneficial for that matter. And it is such an insight as this that will start to bear more and more relevance over time as space expands into it's own supreme vastness. Being conscious is also being partially blinded. It's just the way it is. A conscious self and some self-deception appear to go hand in hand. Norretranders points this out when he states that "The trick consciousness pulls is to combine two widely different approaches to the world: One approach concerns the stimuli we sense from the outside world; the other concerns the image we have in order to explain these experiences. We do not experience [just] the raw sensory data but a simulation of them. The simulation of our sensory experience is a hypothesis about reality. This simulation is what we experience." We propose, form conjectures, speculate, create our own meaning out of events. And none of this necessarily has to be "true". In fact, and up to a certain point, we "create" our own "truths", our own stories about Reality. There is what is given, and then there is our meaninful response to that. Our specific take on it all. What it means to us. How we respond to it. View. Path. Fruit. We have a View. We take up a Path based upon that View, that Basis for Action. And then there is a specific Fruit that is the Realization of the View turned to Path, become Action. Some of this may seem to run counter to what we have each come to believe to be so, based on our own experiences, along with our cultural conditioning. There is a lot here for us to digest, and sometimes it is best to not do so consciously, but to just trust that there are involuntary processes that digest everything just fine if we don't tax the system too much. Processes are involuntary and unconscious fro a reason. It is not necessarily a conspiracy. And, furthermore, attempting to render certain unconscious processes conscious, may, ultimately speaking, do more harm than good. There are limits to what is 'conscious'. These limits exist for a reason. My proposition is that we can trust these limits; that they are wise limits; limits that are worthy of our trust.
There are verifiable nonconscious processes that sustain our embodied-beingness. It is a fact. A truth, if you will. The same goes for our conscious awareness of most all phenomena that do occur; we can feel and reflect on what has already happened --- on what has already been dreamed, for instance --- but we cannot consciously control, in toto, all of the phenomenal occurrences and occassions of our lives. We can consciously affect only to a certain extent; that is, without losing the support of the unconscious substrate that makes for all of our experience to begin with. Ken Wilber points this out in Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, when he writes that one of the tenets all holons exhibit (holons being whole/parts, i.e., a whole individual which is part of the larger universe, or a whole brain which is part of a larger being) is that "the lower [holon] sets the possibilities of the higher [holon]; [while] the higher [holon] sets the probabilities of the lower [holon]". In essence, this tenet points out that we cannot violate the laws of the lower holons that are a part of us without some consequences (this is surely quite apparent to us all by know, what with the environmental degradations and addictions prevalent among us Being-humans). The lower holons --- those that make up our Body, for instance --- set up our possibilities as self-aware Bodies; while the higher holons, such as our capacity for reasoning and reflection set the probabilities of how we will relate and respond to the Body as a holon. For instance, as a "self" we can choose to probabalize a potential for a diseased Body by relating to the Body in a toxic way, thereby, actually creating a diseased Body (which is, of course, what is done in many cases). On the other hand, we can probabalize a potential for a healthy and vital Body by relating to the Body in a beneficial manner, thereby, creating a healthy and responsive Body in the actual sense. This can all be summed up thusly: Whereas the Body sets possibilities, structurally speaking, the Mind sets probabilities of relating to that structure of possibilities --- as how we relate.
Only now we are beginning to "feel" ourselves rise up towards the returning light of spring, and we do so in renewed appreciation for the self-aware wonders that the Body has wrought from the Ground of the Not-so-self-conscious. The turning of certain philosophical and interpretive abstractions into so-called "Absolutes" may turn out to be one of the greatest magical acts of all time. The illusion has been and still is quite good. So good, in fact, that it is taken on the appearance of now being a Transcendent-Eternal Absolute. Now that's some powerful magic for ya! To take an interpretation, an abstract one at that, and turn that interpretation into a Transcendent-Eternal Absolute --- one that by definition applies to all --- is high magic indeed! "How did they do that!" gasps the stunned audience. Indeed, how? Part of the answer lies in the audience themselves; in our own perceptual and cognitive blind-spots. If we were not so easily deceived then the magic act would have no foothold. But because we are so susceptible to blinspots and interpretive glossing, then we are also susceptible to buying the "illusions" as being a demonstartion of "real magic". I would like to propose that we are magically inclined precisely because we are able to be conscious of so little at any one moment in time. The supreme irony of being conscious is that it leaves so much "outside" of itself: Each conscious point in space/time --- or let's say, the consciousness continuum --- is left behind for every other conscious point. What we knew but a moment ago we are blind to now, and what we will come to know a moment from now will make us blind to what we are conscious of now. It comes and it goes. Our conscious focus --- or ability --- is confined, to a degree, by the possibilities set by the Body --- where our conscious probabilities are enacted. The limits of the Body tell us that I cannot be conscious in you and you cannot be conscious in me. And we can hardly be conscious of our own Body and all that takes place in it --- as we have seen. So, it is these very limits of consciousness that account for the presence of illusion in our lives. Again, the very limits of what we can be conscious of are also those very edges where the proliferation of illusions begin to commence as well. Without limits on what we can be conscious of there would be no illusions. Yet, precisely because of the limits of what the audience can be conscious of at any one moment in time, the magician is able to deceive the consciousness of the perceivers, i.e., the audience. This tells us a lot about life in general: A lot about our relationships and the difficulties we experience in intersubjective relational exchange. For one, we are not all "conscious" of the same interpretation. Even what we consider to be our own consciousness varies from moment to moment. Different circumstances reveal different interpretations, which means a different conscious glaze on reality, which means a different sort of "conscious self". There appears to be some continuity of consciousness for us, but this continuity of consciousness is due to the movement and the flow of consciousness revealing itself like a River, and not because of any sort of stasis of consciousness itself. While the edges of the River appear to make the River stable, we know that the River could suddenly rise and overrun its banks. Thus, the River is fluid and dynamic, like consciousness revealing itself. In this fluid manner, consciousness creates grooves and patterns; like the eddies and the high watermarks that we note in the River. These patterns may remain stable for a time. They recur. The flowing River reinforces them for a time. That is, until the River rises or falls, overruns its banks or dries up for a time. Much the same for consciousness. Patterns recur. Then, all of a sudden the environement changes, the River runs faster, leaner, and those patterns dissipate, dissolve, alter, recur, reform, whatever. When we are in a distinct environment, our consciousness is flavored with that environment; we are a different type of consciousness in prison than we are out on the lake while fishing. We cannot help but be different in what we are conscious of, because the environment we are immersed in has undergone a change, or a shift. So, we are required to call on, or be conscious of difference in relation to environment, specifically. Example: Water is water. Yet, water as a consciousness experience for a thristy man in a desert is quite different than it is for a man who has just been spared from drowning in the Ocean. The very same element or item becomes a distinctly different consciousness experience for the subject, depending upon the context in which it is presented to that subject. It is in this way, that the net-works: we can be consciously aware, in descriptive fashion, of only a limited, specific area or domain (usually tied to our embodied reality). We certainly cannot encompass it all, except in the most abstract sense. And as we have already sufficiently noted, abstraction moves contrary to specification, which is what the conscious experience, in essence, really is: Being specifically aware of one thing over and against all others; discarding the inconsequential information so as to focus on what is being considered primary at that moment in time. If we take this back to our example of the men of water --- the thirsty man in the desert and the man who almost drowned in the Ocean --- we can easily comprehend how the conscious experience is specification, is the discarding of non-essential information. The man in the desert has a specific thirst, all but the most essential has been eliminated from his conscious awareness; namely, some water, that is what remains. Meanwhile, the man who almost drowned has just experienced an acute overabundance of water, all but the most essential was eliminated from his conscious experience; namely, how to get out of the water.
Tor Norretranders once again:
Then where do the "enormous quantities of information [that] are discarded" go? Well, where else but to the unconscious, the nonconscious. All that we dismiss and deny, that has been discarded and negated as part of the consciousness experience does not just vanish. The rest of the Network does not just disappear because we determined that it was not relevant to us specifically! It is all still present and persistently active. And we can still choose to turn the little light of our conscious awareness in the direction of the formerly dismissed --- the nonconscious --- if we deem it to be relevant at some later date. Thus, the limit of consciousness is not necessarily a limit on Reality. In other words, the limits on the consciousness experience do not negate and dismiss other interpretations, other ways of seeing; do not limit Reality and alternatives in any way whatsoever. Only the subject experiences the consciousness limit, and only for a moment; for that limit can shift just as easily as what was previously discarded and rendered nonconscious becomes retained as significant and quite conscious. I am almost certain that we have clearly illumined some of the potential concerns surronding proposed "Absolutes" and the like. We have seen how the Newtonain and Platonic Absolutes have been susceptible to historical revision; thereby rendering them not so much as being Absolutes, but as context bound relativities --- or, in the Platonic sense, a potentially "absolutized interpretation". We have seen how cultural influences color our interpretations, and how environmental conditions color our perceptions. We have had illumined the profoundly embodied reality of reason, and the unconscious interpretive glazing that "just is". Couple this with the "art of awareness", along with the Zen of perception", and we are set for a new period of expressive realizations. This integrative age of expressive realizations is not so much concerned with the absolute, as it is with the relative application of awareness, knowledge, and embodied action in contextual circumstances. In other words, the age of the Absolutely Singular Answer is behind us. And now, when we are asked questions by Life, we can answer, "It depends. It depends on what the extenuating circumstances are. It depends on whether or not I almost drowned, or if I am dying of thirst. It simply depends. It depends on the circumstances," i.e., the embodied immanent reality, the context, the here and now matters. No pat, absolute answer really does any of us justice. It simply depends.
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