Texts for this class1. Stan Grof, "Science and Spirituality: Observations from Modern Consciousness Research"
2. Alex Grey, "What is Visionary Art?"
3. Christopher Alexander, "The Mirror of the Self" from The Nature of Order, Vol. 1 (excerpts)
1. ”For three hundred years our mechanistic world view has disconnected us from our selves. We have a picture of the universe that is powerful and apparently accurate, but no clear sense of how we, our own selves, enter into this picture. We have a disconnected vision of reality, which seems secure, which seems strong and objective – but which leaves me out. My experience of self, my own actual person, my existence of self, my own actual person, my existence as I experience it every day is not part of the “objective” world-picture. So, in my daily encounter with the world, I have to make do with a world-picture that fails to connect me to the world. I flail around in it and struggle… In the new world picture based on wholeness and the structure of centers, the connection between the outer or objective world and my experience of the self is profound and immediate. It makes sense. It is pervasive. It is direct.
AN EMPIRICAL TEST FOR COMPARING THE DEGREE OF LIFE OF DIFFERENT CENTERS
2. “To decide objectively which centers have more life and which ones have less life, we need an experimental method that allows people to escape from the trap of subjective preference, and to concentrate instead on the real liking they feel…. How can this be done? Is there a way of seeing life or wholeness in a building which allows the observer to see life or wholeness clearly as a quality in the object, and to rise above overlays of learned preference, inexperience, opinion, and bias?
3. “I believe there is. The methods I propose make use of the fact that each one of us, as an observer, is directly tuned to the phenomenon of wholeness, and is able to see both wholeness itself and the degree to which it is present in any given situation. It accomplishes this awareness of wholeness, by asking people for a judgment which comes directly from their own feeling. I do not mean by this that we ask someone, “Which one do you feel is best?” I mean that we ask, specifically, which of the two things generates, in the observer, the most wholesome feeling…
4. “In the method of observation which I propose, the observer asks to what degree each of the two things we are trying to judge is, or is not, a picture of the self – and by this I mean your and my wholesome self, perhaps even our eternal self.
5. “Suppose you and I are discussing this matter in a coffee shop. I look around on the table for things to use in an experiment. There is a bottle of ketchup on the table and, perhaps, an old fashioned salt shaker. I ask you: “Which one of these is more like your own self?” Of course, the question appears slightly absurd. You might legitimately say, “It has no sensible answer.” But suppose I insist on the question, and you, to humor me, agree to pick one of the two: whichever one seems closer to representing you, your own self, in your totality.
6. “Before you do it, I add a few more words. I make it clear that I am asking which of the two objects seems like a better picture of all of you, the whole of you: a picture which shows you as you are, with all your hopes, fears, weaknesses, glory and absurdity, and which – as far as possible – includes everything that you could ever hope to be. In other words, which comes closer to being a picture of you in all your weakness and humanity; of the love in you, and the hate; of your youth and your age; of the good in you, and the bad; of your past, your present, and your future; of your dreams of what you hope to be, as well as what you are?
7. "Now I ask you again to look at the two things, the salt shaker and the ketchup bottle, and decide which of the two is a better picture of all that. In the experiments I have made, more than eighty percent of all people who ask themselves this question choose the salt shaker. The result is, as far as my experiments can tell, independent of culture or personality. People make the same choice whether they are young or old, man or woman, European or African or American.
8. “But the value of the result and the success of the experiment depends on the question they are answering: and on whether it really is this question they are answering. There are, always, those who choose the ketchup bottle. There are good reasons why they do. Ketchup goes with hamburger. It is an icon, almost, of our modern life; we associate with it because it is ordinary, comfortable, relevant to everyday life, and highly identifiable. Also rather nice. The salt shaker is almost archaic by comparison. Though many people still have this type of salt shaker around, it feels as though it might disappear from our lives, be replaced by another way of dispensing salt. All this is true, and explains why twenty percent of the people who ask themselves this question choose the ketchup bottle. But none of this is relevant to the way I mean the question to be asked. The question I mean to ask is, of the two, which is more deeply connected to your eternal self? Which feels as if it is a better picture of your eternal self, your aspiration, the core of you that exists inside?
THE LUMINOUS GROUND
9. ”Somehow – whether it be in color, or in a harmonious garden, or in a room whose light and mood are just right, or in the awesome wall of a great building which allows us to walk near it – some placid, piercing unity occurs, sharp and soft, embracing, tying all things together, wrapping us up in it, allowing us to feel our own unity. What, physically, is this unity which seems to speak to us of I?”
10. “When I look at a thing which has a living quality, sometimes I am aware of it, almost as if it is faintly glowing. I am aware of something like light – not actual light itself, but something softer, something very like it – in the thing. The more it is alive, the more it seems faintly to shine.
11. “In my later years, as I have encountered this sensation more and more concretely, and with more and more certainty, it seems to me, that I am seeing God, the glowing of all things, shining out from that old brick wall, or from that bush, or from that face, or from the flowers in a vase.
12. “It is the same life, already described so many times. But in the end, this is what I am left with, the sensation that somehow, in this living thing, there is something faintly luminous, there is something streaming from it, something visible, and something real.
13. “It has been said that God is immanent, that all matter is imbued with God, that God is the ultimate material of the Universe. And that may be so. But if so, why is it that this shining forth of God is visible more in some things than others; why is God visible more in some events, and less in others. What causes the life in things; what causes God to be more visible in one thing, more visible in one moment, less visible in another?
POSSIBLE EXISTENCE OF A SINGLE UNDERLYING SUBSTANCE
14. “I am going to start with the idea that the I exists physically, that there is some plenum, not part of the physical space and matter, but nevertheless there in fact, at every point of what we think of as space and matter… [According to this I-hypothesis], we postulate that there is, in the universe, and underlying all matter, a single plenum or Ground. Above all, it is single, and it is personal. This plenum is the “something” which shall simply be called “I.”
15. “However, I now add the idea that it really exists everywhere, it is single, underlying all things. It may exist in another dimension curled up in space, or it may exist in some other linkage we cannot yet imagine. I am viewing this plenum as being perfectly connected to all the physical reality that we know about, like a deeper reality which shadows and underlies the first. For the time being I shall say that this plenum is either “I” or “Self,” a huge, single Self, underlying all the matter in the universe.
16. “Now I am going to say that some kind of tunneling can occur, to connect physical structures in our familiar physical domain with the single I-stuff of the plenum. I use the word “tunneling” in the sense that modern physics uses it, to mean a direct connection between two regions which are in different dimensions. I am asserting that some connection can occur between the physical structure of the everyday world of matter and the underlying I.”
17. The most common example of this tunneling would be the one which occurs in the experience of I and self which each person has. In a human body, which is at least in part a structure of matter alone, the experience of I or “self” arises. In spite of various sociological attempts at explanation, this everyday experience of our selves is not yet understood in a satisfactory way by physics. But it would be relatively easy to understand if we postulate the plenum of I, universal and general, linked to matter, and if it were a fact that the matter in a body, once organized, is able to make direct connection with this I. We would then experience the bridge or tunnel to the I as our own self, not realizing that it is in fact merely one bridge, of a million similar bridges, between the matter in different beings and the I. That is to say, in such a conception the I which one of us experiences as his own self is not a private and individual thing, as most of us imagine it to be, but a partial connection of our own physical matter (my body) to this very great, and single, plenum of I-stuff.
18. Now I am going to say, much more generally, that every living center in the matter of the universe – even the smallest center which is induced in space – starts this kind of tunneling towards the I-stuff. And, the stronger the center is, the bigger the tunnel, the stronger the connection of matter to the I. That means, that every beautiful object, to the extent it has the structure which I have described, also begins to open the door towards the I-stuff or the self."
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