The Eye of the Senses and the Eye of the Mind Animated by the Inter-Included Eye of Consciousness
Part 4 of a 5-Part Series of the Early Draft Essay "The Eye of Value"
A similar inter-inclusion of the Eye of the Mind with the Eye of Consciousness [Eye of the Heart, Spirit, Value, Contemplation] takes place in regard to systems theory and its more mathematical daughters, complexity theory and chaos theory.
From the dogmatic perspective of materialism,[1] complexity theory discloses the emergence of what Prigogine & Stengers have called Order Out of Chaos, in a book by that name,[2] as well as how self-organization creates patterns of coherence as if following a—not externally imposed design but inherent—design, which, as we will show, implies LoveIntelligence moving towards ever-deeper and wider forms of intimacy and aliveness. Indeed, from the integrated perspective of the Eye of the Senses, the Eye of the Mind, and the Eye of Consciousness, the “hills are alive with the sound of music”—or the sound of Eros.
In other words, complexity theory, for example, when seen from the depth perspective of the integrated Eyes, discloses itself as a kind of mathematics of intimacy. As it is highly relevant here, we briefly adduce CosmoErotic Humanism’s intimacy equation,[3] which we shall briefly unpack below and even more extensively in a foundational work on CosmoErotic Humanism focused on and entitled The Tenets of Intimacy.[4]
Intimacy = Shared Identity in the Context of (Relative) Otherness x Mutuality of Recognition x Mutuality of Pathos x Mutuality of Value x Mutuality of Purpose
This is an equation of the interior sciences, which is well tracked by its exterior correlate, complexity theory. From this perspective, the Eye of the Senses and the Eye of the Mind—re-animated by the Eye of Consciousness in all of its forms—directly disclose Evolution: The Love Story of the Universe and the Universe: A Love Story.
All three Eyes are inter-included and mutually animate each other.
The Eye of the Senses Becomes the Eye of Consciousness [The Eye of the Heart, Contemplation, Spirit, & Value]
In the same sense that there is but One Heart of Cosmos, there is, in the end, only One Eye. As we pointed towards above, in the core substrate of Reality, all of the Eyes are part of the same One Eye, because the Reality that each of them sees, of which they themselves are an expression, is part of—participates in—the same One Field of the One Reality.
Indeed, that is the appropriate premise of all exterior and interior sciences, each with their own empirical methods of discerning Reality, which are all part of what William James wonderfully called Radical Empiricism, to which we referred above.
The failure to recognize the One Heart of Reality was indeed the crippling flaw of key premodern and modern worldviews, at least in the exoteric religions and their dogmas, as well as in the mainstreams of scientistic dogmas, which themselves were, of course, appropriately rebelling against earlier religious dogmas.
As we have already alluded to, when one engages a deeper read of Reality, and at higher levels of consciousness, both in terms of waking up and growing up, the One Field of Reality begins to disclose itself.
Indeed, any one of the three Eyes themselves, when their doors of perception are fully cleansed, opens to the Infinite.
It was in that sense that the poet William Blake wrote,
If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things, thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.[5]
It is in this light that Blake’s famous lines in his early Notebook poems must be understood.
Love to faults is always blind
Always to joy inclin’d
Lawless, wing’d and unconfin’d
And breaks the chain from every mind
Love breaks the barriers of the surface expressions of the Eye of the Mind, sees beyond the narrow cavern of the surface personality, which is lost in rivalrous conflict governed by win/lose metrics and focuses on the inevitable faults that are an inextricable part of being human. Instead, it transcends the laws of separation and invites the angelic beings winged and unconfined that discern the joy at the heart of existence.
Or, as Dickinson was to say it a hundred years later,
Not “Revelation”—‘tis—that waits,
But our unfurnished eyes—
One of the places where we see most subtly but beautifully the interpenetration of all of the three Eyes, all disclosing that Eros, or Love, is real, and that it lies at the heart of existence, is music itself.
Photography by Kristina Tahel Amelong
It was Aldous Huxley who reminded us that music discloses “the blessedness that is at the heart of things.”[6]
And of course—and so it has been from the beginning of time—the preponderance of music, its rhythms, melodies, and lyrics speak about love. It may be personal love or its loss, it may love of spirit, of nature, of country, or their loss. But it is always love, its agonies and ecstasies, its devotions and demands, its rapture and ravaging, that is at the center of music. Music is love songs in all of their myriad forms.
And music itself may said to be the inner form of mathematics.
The avowedly anti-materialist, transcendentalist, and a close colleague of them all, Margaret Fuller echoed the pre-Socratic Pythagoreans when she wrote,
“all truth is comprised of music and mathematics.”[7]
But music itself does not exist before the manifest world of matter emerges. For sound itself is made of sound waves, which is energy moving through a medium such as air, water or any other liquid or solid matter.
And yet, there have been earlier waves in the Universe that were an expression of one of the early forms of matter, gravitational waves. Gravitational waves were disclosed by Einstein’s mathematics, which we have only recently been able to detect, through the most wondrous expression of the Eye of the Mind.[8]
As Michael Greshko from the National Geographic wrote in an article in March 2019:[9]
Gravitational waves are distortions in the fabric of space and time caused by the movement of massive objects, like sound waves in air or the ripples made on a pond’s surface when someone throws a rock in the water. But unlike sound waves pond ripples, which spread out through a medium like water, gravitational waves are vibrations in spacetime itself, which means they move just fine through the vacuum of space. And unlike the gentle drop of a stone in a pond, the events that trigger gravitational waves are among the most powerful in the universe.
We can hear gravitational waves, in the same sense that sound waves travel through water, or seismic waves move through the earth. The difference is that sound waves vibrate through a medium, like water or soil. For gravitational waves, spacetime is the medium. It just takes the right instrument to hear them.
Detecting gravitational waves on Earth was a challenge that took roughly a century to complete, since the ones that wash through the planet are incredibly tiny.
…
The analogy that some physicists use is that gravitational waves let us “hear the universe.” To be clear, sound and gravitational waves are very different things. But by watching events play out in the universe at different wavelengths of light, while also watching out for the vibrations of gravitational waves, we can embark on what's known as multi-messenger astronomy.
…
In a few decades’ time, we’ll be able to hear the universe as never before, from the deep rumble of merging supermassive black holes to the zippy chirps of colliding neutron stars. The universe is full of light; now we know it’s also full of music.
And music is, of course, also an expression of time, which, as Einstein’s theory of relativity, rooted and expressed in the language of mathematics, disclosed, is not separate from space, hence the realization that we live in and are composed of the spacetime continuum.
As Natalie Hodges has written, music is made not of notes of sound, but rather of what sound is at its core—atoms of time. When the single point of the singularity stretches itself out in a line, time is birthed into Reality. Within that line of continuity, moments distinguish themselves. Chords and harmonies, rhythm and melody are born.
Once we realize that music is the stuff of time, and that we ourselves are made of time, we further realize that we are made of music.[10]
And of course, Blake’s portrayal of human beings making music in his Book of Job painting, depicts Job and his family, when their fortune has been restored, and they have encountered God in the whirlwind—something of the mystery has been disclosed, and they understand that love stands at the center of the mystery.
In the pivotal verse in Job,
God restored the prosperity of Job when he prayed for his neighbors
the word for friend is the same Hebrew word that is deployed in the classic text,
love your neighbor as yourself.
It is in the moment of love—empathos—that Job is restored to his true nature.
Blake expresses this moment by showing each of them with a musical instrument in their hand. Together, they open the Eye of Consciousness, mediated through the Eye of the Senses and the Eye of the Mind, all of which together are forms of music. God speaks to Job, in the book, from out of the whirlwind.
Most of the Book of Job until this juncture is man’s question to God. In chapter thirty-eight, we find the response: God’s question to man.
Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation
Tell me if you understand,
Who marked off its dimensions?
Surely you know
On what were its footings
Or who laid its cornerstone
While the morning stars sang together
And all the angels shouted for joy.
For the interior sciences of the Book of Job, and for Blake, love and joy are the foundations of Reality. In many of the interior sciences, from Hebrew wisdom to Whitehead, joy—in the sense of the intrinsic joy of Cosmos—is virtually synonymous with Eros.[11]
The book does not deal in theo-logic or painful theodicies that seek to justify the Divine or to make sense of the horror of evil. Rather, the book affirms that the Universe: A Love Story is the nature of Cosmos, even as the mystery is never ultimately overcome. It is not by accident that Terrance Mallick’s epic film, The Tree of Life, is a commentary on this verse, which appears on the screen at the outset, and that the film, rather than answer the questions, invokes music, time and again, that points to the mysterious love that animates the all.
It is for this very same reason that, when humanity desired to reach for Cosmos, it sent into space not words but music. The music was carried on, what was called the Golden record, in 1977, aboard the space shuttle, voyager.[12] The Golden record is perhaps humanity’s most daring act of Eros—an expression of humanity’s desire to make contact with the One Heart of Cosmos, in all its living forms in the universe—in the most potent way that we know—through music.
A beautiful young woman, Clemency Burton Hill, creative director of the oldest public radio station for classical music, suffered a disastrous brain hemorrhage. Before the tragedy, she had written of Bach as the “music that contains everything”—she experienced his violin solo in E major, as apparently “rearranging the molecules around me.”[13] In her tragedy, she lost, for a time, her contact with Bach. But gradually she came to realizes that Bach is, in her words, the “existential soundtrack to aliveness itself” and that to “recover Bach in me” is the only way to ever be made whole again.[14]
Continue reading underneath the book announcement…
First Values & First Principles
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First Values & First Principles
Forty-Two Propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism, the Meta-Crisis, and the World to Come
by David J. Temple
AS THE META-CRISIS DEEPENS, THE FATE OF CIVILIZATION AND HUMANITY HANGS IN THE BALANCE.
First Principles and First Values is the tip of the spear in the fight for a humane future. Establishing frameworks for a new school of thought called CosmoErotic Humanism, the book is built around forty-two propositions that provide new source code for the future of planetary culture.
Like Europe in the early Renaissance, humanity is in a time between worlds, at a time between stories. First Principles and First Values contains blueprints for the bridge needed to cross from this world to the next.
“The position argued for in this book is of vital importance . . . it needs urgently to be read.”
IAIN McGILCHRIST, author of The Master and His Emissary
David J. Temple is a pseudonym created for enabling ongoing collaborative authorship at the Center for World Philosophy and Religion, a leading international think tank whose mission is to address existential risk by articulating a shared universal Story of Value for global intimacy and global coordination. The Center focuses its work on a world philosophy, CosmoErotic Humanism, as the ground for a global vision of value, economics, politics, and spiritual coherence. The two primary authors behind David J. Temple are Marc Gafni and Zak Stein. For different projects specific writers will be named as part of the collaboration. In this volume Ken Wilber joins Dr. Gafni and Dr. Stein.
It is little known that Albert Schweitzer, the Nobel Laureate Humanitarian who inspired early environmentalist Rachel Carson, located his own center in Bach. Indeed, a piano goes with him to his work in Africa and remains with him in the jungle for years. Schweitzer, who had much to do with the revival of Bach, who had fallen on hard times, with the supercomputer mathematical genius quality of his work obscuring for some its unbearable depth.
Schweitzer speaks of two kinds of artist, the first who is a law unto themselves, who uses art to expresses their own personhood, while the second group moves beyond first-level personhood, not to the impersonal, but to what he calls the superpersonal.[15] These artists not only hold the larger Field in their being, as indeed all beings do, but they are able to transmit that Field in their art, giving us direct access to the inner superstructure of Reality.
This second kind of artist is, for Schweitzer, intimate with the interior Face of the Cosmos. The art of this second kind of artist, who is beyond the personal, but instead of merging with the impersonal becomes superpersonal—channeling the intimate depth of “what he already finds in existence, …to express it definitively, in unique perfection” through his or her person.[16]
Clemency Burton Hill understands that the greatness of Bach lies precisely in the place that music, which is mathematics, become intimacy:[17]
“The essence of what makes Bach the greatest eludes words…People often describe Bach as ‘mathematical’ because of the complex intricate patterns in his music… [that articulate] intense joy but also wild grief… there has never been a composer or songwriter more attuned to the vagaries of the human heart…”
…which are the structure of Cosmos itself.
But what we have tried to point towards above is that, although music opens the Eye of Consciousness, it participates directly in the material word. Sound is an expression of the manifest, sound waves moving through matter and atoms of time.
The poet Ronald Johnson, steeped in the sciences, was not wrong when he wrote,
“Sound is Sea: pattern lapping pattern…Matter delights in music and became Bach.”[18]
This principle of non-alienation, indeed of intercluded union between the three Eyes was often missed in the medieval presentations of the three Eyes and in their recapitulations in modernity. In the medieval period, that alienation between the three Eyes was rooted in the fundamental picture of Reality as being what Arthur Lovejoy in a book by that name famously described as The Great Chain of Being.[19]
The general direction of the chain moved from matter to life to mind to soul to spirit. Matter is the physiosphere, the realm of the ostensibly inanimate; life is the biosphere, mind is, what Jesuit Paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin called, the noosphere; soul is the individuated expression of interior spirit; and spirit itself is the Ground and Field of Spirit in all of its expressions, which suffuses everything, everyone, and everywhere.
The weakness of this medieval picture was that it viewed matter as being at the bottom of this hierarchy and soul and spirit on top.
Modernity, however, has quite clearly disclosed that this is not the case. For example, we are deeply aware of expressions of love in the physical substrates of dopamine and other neurochemicals. We now can trace at least some of the neuroscience that maps the experiences of awe and wonder induced by chemical substances such as MDMA. It is clear, however, to everyone but a dogmatic materialist, that love, awe, and wonder are not reducible to their chemical expressions.
Rather, we understand that the core vision of the great chain of being needs to be evolved with the realization of what we call, in CosmoErotic Humanism, pan-interiority, which simply means—echoing the interior sciences of the Hebrew wisdom and Kashmir Shaivism, expressed as well in polymaths like James Mark Baldwin, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Alfred North Whitehead—Reality is interiors and exteriors all the way up and all the way down.
All of Reality, to one degree or another, contains a degree of Eros—or of what has been called interior experience. Every exterior has some level of interior, and every interior incarnates in some form of exterior.
Love is an interior quality of Cosmos, which expresses itself in unique configurations of intimacy—e.g., in what we call chemistry between various elementary particles, atoms, molecules, and macromolecules. This is critical, however, because it implicitly reminds us that there is only One Reality. There are not, as the dualists suggest—both medieval and modern (17th-century European dualists, for example)—two absolute, ultimately distinct, realities, one material and the other interior, with the spiritual being one form of interior experience,[20] each with its own Eye, or Eyes,[21] to discern its nature.
There are, however, the appearances of exteriors and interiors that are in many ways distinct from each other, but only in their appeared, not in their ultimate nature.
Rather, the world is ultimately one, as seen from what has sometimes been called nondual monism.[22] While Reality discloses itself as interiors and exteriors, there is an underlying fabric of Reality—a unified Field of Eros.
Thus, for example, music is waves of sound and atoms of time—time itself is part of the spacetime continuum, an expression of the world of matter, and yet, music arouses interiors in the most wondrous of ways. In other words, at their deeper levels, as we noted above, just like Reality itself is inter-included and interanimating exteriors and interiors, so naturally, the Eye of the Senses and the Eye of the Mind interanimate and inter-include with the Eye of Consciousness in all of its expressions (the Eye of Value, Heart, Contemplation, and Spirit).
This sense of inter-inclusion and interanimation is already present in the more advanced of the premodern interior sciences that did not adhere to a rigorous vision of the great chain of being with matter on the bottom and soul and spirit on top. For example, a text, often cited in the interior sciences of Kabbalah and Hassidism, reads,
Through my flesh I vision God[23]
or alternatively,
Through my body I vision God.
Here, the Eye of the Senses—alternatively called the Eye of the Flesh—when carried through to its depth expressions, becomes the Eye of Consciousness. This understanding of the body, as being infused with interiority itself, both animates the interior sciences and the frontiers of the exterior sciences.
One has to but read the work of James Shapiro and the lineage that precedes him [think biologist Lynn Margulis] on natural genetic engineering, to access a clear sense of the living intelligence and will of cells.[24]
Cells are clearly more than mechanical programs. That ship has long sailed for anyone following the advances in molecular biology over the last two decades.
At the same time, obviously, there are sharp distinctions between the nature of will and consciousness in human beings and the cells that constitute them.
Cells create larger unions of mutuality, union, recognition, and embrace that become larger wholes—multicellular organisms. That is the erotic trajectory of evolution.
And, as we noted in our writings on First Principles and First Values, there is self-evidently discontinuity between matter, life, and mind, even as there is also continuity.
The key point, however, is that cells, as Lynn Margulis, Shapiro, Stuart Kauffman, Richard Feynman, and others point out, and human beings, who are not only formally constituted by cells, participate in the same field of will and consciousness as cells.
Moreover, the absolute boundary between the animate and inanimate is, as we point towards implicitly through the CosmoErotic Humanism volumes, is increasingly tenuous, as we realize the self-organizing and self-actualizing quality of the subatomic world.
Indeed, Reality is Eros implies sentience—or interiority—all the way down and all the way up the evolutionary chain. Kauffman, Feynman, and Whitehead join the interior sciences of many major traditions in asserting that the same is true at the level of what is ostensibly called matter.[25] One expression of this core notion in the interior sciences, stepped up one level, is captured in the epigram,
Greater is the source of the vessels than the source of the light.
Generally, in the word of spirit, the vessels are understood as holding the light, which is of a higher substance and quality. In the human dimension, the body is generally identified as the vessel, with the soul, or spirit, or interiors, being the light—as in the famous epigram, the body is the temple of the soul.
That is precisely what is turned on its head in the epigram of the interior sciences,
Greater is the source of the vessels than the source of the light.
In the interior science of Luria, in which this epigram is sourced, the vessels themselves are a form of congealed light—light that drives from a higher gradation of Spirit than what is generally considered to be associated with Spirit in this world. In this precise and potent sense, the world of the vessel—the body—is animated by, and indeed suffused with, interiors that are more subtle and refined than the ostensibly spiritual.
In one text of the interior sciences, there is a discussion of the biblical story of the binding of Isaac. The God voice, after seemingly telling Abraham to sacrifice his son to God as an offering on Mount Moriah, is countermanded by a second God voice,
An Angel called to him, saying, Do not stretch forth your arm against the boy, do not harm him in any way.
Hasidic writer and interior scientist, Elimelech of Lishensk, commenting on this text, writes audaciously in late 18th century that the God voice calling to him is actually Abraham’s body—particularly his arm—which knew that sacrificing Isaac was not the Divine Will.
Through my body I vision God.
It is in this precise sense we say in other writing of CosmoErotic Humanism that sex is love in the body. Sex, an expression of the sense of touch, often coupled with the other four senses—the Eye of the Senses—in its depth expression, opens the Eye of the Heart.
It is not just that sex generates dopamine, neurochemicals of connection. Rather, that is the exterior expression of an interior, the love that courses through the body and in between bodies. Similarly, sex, which is engaging the Eye of the Senses, might also open the Eye of Contemplation. We discuss this at length in our writings in CosmoErotic Humanism on the Seven Levels of Sexing and Eros, particularly in Level Five, which is called Mystical Sexing.
Sexing, engaging the Eye of the Senses, also opens the Eye of Value. We dedicated a chapter in A Return to Eros to the realization in sexing that the bill of rights is encrypted in the body sacred. The experience of touch and the other senses in sexing convey the infinite value of the body quivering with Pleasure for which it was self-evidently designed. We understand in our very bodies the dignity of devotion and gifting the beloved with Pleasure and the great sin when the body is violated by intentionally inflicted wanton pain.
John Pierrakos, a student of Wilhelm Reich, and founder of Core Energetics—a form of somatic psychology that is based on extensive clinical empirical data—affirms that “at their center people are a pulsating core of energy that is love…When people are in touch with their CORE they love themselves and their fellow creatures.”[26]
What is critical about core energetics is that it is based on extensive empirical data, which suggests that human beings seek the expansion of consciousness, or the life force, and that the life force lives in the very form of the body. The body is understood by Reich and Pierrakos to enflesh our interiors. Pierrakos’s core energetics works with five levels, the physical body, feeling, mind and thought, will, and spirit. But his key clinical finding is that the five are utterly inter-included, that is to say, you can get to all of them through any of them. The Eye of Consciousness, the Eye of the Mind, and the Eye of the Senses are part of the same visual apparatus, and each Eye when, opened in depth, leads to the opening of the other Eyes.
In many systems of the interior sciences, originating with the several-hundred-word Sefer Yetzirah: The Book of Creation, which dates back some two thousand years, all the way through to the contemporary theosophist Rudolf Steiner (with echoes in Howard Gardner), there is reference to not five but twelve human senses, or what Howard Gardner, in his studies on human cognition, called multiple intelligences.
The key is, as has already been noted by commentary on The Book of Creation, that all of the twelve senses, which include expressions of all three Eyes, are intercluded with each other. Each sense, when sufficiently developed, alludes to the same perception visualized by the others.
In Kashmir Shaivism and other forms of Indian Vedanta, there is extensive interior science on what are called the three bodies: the gross—or classically physical—the subtle, and the casual bodies.
These are respectively referred to as the food sheath (the gross body—or our ordinary waking state—the classically physical realms), the mental sheath (the subtle body—think not only of mind, but of the dream state, visionary imagination, and multiple forms of subtle feeling states), and the bliss or love sheath (the causal body, which sees most directly consciousness and Eros).
The key is that all three bodies and their perceptive faculties are inter-included with each other.
These distinctions, of course, are roughly congruent, but not isomorphic, with the Eye of the Senses, the Eye of the Mind, and the Eye of Consciousness. All of them together disclose Eros, Love, and Love as the most real—foundational—superstructure, which both animates Cosmos and towards which Cosmos reaches.
But one more example:
Attachment theory tells us that a child, even if well-nourished physically and well-educated mentally, if not held in the gaze of love, and if not seeing Reality through the gaze of love, suffers fundamental life collapse of myriad forms.[27]
The Eyes cannot be ultimately split from each other.
In another expression of the principles of the inter-included Eyes, we note that even when we are discussing the Eye of the Mind, there is no way to bypass the Eye of Value and the Eye of the Heart. For example, rational moral reasoning makes no real sense without the Eye of Value—the axiomatic knowing that some choices, courses of actions, and outcomes are more good, true, and beautiful than others. Or said differently, they generate more value than the alternatives. Even more foundationally, without the Eye of Value, we cannot discern goodness as an intrinsic quality of Reality.
But the Eye of Value itself must be joined with the Eye of the Mind. The Eye of Value, deployed by modernity, needed to be coupled with a particular quality of modernity—the Eye of the Mind—namely the third-person perspective, in order to liberate humanity from slavery, discern the truth of universal human rights, and birth the beginnings of suffrage, and equal rights and opportunities for women in general, who, until that point, were denied the most elementary of what we now consider to be elemental human rights.
This is part 4 of an early draft of an essay drawn from the forthcoming volumes of The Universe: A Love Story—First Meditations on CosmoErotic Humanism in Response to the Meta-Crisis in the Great Library of CosmoErotic Humanism. The first draft of this essay was written by Dr. Marc Gafni in conversation with Barbara Marx Hubbard and Dr. Zak Stein. It was edited and prepared for publication by Kerstin Tuschik. We welcome substantive feedback as we prepare a more advanced version of this essay.
»Click here to read Part 1 of this Essay«
Footnotes
[1] Together with its corresponding philosophy that “has been variously called reductionism, mechanicism or modernism…all phenomena [can be reduced] to movements of independent, material particles governed by deterministic laws.” That dogmatic materialism also holds the promise that understanding these laws more and more fully will eventually lead to “a complete, objective and certain knowledge of past and future.” The central agent of complexity theory, which integrates different approaches—from Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle in quantum physics, chaos theory, systems theory, cybernetics, to theories of self-organization and biological evolution—is “the multi-agent system: a collection of autonomous components whose local interactions give rise to a global order. Agents are intrinsically subjective and uncertain about the consequences of their actions, yet they generally manage to self-organize into an emergent, adaptive system.” Francis Heylighen, Paul Cilliers, Carlos Gershenson, “Complexity and Philosophy,” pp. 18-19, https://arxiv.org/ftp/cs/papers/0604/0604072.pdf.
[2] Prigogine, I. and Stengers, I. 1984. Order Out of Chaos, Bantam Books, New York.
[3] For an early, ten-thousand-word statement of the Tenets of Intimacy, see First Meditations on the Intimate Universe: Global Intimacy Disorder as Cause for Global Action Paralysis—A New Universe Story as the Necessary Response to Existential Risk by Dr. Marc Gafni & Barbara Marx Hubbard, Waterside Productions, 2022.
[4] CosmoErotic Humanism—Toward the New Human and the New Humanity: Homo Amor—The Tenets of Intimacy and the Social Miracles, by M. Gafni, Z. Stein, and B. M. Hubbard—in Preparation.
[5] William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: In Full Color, Dover Publications, 1994, first published 1790.
[6] Aldous Huxley, Music at Night and Other Essays, p. 47, Doubleday Doran Amp Company, Inc., 1931.
[7] Margaret Fuller, Papers on Literature and Art, “Lives of the Great Composers,” p. 49, New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1846.
[8] In a 1916 paper on his general theory of relativity, Einstein articulated a vision of ripples in the field of spacetime—gravitational waves—caused by astronomic events. This vision of gravitational waves, which are themselves the stuff of music, were, however, only theoretical for Einstein. It took a hundred years, and the development a wondrous new instrument of the Eye of the Senses and the Eye of the Mind—the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory—aka LIGO—to have the capacity to validate, through the Eye of the Senses, Einstein’s theoretical gravitational waves, which he envisioned through the Eye of the Mind. At the core of the observatory are two gigantic instruments, which took decades to construct, some three thousand kilometers apart, which were able, in Sept. 2015, to detect the rumble of a gravitational wave generated by the collision between two black holes, some billion light years away, 1.3 billion years ago. On this stunning expression of the Eye of the Mind and the Eye of the Senses, see the work of Astrophysicist, Janna Levin, Black Hole Blues: And Other Songs from Outer Space, First ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016.
[9] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/gravitational-waves.
[10] See Natalie Hodges, Uncommon Measure: A Journey Through Music, Performance, and the Science of Time, First ed. New York: Bellevue Literary Press; 2022.
[11] See Whitehead, ibid. On Joy, see Gafni and Ezrahi, Meditations on Joy in the Interior Science of Hebrew Wisdom (forthcoming).
[12] See Sagan, Carl, Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record. London; Sydney; Auckland; Toronto: Hodder and Stoughton; 1979.
[13] See Burton-Hill, Clemency, Year of Wonder: Classical Music to Enjoy Day by Day. First U.S. ed. New York NY: Harper an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers; 2018.
[14] See Clemency Burton Hill, BBC, Planet Bach, https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000ytzj.
[15] See Albert Schweitzer, J.S. Bach, Vol. 1, p. 112, London: Adam & Charles Black; 1923.
[16] Ibid.
[17] See Burton-Hill, Clemency, Year of Wonder: Classical Music to Enjoy Day by Day. First U.S. ed. New York NY: Harper an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers; 2018, p. 42.
[18] Ronald Johnson, Ark, First paperback edition ed. Chicago: Flood Editions; 2014.
[19] Arthur Lovejoy. The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea. Routledge; 2009.
[20] In order to understand the notion of interiority all the way up and all the way down the evolutionary chain, we need to introduce Whitehead’s term prehension. In his own words: “I will adopt the pre-Kantian phraseology, and say that the experience enjoyed by an actual entity is that entity formaliter. By this I mean that the entity, when considered ‘formally,’ is being described in respect to those forms of its constitution whereby it is that individual entity with its own measure of absolute self-realization. Its ‘ideas of things’ are what other things are for it. In the phraseology of these lectures, they are its ‘feelings.’ The actual entity is composite and analysable; and its ‘ideas’ express how, and in what sense, other things are components in its own constitution. Thus the form of its constitution is to be found by an analysis of the Lockian ideas. Locke talks of ‘understanding’ and ‘perception.’ He should have started with a more general neutral term to express the synthetic concrescence whereby the many things of the universe become the one actual entity. Accordingly I have adopted the term ‘prehension,’ to express the activity whereby an actual entity effects its own concretion of other things. The ‘prehension’ of one actual entity by another actual entity is the complete transaction, analysable into the objectification of the former entity as one of the data for the latter, and into the fully clothed feeling whereby the datum is absorbed into the subjective satisfaction—‘clothed’ with the various elements of its ‘subjective form.’”—Whitehead, Alfred North, CHAPTER I FACT AND FORM in Process and Reality (Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of Edinburgh During the Session 1927-28), Corrected Edition, Edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne, 2nd Edition 2010.
[21] While the exterior world is discerned by the Eye of the Senses and their extensions (like microscopes and other instruments)—supported by the Eye of the Mind, which, by dogmatic materialists, is only seen as an illusion created by exterior brain processes—the interior world, consisting of prehensions, feelings, mental images and thoughts, as well as subtle and causal realizations, can be discerned by the Eye of the Mind and the Eye of Consciousness with its four expressions (the Eye of the Heart, the Eye of the Spirit, the Eye of Contemplation, and the Eye of Value).
[22] For a good introduction for laymen to nondual monism, or what he calls dual-aspect monism, see Kripal, Jeffrey, The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge, Bellevue Literary Press, 2019, Chapter 3, “Cosmos and Consciousness,” and relevant bibliography there.
[23] The Book of Job, chapter 19.
[24] Shapiro first laid out his ideas of genetic engineering in 1992, in a paper, Shapiro, James A. (1992). "Natural genetic engineering in evolution" (PDF). Genetica. 86 (1–3): 99–111. https://shapiro.bsd.uchicago.edu/Shapiro.1992.Gentica.NatGenEngInEvo.pdf. Later, he developed them further in both, the primary scientific literature and works directed at wider audiences. See, for example, Shapiro, James A. (2011). Evolution: A View from the 21st Century. FT Press.
[25] Stuart Kauffman, “Physics and Five Problems in the Philosophy of Mind,” July 15, 2009, arXiv.org, http://arxiv.org/abs/0907.2494 (accessed September 30, 2011); Stuart A. Kauffman, “Five Problems in the Philosophy of Mind,” Edge.org, August 7, 2009, http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/kauffman09/kauffman09_index.html (accessed September 7, 2011); Robert Kane, The Oxford Handbook of Free Will (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011)—quoted from Bloom, Howard, The God Problem, How a Godless Cosmos Creates, (Prometheus, 2016). According to Howard Bloom, “Five Problems in the Philosophy of Mind” is “an essay that appears on one of the most prominent websites for advanced physicists and mathematicians,” arxiv.org.
[26] See John Pierrakos, M.D., Core Energetics: Developing the Capacity to Love and Heal, Life Rhythm Publication, 1987.
[27] On attachment theory, see, for example, Daniel P. Brown, David S. Elliott, Attachment Disturbances in Adults: Treatment for Comprehensive Repair. First ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company; 2016.