In Adam’s advancing years, he increasingly pondered at the beauty of the vast cosmos and elegance of nature, and increasingly he marveled as to how it all could have come to be. In his reverie, he wondered as to how – were he ever to be so inclined and empowered – he would go about creating a self-renewing Universe harboring sentient life-forms which themselves possessed Consciousness.

And so, eventually, Adam came to ponder upon the three essential components necessary to platform such a creation – endless Time; then a vast reservoir of infinite, creative, cycling Energy; and lastly, materially-based yet immaterial Minds that not only could organize and sustain the life impulse, but also internally imagine the whole by bridging past, present and future.

This, then, is the story of Adam’s journey as he attempted to realize …

Origins: Emergence and Process

Visual illusions reveal that perceptions generated by the brain do not necessarily correlate with reality. Hallucinations, dreams, and delusions illustrate the same point. And the story goes even deeper. We don't have a strong grasp of what reality "out there" even is, because we detect such an unbearably small slice of it. That small slice is called the umwelt.

Each organism presumably assumes its umwelt to be the entirety of objective reality. Until a child learns that honeybees enjoy ultraviolet signals and rattlesnakes see infrared, it is not obvious that plenty of information is riding on channels to which we have no natural access. In fact, the part of the electromagnetic spectrum visible to us is less than a ten-trillionth of it. Our sensorium is enough to get by in our ecosystem, but no better. The concept of the umwelt neatly captures the idea of limited knowledge, of unobtainable information, and of unimagined possibilities. The unconscious brain and its response to "influences" such as genes and society really is "in the driver's seat". (David Eagleman – 1)

Einstein alleged that “the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible”. He was right to be astonished. The bedrock nature of time, space and matter – the structure of our entire universe – may forever remain incomprehensible, beyond the grasp of human faculties. Yet we humans have always tried to plumb the mystery, and still do. As though by establishing a beginning and a sense of the means though which it all … ourselves and everything that is … came to be, we can thereby secure a sense of permanence about what we hope is reality, instead of dreading that ALL may be nothing but the froth of illusion.

It does seem magical, that there is a world in which we are able to grasp that a form of order seemingly exists, and that we ourselves are somehow here, complete with senses that can witness this world and observe its wonders, and with evolved integrative minds that can even make some limited sense of what we infer is the whole thing. In this essay we’ll try to examine three apparently unconnected facets of the evolving enigma, and perhaps platform our sense of wonder for further progression.

The three facets that we’ll examine are Time, Holomovement, and Microgenesis. Sometimes it helps if we temporarily set aside our present ‘knowns’, adopt a humble uncertainty attitude, and approach matters with a beginner’s mind, thereby perhaps allowing new perspectives to perculate into awareness. If we’re lucky today, maybe we can bridge these three facets into a keystone piece of the larger puzzle of existence itself, appreciating that the fact of sentient life itself is so complex that even the smallest insect with its intricate structure, is far more complex than either an atom or a star.

TIME:

Time, always considered enigmatic, sometimes has been thought of an arrow, sometimes as a Newtonian clock or a flowing stream, sometimes as a canvas onto which existence is painted, and sometimes as an energy propelling all before it. There are concepts of cosmological time, archaeological time, inexorable time, and psychological time. Sometimes time seems to move too quickly, sometimes too slowly … and always slip-slldin’ away … haven’t we all experienced how difficult it is to capture and hold the essence of a moment and imprison time in a bottle? But what if there is no ‘Time’ in the forgoing sense, but rather there is an infinite series of “nows” which sentient minds – with their marvelous faculties of memory and imagination – are able to weave into an apparent continuum of motion and duration. Then, perhaps, although our minds are able to range into the past and into the future, our existence is always in the now.

Julian Barbour, a British theoretical physicist – along with a growing group of wondering scientists – advances timeless physics: a thesis that time, as we perceive it, does not exist as anything other than a form of illusion, and that a number of problems in physical theory arise from assuming that a time-stream does – on its own – exist. He argues that we have no evidence of the past other than our memory of it, and no evidence of the future other than our belief in it. "Change merely creates an illusion of time, with each individual moment existing in its own right, complete and whole." He calls these individual moments “Nows”. Time-based reality is all an illusion: there is no motion and no change. Barbour argues that the illusion of time is what our minds interpret through connecting discrete ‘time capsules’, which themselves are "any fixed pattern that creates or encodes the appearance of motion, change or history". The assertion is that there is no invisible, flowing river of time, but rather what really exists are separate instants of time … or discrete nows, and that everything in the whole universe is at this same moment, now.

One’s brain is a complex of interacting systems all the way up from the senses to the conceptual machinery of the mind. From the very moment that input from the environment triggers a sensory receptor to set off a nerve impulse that becomes a chain reaction, our brain-minds function as extremely complicated processing systems that have evolved to create rich narratives of the world around us. We have no direct contact with reality … everything experienced is an abstracted version of reality that has been generated through the brain-mind’s simulation machinery to produce meaning. According to Barbour’s thesis, existence – whether cosmological or sentient - moves through a succession of discrete instants of now time capsules, and what we think is the flow of time – and even seeing motion – is actually a form of brain-generated artifact. According to this perspective, these time capsules of discrete ‘nows’ – when observed by sentient minds holding presuppositions that time is an unfolding duration continuum that flows forever – lend hints as to how the powerful impression of the passage of time can arise in a timeless world ... where all possible instants coexist, and complex mathematical rules of quantum mechanics bind together a special selection of these instants into a coherent order that is perceived as a flow of time.

In his own words, Barbour explains his vision of time/reality:

I suggest that our belief in time and a past arises solely because our entire experience comes to us through the medium of static arrangements of matter, in Nows, that create the appearance of time and change. Geologists certainly deduced that the earth has an immensely long history from structures frozen in rocks, i.e. evidence for time and motion in static form. Our long- term memories must also be hard-wired in the patterns of the neural network in our brains. Again, we have mutually consistent records in static form. It is even possible that when we see motion the material counterpart of the phenomenon is a pattern of neuronal connections that codes several different positions of a moving object at once, and the appearance of motion arises from their simultaneous presence in one brain configuration. … I suggest that the appearance of time arises exclusively from very special matter configurations which we find can be interpreted as mutually consistent records of processes that unfolded in a past in accordance with definite physical laws that involve time. I call such configurations time capsules and take the perfectly conventional realist view that they do exist in an external world. (Julian Barbour – 2)

Adam sensed there was something very complex going on. Evolution, for example, can’t be wholly chance; there must be the creativity of new information as well as new form emerging from the depths. As his thought progressed, he wondered that there might be a difference between perceptual reality and truth. Strange … Perhaps the world and its substance aren't created within the banks of some linear time stream ... perhaps instant by instant and realization by realization – it is really knitted together and metaphorically said into existence through the structures of sentient minds, and the sharing of observations through language may play an essential role in the creation, co-building and understanding of reality. And our minds can’t see the process all at once, yet what may be too subtle to grasp in one instant, can become manifest and palpable in a later ‘now’, as one’s questing mind bridges the gaps between the nows, and the resulting image resonates with the harmony of the whole.

Our perception creates a duality of subject and object, of the subjective and the objective.  We think of information as objective, and experience as subjective. In fact, no such dualities exist.  Information and experience are one and the same.  Every particle in the universe is alive with experience.  Every organism is alive with experience.  The Universe is alive with experience.  On the universal level, experience is one.  We are one with this universal experience.

Information does not pass into extinction with the passage of time.  Time is a series of universal boundaries beginning with the inception of our universe.  We know, according to relativity that, at the speed of light, time stands still.  So, for light, and for the Universal Holographic boundary expanded outward at the speed of light, time is standing still.  Light is essentially timeless.  It is eternal.

On the boundary of our universe, there is only now.  The universe, is, in fact, continually being recreated, continuously revisiting and repeating its own history.  It is always being now.  From eternity to eternity, forever and ever, from now-past to now-future, it is always being now.  This is the eternal now.  Everything and everybody is eternal on the highest dimension of the universal pulse.

And yet time flows.  It flows in the lower dimensions, tied to the bulk, tied to matter, tied to the continuous stutter of systems, following the arrow of the concatenation of information.  The light moves outward.  Time seems to move.  And yet, it is always being now. 

Our now is the outer surface in time of a series of nows.  This series of nows is time. As this outer surface moves ever further outward, things appear to be created, things appear to be destroyed.  The body dies and decays.  This all is an illusion of our perception.  When the curtain is lifted, we pass into eternity, which is our home.  Eternity is here, right here, all around us, spread like a blanket that covers the Earth.  Pierre Teihard de Chardin called this blanket the noosphere, the blanket of knowing.  It is a blanket upon blankets upon blankets of nows, built up like the strata that lie beneath our feet, each reaching to a higher dimension of knowing.  This is the most fundamental basis of evolution. 

We stand, as it were, on the outermost blanket of the pulse of our planet.  With every pulse is the creative advance.  With every pulse there is a higher dimension of knowing. The evolution of life is fossilized, or so it would appear, in the strata beneath our feet.  And yet, if we were to remove these strata, we would have no place to stand.  We would fall into the void, into the abyss of time, disconnected from are own ground of being. (Mark Germine - 3)

THE HOLOMOVEMENT:

David Bohm's life-long work in physics focused primarily on the fundamentals of quantum theory and relativity theory and their implications in several other fields. He also searched beyond physics, and maintained a long connection with the Indian spiritual master, J. Krishnamurti.

Bohm's world view had profound implications for the whole of science. Prior to Bohm, science had generally regarded the universe as a vast multitude of separate interacting particles. Bohm offered an altogether new view of reality to underpin the entire body of theory and data that we call science. The single most important feature of this new reality is "unbroken wholeness in flowing movement"… the Holomovement. While Bohm showed that there was no concrete scientific evidence to favor the Newtonian fragmented worldview over the unbroken, flowing holomovement that he proposed, many scientists had difficulty with his proposals due to their individual beliefs and the predilections within the establishment. Ironically, what was remarkable about Bohm's hypothesis is that it’s also consistent with spiritual wisdom down through the ages.

Bohm taught that what we call matter is merely an apparent manifestation of the explicate order of the overall holomovement. This explicate order is the surface appearance of a much greater enfolded or implicate order, most of which is hidden. Contemporary physics and mainstream sciences deal with explicate phenomena only, which is why physics (and psychiatry) has encountered such great difficulty in explaining a variety of phenomena.

The holomovement’s implicate order is the fundamental and primary reality, albeit invisible. The explicate order – the vast physical universe that we experience – is only a set of "ripples" manifesting on the surface of the implicate order, and the manifest form of these ripples is guided by information received from the implicate order that is transmitted through the quantum potential, which is a wave-like information field independent of space and time. The manifest objects that we regard as comprising ordinary reality are only the unfolded projections of the much deeper, richer implicate order, which is the fundamental reality.

The implicate and explicate orders interpenetrate in all regions of space-time, and each region enfolds all of existence; everything is enfolded into everything else. As Bohm explained:

In the implicate order the totality of existence is enfolded within each region of space and time. So, whatever part, element, or aspect we may abstract in thought, this still enfolds the whole and is therefore intrinsically related to the totality from which it has been abstracted. Thus, wholeness permeates all that is being discussed, from the very outset.

(Bohm - Wholeness and The Implicate Order - 1980)

Beyond the implicate order, further ever-more subtle causative realms exist which themselves are even more highly complex and difficult to conceive in terms of ordinary concepts. For example, Bohm spoke of a generative eternal order, comprising a superimplicate order that lies beyond the domain of time. This generative eternal order is neither static nor everlasting but is outside of time altogether, and ever creative. As this creativity filters down to lower implicate orders, it tends to become manifest in time; that is, it enters a temporal order. In Bohm's words:

The eternal order is not properly to be regarded as static, but rather as eternally fresh and new. As attention goes to the consideration of succession, however, it begins to get directed toward the temporal or secular order. (ibid)

The quantum potential, the implicate order, and the superimplicate orders are all names given to realms that are invisible to ordinary perception, yet they constitute the true structure of reality. The holomovement is the nature of reality, and the implicate and superimplicate orders are its primary structural features, with the explicate order being only the surface appearance. Superimplicate orders may be involved in innumerable physical and natural processes. For example, in evolution, the superimplicate orders could guide the emergence of a bird, which must not only develop wings but aerodynamically adapted feathers, appropriate musculature, a shifted center of gravity, lighter bones and appropriate changes in metabolism, all at the same time. Otherwise, any one of these changes by itself would likely decrease the specie’s chances of survival.

Observe that the superimplicate order appears to be analogous to Jung’s archetypes or to Rupert Sheldrake's morphogenetic fields. All of these terms are simply labels for subtle orders or forces that remain hidden to empirical science, and hence their existence is resisted by mainstream scientists, sometimes vehemently. However, just because these realms haven’t been directly observed does not mean that they do not exist. In his thesis of the holomovement and implicate order, Bohm mathematically demonstrated the existence of such fundamental realms which had been missed altogether by mainstream science in its focus on the explicate order only.

Extending his foregoing thesis into metaphysics, Bohm came to believe that there is a relationship between matter and consciousness; that mind and body respectively correspond to the implicate and explicate orders; that the implicate orders and meaning are analogous, with the subtler levels of both ultimately organizing and giving rise to the more manifest levels; and that informational and material processes are inextricably intertwined in all things. Bohm used the term soma-significance to refer to this intrinsic codependency and interpenetration, and there are suggestive indications in his writings that prefigure the later field of microgenesis. (4)

Bohm's holographic metaphor has found fruitful application in brain physiology and human consciousness. Neurosurgeon Karl Pribram developed a model of the brain based on holographic principles; he’d been trying to understand various features of the brain, especially the observed anomaly that the function of memory storage is not localized in the brain. Pribram's controversial holographic model accounts for such mysterious properties of the brain as the mind’s vast storage capacity, the imaging capability of the sensory system, and certain features of associative recall. Another striking application of the holographic model has been in analyzing the spectrum of human consciousness. Psychiatrist Stanislav Grof noted a close correspondence between the holomovement and his own consciousness research findings, and he developed a cartography that summarized his extensive research into non-ordinary states of consciousness. More than thirty years of clinical research and observation led Grof to the viewpoint that "each of us is everything" meaning that every human being has potential access to all forms of consciousness.

Through studying David Bohm’s work, Adam intuited that all finite phenomena – whether material or mental – have their ultimate origins and ends in the ocean of the infinite, the font from which all creativity emerges into any finite domain. Pulling back into a recess of his mind in an attempt to see the whole, Adam perceived that – in reality – science is an ongoing experience that is not permanently truth-based at all, but rather is essentially a creative art form that paints dynamic portraits of the natural world, using the evolving human intellect as its canvas and the tools of reason as its palette. What the painter cannot conceive in his imagination cannot be painted onto the canvas, and thus remains outside the viewers’ understanding of meaning and reality.

Adam also saw how necessary it was to practice quietness of mind so as to allow its generative order to be more creative, and enable the implicit implicate orders of the mind to throw up new explicate insights.

Each perception of a new meaning by human beings actually changes the over-all reality in which they live and have their existence, sometimes in a far- reaching way. This implies that such reality can never be complete. In the older view, however, meaning and reality were sharply separated. Reality was not supposed to be thus actually changed in a direct way by perception of a new meaning. Rather, it was thought that to do this was merely to obtain a better view of a reality that is independent of what it means to us. For example, one might discover that what one thought was the bottom level of reality was not, and believe that now, finally, one "saw'' the true bottom level.

This point is of crucial significance for understanding psychological and social change. For if meaning is something separate from human reality as a whole, then any such change must be produced by an act of will or choice, guided perhaps by our new perceptions of meaning. But if meaning itself is a key part of reality, then whenever society, the individual, and their relationships are seen to mean something different from what they did before, a fundamental change has already taken place. No special choice or act of will is further required for this to happen. Rather, the content of will and the framework of perceived possibilities within which choice takes place, along with the restriction to the one of these actually chosen, will themselves grow out of the meaning of the total situation that confronts us at any given moment. Or to put it differently, what man does is an inevitable signa- somatic consequence of what the whole of his experience, inward and outward, means to him.

For example, once the world came to mean a set of disjoint mechanical fragments, one of which is oneself, people could not do other than act accordingly, and engage in the kind of ceaseless conflict that this meaning implies. However, if mankind could sustain a perception signifying that the world is an unbroken whole, with a multiplicity of meanings, some of which are fitting and harmonious, and some of which are not, a very different state of affairs could unfold. For then, there could be an unending creative perception of new meanings that encompass the older ones in broader and more harmonious wholes, which would unfold in a corresponding transformation of the over-all reality that was thus encompassed.

In this connection, it is worth noting that our civilization has been suffering from what may be called a failure of meaning. Indeed, from earliest times, people have felt this as a kind of meaninglessness of life. In this sense, meaning also signifies value. That is to say, a meaningless life has no value; it is not worth living.

(David Bohm – Soma- Significance: A New Notion of the Relationship Between the Physical and the Mental - 4)

MICROGENESIS:

The evolution of the cerebral cortex, as well as many other brain regions, has been associated with an increase in lamination or layering, which is proportional to the size of the brain region. ...  Within each neural center or region, there are a vast number of lower order surfaces.  Thus the integration of lower order surfaces by higher order surfaces is a mathematic function which allows for the emergence of information in higher order surfaces. (Mark Germine - 3)

Microgenesis is a theory about the way thoughts and messages move through the brain, percolating through the various regions of the brain (reptilian, limbic, and neo-mammalian cortex), thus mimicking evolution, before being perceived consciously by the organism. Microgenetic theory entails an examination of the development process of thoughts, motions, or actions by the human body or brain, in discrete but generally imperceptible yet seemingly continuous increments. The theory owes much to observations by Dr. Jason Brown and others in their neurological clinics, as they dealt with patients afflicted by:

· aphasia - an acquired disorder due to brain damage from a stroke or head injury; or

· apraxia - a disorder of motor planning and execution which is not caused by incoordination, sensory loss, or failure to comprehend simple commands; or

· agnosia - a loss of ability to recognize objects, persons, sounds, shapes, or smells while the specific sense is not defective nor is there any significant memory loss.

The study of these afflictions – all involving disturbances of language, action and perception – eventually progressed to the concept of microgenesis as a theory of mind and brain rooted in a process approach to anatomy as related to evolutionary growth trends. As in many other fields of organic study, through the clinical study of dysfunction, a model of the processes of normalcy can be inferred; in the case of development of microgenesis theory, the organization of cognition in the normal brain was inferred from the symptoms of brain damage, the change in symptoms over time and their relation to pathology in specific brain areas. The mapping of symptoms to distributed brain systems and the ability to infer normal cognitive function from pathology provided the basis for a process theory of the mind/brain state. The picture that emerged was of an intrinsic process of mentation that actualizes over progressive phases from past to present and from depth to surface in evolutionary brain structure and mind. In this process, content fractionates from a unitary base into the different brain-mind modalities as it undergoes progressive articulation and terminates in the world of object perception. The mind/brain state is a process of becoming, reiterated and evolved across the entity’s development (and – in a way – across the long arc of the brain’s development as passed on by successive ancestors), and any damage to the brain at points in becoming can affect phases or levels in the mental state.

The process of microgenesis, as it applies to brain evolution, can be seen in a purely classical way, related to the recapitulation theory of vertebrate brain evolution, which implies that sensory projection sites and processing circuits have been conserved [recapitulated] in reptiles and mammals in the course of evolution.  Again, there is an element of predictability in evolution which seems to belie the purposelessness of random natural selection, and the development of the organism is a product of its evolutionary history, and is in continuous intercourse with that history. … Microgenesis is readily related to the Holographic Principle of Mind, whereby the past remains actual, and, in the course of each mental state or mental process, there is a literal recapitulation of the organism’s entire past.   (Mark Germine - 3)

The philosophy of mind that derives from microgenetic theory departs from the strongly computational and linguistic approaches of conventional philosophy. There is a relation to the work of Henri Bergson, William James and, especially, Alfred North Whitehead, whose controversial process metaphysics was relevant in the microgenetic studies. Like evolutionary or developmental theories, microgenesis is a retrospective mode that describes how a present state or object came to be what it is. In certain respects, however, microgenesis is more fundamental, as it examines individual or group patterns that seem to be extended in time, while concurrently recognizing that these patterns reflect the reiteration of a single instance of becoming over different evolutionary or lifespan durations. Every organism is in a constant process of becoming that reinstantiates itself across some duration, and in a sense the evolution of the entity (thought, self, group) is the time-creating pattern of a single becoming instantiation, the time-creation being not so much temporal, as psychological. Becoming is succession without temporal incrementation, and every actualization is a whole unit of psychological time. After considerable time of preparatory, pre-conscious processing, an insight may seem to occur in a fraction of a second. The personal past is the ground in which every new present is conceived, and every present is re-created in a traversal from the distant to the more recent experiential past.

[Whitehead stated that entities repeat in microcosm what the universe is in macrocosm, suggesting a wider purview of a teleology (goal-orientated intelligence) behind the actual evolution of thought or nature.  The process goes in two directions, from the microscopic to the macroscopic to the microscopic, or – metaphorically – from God to the World and from the World to God.  Actualities in the World emerge through self-causation only in the context of this deep intercourse between God and the World.]

Darwin had certain basic principles in his theory of evolution into which he collapsed the diversity of life forms; survival of the fittest, selection pressure, and adaptation to the environment are the main examples. One could say he tried to explain the diversity in terms of a few common principles. My objective or rather my way of thinking has been similar: to understand the diversity of pathological forms by means of a few underlying principles. As it turns out, they are evolutionary principles similar to the Darwinian idea of natural selection and competition among organisms. The concept of sensory constraints on object-formation corresponds with the elimination of the unfit. The environment in the form of sensation trims the potential for a diversity of objects to those that conform to the external world. The objects before us are momentary adaptations that have competed for survival during the final phases of the object-formation. In this way, the organism, its acts, objects, words, and thoughts, come into conformity with passing external states of affairs.

The multiplicity of organisms sacrificed for the few that survive and reproduce corresponds with the potential of the core which is parsed or specified to the individuality of a single act or thought. The reproduction of populations corresponds to the replication of the mental state, understood in terms of recurrence rather than an open-ended progression. The microgenetic idea that sensation does not form the building blocks of perception but sculpts a changing endogenous configuration from outside is comparable to the role of the environment in evolutionary theory in the elimination of unfit exemplars. Sensory data restrict the developing act of cognition to mirror the external conditions. The constraints that exclude alternate paths of development are the equivalent, in evolution, to the competition with other organisms. They eliminate all possible developments save that which actualizes and best fits the real world on the other side of our perception of it.

Evolution is a theory based on speciation over millions of years in populations, while microgenesis is a theory of recurrence in a fraction of a second in the mind of an individual organism. Evolution is a dynamic that involves multiple organisms while microgenesis is the momentary evolution of a single act of cognition. Consider an extended analogy with three terms. The first is evolutionary change; the second is ontogenesis and the developmental changes of morphogenesis; the third is microgenesis. Each has its respective time frame, ranging from highly extended periods in the case of evolution, to months and years in the case of the individual organism, to the fraction of a second required for completion of individual states. All are subject to comparable patterns of change, with such patterns identified as process. … The elimination of cells and connections in morphogenesis continues in cognitive development by way of inhibition, which accomplishes much the same thing as elimination of connections.

In evolution … the cat that rubs its back against my leg is the same cat that rubbed its back a thousand years ago. The same cat over and over, like transformations with some novelty over evolutionary time. The growth, death, and replacement of organisms occurs as a cyclical process spread out over the lifespan, while the arising, perishing, and re-birth of a cognition occurs in a fraction of a second as an epoch of change that replaces itself. The cyclical nature of replacement differs from the historical nature of a linear concatenation or causal chain of events. It is rather like the tide that surges and withdraws and surges once again, or like the seasons that come and go. Later, I became aware that the concept of the arising and perishing of a temporal point, the mental state, was linked to certain traditions in Indian philosophy as well as process metaphysics. … The evolutionary theme plays out in the micro-temporal of the unfolding of thought, act, object, and utterance. A person without natural constraints on object-formation has an illusory or hallucinatory world.

(Jason Brown M.D, in dialogue with David T. Bradford, PhD, Psychologist, Austin Texas – 5)

Many potentials (pre-adaptations) of thought and of form are always being created, but by selection only some are deemed sufficiently fit to go forward into the environment. A familiar example would be that of the phenomenon of dream sequences wherein an internalized certainty, after awakening, must be pruned to conform to the exigencies of the external world environment of forces both physical and social. Otherwise, a ‘divine’ dream instruction may founder upon the shoals of reality.

The sense of responsibility to oneself for acts that are in conflict with the group or independent of its values originates in the evolution of instincts of social cohesion to cultural valuations, which gradually internalize to accompany the growth of the self concept. In the shift from core disposition to social cohesion, i.e. from wantonness to responsibility or from selfishness to compassion etc., the developing self-concept appropriates cultural attitudes. These attitudes infiltrate the drives and create a personal valuation that is deemed constitutive or defining by the individual. The fact that evolution gives us moral dispositions, however, cannot anchor the truth or certainty of a given set of values. Evolutionary dispositions influence behavior because they have survival value, not because they are values. Microgenesis is consistent with value relativism in that values are learned adaptations of inherited dispositions.

The core self is carved up by social values through learning. Certain values are central or constitutive to a definition of the individual, while others are peripheral to the self or define the society. All values regardless of their positive or negative valence have their locus in the self-concept. When responsibility to one’s self – whether because of self-gratification or a desired appearance of altruism – supersedes responsibility to another person or to a group, the constitutive set of values is privileged over others and biases one’s options and choices regardless of apparent strengths and hierarchies etc.

Adam pondered. For a long time he was blocked by the image of it being essentially “the same cat that rubs it back against his leg now that rubbed its back a thousand years ago. The same cat over and over, like transformations with some novelty over evolutionary time.” For if that were true for the cat, then no less for himself. Yet he was surely aging, and – sooner than he cared to estimate – his body would resolve to earth, as had those of his ancestors. Why, even the granite mountains erode into sand and soil that later forms the seabed. Imagine!! All the issues of illness, aging, doubt, pain, suffering and fear of expiration … and THEN, to live again, and then again ...

Blocked, and then stunned, and then – his curiosity aroused – Adam was thankful in learning about the process whereby inherited brains could provide both the cat and himself with minds that could develop images and thoughts and action-previews – most of which happens outside of conscious awareness, and often with relative spontaneity. While evolution forms speciation over millions of years in populations, microgenesis may facilitate cognitive resolution and phased progression in a fraction of a second in the mind of an individual organism. Evolution: the macro-dynamic that involves multiple organisms, complemented by microgenesis: the micro-scale emergence of evolved, single acts of cognition.

As happens with other life forms, there is a process of emergence in human beings including a creative unfoldment and unpacking of meanings, with today’s realization comprising an essential step along the path whereby deeper insights reveal the creative unfoldment of tomorrow’s new meanings.

CONNECTING THE PIECES:

The Three Dimensions of Consciousness

TIME: The measure of our understanding of manifested ideas.

SPACE: The measure of understanding of the relationships between manifested ideas.

PATIENCE: The measure of understanding the purpose of manifested ideas, and our responsibility for them. (Everett Irion)

Three apparently unconnected concepts – Time, Holomovement and Microgenesis, yet when one looks for deeper resonances, they are not hard to find if one is inclined to wonder about the Origins of things, and the Process by which things Emerge and evolve … whether Universes, or sentient life-form, or thought, or … well, anything.

If one happens to be interested in such matters, then one tends to hone in on the similarities and differences of things, automatically creating categories that over time reveal the common precursors of a fundamental commonality behind all phenomena. In some deep manner, all things are connected; all phenomena come into being and after their brief moment, fade back into the creative matrix. All phenomena arise from the holomovement, try to adapt to their environment so as to prolong their moment, and ultimately are reabsorbed as the eternal flux recycles and renews all.

One may prefer to conceptualize Time in some other way than Barbour has conceived it … certainly we all have our comfort zones of ‘reality’ … yet it doesn’t matter what we prefer reality to be, TRUTH is beyond preferential realities. One may shudder at the implications of Bohm’s vision that in essence you and I are no different than the froth of any other explicate phenomenon arising into temporal existence, and soon to be subsumed back into the generative implicate womb. One may also like to imagine that their thoughts and choices are their own, and are born full-fledged as a result of one’s fine-tuned intelligence and reasoning faculty, when on the contrary microgenesis points to the slow and subtle sculpting of each coping response to life’s challenges, up through the countless iterations of our forebears’ brains – the whole of our reptilian, mammalian and sapiens evolutionary inheritance – with the response in any now always necessarily having to take into account the environment wherein implementation is attempted. Night and day our challenges are processed in the sub-conscious and pre-conscious layered phases of our minds, until a tentative option is presented into awareness for fitness evaluation in this particular instant of ‘now’. Here the option that emerged from within can be pruned and modeled to deal with the constraints out there in the physical world.

Man only progresses by slowly elaborating from age to age the essence and the totality of a universe deposited within him.

(Pierre Teihard de Chardin – The Phenomenon Of Man)

In one sense each creature is but perishable ‘froth’ … in another sense each embodies the essential potential for eternal life, since each has been provided with a governing mind which itself is malleable, invisible and non-quantifiable, albeit temporarily conjoined with a form that is soon to return to dust. The perennial question thus arises: Is man actually finite or infinite? Man’s body form regenerates across time and has the appearance of relative durability, if not actual infinitude. Man’s mind – being evanescent – evolves and learns and captures deeper understandings of the hidden forces behind existence. However, as long as the significance of the finite is what dominates a man’s consciousness, then he will actually be this finite significance. But when a human being truly sees the new meaning that mankind need not be limited in this way he will actually cease to be limited. He will begin to open to the infinite, and act creatively in every phase of life, whether individual or collective.

For countless ages, mankind has engaged non-ordinary or altered states of consciousness (dream, meditative, reverie, medicated) to facilitate non-standard communications with loved ones who are no longer directly accessible.  These internally accessed communications or realizations – while being far from evidential in normal terms – may yet have profound personal validity and allow healing. Normally, the way we process reality is that prior to the preconscious phase of our mind alerting our normal consciousness, the input must pass threshold tests. If the material passes the tests and is considered sufficiently important then the preconscious will allow the input to move into our more rational levels of mind and eventually into consciousness and functional awareness. In the altered states, thresholds may be lower than normal since we do not have the waking overload of input from the five senses interrupting the flow of realization. Therefore, communication that may normally be able to occur in a dream, meditative, reverie or drowsy state, gets through easier than in the normal state of consciousness.

… And so, in his advancing years Adam had tried to peer deeply into origins and their emergence and process … not only of the manifest Universe, but also those of communication and of suffering, for those dynamics are part and parcel of the whole fabric of sentient life. For Adam was enamored of philosophy, the love of wisdom. And who has gained wisdom that has not struggled in communication, and tasted suffering.

Adam had studied and pondered greatly, and it came to him that, under normal conditions, mental processes are highly unreliable in the sense that there is often great variability in concentration when trying to think things through, and one runs up against barriers as the mind stalls when trying to deal with difficult issues. At such times, there may occur rapid changes in the form and content of one’s consciousness, as the mind repeatedly alternates away from emotionally loaded issues and toward some absentminded computational or mechanical task. During situations fraught with communicative difficulty or when recalling traumatic situations and reminisces, time itself seems to thicken, pool and slow … as opposed to the sense of quickening time passages when engaged in simpler tasks. This focal derailment frequently occurs when one has become melancholic or depressed because of mourning or grief over loss of an important relationship. Such a loss may feel like the excision of an essential part of the self, and when it happens, then one suffers unremittingly, one’s vitality is blunted, and time passes very slowly.

When awareness aborts to safer tasks, the more painful issue has not been abandoned, rather it’s the case that one can only bear so much pain at a time, so the mind protects the whole system by transferring the issue away from direct awareness back to a slower percolating ‘off-line’ pre-conscious phase where the matter can be nursed, away from the rigors of harsh reality and the direct glare of one’s reasoning faculties.

Preconscious modalities march to different time-rhythms than normal temporal frames, and when the traumatic issue is later phased back into consciousness, the narrative sculpted and offered up by the preconscious may then carry less emotional freight and allow for safer processing. Depending on its emotional valence, many transits of the issue may have to occur between the preconscious and conscious realms prior to the latter’s acceptance and closure. Time doesn’t heal all losses, yet may allow the strengthening of one’s psychic faculties to allow the memory and processing of formerly intolerable issues to be experienced in normal time without one succumbing to the time-thickening, enervating effects of melancholia and depression.

And as to real Origins? Wouldn’t it be a twist if there were no such things … that it’s just unending emergence and recession, creativity all the way down.

REFERENCES:

(1) (David Eagleman – acclaimed neuroscientist, in dialogue with Raymond Tallis - British philosopher, secular humanist, poet, cultural critic and retired medical doctor http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/apr/29/neuroscience-david-eagleman-raymond-tallis

(2) see http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge60.html for an enlightening interview with physicist Julian Barbour about “Time”

(3) Mark Germine, M.D. psychiatrist & founder, Institute for Psychoscience, California - http://goertzel.org/dynapsyc/2007/holomind.htm

(4) For a very comprehensive treatment of David Bohm’s work on wholeness and the holomovemt, see Will Keepin’s essay entitled River of Truth – The Lifework of David Bohm; additional insights into the breadth and depth of Bohm’s interests are in his last paper prior to his fatal heart attack - “Soma- Significance: A New Notion of the Relationship Between the Physical and the Mental”

(5) For the Brown-Bradford interviews, see http://www.psychoscience.net/interviews_with_jason_brown.htm and http://www.psychoscience.net/interviews_with_jason_brownII.htm

Posted June 4^th, 2012

Keith and Marnie Elliott’s “REMEDY” Site

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