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..:: The Mental
Field VII ::..
“Synergy”
By
Alan Schneider
What is synergy? This term
implies a conjoining of two contributing factors – synthesis and
energy. So, synergy means a synthesis of energy on several
conceptual levels – the combined energy and inspiration of a group of
individual human beings, the combination of different forms and types of
energy into a single cohesive format (as in the implied synergy of an
automobile, including the driver, passengers, cargo, vehicle, engine,
motion, traffic conditions, and intended destination), and a synergy of
personal consciousness and the social, spiritual, and political
environment in which that consciousness functions.
Although of interest in their
own right, physical, mechanical, and chemical synergy are not the focus
of this and future newsletters, while spiritual and social
synergy most definitely are. With very few exceptions, spiritual
perception and behavior take place and are expressed in social and
cultural contexts. Even the phenomena of the spiritual hermit or
solitary practitioner are still implicitly social through the
rejection of social involvement, and in consequence of the lingering
linguistic and cultural symbolic ego residue acquired in the
acculturation process. Although confined in our isolated containers of
flesh, we are, above all, social creatures who tend to cleave to each
other through the media of relationships invariably occurring in
cultural motifs.
The Jungian theories of the
Collective Unconscious and Racial Memory have been, and continue to be,
points of hot contention, in not only the academic community, but the
associated spiritual and psychic communities as well. On the surface of
things, it would seem to be impossible that we could share any type of
experiential condition in any sense other than acculturated agreement
and acceptance of the common definitions of experience, but
certainly not the perceived experience itself. Jung’s great
genius in this matter was his realization that the common themes of
awareness seen across cultures – themes which he himself performed the
ground breaking research upon – implied common root experiences present
in the human Psyche, ones emerging from communal psychological sources.
These drivers of collective human experience he called archetypes.
I have given the reader much discourse on this subject in these
articles, and will give more now.
The universe that we
experience in the physical senses appears to be fundamentally
atomistic, that is, manifest in the form of discreet entities of
various sizes and types that are bound together not by any fundamental
association, but by statistical tendencies to behave in predictable
fashions. We call these tendencies natural laws, physical principals,
chemical rules of interaction, and so forth. And the universe appears to
be in a state of constant flux, always changing, from the most minute
levels of quarks and cosmic strings, to the galaxies themselves –
continuously expanding and becoming more differentiated. We can say that
the universe is in a state of constant turbulence, resulting from and
reflective of the primordial explosion that initiated it from a
non-differentiated micro-singularity – the so-called Big Bang. What
preceded the Big Bang we cannot know, because that event marks the
limits of our ability to theorize and conduct observations – another
Threshold of Chaos of an apparently different kind than that we
have discussed thus far. I will suggest in this article that the
difference between chaos on a cosmic scale and chaos on an internal
perceptual scale is essentially nill – they are the same phenomenon
when correctly understood by the observer.
We have evolved as a species
to regard the essential turbulence of the universe as normative – it is
the background condition that produces us and eventually consumes us. It
is natural to us – we feel comfortable with a certain level of this
turbulence, in fact must have a certain bandwidth of this
condition to exist, to observe, to perceive. We must know turbulence to
breath, to eat, to procreate, to travel, to think, and to feel. We
are turbulence existing in a turbulent continuum of sensory
interaction with a turbulent environment. And we tend to like it
that way, at least as far as we know – individual, discreet objects of
perception surging around on a wave of comfortable chaos amid functional
infinity.
All of this begins, however,
to break down under sufficiently close observation. Anomalies begin to
appear that defy logical classification. A now famous experiment
concerns optical anomalies associated with the wave/particle nature of
light, itself an anomaly. When light is passed through a pair of
contiguous pinhole apertures, it displays what is called an interference
pattern – ripples that intersect each other at a short distance from the
apertures. When this is used to expose photographic film, the pattern is
also apparent, and this was one of the supporting arguments for the wave
nature of light – the waves were thought to interrupt, or interfere
with, each other. Under these conditions, it is logical to assume that a
photographic film that is alternately exposed to light from first one
aperture, then the other, but never simultaneously, will not display the
interference pattern seen with simultaneous exposure, since no
interference is possible, but, in fact, the same pattern still occurs!
The mystified researchers eventually came to the conclusion that there
was something about the quantum vibration of the experiment in
space-time – its quantum form – that was producing the pattern, and that
this form included the researchers themselves and their observations.
What was this quantum form, and where did it come from?
Another equally baffling
situation concerns simultaneous quantum experimentation conducted at
remote locations. A group of researchers on one coast of the United
States exposed a photographic film through on aperture, but not the
other, while simultaneously on the other coast, another group exposed an
identical film through the opposing aperture. The same interference
pattern once again appeared, even with only one aperture used for the
exposure! How did the light on one coast “know” what the light on the
other coast was doing, and respond accordingly? Light is not
intelligent, sentient, or motivated, or is it? Once again, the
researchers were forced to come to the conclusion that it was the
quantum form of the experiment that was being observed, and that this
form was independent of physical or temporal location – the fact that
the observers all knew about the experimental
design was all that was required to produce the paradoxical result.
The suggestion of these
results is that the apparently dissociated universe is far more
interconnected than the casual observations of the senses would suggest
– interconnected by observers and their observations, both conscious and
subconscious. Einstein himself has suggested that the very “fabric” of
space-time is curved, and can be distorted by a sufficiently massive
body, thereby causing light to bend away from its otherwise linear path
as it follows the distortion. He postulated that anyone (theoretically)
leaving Earth and traveling away from it as consistently as measurement
would permit would eventually come right back to Earth at the point
where they left it! At the end of his life, Einstein was working on what
he called the Unified Field Theory of the Universe, a theory designed to
support the belief that the universe was well-ordered, and that the
order reflected an organizing intelligence. Although this theory
required experimental methodology that is still not, for the most part,
available today (in fact portions of the Special and General Theories of
Relativity still have not been verified, either) quantum experimentation
of the type discussed in the previous paragraph has begun to suggest
that the apparent chaos of the universe is just that – only apparent,
due to the as yet relatively primitive sensory perception of human
beings. Because we cannot perceive the order, does not mean that it does
not exist. In fact, our inability to perceive degrees of order is
directly related to our observational proximity to a given condition –
the more involved we are in something, the less perspective we have
regarding it, and lack of perspective is one of the primary constituents
of perceived chaos. Presumably, a sufficiently distant, detached
observer would perceive the orderly universe that Einstein suspected
existed.
Returning to our
experimental observers, I am going to suggest that they were all
participating at some level in what amounts to a collective experience
of consciousness regarding the experiments mentioned, even if they did
not consciously perceive this collective phenomenon, and that this
collective consciousness – essentially synergy – superseded and
determined the experimental outcome. The object here is the question of
where this collective manifestation of consciousness came from, and how
discreet human observers can detect its presence when it occurs in their
separated sensory conditions. That we were not intended by evolution to
attain this level of perception would seem to be obvious, but it still
may be possible. We need to begin here by looking beyond the senses into
the subconscious mind.
I have attempted in the
Mental Field series to construct a working model of human experience and
perception that describes as accurately as possible the extended
mechanism of consciousness and the stable dynamics of that mechanism,
beginning with sensory perception, then addressing ego development and
differentiation, next the personal unconscious, then the collective
unconscious, and finally the Jungian Self – all following the Jungian
Sphere of Consciousness model as the most scientific one available to my
knowledge. A series of suggestions was made regarding what amount to
transitional jumping-off points, or portals, that determine our
perception as we delve deeper into the total Psyche, along with
experimental methods that were felt to both safe and effective to employ
in our self-inquiry into these matters, chief among them voluntary
meditation. Regarding this latter, the suggestion was made that the
investigator can and will profit greatly from identifying,
understanding, and building upon the phenomenon of the Portal of Chaos
as the first threshold beyond conscious ego experience. Beyond the
Portal of Chaos, other conceptual systems were introduced for the
reader’s consideration, notably the Hindu Chakra System, and the
Cabalistic Tree of Life System. Every attempt was made to outline the
consistencies present in, and emerging from, the field of chaos
beyond logical human ego-perception, based upon the Jungian archetypes
and archetypal symbols, and several significant examples were provided,
including the cases of certain guardian images that mediate our
perception of what appears at the Portal of Chaos. Although this series
has spanned seven articles including this one, the reader can be assured
that we have barely addressed the surface of these matters. But, a basic
conceptual framework has been developed.
Synergy in the spiritual
sense involves the personal perception of any tradition, including
the one outlined in the Mental Field series. The individual reader is
invited to ponder what is said in these pages, and arrive at whatever
conclusions seem to be valid ones. Synergy in the social sense
involves group processes and the sharing of individual perception in the
group contexts. If Jung was correct in his observations and suppositions
regarding the human Psyche, then our individual perceptions and
experience tend to be collectively determined by the archetypes. These,
in turn, suggest an ordering influence at work in the chaos beyond
superficially organized (i.e. ego) perception. The question here
is this – how orderly is the chaos at the Portal of Chaos, and
how can this order be experienced and identified at the group level by a
set of apparently isolated human observers?
Meditation involves the
relaxation of the ego-focused state of consciousness equated in these
articles with the Physical Plane (or state, or mode) of awareness, and
attendant sense perception. As soon as we begin the practice of
meditation, we begin the identification and construction of the Portal
of Chaos in the Mental Field, although we may not even notice this
process, or the mandala of perception that results. It is of critical
importance from the viewpoint of legitimate scientific investigation
that we acknowledge that we leaving the world of concrete manifestation
behind in meditation by turning away from the senses and the ego. The
recognition and acceptance of the existence of the Portal of Chaos as
the first mediating influence beyond sensory experience builds a
perceptual bridge from that mode of experience to the unmanifest, but
still perceptible, contents of the subconscious mind, and creates a
perceptual environment for those contents to be expressed within. So, we
can say that the Portal of Chaos is a clarification or focusing
mechanism for the contents of the subconscious mind – in a word, the
archetypes. At the same time, it serves as the interface back to the ego
and physical senses. Whether we progress only slightly or very far into
the Psyche, the implicit acknowledgement that we are still working
within the mandala form of the Portal of Chaos will go a long way toward
the maintenance of a sane, integrated consciousness.
The Synergy concept as I
envision it involves the individual spiritual perception coupled
with collective, social group perception, using meditation as an
exploratory tool to “mine” the contents of the subconscious. This
meditation may take place within the individual Psyche, but acquires
deep, collective meaning through subsequent group interaction and
discussion of the visions occurring at the Portal of Chaos upon
returning to the “normal” perception of the Physical Plane and senses.
The discussions and interaction can involve any relevant comparisons of
similar perceptions among group members, and symbolic interpretations of
meanings and import present. It is my feeling at this writing that the
traditional, unguided Self-Realization meditation is the most effective
tool for our subconscious exploration process, since it permits the
maximum degree of freedom for the contents of that region to emerge
unfiltered and uninterpreted into perception at the Portal of Chaos. In
general, the less ego-involvement present, the better the chances that
the influence of the archetypes, and ultimately the Jungian Self, will
be revealed to the individual through the group social context.
And this concept will
continue to function, even without meditation as the catalyst
process. Any perceptual process that departs from the stream of sensory
experience and interpretation, however briefly, will produce some kind
of symbolic image residue, and this can also be integrated through group
dynamics. Fantasies, day-dreams, waking visions, and sleeping dreams are
all things that can be illuminated by the Synergy process. Even the
waking experiences of synchronicities can be meaningfully investigated
through group Synergy techniques.
The process of evolution on
this planet has produced humanity as the sentient, dominant species
resident here on the Physical Plane of Manifestation. We are, above
all, makers of meaning and purpose in this life that serves as the
backdrop for consciousness and the Psyche. It is inconceivable that our
presence here on Earth is a mere statistical accident, the superficial
indications of the senses notwithstanding. The apparent chaos within and
around us is filled with hidden meaning, and we have at our disposal the
methodology of successful investigation into these matters if we will
but take the required steps along the Path.
- With Love, Alan -
(CR2008, Alan Schneider)
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