Hologram, Ecogram, Mandala, Part I

Contemplations on the Obsolescence of Contemporary Education, the Problems of Western Languages, and the Need for Better Ways of Knowing, Being, Living, and Loving

Part I

To call contemporary education obsolete can sound inflammatory or exaggerated. We face some significant challenges though, and it behooves us to think with care. To what extent can we sincerely admit the problems with contemporary education in the dominant culture?

Various traditions of LoveWisdom emphasize the troubling fact that many of the most significant limitations in our thought, speech, and action remain stubbornly invisible to us. Our lives get swept up in the energetic rivers and tides of habit, and we become embedded in ecologies of mind that may not nurture the conditions of life, may close off possibilities and potentials for ourselves, others, and the world—possibilities and potentials we very much need in order to rejuvenate ourselves and the world, and in order to not only heal but to evolve.

In the technical way of putting it, we can say we live an outdated “epistemology,” an outdated way of knowing. LoveWisdom has to do with our basic sense of how to know, what to know, who we are, what the world is. An unskillful or unrealistic way of knowing things and doing things goes altogether with an unskillful or unrealistic education.

The education most of us receive in the dominant culture seems obsolete, unskillful, and unrealistic from a scientific and philosophical perspective—to say nothing of its political, economic, and social obsolescence.

Perhaps the simplest way to characterize the obsolete nature of education comes to recognizing that education can only have one purpose: Education must help us cultivate the whole of life onward, in the context of helping us realize our own most precious values and potentials. Since education can only happen in, through, and as experience, we could also say that education must help us to gift, to ourselves and to the world, what the philosopher John Dewey called consummatory experiences—experiences that, in some sense, bring to fruition our highest values and most mysterious potentials.

From this perspective, we can see the unskillfulness of our education in the degraded ecologies of our world, in the degraded economies, in the unprecedented inequality, in the political enmity, and in the pervasive presence of jobs, patterns of consumption, and ways of living that the majority of people don’t find deeply meaningful. We cannot say we skillfully cultivate the whole of life onward as we find ourselves in the midst of a mass extinction, and we cannot call our experience consummatory as it expresses fragmentation and a crisis of meaning.

That loss of meaning matters a great deal, and we don’t seem to grapple with it directly enough. How many people hate their jobs? How many people dislike their jobs? How many people have to rationalize jobs that wouldn’t exist in a healthier culture? How many people experience a feeling that somehow their life should be more than it is, and that this more has nothing really to do with making more money, buying more stuff?

Let’s remind ourselves of the challenge that comes in asking such questions. We noted a moment ago that the most significant limitations in our whole way of life stubbornly resist perception. When we ask or answer questions about our culture, when we try to justify or criticize things in our life as individuals and as a society, we cannot sense the invisible things that might dramatically change the way we ask those questions, the questions we ask, the way we would answer, the things we would think important.

Let’s try and get at the invisible.

In some sense we cannot do it. But let’s draw nearer to it, open up some spaciousness in the soul.

We might accomplish that with an analogy, depending on how carefully we work with it. Though the basic analogy has appeared before, we could work with it in a deeper and more nuanced way and learn something valuable.

Let’s say we make a photographic image in the old-school way, using non-digital media, like film or a photographic plate. We can develop the plate or the film and produce what is called a negative—not a print, but the developed medium that recorded the image.

Importantly, once we have that negative, even if we don’t hold it up to a light source, we can often recognize an image. But when we hold it up to the light, the image may become even clearer. We can see the image in the negative, and we could then use the negative to make a print using ordinary light.

Let’s say we cut the film or photographic plate in half. If we cut the negative in half, we get only half the image in each piece. If I make an image of you, and we cut the image in half, we will see only half of you in each piece of the negative. It’s essential to recognize this fundamental fact.

As more and more people have become aware, a hologram presents a radically shifted situation, arising as it does from a fundamentally different process than the one used to make a regular photograph. First of all, the holographic process makes use of coherent light (for instance, a laser), while ordinary photography makes use of incoherent light.

Let’s make this a little clearer. The physicist and philosopher David Bohm explains the importance of coherence this way:

Ordinary light is called “incoherent,” which means that it is going in all sorts of directions, and the light waves are not in phase with each other so they don’t build up. But a laser produces a very intense beam which is coherent. The light waves build up strength because they are all going in the same direction. This beam can do all sorts of things that ordinary light cannot. (On Dialogue, p. 33)

A laser can travel long distances in a focused, coherent beam, and the energy of coherence allows the laser to burn through an obstacle that would completely block ordinary light.

We can also use a laser to make a special kind of photograph, known as a hologram. We make a hologram by shining laser light onto whatever we want to make an image of. We require a great deal of stillness for this process to work, because of the coherence of the laser. That’s a fairly key detail. If we lack stillness, we get a fuzzy hologram. Stillness.

There are different kinds of holograms, but the laser hologram we have in mind here relies on a laser beam that gets split. Half the beam shines onto the subject of the hologram (say, an apple), and the other half goes to the holographic plate (i.e. the “film” we use to record the image). The beam that shines on the apple bounces off of it and meets up with its other half at the holographic plate. These two laser beams then intermingle in what is called a diffraction pattern or interference pattern.

Set-up for making a hologram

That’s a key detail. Even if you find some of the holographic principle confusing, keep this in mind: If we look at the holographic plate (the “film” on which the image is held), we see diffraction patterns, not an image. We can only see the image of the apple if we shine the laser light through the hologram.

This usually receives too little emphasis.

It may help us a great deal to sit with the fact that, if we look at a holographic negative, in the context of ordinary, incoherent light, it will look like nonsense to our ordinary, habit-laden eyes. We can usefully see our current cultural context as a space of incoherent light. We think that since we have light, we can shine it wherever we like, and all will be revealed. Not so with a hologram. In ordinary light, we see nothing that looks meaningful. A deeper, implicit order remains hidden to us.

The way the holographic image might look . . . This could be an apple, a lion, a cube, a butterfly—-no way to tell by looking at it with incoherent light.

We may go so far as to say the totality of the hologram is inconceivable to us. And, again, with a classic hologram, ordinary incoherent light will not help, no matter how bright. We need to know how to know the image, and that requires a coherent light source, like a laser. Coherence made the image, and coherence reveals it. And that image, moreover, appears in three-dimensions, not two.

We now have another way to state the basic unskillfulness or obsolescence of education: Education fails to make us congruent or coherent with ourselves, with each other, and with the world. It does not even have this as its central aim. And thus it also fails to make the world come alive for us in all its fullness, and it tends to flatten something much more spacious and alive than our incoherent experience can reveal.

Education does aim to make us congruent, as far as possible, with the structures of power in the dominant culture. But those structures are themselves incongruent—with each of us, with us as a community, and with the world and its spiritual and ecological realities. Thus, education essential becomes fragmented and fragmenting.

Bohm offers us the following suggestions, which similarly connect coherence, education, and culture:

. . . you could say that our ordinary thought in society is incoherent—it is going in all sorts of directions, with thoughts conflicting and canceling each other out. But if people were to think together in a coherent way, it would have tremendous power. That’s the suggestion. If we have a dialogue situation—a group which has sustained dialogue for quite a while in which people get to know each other, and so on—then we might have such a coherent movement of thought, a coherent movement of communication. It would be coherent not only at the level we recognize, but at the tacit level, at the level for which we have only a vague feeling. That would be more important.

 “Tacit” means that which is unspoken, which cannot be described—like the knowledge required to ride a bicycle. It is the actual knowledge, and it may be coherent or not. I am proposing that thought is actually a subtle tacit process. The concrete process of thinking is very tacit. The meaning is basically tacit.

 And what we can say explicitly is only a very small part of it. I think we all realize that we do almost everything by this sort of tacit knowledge. Thought is emerging from the tacit ground, and any fundamental change in thought will come from the tacit ground. So if we are communicating at the tacit level, then maybe thought is changing.

 The tacit process is common. It is shared. The sharing is not merely the explicit communication and the body language and all that, which are part of it, but there is also a deeper tacit process which is common. I think the whole human race knew this for a million years; and then in five thousand years of civilization we have lost it, because our societies got too big to carry it out. But now we have to get started again, because it has become urgent that we communicate. We have to share our consciousness and to be able to think together, in order to do intelligently whatever is necessary. If we begin to confront what’s going on in a dialogue group, we sort of have the nucleus of what’s going on in all society. When you are by yourself you miss quite a bit of that; even one-on-one you don’t really get it. (On Dialogue, pp. 33-4)

If we contemplate with care, we could begin to sense that we can say all of this another way: We properly call our education (and thus a certain dimension or basic current of our culture) obsolete because it lacks a vitalizing vision of a healthy mind, a healing heart, and a holy cosmos—we could add, a holistic mind, a happy heart, and a wondrous,  interwoven cosmos . . . these things all go together.

Why put it that way? First, let’s take a breath at the mention of holiness. We need a sense of the sacred that allows atheist, theist, and non-theist to share a common sensibility. “Holy” has the same etymological root as “healthy,” “healing,” and “holistic”. In this context, it also carries a connotation of sacredness, meaningfulness.

Secondly, Bohm implies that we function on the basis of an unhealthy, incoherent mind, and thus our shared sense of meaning and our ability to think creatively and wisely together gets compromised. This happens because we don’t have a shared sense of what a healthy mind is, what a coherent culture and manner of thinking, speaking, and acting are. We need to heal this situation—by means of a healthy mind.

A healthy mind means, in practical terms, a kind of attunement, atonement, congruence, synchronization, or coherence of mind, heart, body, world, and cosmos. It is synchronicity itself, our life as a mandala rather than as a point or an object or even a subject.

We can begin to sense this as clearly in our own lives as we can in the culture at large—though it takes some practice, some stillness, to bring out the fullness of our own and our culture’s incoherence. Of course, we may readily concede that the culture at large seems incoherent with our professed values. But it takes some practice in coherence to sense this more fully, and it takes courage to face this incoherence in our culture and in ourselves.

Think about a time when you had to do something you didn’t want to do. The part of us that doesn’t want to do the thing feels out of congruence with the part that does it. We feel split, fragmented. In the worst case, this creates a psychotic episode, a breakdown. But even in the best case it creates neurosis, suffering, and all sorts of negative side-effects. We might feel like we need alcohol or some kind of distraction to numb our discomfort. We might start acting out.

When we live incongruently, we get captured by psychological complexes, which we should understand as arising not only in the individual psyche but also in the collective psyche. A psychological “complex” is a persistent constellation of connections, a habitual way of practicing and realizing something that might be unskillful, limited, and limiting in harmful ways, and it tends to hold us at first in an unconscious way. That means we are not conscious of it, and at the level of conscious awareness we have other explanations for our behavior—often enough, explanations that blame others or blame fate. Such a complex is not merely “in” us, but must manifest outside us in various ways. Moreover, the unhealthy culture of necessity embeds us in complexes of incongruence.

Jung framed an essential aspect of this as follows: “The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate.” This rule applies in all sorts of life situations, and we may find that what appears like an “accident” over which we had no control . . . if we could reflect deeply enough, perhaps with the help of a guide, and often only by means of certain arts of awareness that would allow us to see it, we might find a troubling synchronicity, an unsettling sense that the “accident” was no mere accident. In the most general sense, the state of the world reflects the state of our souls.

We come here to something like an essential dimension in our vital need for education that produces coherence, congruence, and attunement, and we touch a kind of mandala connecting education, congruence, coherence, attunement, atonement, healing, sacredness, and mystery.

Sacredness means, “making holy”. It seems essential for us to find ways of making the world holy, revered, and deeply appreciated by each of us, which means helping and allowing the world to be mutually nourishing, mutually illuminating, and mutually liberating, for all beings. This doesn’t mean anything “religious” in a pejorative, restrictive, or conventional sense. It means healing ourselves, especially given that we find ourselves in a crisis. We can rightly frame the ecological catastrophe as a crisis of sacredness, a crisis of reverence, a crisis of meaning. The same holds for the extraordinary wealth inequality, the resurgence of nationalism, the countless “civilized” forms of violence and aggression in our world.

Some of this may seem strange. Let’s try and stay with it.

How did we get from holograms to sacredness? It has to do with congruence. Let’s pause with respect to sacredness. It will help to return to holograms, and then to come back again to the sacred.

One of the craziest things about a hologram has now become rather broadly discussed, but we can still learn from it: If we cut the holographic film or holographic plate in half, we get two pieces, and—radically unlike a normal photograph—each piece contains the whole image (something akin to the Net of Indra) It is not two halves, but two wholes. If we cut those two wholes in half, we will not have four pieces, but four wholes.

The whole world in each sip of water.

Again, if we make a hologram of an apple, and we look at the film plate, we would only see a diffraction pattern. It doesn’t look anything like an apple or even a “scrambled up” apple. If we shine a coherent light through the plate, we get a 3-dimensional apple. If we cut the plate in half, and we shine a light through just that half, we still get a whole 3-dimensional apple. The same would happen if we cut the holographic plate into four, eight, or more pieces. Shining light through any of those “pieces”would reveal a whole apple.

Now, imagine that we could make a hologram of a place in Nature, maybe one with a broad view in the background. Just after we make that image, a beautiful butterfly lands enters the scence. Perhaps we notice it, or perhaps we don’t In any case, we find ourselves inspired to make another image, even if we don’t know why. Maybe we have come to enough stillness in our heart-mind-body-world that we intimately sense this butterfly, and we sense something mysterious in the whole.

If we made ordinary photographs of this scene, with and without the butterfly, we would think that just one part of the image had changed, namely the place where the butterfly is. But looking at the diffraction patterns of the two images, they are totally different. We know that if we take the image with the butterfly and cut it in half, each half contains the whole image. We could cut that half in half, and again the whole image would be there. Thus, the little butterfly is in the whole image. The butterfly affected every aspect of the whole. The butterfly is interwoven into the whole.

Check your own intuitions. Does it seem like, in the practice of everyday life, you live as if the world functions like ordinary film, or like a hologram? If we are honest and rigorous about what it means to know and what we can claim to know on the basis of lived experience, it seems we have such a limiting and limited view that we don’t truly wonderstand that the presence (or absence) of the butterfly changes everything. Wonderstanding the butterfly in, through, and as the mandala principle involves opening up to the synchronicity of butterfly, the way each butterfly already ruptures the ordinary barriers of space and time. It involves a deep practice and realization, one that goes against the habits ingrained by education in the dominant culture.

The dominant cultures educates us to live and think as if the world were like an ordinary photograph. Such a view has certainly received intellectual criticism—and how could it not if things don’t seem to actually be that way? For instance, Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature could have been called Philosophy and the Photographic Image of Nature. Even though some people may agree with some, much, or even all of the spirit or substance of Rorty’s critique, we still practice and realize a representational theory of mind and a correspondence theory of truth.

In practical terms, we live in a photograph, not in a living ecological hologram (an ecogram—which actually means a dynamic mandala). In most cases, we live as if we make an image “in the brain,” and we then check to see how well the image matches up to reality. Some of us like to pretend this isn’t the case, and, to say it again, we may make all sorts of intellectual criticisms about it, as we do with theories of language and other things based on such a feel for life. But we miss that this is a feel for life, a style of mind (or a mindset, a style of consciousness) that no amount of intellectual critique seems likely to uproot.

Functionally, we behave as if we have a brain that receives “data” from the “outside” “world,” and we hide behind our own skin, not aware that the outside world really does come alive “in” us—that our heart is where all beings come alive and alove. We are hooked by an “image,” an image that itself embodies distance rather than intimacy, and one that thus keeps us outside of the symbolic/religious/spiritual/philosophical life we need, a life of vitalizing imagination, which does not mean mere fancy or whimsy but the visionary capacity of intelligence. An image in the proper sense is not restrained to the “visual”.

It may prove useful to summarize some of our critical questions at this point, as we will continue to contemplate them in the next few installments on this theme of the hologram, the ecogram, and the mandala:

1) Does our culture (and thus our education) teach us to relate to life in the manner of a photograph, or does it teach us to relate to life (and thus ourselves) in the manner of a hologram, ecogram, or mandala? We must speak in practical terms, not in terms of ideals. How does it teach us to function?

2) Does our culture teach us that knowledge depends on “how things are,” or does it teach us that knowledge depends on the process by which we come to know? Note that this is not the same as the post-truth catastrophe that knowledge is whatever we “decide” or “claim,” but that it recognizes the profound insights of systems science and systems philosophy.

3) Given the above (though, all these questions go together), does our culture teach us the importance of the quality of our being as part of how we know, live, and love—things like clarity of mind, capacity for nondistraction, effective action (nondoing), and so on—and does it teach us practices for developing a skillful and realistic quality of mind, heart, body, and world? Or do we merely hear admonishments to “pay attention” and “get control of yourself,” with no concrete instruction for how to do this, and no serious inquiry and teaching about how this relates to skillfully knowing the world, living with others, and creating a healthy culture?

4) Does our culture give us clear, vitalizing images of a healthy mind, and does it offer concepts and practices for realizing it? And does this image of a healthy mind come embedded in, through, as a basic style of consciousness that relates to life in the manner of a photograph, or in the manner of a hologram, ecogram, or mandala?

5) Does our culture teach us to live in a Newtonian, mechanistic universe, or does it teach us to live in a participatory Cosmos?

6) Does our culture raise atomized individuals who must compete for scarce resources, or does it raise relational, cooperative beings who co-create a world in such a way as to rejuvenate resources to provide for all?

7) Do our habits of thought, speech, and action tend toward and from fragmentation or toward and from holism? Consider, for instance, the way we set up academic departments, the nature of specialization, the subject-object habits of speaking, and the preponderance of nouns in the languages of the dominant culture. We will get to these issues of language in more detail later, but how does it seem from an intuitive level?

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