Experiments in Quanta, Experience in Qualia
Quantitative metrics measure the past. Qualitative consciousness experiences the present.
From the quanta, we can accumulate data through the experimental. These are the artifacts of the present that we can quantify in the records of the past.
The present cannot be quantified. The present can only be experienced. If you are quantifying the present, you are already in the mode of measuring what has already past. You cannot possibly be in the moment of this experience of thought, feeling, sensation, and movement, since the analysis is the mental frame that is making sense of the experience of consciousness through intellectual formations derived from experience. You are outside of the river, attempting to catch the river with a sieve. The sieve collects objects floating in that river long enough to look at them before they dissolve.
When taking living beings out of the stream of life, they die under the microscope or telescope of observation, much like Schrödinger’s cat never deserved to be placed in a box. A cat belongs in the flow of life, not in a box.
Neither does an atom deserve to be smashed to bits in the Large Hadron Collider. An atom’s life matters.
We seek to understand life by dissecting life out of the whole to observe the parts. We treat life like a clockwork or a machine to disassemble and reassemble. With successful surgical interventions, we gain confidence to redesign life to more closely resemble a machine as a means of asserting control and dominance over nature.
This venture empties the body of the soul and of life, turning it into a machine that more closely resembles something that we can understand, manipulate, program, and control, rather than a mystery that inspires wonder and awe and respect.
This, at its foundation, is a spiritual and metaphysical catastrophe for life, a disaster and cataclysm of our own making.
A demon is not a supernatural entity that exists in the unseen realm of spirit, haunting the living physical bodies that we inhabit to influence and manipulate our minds. A daemon is a background process in an operating system of a computer or device that is beyond the access of the user interface, having been embedded into the inner workings of the programming to operate beyond conscious awareness. We create the systems, then we swim in the water of our own systems, unaware of the background operations that drive our intentions. In modern, industrial, global economic systems, these daemons are imperialism, colonialism, racism, industrialism, modernism, scientism, legalism, and capitalism. These are human inventions and constructions that are the foundations of a global human civilization, the process that causes desertification by incentivizing the taking of life in order to transform it into financial quantities, assets, and numbers on a ledger. This is a diabolical enterprise, to take life and disintegrate it. Humans worship a cult of death in their attempts to earn a living from the god of productivity.
The increasing specialization of industry and productivity is not a bug of the system. It is a feature. Distraction from the motivations and machinations of the slave drivers of the system is the intention. There is a reason that the system benefits only those at the top of the hierarchy. This is by design. When we are too busy paying attention to the minutiae of the system, we do not have time to question the existence of such a system, because survival within the system depends on deep focus on the task or problem at hand, not on the bigger picture.
The focus on quantities of economic industry at the expense of the qualities of life has reduced life to quantities on a ledger. There is a reason why a digital ledger cannot be a solution for distributing greater quality of life. Metrics and measurement of quantities do not create qualities. They quantify what can be measured and quantified. We value what we measure. Therefore, we ignore and marginalize what is actually meaningful and purposeful in life, because they cannot be measured and quantified. They can only be experienced.
By focusing on experiments in quanta, we ignore the experience of the here and now, the experience of immersion in qualia.
For a decade, I have been in the process of extracting myself from the system. I was burning out and I needed a rest. Frankly, I am surprised I am still here.
Meaning and Purpose
I was awake just after 6am. I checked to see if there were possibilities for discussions around inner and outer architecture or inner and outer landscape. Finding none, in the distraction of checking for messages and planning possible events of the day, I discovered a series of slides about liberation from capitalism, pointing to a Substack publication called Cosmic Anarchy. I will need to come back to that.
I began my meditations in the dark of the early morning with embodied affirmations.
I am enough.
I am infinite.
I am worth the time / and the effort.
I am loved. I am love.
Breathing in, I am breathing in.
Breathing out, I am breathing out.
In my 45-minute silent meditation, separated into three periods of 15 minutes, I meditated on my connection to self, to others, and to Spirit, with a focus on meaning and purpose. My intention was to calm my mind in order to listen to Spirit.
“Quiet the mind, and the soul will speak.”
— Ma Jaya Sati Bhagavati
I was wondering if a mantra would help to quiet my mind. I thought back to my embodied affirmations. I have repeated these enough on a daily basis that they are now part of muscle memory. But I wasn’t really satisfied with them as a meditation. They flow out of past harms, traumas, and limitations. How could I focus on the process of becoming and being the creator?
I reached back into my memory to remember the triads. At first, I could only remember the triad of presence.
I am here.
I am now.
I am one.
Then I remembered that it began with the first three days of creation and their connection to the way we conceive of the self.
I am mind. (light)
I am heart. (water)
I am body. (earth)
Then I connected these to the transcendent. “These three remain, but the greatest of these is love.”
I am faith. (mind)
I am hope. (heart)
I am love. (body)
This felt incomplete. Nine wants to become twelve. Perhaps, I go back to the beginning to find what precedes all of this. I had the thought that humans invented time. There is only here and now. I still cannot get past the notion of time: past, present, and future. It still feels foundational.
I am time.
I am energy.
I am matter.
As I contemplated these four triads while I was breathing them in and out, I categorized them and placed them in order: universal, terrestrial, experiential, and transcendent (or inspirational or spiritual). Where I eventually landed was:
Life: mind, energy, matter
Universal (existential): time (mind), energy (heart), matter (body)
Particular (physical): light, water, earth
Experiential (metaphysical): here, now, one
Spiritual (pataphysical): faith, hope, love
This is how we follow. These are the twelve disciplines. They could be represented as two weeks: six days and a day of rest. The first three days set the stage for what comes next. The days of creation are two iterations that are fulfilled by new life. It is not a hierarchy but a process. The transformation from simplicity and homogeneity to complexity and diversity has been a process from the existential to the physical to the metaphysical to the pataphysical. This is how the finite can be intimate with the infinite. We cannot grasp the infinite as finite creatures. However, we can imagine the infinite. We can acknowledge the vast immensity of a universe so large that it overwhelms our capacity to know it fully. We can also appreciate the intention to bring all of this into existence for creatures as limited and finite as ourselves to contemplate the wonder and beauty of this existence and this life.
However, there is also horror, suffering, and death. For millennia, humans have been attempting to make sense of it all. We lacked the senses to fully take in the vast amount of information that surrounds us in each moment of life. So much attention and focus is necessary to begin to understand the whole. Our machines and computational devices and industrial and logistical systems have given us this moment to rest and contemplate, if we have found such privilege. But we now recognize that rest was once available to all. Rest is regarded as a luxury experienced by the wealthy, those at the top of a hierarchy. The desertification caused by civilization has manufactured artificial scarcity to drive up the price of scarce commodities such as food and water, which do actually grow on trees and fall from the sky, on both the evil and the good, unlike money. Love is unconditional. However, even love can grow cold under these oppressive conditions. The revolution is an evolution. Evolution is a process from existential to physical to metaphysical to pataphysical. This is how change happens.
It is the scale and pace of change that should give us pause. Let’s give it a rest.
It takes time for humans to change. Nature also needs time to adapt and evolve. The earth is experiencing exhaustion and overwhelm because of human activity. A sixth mass extinction of species is a signal of how the systems we designed for humans have not been designed within the social boundaries of humans and the physical limits and capacities of the earth.
Slowing down, rest, and healing are our gifts to the world.