To Russ and John,
I seem to remember that Jung saw himself (in a near death experience) being dreamed by a yogi, and he knew if the yogi opened his eyes he, Jung, would disappear.
As a dreamer I personally feel “entangled with the dream stuff at every turn”. So, I tend to agree with John when he suggests that dream work is “introverted”. John further says, there is one perspective superordinate to all partial perspectives, i.e. the perception of the "living whole".
It seems life is a field of possibilities. Every cell in our body straddles probabilities. Is pure consciousness exploring itself in a myriad of dream bubbles, and the "objective reality” of our universe (whose objectivity is now in question) is simply one of those bubbles? Is reality a dynamic flow of consciousness, emerging from a universal field —the “living whole” John mentions? And in these bubbles are we playing with, as Russ suggests, a subjective reality & objective reality that “are both & neither at the same time”?
Does everything that happens affect this field? Does each independent observer, through all their experiences in this reality, tincture the “living whole" in a way that is never lost?
Any way you look at it the crumbling social scripts and political insanity of the 21st C. are killing us. At the same time new openings for a deeper reality to penetrate our world may be developing, even to the point of getting into our everyday life — hence “Fex & Coo”, and John’s sense of an “other” awakening in him able to perceive the morning "out here". I’ve had a few of my own experiences. Novelty is penetrating our objective reality and changing it, perhaps fundamentally. I’d like to think this isn’t the final end of the world, that there can still be a starting point for the next leap we take as a species.
How amazing that Proietti’s experiment created two conflicting realities, compared them, and determined: “Both realities can coexist even with irreconcilable outcomes!” Which changes the nature of reality.
Jung felt synchronicity showed us that in some strange way the mind (unconsciously) can “arrange” reality to produce experiences of “meaningful coincidence”, i.e. which occur when a correspondence between what's happening in our mind & what’s happening in — what Jung still believed to be — the objective world takes place. What if we could produce synchronicities consciously!
Does ART have the alchemical ability to take something composed of prima material, the fundamental stuff out of which everything is made, reform it with the imagination, then set it free to act on our world? Isn’t life transformation itself?
We don’t experience our body as cells, tissues, or organs. We experience it as different states or fields of consciousness. To be awake is a different state than to dream. To feel sick is a different state than to feel well. The different states make us feel as if consciousness isn’t one thing, even though it is. All these states exist in a single field of consciousness, one state morphing into another in seamless motion.
It appears as if atomic particles wink in and out of the quantum vacuum, reappearing each time in a slightly different place? Actually, they don’t move because the different places are just changes of state. In a TV box the objects don’t move either. Instead LED lights wink on & off in certain sequences to give the illusion of movement. We simply give into the illusion. We can walk away from the TV, but we can’t walk away from our brains and their constant construction of this “real” world. Why do we cling to the illusions so absolutely and tenaciously? To me a great gift of our dreams, with all their richness and utter surprise, is to break us out of these illusory traps.
In a lucid dream all the senses are engaged. We can feel the breeze and smell the bread baking, only when we wake up do we realize we were in a different state. Is the key to feeling part of the “living whole" the ability to be simultaneously aware of each state? Is that the starting point for our next leap, if such a leap is possible? (I think this is what Jean Gebser was talking about with his integral structure of consciousness.)
Can we become conscious of the "paradoxical nexus where subjective reality & objective reality are both & neither at the same time"?
Does a photon see the same paradox we do? Russ asks. Actually, a photon doesn’t possess light only frequency waves. Our brain produces the sensation of light. Did eyes evolve so the mind can see? Does some psychic spirit-force want to experience life as a photon in a human body in order to experience the phenomenon of light?
Apparently, subatomic particles have no fixed properties, nor do the things made of particles. Does that mean there are no physical objects from quarks to galaxies. Is it all paradox?
Merrilee