Decomposition

Die,

decompose unbothered

by the gaps between

your atoms. Spirit knows

space is neither here nor there.

Consciousness: Matter and Spirit

I wrote about my theory of matter and spirit here, and this morning I found a fascinating article on consciousness that seems in line with my thoughts.

It sounds like an anesthesiologist is doing a double-slit experiment with the brain. Are they indeed saying that consciousness exists as a wave, and anesthesia breaks the wave function so that there are only “pieces” – which would be like consciousness particles? If so, any drug that could somehow “observe” (read: interfere) with the electrons specific to the consciousness wave would cause perfect anesthesia.  I’m not sure that the researcher makes this conclusion exactly (The Atlantic undoubtedly dumbed things down).

Quote from Joshua Lang’s “Awakening”:

Compare the brain to New York City: just as cars navigate the city’s neighborhoods via a patchwork of streets, bridges, tunnels, and highways, electrical signals traverse the brain via a meshwork of neurons. Tononi’s theory predicts that in a fully conscious brain, traffic in one neighborhood will affect traffic in other neighborhoods, but that as consciousness fades—for instance, during sleep or anesthesia—this ripple effect will decrease or disappear.

In 2008, in one of several experiments demonstrating this effect, Tononi pulsed the brains of 10 fully conscious subjects with his electromagnetic gun—the equivalent of, say, injecting a flood of new cars into SoHo. The traffic (the electromagnetic waves) rippled across Manhattan (the brain): things jammed up in Tribeca and Greenwich Village, even in Chelsea. Tononi’s EEG electrodes captured ripples and reverberations that were different for every subject and for every region of the brain, patterns as complex and varied as the traffic in Manhattan on any given day.

Tononi then put the same subjects under anesthesia. Before he pulsed his gun again, the subjects’ brain traffic seemed as busy as when they were conscious: cars still circulated in SoHo and Tribeca, in Greenwich Village and Chelsea. But the pulse had a drastically different effect: This time, the traffic jam was confined to SoHo. No more ripples. “It’s as if [the brain] has fragmented into pieces,” Tononi told me. He published these findings in 2010, and also used them to file a patent for “a method for assessing anesthetization.”

Home

You wake

upon the same mattress that once adorned

your crib and cry

because you want to go home.

Your parents have forgotten

that simplest desire, to return

to what came before,

so no one comforts

you but to say you’re already here.

Meanwhile you know

different, know how you’ve come

from everything and nothing

and now this is a shard-sharp something.

It’s a shock. You tear

with the day along its crisp-creased folds, red

from the sun’s throb between buildings,

between heartbeats,

where spacetime’s fault lines rub hot,

like the sight behind your eyelids

when you press them shut.

There’s no helping it, you come to pieces, fall

out of place and out of bed. It’s wild

how you only hear

one stream of thought and only see

one view, one bed, one family, one house

that isn’t home.

Spirit

Spirit, undaunted by time,

uses your body when you

are gone. Cause and effect

lie quiet, dead,

so Spirit doesn’t need your brain

to think its thoughts,

but can slip inside you

throughout eternity, at its whim.

And it can spend the untime tweaking

bits of your reality, until everything

and you are perfect.

Theories of Everything

The wick in the moth is less deadly

than physics is in you.

Back then, you said Curie wasn’t sorry;

now we wear prosthetic spirits.

You’ve fallen asleep head-on-desk,

computer-lit and eerie, an astronaut adrift

amongst wastepaper stars,

and I’ve slid from bed to steal your calculations.

Not the flat, careful pages; it’s the wild ones,

the trashed ones –

forced into three dimensions, twisted,

layered, and intersected –

that conceive the strangest things.

They crackle up my housecoat sleeves,

each puff nipping my unnerves

with its audacious reality, the way you once

chased my blush from chest to cheek.

Now when you stroke my skin

you touch mere electromagnetism.

Yet your unmind also crumples, coils,

winds, and intertwines

into a ball of electric poetry

that arcs sometimes to shock me;

while your body yields like a ghost.

So I fold you, knot, curl, and bend you

to steal the jump between us

and innervate the dead.

we are both all separate and all one

Some freak she was, one half

of a conjoined twin, the Universe

the other half. Joined

sense to sense like that: breath

to breath, back to back, each half-

hobbled by the other’s pull,

she researched her wild escape

but found she supplied space and time

without which all things happened

at once and never:

her own death forever forestalled.

Reality and the Brain

We think that we create our realities by our brain connections — our neural nets, which we imagine to be built over years of experience. But get this — toddlers have more brain connections than adults, maybe ten times more.

I think experience limits our realities like the statue that lies hidden within the stone. Perhaps babies are born out of the Nothing with an image of the Everything in their minds.

Spring, and Life and Death

Signs of Spring are creeping into the wild. About a week back we left an offering in the woods, and when we came back to check on it a tiny little possum was happily chowing down. Then the other day my partner saw a huge coyote standing on a hill in broad daylight, and got some great photos of it.

Meanwhile, I sorted out for myself how Spirit and Matter intertwine, dissolving into each other. It sounds crazy but some quantum physicists will suggest that when not being observed, objects are not in matter or particle form, but rather wave functions of possibility. I call that an aspect of Spirit, as I believe that imagination and potential are Spirit. So Land Spirits are the very trees and rocks they embody, simply switching between material and spirit form, being both simultaneously.

It made me wonder how come living things like trees and animals would eventually become spirit only, via death. Then I figured that things that eat or otherwise absorb energy from the universe must eventually become food themselves, giving that energy back. We decompose and disperse our energy because we’ve taken so much energy from the universe temporarily.

It’s not a new idea, but I’m seeing life and death in a whole new light tonight.

Matter and Spirit

Matter and spirit are like the Everything and the Nothing. They intertwine endlessly, being interdependent, and at their core they are the same.**

There are only two forms of being. One is to be made of parts, which is matter. The other is to be without parts, which is spirit. Spirit can be just as complex as matter, but it is without the bits and pieces that make matter so…material.

Because Spirit is complexity without parts, we can never be apart from it. There is no disconnection. We are not separate selves in Spirit, though it may seem that way. We are like the field of mushrooms which all seem individual yet are connected underground as one entity.

I suspect that spirit is very close to energy insofar as energy is expressed as a wave. Waves also are complex and without parts. In fact, when things are not observed some quantum physicists have said they exist as wave functions only, and that observing them breaks the wave function and makes the thing “real.” This makes a lot of sense to my mind. What is spirit but the unseen sight, the unheard sound? To see it, to hear it, is to make it physical and material. But really they are one and the same.

Light is both particle and wave; even molecules are both particle-like and wave-like. It is likely that everything exhibits a kind of particle-wave duality. So too everything is both matter and spirit.

One consequence of this line of thought is that you cannot go looking for spirit in any physical way. You cannot ask spirit to reveal itself. You can only intuit it. You have to rely on a different kind of knowing than sensory-based knowing. Gut instinct, revealed knowledge…these ways of knowing have value too. The experience of knowing something is an unmistakeable feeling. I know things for which I have no sensory input whatsoever. These are spirit things.

Another consequence is that one really ought not to go looking at all. There is no gap between matter and spirit. Matter is. Spirit is. That’s all.

Now, some people cannot conceive of spirit at all — I have been such a person. To say that spirit can be a wave function might sound ridiculous. Isn’t spirit akin to the soul? Is there proof of life after death via the soul, or am I just talking of energy and matter in a roundabout way, and not “real” spiritual things?

I am talking about the soul. If you want proof of its existence, think of a piece of music in your mind. Can you hear it? Spirit is, among other things, unhoused thought.

Thoughts, like vagrants, own
no real estate but sneak
off through space and even steal,
unnoticed, into someone else’s brain
and leave all the lights on.

Part of my belief in the Everything and the Nothing makes me wary of the limitations of spacetime. Spacetime is an illusion, surely. Freed from spacetime, a thought can happen outside your head and separate from the causal connections of synapses. A thought becomes a thing in itself, standing alone. This thought is not made of atoms. What is it but spirit?

All that we imagine is spirit too, so imagine wildly, secure that everything happens. In this way we dream the world into being.

All is spirit and all is matter.

**I should note that I don’t actually think my ideas are superior to anyone else’s. Nor do I think anyone should believe in these ideas, despite the fact that I’m trying to sound convincing

Yanantin

The most wonderful thing has happened. The other day. just moments after I reconnected with Spirit, coming to know it more deeply than I ever have before, I found echoes of my personal belief system in the Q’ero shamans of Peru. I have been building my theory of the Everything and the Nothing for years, but I could never find it expressed in any book or culture. I both wanted and did not want to find it, since it was kind of cool to be original, but when I found the Q’ero concept of yanantin I was absolutely thrilled.

Yanantin expresses complementary dualism in all things. It is like Taoism, but somehow Taoism never really appealed to me, and this does. I will not ramble on about theory and philosophy — what’s really important is that I have been touched and awakened and even brought back to shamanism, which I had strayed from these last months. How wonderful is it that my deeply held beliefs are echoed in Q’ero shamanism of all things! It seems so deliciously right. 

It is wonderful also that the Q’ero have a prophecy about the awakening of the world in 2012, which is when my own awakening unfolded. They also believe that the new shamans will come from the western world — so I will, with their apparent blessing, put aside worries of cultural appropriation. I don’t think I am in danger of that anyway, since I don’t want to adopt a belief or way of life that did not come from myself first. I’m not even borrowing from the Q’ero culture in any manner, and I’m not planning to run off to Peru. But these days one cannot casually claim to align with an indigenous culture without worrying about being offensive.

For now, I am simply getting to know Spirit again, as if we had never met. I feel as if I am a newborn baby, and also like I’m gazing at my own child for the first time.

 

You nod and say no, never – but yes, utterly. At least you come by it honestly. You say the Universe never made a choice, not before it came alight or after. I say, quiet. We kiss. This is really happening, right now, sometime between birth and death, but you say, everything happens. Nothing happens, always and never.