OP-ED BY HASSAN ZAMAN
Shores of Space-Time
Transitioning into this current millennia with information at our fingertips, it’s the interplay between any and all ideas which will foster the vanguard. Perhaps, the most essential quality of the Information Age is its interdisciplinary nature. In considering an interplay between scientific advancements and wisdom traditions, for instance, artistic expression in modernity can be deeply affected, both paralleling, and indicative of, humanity's spiritual evolution (Doctor Eamonn Healy gives an evocative soliloquy on the telescoping nature of this evolution in Richard Linklater’s 2001 film, Waking Life).
In this new age, innovations in traditional perspectives on the mechanics of reality brings concepts like space and time under re-inspection. The perceptivity by which human beings navigate reality has been largely informed by an Issac Newtonian mode of thinking, grounding our understandings of physical sciences (key word: physical) during the Scientific Revolution around the 14th Century. The world has been unequivocally tumultuous since, with its ample compounding of warfare and social growing pains throughout the 20th Century. This transition into our burgeoning age of information—emboldened by its evolutionary strides in technology, research and rhetoric—is an opportunity to transparently apply what we’ve learned through the guises and polarities of his-story. The implications of deepening and broadening purviews on the faculties of reality (featuring the integration of ideas in quantum science, and the Western popularization of Eastern wisdom traditions like yoga or Buddhism) prove markedly revelatory, with the inherent potential to considerably mitigate the constrictions of a strictly Newtonian worldview.
Leading with Examples
Big-R Reality is a notion submitted by 19th Century philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegelian Reality is sentience as it is experienced by an individual, subjective point-of-view. With the individual’s Reality in consideration, we can confront synchronicity, highly regarded in some spiritual communities, as the phenomenon in which an individual experiences events in-concert with one another in meaningful ways (read: divine timing, or the musicality of life). It's in highlighting Reality that we can invite synchronicity as a valid mode of perception. Though to embrace this invitation requires, within at least some degree, a commitment to a neutral awareness—an objective, nonjudgemental and open temperament in experiencing perceptual information (not to mention the disassociation from, or deprogramming of, cultural conditioning, societal standardizations and other approximately arbitrary valuations). This is to propose, that in order to more adeptly comply with whatever the fundamental mechanics of reality are, that human beings adopt purviews which at once welcome and integrate information, in that they are conducive to the process of evolving conscious awareness.
The Hundredth Monkey Effect is a phenomenon which illustrates that an advantageous behavior can proliferate throughout a community without explicit instruction or demonstration. The population adapts the behavior as a critical mass of beings within it become cognizant of it, and choose to adopt it for the sake of their individual wellbeing. Further substantiating this phenomenon is Rupert Sheldrake’s study of Morphic Resonance, observing how behavior—i.e. energy, frequency and vibration—can permeate throughout a community in the same fashion. These findings imply that ideas can indeed spread by sincere and persistent practice. And these are significant realizations to integrate: that elegant thought-patterns and behavioral solutions to environmental challenges can be introduced and spread throughout communities by the Doing—by the Being.
Soul of the World
Contrarians of spiritual ideas, like synchronicity (or the clairsentience that could be implied by Morphic Resonance), might argue that these ideas cannot be explicitly substantiated by the physical senses within three-dimensional space-time, and are therefore inherently negated. Now we may sense that identifying with Reality exclusively within a Newtonian worldview easily perpetuates delusions of separateness. It's simple and staid to identify with dualistic concepts (namely polarities like right and wrong, good and bad, anarchy and order, et al.), subtly perpetuated over our lifetimes . Although, dualisms do have their implications and implementations on the journey... It’s under the guise of “concepts” and over-identification with either/or polarities that our perceptual clarity (read: wisdom) becomes diluted.
The individual's own realization of truths can be integrated as insight necessary throughout the process of evolving consciousness. By playing with and intersecting ideas, we develop grander perspectives, and elevate a unified consciousness as a preeminent innerstanding of the divine, wholistic-happening of existence (the “on-going wow”, as Speed Levitch put it). Embracing conscious awareness as such cultivates a more luminous and fulfilling conduit between our human experience, and the creative expression of it. In film or photography, for example, pictures are the captured reflections of happenings as space-time.
As technology and the internet refines, and the species gravitates towards singularity, insistences on separations will naturally dissolve, and the fundamental nature of Being will illuminate itself. In realizing the spirit inherent as all experience, we remember and recollect that the seen and the unseen commingle as a whole (as the Soul of the World, as Paolo Coelho might describe it).
Crafting Experience
Given these myriad insights on the cogs of conscious awareness, the human experience can become considerably less foreboding, and far more welcoming to what is fundamentally spiritual inquiry and development.
The idea of Maya—derived from Eastern wisdom tradition—signifies the existence of inherent illusions in our perceptions of (R)reality. We can ruminate on ideas like tools with which to decipher, navigate and transcend layers of illusion.
It’s in commingling and harboring intimacy with multiple disciplines, which the Information Age affords us access, that our species can continue to navigate and evolve. And we can integrate energies to become more whole, building a purview which embraces unity consciousness as the pervasive axiom.
Modernity has a keen eye on the humanities thus far. From this vantage, we can declassify and reunify art, science and spirituality as to dissolve notions of disparate disciplines. We may learn to appreciate that perceiving any bit of information as distinct from another is just a way-post on the journey to embracing and participating in One-Whole, evocative experience of Being anything at all. You're a refraction of divinity. All that you experience is a reflection of your Universe. Nothing is disconnected. And evolution is always. Though, if nothing else (and in some sense, above all) remember this: the Greeks said, gnothi seauton.
Hassan Zaman is a writer living in Rochester, New York, USA. Tweet him @_hzaman.
More info: noicemagazine.com
