Hologram, Ecogram, Mandala, Part II

Returning to the hologram, we could imagine making a holographic movie. This would likely require a lot of energy, since the kind of hologram we have spoken about demands stillness, and overcoming that need for relative stillness would require pulses of intense energy. We can think of this as mainly a thought experiment, and we can usefully realize that, in the case of a holographic movie, the whole pattern shifts, moment to moment, even if something small comes in from outside of the frame.

A single leaf falling in the scene would transform the entire scene at once. Every rustle of wind, every shift of light would change the whole scene. And if we could sense the living hologram of that scene, sense it without having to resort to a hologram but instead to somehow touch the intimacy of the living interwovenness of things—sense it in ceaseless transformation as everything moves, grows, shifts, thinks, dreams, dances its way into being—then we ourselves would become liberated into that fuller ecology of mind.

In our own lives, as a matter of habit, we make barriers with the mind. We block our capacity to sense this living interwovenness. We make barriers against sensing, barriers against reality, barriers against interwovenness, barriers between ourselves and the nonduality of unity and diversity, self and other.

The butterfly has its own life, and yet it cannot have its own life without its interwovenness, without your life and my life. The butterfly cannot exist without trees, wind, grass, sun, moon, river, human. Job had to learn this lesson as well: We can’t manipulate the World, and even the Divine finds the World startling and wondrous—because of its inconceivability. The World is not an object to be known, and yet this marks our ordinary process of inquiry. Not so in the traditions of LoveWisdom, in which the barrier between knower and known eventually burns away in the passion of practice.

The Divine made us in the Image of the Divine. We need a whole additional post to reflect on this. But for now could we not sense that the Divine had to have made the World in the Image of the Divine as well? How else could we live here? How else could the World manifest as so fitted to us, so intimately well-fitted that we breathe the air, have microbes all over us and in us, that we can eat the fruits and flesh of this place, drink the water, enjoy the sun? And can we not sense that the World, too, must therefore be inconceivable?

Let us make a clear suggestion: We can speak about “the Divine” without needing to get “religious” in a conventional sense. We can think of this “Divine” in a way that deeply resonates with ourselves and the World. This does not let us go so far as to think of “the Divine” in any old way we please, in a manner of self-styled thinking. But, we can certainly think of it, think with it, in ways that transcend the limited and even traumatizing views the dominant culture still feels active within it.

In other words, a genuine sense of sacredness remains available to all of us, a sense of sacredness that can help constitute a common ground for all human cultures, and thus the whole of Nature-Culture. This sense of sacredness can come alive and alove in the atheist as well as the theist, the scientist and the monk, the conservative and the liberal. It can dispel confusion and conquest consciousness. But only if we approach it with skillful and realistic skepticism.

G.K. Chesterton offers some delightful contemplations on “the Divine” that came from the inspiration of the Book of Job, contemplations that seem valuable in general, and somehow fitting in our present inquiry:

Everywhere else, then, the Old Testament positively rejoices in the obliteration of man in comparison with the divine purpose. The book of Job stands definitely alone because the book of Job definitely asks, “But what is the purpose of God? Is it worth the sacrifice even of our miserable humanity? Of course, it is easy enough to wipe out our own paltry wills for the sake of a will that is grander and kinder. But is it grander and kinder? Let God use His tools; let God break His tools. But what is He doing, and what are they being broken for?” It is because of this question that we have to attack as a philosophical riddle the riddle of the book of Job. 

. . . . philosophy is either eternal or it is not philosophy. . . The modern habit of saying “Every man has a different philosophy; this is my philosophy and it suits me” – the habit of saying this is mere weak-mindedness. A cosmic philosophy is not constructed to fit a man; a cosmic philosophy is constructed to fit a cosmos. A man can no more possess a private religion than he can possess a private sun and moon. 

The first of the intellectual beauties of the book of Job is that it is all concerned with this desire to know the actuality; the desire to know what is, and not merely what seems. . . .  

When, at the end of the poem, God enters (somewhat abruptly), is struck the sudden and splendid note which makes the thing as great as it is. All the human beings through the story, and Job especially, have been asking questions of God. A more trivial poet would have made God enter in some sense or other in order to answer the questions. By a touch truly to be called inspired, when God enters, it is to ask a number of questions on His own account. In this drama of skepticism God Himself takes up the role of skeptic. He does what all the great voices defending religion have always done. He does, for instance, what Socrates did. . . . He seems to say that if it comes to asking questions, He can ask some question which will fling down and flatten out all conceivable human questioners. . . . The everlasting adopts an enormous and sardonic humility. He is quite willing to be prosecuted. He only asks for the right which every prosecuted person possesses; he asks to be allowed to cross-examine the witness for the prosecution. And  . . . the first question, essentially speaking, which He asks of Job is the question that any criminal accused by Job would be most entitled to ask. He asks Job who he is. And Job, being a man of candid intellect, takes a little time to consider, and comes to the conclusion that he does not know. 

This is the first great fact to notice about the speech of God, which is the culmination of the inquiry. It represents all human skeptics routed by a higher skepticism. It is this method, used sometimes by supreme and sometimes by mediocre minds, that has ever since been the logical weapon of the true mystic. . . . In dealing with the arrogant asserter of doubt, it is not the right method to tell him to stop doubting. It is rather the right method to tell him to go on doubting, to doubt a little more, to doubt every day newer and wilder things in the universe, until at last, by some strange enlightenment, he may begin to doubt himself.

This, I say, is the first fact touching the speech; the fine inspiration by which God comes in at the end, not to answer riddles, but to propound them. The other great fact which, taken together with this one, makes the whole work religious instead of merely philosophical is that other great surprise which makes Job suddenly satisfied with the mere presentation of something impenetrable. . . . The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man. 

. . . . God says, in effect, that if there is one fine thing about the world, as far as men are concerned, it is that it cannot be explained. He insists on the inexplicableness of everything. “Hath the rain a father?. . .Out of whose womb came the ice?” (38:28f). . . . To startle man, God becomes for an instant a blasphemer; one might almost say that God becomes for an instant an atheist. He unrolls before Job a long panorama of created things, the horse, the eagle, the raven, the wild ass, the peacock, the ostrich, the crocodile. He so describes each of them that it sounds like a monster walking in the sun. The whole is a sort of psalm or rhapsody of the sense of wonder. The maker of all things is astonished at the things he has Himself made. 

. . . . Instead of proving to Job that it is an explicable world, He insists that it is a much stranger world than Job ever thought it was. Lastly, the poet has achieved in this speech, with that unconscious artistic accuracy found in so many of the simpler epics, another and much more delicate thing. Without once relaxing the rigid impenetrability of Jehovah in His deliberate declaration, he has contrived to let fall here and there in the metaphors, in the parenthetical imagery, sudden and splendid suggestions that the secret of God is a bright and not a sad one . . . 

It would be difficult to praise too highly, in a purely poetical sense, the instinctive exactitude and ease with which these more optimistic insinuations are let fall in other connections, as if the Almighty Himself were scarcely aware that He was letting them out. For instance, there is that famous passage where Jehovah, with devastating sarcasm, asks Job where he was when the foundations of the world were laid, and then (as if merely fixing a date) mentions the time when the sons of God shouted for joy (38:4-7). One cannot help feeling, even upon this meager information, that they must have had something to shout about. . . . 

Nothing could be better, artistically speaking, than this optimism breaking though agnosticism like fiery gold round the edges of a black cloud. . . . 

. . . . I do not know, and I doubt whether even scholars know, if the book of Job had a great effect or had any effect upon the after development of Jewish thought. But if it did have any effect it may have saved them from an enormous collapse and decay. Here in this book the question is really asked whether God invariably punishes vice with terrestrial punishment and rewards virtue with terrestrial prosperity. If the Jews had answered that question wrongly they might have lost all their after influence in human history. They might have sunk even down to the level of modern well-educated society. For when once people have begun to believe that prosperity is the reward of virtue, their next calamity is obvious. If prosperity is regarded as the reward of virtue it will be regarded as the symptom of virtue. Men will leave off the heavy task of making good men successful. He will adopt the easier task of making out successful men good. This, which has happened throughout modern commerce and journalism, is the ultimate Nemesis of the wicked optimism of the comforters of Job. If the Jews could be saved from it, the book of Job saved them. (https://www.chesterton.org/introduction-to-job/)

Can anything in this book save us as well?

Do we live, learn, and love a cosmic philosophy, or merely a philosophy of opinion?

Have we started to believe, as fervently as the people of Athens whom Socrates questioned, that rich people must have wisdom and virtue—because they are rich?

Chesterton touches here on the Great Doubt of the traditions of LoveWisdom. We could put the obsolescence of contemporary education as simply as this: It fails to teach us Great Doubt—not the little doubts of academia, the hyper-critical intellectualism and anti-intellectualism that poses as skepticism, doubt, individuality, and self-reliance, but the Great Doubt of the mystic.

We must go beyond little doubts, including the paralyzing self-doubt that plagues so many in the dominant culture. We must doubt so deeply we begin to wonder who we are—really who we are . . . and then become silent in the admission we do not know. We suspend ourselves in a liminal space, suspend ourselves between “this” and “that,” between our ordinary “known” and “unknown,” our habitual “right” and “wrong,” “us” and “them”. We become spiritual skeptics.

The spiritual skeptic has become an endangered species. A true skeptic seeks to open us, to open the heart, to open the mind, the body, the World. They offer an invitation into Wonder—not fear and doubt in the typical sense, but a Great Doubt, an enlivening Wonder that holds the mind in well-put-togetherness, the kind of Doubt that holds boredom and laziness at bay.  

The original Greek word σκέπτομαι (skeptomai) had to do with inquiry, investigation, searching-into. It does not seem coherent to refers to today’s “skeptic” as a searcher. More coherently, we could call them fearful debunkers, or zealots of rationality and scientism.

 The original, spiritual Skeptic practiced suspense, which mean a suspense of beliefs and presuppositions. Such a suspense feels suspenseful—passionate, enlivening, quickening—because it may lead us into genuine Wonder (we may recall here Emerson’s invitation into unsettlement and surprise—which means, in this context, Wonder). Today’s skeptic suspends nothing they cling to—least of all their sense of self. They do not suspend any doubt, but criticize everything from the standpoint of “science” (or some other dogma) as a metaphysical (or, depending on the dogma, a social, political, or economic) certainty.

The old saying goes, “Great Doubt, Great Awakening; small doubt, small awakening; no doubt, no awakening.”

In place of Great Doubt, we have practiced self-doubt and the post-truth catastrophe. We pretend to doubt many things, but we lack true self-confidence, lack profound self-awareness and intimacy with reality, and we assert countless dogmatic beliefs as fact, facts we value because we like them, not because we have genuinely inquired and lived into them.

The philosopher Boshan said that all sorts of spiritual ailments will set in when we cannot rouse the Great Doubt. If we cannot rouse this most intimate Doubt, we may fall into suppressing our emotions (perhaps pretending we are calm, collected, “enlightened”), indulging in all manner of hedonism and adrenaline-seeking, indulging in speculations of all kinds, and essentially every kind of spiritual materialism, including that of thinking ourselves wise when we are not, thinking we know it all because we can google things, watch youtube videos, read books, and so on.

How could we overcome this? Shifting traditions, the Divine of the Old Testament seems to imply that Job could learn a lot by simply wondering at Creation, studying and learning from the sentient beings inhabiting it with great natural perfection:

1 Do you know when the mountain goats give birth?

    Do you watch when the doe bears her fawn?

2 Do you count the months till they bear?

    Do you know the time they give birth?

3 They crouch down and bring forth their young;

    their labor pains are ended.

4 Their young thrive and grow strong in the wilds;

    they leave and do not return.

 5 Who let the wild donkey go free?

    Who untied its ropes?

6 I gave it the wasteland as its home,

    the salt flats as its habitat.

7 It laughs at the commotion in the town;

    it does not hear a driver’s shout.

8 It ranges the hills for its pasture

    and searches for any green thing. . . .

19 Do you give the horse its strength

    or clothe its neck with a flowing mane?

20 Do you make it leap like a locust,

    striking terror with its proud snorting?

21 It paws fiercely, rejoicing in its strength,

    and charges into the fray.

22 It laughs at fear, afraid of nothing;

    it does not shy away from the sword. . . .

26 Does the hawk take flight by your wisdom

    and spread its wings toward the south?

27 Does the eagle soar at your command

    and build its nest on high?

28 It dwells on a cliff and stays there at night;

    a rocky crag is its stronghold.

But Boshan would return us to the Divine’s original question to Job: Who are you? And then he would point to the Divine’s Great Questioning of the whole of existence, the very thing Chesteron marvels at. For Boshan, we can immediately enter Great Doubt if we sincerely confront the mystery of life and death. The Divine essentially asks, “Where did all this come from? Where will it go? What is it for? Where did you come from? Where will you go? What are you for?” The obsolescence of our education comes to this: A failure to make those questions salient and central, and a failure to provide a matrix of practice for entering those questions with fierce yet tender intimacy.

Though greater attunement remains possible in the photo above and the one below, notice how the human architecture seeks harmony with “the environment”. In all we do, including our architecture and daily life, we can aim for the nonduality of Nature-Culture, a profound and thoroughgoing attunement with a healthy, skillful, and realistic cosmic philosophy.

Boshan put it this way:

In Zen practice, the essential point is to arouse Doubt. What is this Doubt? For example, when you are born, where do you come from? You cannot help but remain in doubt about this. When you die, where do you go? Again, you cannot help but remain in doubt. Since you cannot pierce this barrier of life-and-death, suddenly the Doubt will coalesce right before your eyes. Try to put it down, you cannot; try to push it away, you cannot. Eventually this Doubt Block will be broken through and you’ll realize what a worthless notion is life-and-death– ha! As the old worthies said: “Great Doubt, Great Awakening; small doubt, small awakening; no doubt, no awakening.”

We speak here, as one way of putting it, of the difference between a culture in which the best things can’t be told, and one in which most things worth knowing can simply be googled, and then, perhaps, ordered on that website that shouldn’t be allowed to have the name of a rain forest.

Boshan might put the obsolescence of our education this way: It fails to awaken a passion in us—not a “drive” for “success,” nor any craving for material solutions, but a passion for our own lives, a passion for finding out for ourselves how things really are, not merely to have politicized dogmas and neurotic fears which we take for facts. Boshan believed that Great Doubt offered a necessary medicine for healing our basic confusion, and the spiritual laziness, boredom, and all manner of things that waste our lives and keep us from properly addressing that confusion.

The sage tells us the World is invonceivable—beyond worthless notions like birth and death, democrat and republican, capitalist and socialist—and yet we participate in it, intimately. Again, the butterfly has its own life, and it cannot have its own life without its interwovenness, without your life and my life. Nor can you and I have our lives without the butterfly—hence the grave danger of our current large-scale effort to exterminate species, including many species of butterfly. We do not see how our activity degrades the landscape of our own soul, degrades the ecologies of our own mind.

In a similar manner, it seems that you exist “over there,” which for you is “here”. I exist “here,” but it is your “there”.

If we could sit at a table together and enjoy some tea, I could ask, “Where am I?” You would naturally point at me and say, “You are there.” But, in an important sense, I am located at your “here,” and you would do better to point at “yourself,” saying, “You are here.” You might do even better and just laugh at the question.

Our cognitive science indicates that we show up for each other in the intimacy of awareness, in a nonlocal way. But our localized way of knowing and being, the one we naïvely practice and realize, gives us a world of parts, times, fragmentations, localizations, incoherencies, incongruencies. and barriers—borders to defend, bank accounts to arrange, factories to own, trinkets to collect, weapons to amass.

Arts of Awareness can facilitate our self-liberation into larger ecologies of mind, and into a more skillful mind of ecology.

By means of practices of what we might call Liminal Awareness or Ecosensual Awareness, a more primordial awareness practiced and realized by means of the cultivation of general Arts of Awareness (e.g. meditation, meditative art practice, dream work, spiritual dialogue, Gendlin’s focusing technique, and so on . . . all dependent on proper contextualization in a holistic, cosmic philosophy of life), we can escape this sort of obsolete thinking, liberating ourselves into larger ecologies of mind, and into greater health and wholeness, coherence and congruence, insight and inspirations that goes beyond any mindless assertion that “we are all one,” or “thinking outside the box,” or any number of other cogent-sounding perpetuations of insanity.

Awakening an Ecosensual, Liminal, or Primordial Awareness.

Nevertheless, a not-two-not-one that seems important to practice and realize, which allows us to correct an error. What error?

We can put our “fundamental error” in a number of ways. Gregory Bateson spent much of his life trying to make our fundamental error evident, and encouraging us to heal that error. Bateson’s book, Mind and Nature, A Necessary Unity, gets at some key issues that make our current culture and education obsolete. Among other things, we could consider obsolete any culture that doesn’t root itself in the practice and realization of the nonduality of Mind and Nature, Nature and Culture. In that book, Bateson wrote the following:

We are beginning to play with ideas of ecology, and although we immediately trivialize these ideas into commerce or politics, there is at least an impulse still in the human breast to unify and thereby sanctify the total natural world, of which we are.

            Observe, however, that there have been, and still are, in the world many different and even contrasting epistemologies which have been alike in stressing an ultimate unity, and, although this is less sure, which have also stressed the notion that ultimate unity is aesthetic. The uniformity of these views gives hope that perhaps the great authority of quantitative science may be insufficient to deny an ultimate unifying beauty.

            I hold to the presupposition that our loss of the sense of aesthetic unity was, quite simply, an epistemological mistake. I believe that that mistake may be more serious that all the minor insanities that characterize those older epistemologies which agreed upon the fundamental unity. (p.18)

Here he describes the loss of a sense of unity as a loss of an aesthetic and sacred sensibility, and as an epistemological mistake, a mistake in how we know ourselves and the world. That means this mistake affects science too, as well as politics, economics, the arts, and so on. It’s pervasive enough that we could call it a fundamental or foundational error, perhaps central to an active misknowing of ourselves and reality.

We can all—in our own ways, in our own religious, spiritual, and philosophical traditions—we can all agree that we share the possibility, the potential of touching a sacredness in Nature and in ourselves.

“Just like me! Those beings came from their mother, and they only want to feel happy and free.”

“Just like me, they need water and connectedness.”

Just like me, they take care of each other.”

“Just like me, their life is precarious, and it depends on mysteries of transformation.”

“Just like me . . . just like me . . .” A thought that de-centers the ego, bringing us from ego-centrism to eco-centrism, from atomization and competition, to intimacy and co-creation.

It may prove wise to consider how Bateson and other non-“religious” thinkers can help all of us, theist and atheist alike, to productively work with a sense of sacredness, shifting our understanding of how what we might call religion or spirituality might play a vital role in a better way of knowing.

But let us consider another way of getting at or point to the error Bateson has in mind. In this example we will get closer to issues of language, because the error we have in mind got encoded into our language. That makes it all the more insidious, since our language will then seduce us into continually making this error. It comes from a whole style of thought, and correcting it means transcending that style of thought and bringing another way of thinking into being.

Though all philosophers struggle with terms in one way or another, John Dewey gives us an example of one who struggled with them in relationship to this need for a revolution in our thinking. In a letter to Arthur Bentley, his collaborator on the major work, Knowing and the Known, Dewey wrote,

“Organism” as “an organized body” is as late as the middle of the nineteenth century; harmless enough as a synonym for a living creature, but I’d be inclined to bet that it was through use in anatomical study of the living body that “organism” got so overloaded on the isolated side that even the hyphenated expression, organism-environment, fails to strike people as a name for what anyone can directly see when he opens his eyes. . . . I am inclined to think we should try to find and use a word that wouldn’t be handicapped, as the word “organism” (like other Isms) has now been loaded down. I’ll bet ninety readers out of a hundred wouldn’t stop to think twice, coming across the expression “a dead organism.” The damn “body” has got away with it. (in Ratner & Altman, 1964, p. 592, cited in Palmer 2004: 336)

The reserved Dewey swearing over terms . . . Isn’t that funny? Again, it seem Dewey sought a revolution in philosophy, and in a real revolution, terms can get rather tricky, because we face everyone’s habitual tendency to think with old connotations.

Another philosopher, the Dalai Lama, said something interesting that weaves together the very notion of revolution with the need to challenge the duality of “organism” and “environment”—the very duality that provokes Dewey to swear. These words appear in a book appropriately titled, A Call for Revolution:

I have been inspired by the ideas of the French Revolution that were adopted as the motto of the French Republic: Liberté, équalité, fraternité. I adopted the same motto. As a Buddhist, the aim of my spiritual quest is to free myself of the fundamental ignorance that has led to the notion that there is a division between people and the natural world, which is at the root of all our suffering. (2017: 36-8)

Trying to accomplish a revolution that overturns this kind of separation (and I think Dewey in his own way tried to do this—though he may have lacked the spiritual vision to see it as the root of all suffering, which itself marks a radical suggestion), one would naturally encounter all sorts of difficulties with language and terms. Thus, “organism” is not the only term Dewey may have sworn over, and in the end, his use of terms like “knowledge” and “experience” may have stalled (perhaps, on the whole, forestalled) a wider interest in his work.

Doesn’t it seem striking to read the Dalai Lama putting the issue as a division between Culture and Nature, between human beings and the natural world? Very ecosensual, ecologically wise and compassionate.

The Dalai Lama gives us more perspective on this fundamental ignorance in his book, The Universe in a Single Atom, in which he says the following:

After having talked to numerous scientist friends over the years, I have the conviction that the great discoveries in physics going back as far as Copernicus give rise to the insight that reality is not as it appears to us. When one puts the world under a serious lens of investigation—be it the scientific method and experiment or the Buddhist logic of emptiness or the contemplative method of meditative analysis—one finds things are more subtle than, and in some cases even contradict, the assumptions of our ordinary common-sense view of the world.

One may ask, apart from misrepresenting reality, what is wrong with believing in the independent, intrinsic existence of things? For Nagarjuna [a revered Buddhist philosopher], this belief has serious negative consequences. Nagarjuna argues that it is the belief in intrinsic existence that sustains the basis for a self-perpetuating dysfunction in our engagement with the world and with our fellow human beings. By according intrinsic properties of attractiveness, we react to certain objects and events with deluded attachment, while towards others, to which we accord intrinsic properties of unattractiveness, we react with deluded aversion.

In other words, Nagarjuna argues that grasping at the independent existence of things leads to affliction, which in turn gives rise to a chain of destructive actions, reactions and suffering. In the final analysis, for Nagarjuna, the theory of emptiness [a core theory of Buddhist philosophy, perhaps the core theory, which the spiritual exercises of Buddhist traditions invite us to verify by means of experiment or experience] is not a question of the mere conceptual understanding of reality. It has profound psychological and ethical implications.

I once asked my physicist friend David Bohm this question: from the perspective of modern science, apart from the question of misrepresentation, what is wrong with the belief in the independent existence of things? His response was telling. He said that if we examine the various ideologies that tend to divide humanity, such as racism, extreme nationalism and the Marxist class struggle, one of the key factors of their origin is the tendency to perceive things as inherently divided and disconnected. From this misconception springs the belief that each of these divisions is essentially independent and self-existent. Bohm’s response, grounded in his work in quantum physics, echoes the ethical concern about harbouring such beliefs that had worried Nagarjuna, who wrote nearly 2000 years before.

Granted, strictly speaking, science does not deal with questions of ethics and value judgements, but the fact remains that science, being a human endeavour, is still connected to the basic question of the well-being of humanity. So in a sense, there is nothing surprising about Bohm’s response. I wish there were more scientists with his understanding of the interconnectedness of science, its conceptual frameworks and humanity. (2004: 50-1)

This passage seems quite interesting from the perspective of Bateson’s and Dewey’s views on some kind of fundamental error in our thinking, in our culture, in our education. Here, we sense that Nagarjuna too saw a fundamental error, one that perpetuates “dysfunction in our engagement with the world and with our fellow human beings.” We can usefully see the practice of Buddhism, like the practice of many philosophies and religions, as a systematic approach to correcting the fundamental error Bateson spoke about again and again. We could go so far as to say all vitalizing traditions of LoveWisdom have healing and wholeness as their aim. They seek to heal each person’s soul as they heal the soul of the culture and the soul of the world.

The reference to David Bohm resonates with our earlier inquiry (Part I of this series of contemplations). Bohm began life as a physicist, and ended up experiencing the marginalization that can happen even in the sciences if one tries to challenge the dominant paradigm.[1] He ended up spending much of the latter part of his life as a philosopher, and his work has to me often felt incredibly resonant with the kind of work we are doing here. Among other things, Bohm tried to develop a better way of knowing, a particular dialogical process he dedicated himself to for many years.

Bohm saw very clearly the grave problems with our current ways of thinking and knowing, and this activity of dividing plays no small part. It runs right through our very language, and thus every attempt at speaking comes as a temptation to further think in dividing ways. That bears heavily on those in our universities, who spend so much time making distinctions, analyzing, separating, and so on.

Though philosophers, unlike scientists, seem to deal with questions of ethics and value judgements, does a fundamental misunderstanding of the interconnectedness of things—especially the interconnectedness of our conceptual frameworks and the problems we face as a global species—does that misunderstanding block us from really seeing potential problems with the way we organize society and the economy, think about the meaning of life, decide what is good and bad, engage in science, develop technology, and so on?

We know our education and culture are obsolete because ecologies continue to degrade . . . we continue to degrade the landscapes of nature and the landscapes of the soul.

We know our education and culture are obsolete because we continue to create “environmental” catastrophes.

We know our education and culture are obsolete because we do not see how we catch ourselves in our own nets, and our education and culture do not prevent the gratuitous killing of sentient beings, let alone ecocide, species extinction, culture extinction, the extinction of our sense of sacredness.

We know that our culture and education are obsolete because they force us and other beings to drink from a poison chalice, a chalice of revered ignorance, a chalice of conquest consciousness, a chalice of numbing medication that keeps us hooked to junk food, junk ease, and the disposability of all things.

And does that fundamental misunderstanding further obstruct our ability to arrive at some sort of “decisive experience,” some “breakthrough of total experience” that might transform our personal and collective philosophy, our science, our politics and economics? Has a fundamental error turned our culture into something unhealthy, and will seeing through that error and correcting it allow us to evolve a healed, healing, revjuvenated, and rejuvenating culture that would benefit us all, would benefit the whole world?

Through these sorts of considerations, we try to get at the stuckness of our habitual way of knowing and being, living and loving. Everything we try to do to “fix” the problems of the world or of our own soul will come up against this epistemological mistake. In a non-local epistemology, we realize we cannot “locate” “myself” “someplace”.

Again, we can try to evoke a sense of this, and some vague sense of an alternative. Let’s say we see a photograph of ourselves, a portrait for instance, of our head and shoulders. If someone asks us, “Who is that?” We would naturally say, “That’s me.” But does this really hold up? Thought experiments about brains in vats aside, if we cut you off at the shoulders, you won’t likely function. You won’t still be you. Worse yet, of course, the photo is just the surface of you, as is an image in a mirror—which makes it puzzling that we think of a mirror as a test of self-awareness which we then apply to non-human beings to see if they are as clever as we. Why do we think we are what we look like, or that we are what we see in a mirror?

It may help to keep in mind the very recent discovery that visible matter accounts for only 5% of the universe. When we look out into the cosmos, we fail to see 95% of what’s there—and for all we know, what we currently imagine as the 100% could itself turn out to be another fraction of a larger whole. How can we be sure that when we look at someone we aren’t missing 95% of what they are?

We certainly have found our sense of ourselves frustrated in various ways. For instance, aside from the wonders of the psych, we have discovered that the microbiome influences mood, appetite, and weight. The microbiome has been connected to depression, autism, and the performance of elite athletes.

It is not “I” who wins the race, but an ecology (an “inner” ecology of mind, including microbes, and an outer ecology of mind, including coaches, friends, inspirational works of art and music, and so on—and this “inner” and “outer” arise in mutuality, in nonduality).

“My” “mood” seems like mine. But if the microbiome constitutes it, along with friends, life partner, economic structures, and more, then what should we think?

If we could “zoom in” on ourselves to examine our lung capacity and the strength of our diaphragm, the composition of our microbiome, the epigenetic state of our cells, we would see all sorts of things that clearly constitute our experience. Can we locate ourselves in any of them?

If we “zoom out,” our body would appear again. As we keep zooming out, we would see the room, the air and lighting which constitute our experience—without air, we have no experience reportable in this realm. How does that factor in? Since, without the air, we would find no reportable experience of “me” in that room, should I point to the air as well as the body when I point to “me”? Since the air is so essential for me, isn’t it rather intimate?

We zoom out further to see the Earth, with sky and oceans. We get increasingly inclusive and (though it defies our initial impulse) increasingly intimate, don’t we? To what would we point in order to point to ourselves?

When someone looks at us up close, they may only see our eyes. If they could only see our eyes, that would be all they could point to in order to locate us. Would they be correct? Are we “in there”? They might magically make our eyes vanish, but we could still carry on. We are not in the eyes.

If they back up, they see our whole body. That’s more of us. But, they might magically take certain parts of it without thereby disrupting us catastrophically—maybe they could wave a wand and our left arm and right kidney magically vanish, while we might think we have not thereby vanished as a person. We might still feel like ourselves, still feel like “me,” standing there with one less arm and one less kidney.

Meanwhile, we have just been looking out, so to speak. Perhaps we were looking up at the sky. Perhaps we were looking at the Sun for a moment, just glimpsing it. At such a moment, are we the Earth looking outward, just as on a different scale we are something looking out of eyes that are themselves composite, made up of millions and millions of living cells?

If a person could stand on the Sun and look back, the Earth would be like our body, with an “awareness” somewhere “in there” looking out. They would point and think, “My friend is there, looking in this direction.” If they magically made the atmosphere of the Earth vanish, we, the friend standing in the Earth, would be done for. If they made the Sun vanish, we would be done for. Those things seem much more intimately us, in that sense of a deep and profound interdependence. We can lose an eye but still go on. We cannot lose the sun.

Or can we?

As far as we know, in order to have experience, we need air, water, Sun, soil. As we include more, we include what is quite essential. Wiping out the microbiome would have all sorts of negative consequences, but wiping out the larger ecologies ruins us. Yet we so easily forget that somehow or other, we are the ecologies. There is an undivided wholeness, one that both Bateson and Bohm seem to think we need to realize in order to correct our way of knowing and being, living and loving.

Indigenous philosophers Little Bear and Heavy Head agree—we will come back to them. They cite Bohm and note that his view and the Blackfoot view arise from a sense of reality as “an unfragmented, unbounded whole,” and that “theoretical discussions between cultures” might ease some of the problems we face. But this is not another mindless praise of “wholeness”. We have to think our way into knowing better, living better, loving better.

As Bateson suggested (and Nietzsche would applaud), it somehow has to get into our instincts. If we know that our water comes from a well, and someone is about to poison it, we may feel that quite keenly—one might say, at an instinctive level. We realize, intimately, that we depend on that well, that our experience goes altogether with whatever goes on deep in the ground “over there” (we should pause at that: Our experience arises dependent upon what goes on deep underground . . . how foolish to go carelessly digging things up . . .). Somehow we can realize our interwovenness with that water and with that ground, because it feels intimate. But we are such linear thinkers, by practiced habit, that we forget all the time. We habitually try to localize ourselves, and we thus cover over a nonlocal reality.

Imagine that we could zoom out of the Earth and look at it, and that we could say, “That’s me! That’s us!” Even then, it is part of us. We need to keep zooming out. As far as someone goes outward, our awareness remains at the center of the picture. We aren’t a “thing,” but neither is the rest of it. It’s all relational. Every “thing” we see is constituted by what isn’t there. The microbiome depends on the Sun as much as “I” do.

The inability to find something non-relational, the inability to find something that will persist through observation, becomes the realization of what we are.

The scientist says, “I’m going to do science.”

The philosopher asks, “Who is?”

“I am.”

“Who are you?” asks the philosopher.

Why such a question? Because, how can we “do” “science” if we don’t know who is “doing” it—and therefore what this “science” even is or needs to be, what “doing” is or needs to be? Next thing we know, we will begin running experiments on ourselves—but without realizing it.

Boshan, like the Divine in the Book of Job, and like all great sages, invites us to experience GReat Doubt about “Who am I?” and thereby enter the full mystery of life, enter as a full participant, an artist in co-discovery and co-creation.

That indeed has happened. We are the guinea pigs, the rats in a self-made cage that we think we rather fancy, because we call it “civilization” and “technology”. The experiment we are running, or a few aspects of it: What is it like to increase toxicity in the body, what is it like to drink polluted water, what is it like to breathe polluted air, what is it like to live in degraded ecologies?

The scientist may think to themselves, “I am running an experiment here, in the lab,” but the experiment happens in a nonlocal Cosmos, and thus comes altogether with a way of life, with a way of practicing and realizing how to cultivate life onward, and thus the experiment goes everywhere and comes right back, not to the “here” of the experiment, but the “here” of the body and mind, the heart and soul of the experimenter—and everyone else in the world, all the sentient beings.

Our situation is not like someone sitting on a branch, sawing off the branch. It is the tree cutting itself down, not knowing it is a tree.

We breathe the air of the experiments we run under the rubric of “science” and “technology”. We may admit we have to breathe that air, but this still localizes ourselves, and the larger meaning—the more wondrous intimacy—remains obscured.

How will I allow myself to be in you, and how will allow you to be in me? This is a central question in nonlocal culture (nonlocal Nature-Culture)—not some naïve question of, “What do I know?” but, “How am I with, for, as you? How do I let relationships constitute me and the World? How do I presence the mystery? How will I be lived by sacred powers and inconceivable causes that fools may pretend to understand?”

These are pragmatic questions, because they are spiritual. They can only be scientific by being spiritual, by connecting to meaning and emotional or spiritual energy.

It’s very concrete: How will we show up in the forest, for the forest, with the forest, and how will we let the forest show up in us, for us, as us? How do we allow ourselves to show up in the hearts of those we love, in the hearts of those we don’t love, in the hearts of those to whom we feel indifferent?

In part, a nonlocal, nondualistic way of knowing and being, living and loving, reveals that a localized way of knowing is just too stupid to answer certain kinds of questions, and too dull to recognize the intelligence, the mind that “surrounds” it on all sides.

We can think here beyond Frans de Waal’s valuable question, “Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are?” Are we intelligent enough to recognize how much intelligence surrounds us? We don’t know very much about what intelligence is and how it operates—or else we wouldn’t have put the conditions of life at risk, wouldn’t have degraded our own surrounding intelligence as we have. We clearly don’t see ourselves as embedded in mind, with mind in every direction we can point. We seem blind to the fact that we exist interwoven with vast intelligence, even though that intelligence obviously grows our food and serves as the ultimate source for the majority of our medicines—to say nothing of all the subtle ways that intelligence nourishes us, or the inconceivable ways that it might further do so, opening up potentials unknown to us.

The problem seems to relate to a cultural habit of fragmentation that covers over the interwovenness of things—a way of knowing, a way of doing things reflected in and perpetuated by our manner of thinking, speaking, and moving. It binds our science as much as our politics, economics, and so on. It keeps the whole culture in chains.

Every philosophy is a cosmic philosophy. In some cultures, we may find ourselves trapped in a limited and limiting cosmos, and we will need to take great care, effecting a rupture with the narrow philosophy that will have us in its grips all the way into the depths of our psyche. In the case of the dominant culture, the default cosmos appears flat and localized, in the manner of a photograph. We inhabit a mechanistic universe, in which we must compete with each other for scarce resources, and in which our ability to capture more resources than we could possibly need gets confused with some sort of ideal we should pursue in the manner of pursuing ethical virtues and spiritual imperatives. Indeed, spirituality becomes completely subdued, and then sublimated into consumption. We live as atomized beings, unable to see how our spiritual practice of life could have any great efficacy or meaning. Even if we claim we don’t want to be rich, this loss of a more empowering cosmic vision leaves at least part of us wishing for money and power, or in countless other ways trying to feed the hunger of the soul by consuming shadows, and then nourishing the World by offering it poison.

We have tried here to draw closer to a sense that our culture—and thus our education—may have embedded within it a fundamental error. While the world may function more like a hologram or in accord with the mandala principle, we relate to it as if it were a photograph. We have tried to ask, among other things: Can we look at “the environment,” and see ourselves . . . Can we enter into the wonderstanding that everywhere we look, we see ourselves—not in a sense that would become ego-centric or create a god-complex, but in a sense that liberates us out of our delusions—out of the duality of “organism” and “environment,” “self” and “other,” and all the rest—can we practice and realize a liberation out of all of that and into sacredness and mutual nourishment, serenity and wonder, intimacy and insight, wisdom and love, beauty and insiration, great healing and great joy?

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[1] This BBC interview with Bohm gives some sense of his work and the challenges he faced: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QI66ZglzcO0