The Concept of Reality

Therefore I offer you my contemplations on the infinite universe and the innumerable worlds.

                                                                                                              Giordano Bruno

The entire creative process happens instantaneously, simultaneously and continuously. There is no beginning but rather a combination of states and intensity of Being diversely modulated and invigorated by phenomena operating on the reference plane of existence.

Inside every tiny particle of conceivable matter this process renews itself continuously. The creative energy emits directions and planes with different densities and variables and yet every thing is connected with the All, and every one of its smallest constituent parts contains the infinite.

  

Time

Just as with space and the things and beings that surround us, time is also the fruit of an illusion of the mind: time itself is part of the great experiential theatre created for the evolutionary goals of Consciousness.

Time is in its own way a manifestation of primordial Energy, of the All. For us it becomes the indispensable instrument through which we express and read our perceptive experiences – which have descended into this manifestation – and therefore through which we give significance to this form of existence: to events to life, to ‘history’.

But if we separate from our material nature, we can emancipate ourselves from our limits in space and time and interact with reality outside of the limits of the cause and effect established by our current mind: we can access a superior level of relationship with reality, with power over illusion and synchronicity. Or, at least, remind ourselves that our reality is nothing more than a theatrical representation and, by going behind the scenes every now and again we can ‘return home’.

On a technical plane, ‘time’ more than anything else is the ‘container of possibilities’: an immense circular sphere of the eternal present. There is no flow; everything is there, to design a complex geography of potential events. It is a multi-dimensional field curved in on itself, just like space. The universe is in itself non-local, or indistinct, contemporaneous and simultaneous: The One.

Nevertheless, within the confines of the universal field, time, expressed and perceived in a chronological sense, is important and indispensable: it serves to measure growth, to give a sense of reading (and therefore a sense of consciousness) to the transformation of events or the material world of Form at every level.

  

Levels of Reality

To explore ‘reality’ we have to begin from the supposition that what our current senses perceive is nothing more than one of its possible aspects, or a manifestation consistent with our perceptive and elaborative possibilities. We are talking about a kind of meditation (or better still many levels of meditation) and consequently of a meeting point between the Absolute, higher levels of reality, the mind and the biological senses that limit our experience.

Everything that we participate in is ‘just’ our plane of existence, or the current reality:

·          Three-dimensional

·          Human

·          Terrestrial

·          Consensual

Our plane of existence is the result of a sensorial circuit of a consensual and conventional kind; therefore, it is all relative. It is the result of the meeting between all that is and that which can be differentiated and perceived through the exercise of our current senses. They in their turn are developing so that a possible level of consciousness can interpret this existence and attribute ever more complex significance to it, transcending and identifying it as an aspect of the Absolute. It is thus transformed from mechanics (field of laws) to awareness (field of choice), or from a precarious and unstable manifestation to an incorruptible presence, from the chaotic illusions of the senses to an aware experience of consciousness.

Our reality is - to all intents and purposes - a bubble of appearances: and we have the task (the challenge?) of making it real and everlasting in the Absolute by means of ourselves.

The thoughts - and the considerations that follow - need to be seen in the context of spiritual, alchemical and magical disciplines and therefore with ‘another’ kind of sensitivity – or perhaps with a more authentic sensitivity that we have yet to reawaken – rather than be investigated with the rational mind. We need to use the breath of the thinking heart, as I like to call it: try to read, understand and absorb these ideas with your body, your heart and not just with your brain.

Use the breath. Feel the correspondence and the call of truth inside yourself.  But be careful: we are not talking about expedients. It is necessary to use all your experience to comprehend, so that reading and study becomes a real meditation practice, a kind of yoga-study. Learning to use other parts of yourself to navigate with a new and different logic helps to break away from the ordinary rhythm of the mind. It is necessary to change perspective and comprehend new stimuli on many levels; otherwise there is no point in proceeding. These themes are meditation practices and not just ideas to store in your head.

For example, in the practice of Jnana Yoga (the path of knowledge) the liberation (Moksha) and therefore the union with God can be acquired for half the knowledge of Brahman, recognizing Brahman as your own Self. The liberation from Samsāra (the cycle of birth and death) is achieved thanks to the realization of the identity of the individual soul (Jīva) in the Supreme Soul.

This mainstay of Vedanta philosophy considers metaphysical ignorance (Avidya) the cause of all human suffering and attachment to the material world: it acts like a veil (Maya) preventing Jīva from perceiving her real and divine nature. In its smallness and ignorance the individual soul convinces itself that it is separate and different from Brahman. The knowledge of Brahman (or Brahma Jnana) removes this veil allowing Jīva to re-establish herself in her own essential nature: Sat-Chit-Ananda (Existence, Knowledge, Beatitude).

The Creation of the Material Worlds

It happened, when this our Great inversion took place, from the essence of all nothingness to finity extended in innumerable categories, that an incalculably vast system was produced. Merely by chance, chance in the truest sense of the term, we are found with gods, men, stars, planets, devils, colours, forces and all the materials of the Cosmos: and with time, space and causality, the conditions limiting and involving them all.

Aleister Crowley[1], BERASHITH - 1902

According to esoteric, kabbalistic and alchemical cosmogenesis – but in many ways, also in terms of modern physics - the material world (energy/mass) is not immediately generated as an effect of the clash between primeval forces (primeval laws), rather its creation, considered from the point of view of the human being, follows a series of passages: the process of creation happens in non-time, however, in order to understand this idea we need to make use of logical sequences in order to describe it.

Our Universe is above all a concept:

·          Manifold

·          Diversified

·          Dynamic

Concepts that are translated into a temporal, dimensional and spatial universe.

At the beginning reality is virtual and not yet translated into matter-life-perception-experience. Its existence is only potential: at the act of creation we are still in the field of inexistent Being, in the World of Ideas.

The inexistent is the field that renders true that which is existent and real, through ‘existential significance’ attributing significance to things, life, emotions and thought.

The Absolute is Nothingness and the All.

Nothingness is the All without Consciousness.

The All is Nothingness full of Consciousness.

The creation processes happen outside of creation itself, therefore outside of time. They generate a field that is already the expression of Being but ‘inexistent’. In that state the universe is inexistent because we cannot perceive it, try it out, or give it significance: to do those things we need relationship, or growth. We need time/space, that is, a filter which is able to distinguish and scan reality and the evolved interaction between diversity.

In order to do this we use the mind. The mind is strictly correlated to the phenomena of time and space: It is the instrument for scanning and fixing. Everything comes down to the mind and eventually we have to act to evade it, in order to travel in or manipulate time and space, but that is another story…

The World of Ideas – or the Macrocosmic Mind – is the chaotic and virtual container of all times and of all manifestations and possible existential directions, without any of them being defined: it is the eternal present, the ‘sphere of Time’ where everything is, but does not exist. It corresponds to the kabbalistic  Ain-Soph, the Thelemic[2] body of Nuit, which defines the universal field of the possible and keeps it unified.

Now, we can but try to make an interpretative synthesis of the various cosmogeneses, handed down to us through the images of myth and those of Western and Eastern religions.

In order for material Form to manifest a direction in time is needed, or the possibility of a relationship with multiplicity, space and perception.

In the world of ideas, or in the concept of a universe created by a vibrational wave from Absolute Consciousness, absolute nothingness (a potential but non-existent universe) enters into relationship with absolute time (the container of all ‘existent’ possibilities) emitting an infinitely creative energy, that will orient itself according to a new geometry of laws from which dimensions and existential levels will ensue: the creation.

The Egyptians assigned this role to the Creator God, who was not Ra, in as much as he was absolute Consciousness and all encompassing, but Ptah, the Demiurge God. Today modern science is investigating all of this in mathematical terms, both theoretically and experimentally.

We try to interpret these processes moment by moment, not outside but inside ourselves in relation to reality and its ‘keys of access’. Because it is inside of us, in the depths of our divine essence that all of this is continuously carried out. According to esoteric thought, it is we, who are the representative particles of this same Consciousness and Cosmic Energy: the creators of all-that-is-and-ever-will be.

According to Esoteric Physics, the process of creating worlds, galaxies and all existing things - all that will become life and evolution – passes through what we would traditionally define as the world of numbers: a space-time or ‘vibrational’ sieve. In this case we are not talking about the concept of numbers as we think of them mathematically but as numerical relationships rather than single entities. The ‘world of numbers’ is precisely a dimension in itself, the link between the world of ideas (unitary) and the potential world of the material (manifold). The world of numbers and the pattern of relationships that define the measurements of so called ‘sacred geometry’ is therefore the matrix of the manifest world. The same mechanism that geometrically identifies the material world and its objects, we find reflected in the systems that codify life and its possible evolutionary directions: DNA, is our ‘antenna’ for tuning in on reality.

Human Consciousness – which in fact is not yet ‘human’ until it has truly realized the experience of ‘humanity’ – has to conduct its evolution inside this universal scheme: it reflects itself or better still, it instils itself into the material world of Form to trigger a process of self-awareness, that contemporaneously renders every thing ‘true’ by making it ‘exist’ in absolute terms. With this in mind, it is perhaps useful to re-elaborate the modern myth of ‘ascension’: it is not we who have to ‘ascend’ to the fifth dimension or wherever (if it is, it has always been, here and now and is therefore ‘our home’) but it is the fifth dimension (it is God!) that wants to apply itself to this possible existence: and we are the vehicle! In fact: we are IT.

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[1] In the course of the book I will be quoting from Aleister Crowley – just as I will refer to Theosophy, Gurdjieff,

Aurobindo, Krishnamurti, Osho and many others. However, every time Crowley is mentioned there are those who are immediately scandalized. They are undoubtedly ill-prepared on the subject and have been mislead by the amount of nonsense in circulation regarding a figure who, though certainly controversial, willingly and unwillingly, is worth discovering and considering. I would like to reassure readers that despite his audacious experimentation at the height of the Victorian era; his anarchistic and provocative looks and a certain extravagance that could render him strangely unpleasant – Crowley was not the founder of Satanism, even though he was anti-clerical. And he never sacrificed or ate children. That said, I do not think that Crowley needs me to defend him and as for the rest I am not willing to take it on board. However, I do acknowledge the breadth of his work in setting out the theory and practice of a magic–realization of the Self in the light of new existential and spiritual paradigms. He was without doubt among its precursors when the Age of Aquarius or the New Era had yet to be talked about.

[2] With this adjective I am referring to the concepts and experiences that inspire the research themes and magic-mystical practice recovered and brought to life by Aleister Crowley in the early years of the last century. The Thelemic path (from Thelema, which in Greek means Will) better known as Current 93 (the number, according to the Greek Kabbalah that is associated both with the word Will and Love, thus establishing a link between the two principles), has been further developed by successive Initiate Orders which when not deviate or contaminated, form a bridge between esoteric traditions and the avant-garde of esoteric research at the dawn of this New Era. As far as I am concerned the Thelemic path has become the most ‘up to date’ body of doctrine and knowledge and the principle technical reference for those who, always maintaining the necessary caution, wish to approach Magic in its many forms.

The Breath of Brahma

According to mythical images, Consciousness (or perhaps that aspect of Absolute Consciousness that we might include in the concept of ‘Cosmic-Human Soul’) expresses an act of will and creative love. It emanates, it is a vibration with the ability to generate a wave of existence: to manifest itself from this Cosmos in which laws and significance are progressively discovered. It will assume a shape and consistency that can be perceived and lived by consciousness, infused in the dimensions and bodies that will take on material Form, life, thoughts, entities and gods in the making.

We are all of this. Each one of us is an emanation of the Absolute Consciousness. Even though, paradoxically, we stop being so until we rediscover our primordial and eternal nature. This arrives through an understanding of renewed existential formulas or else through discovering the meaning of our life, the knowledge and experience of which must lead to the re-evolution of Cosmic Consciousness in time.

In Hindu metaphor this process is expressed as the great breath of Brahma which creates and destroys worlds in an incessant cyclical rhythm. God breathes out and the universe proceeds from the appearance of laya, or neutral centre, or else from the primordial meeting point of forces: the field of aggregation. With the intake of breath the universe is called back to the source and ceases to exist, but on the act of breathing out again manifestation begins anew.

Being (Para-Brahman) reveals itself in this field of forces, presented by Cosmic Consciousness in the form of Human Consciousness. Thus Being and Consciousness reveal and show themselves, they fragment and recompose: DISSOLVE and COAGULATE.

In the ultimate analysis, what is the voice of the Self if not the boom of God’s breath in our inner silence? The memory of the primordial Will?

29. For I am divided for love’s sake, for the chance of union.

30. This is the creation of the world, that the pain of division is as nothing, and the joy of dissolution all.

Aiwass – Liber AL vel Legis, I

In Islamic tradition it is said: “I was a treasure unknown then I desired to be known so I created a Creation to which I made myself known, then they knew Me”. The question of being and the soul has occupied eminent philosophers and thinkers from Parmenide to Eraclitus, from Socrates to Plato and Plotinus, resurfacing after centuries of ‘darkness’ in the Middle Ages with Cusanus, Erasmus of Rotterdam, Pico of Mirandola and Bacon of the Renaissance: a period in which the great Christian philosophers such as St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas nevertheless managed to make their mark. And finally with the most recent illuminists – Hume, Leibniz, Kant, Fichte and Nietzsche – to arrive at a peak in the magic and Thelemic-Hermetic renaissance of the early years of last century. I personally like to single them out as a forewarning of scientific, cultural, social and political ferment.

Today all of this can be translated into the language of Physics. Think for example of the concept of the holographic universe (Bohm, Aspect, Pribram) which, in the 1980’s, explained how the known material world is nothing more than the illusory multi-form projection of a single source.

To illustrate this point, below I include several excerpts from the famous article Does Objective reality Exist, or is the Universe a Phantasm?  by Michael Talbot – Ref:  https://www.dmt-nexus.me/forum/default.aspx?g=posts&t=4807

Bohm believes the reason subatomic particles are able to remain in contact with one another regardless of the distance separating them is not because they are sending some sort of mysterious signal back and forth but because their separateness is an illusion. He argues that at some deeper level of reality such particles are not individual entities but are actually extensions of the same fundamental something.

 […]

 According to Bohm, the apparent faster-than –light connection between subatomic particles is really telling us that there is a deeper level of reality we are not privy to, a more complex dimension beyond our own. . […]. And, he adds, we view objects such as subatomic particles as separate from one another because we are seeing only a portion of their reality. Such particles are not separate ‘parts’ but facets of a deeper and more underlying unity. […] And since everything in physical reality is comprised of these ‘eidolons’, the universe is itself a projection, a hologram.

In addition to its phantom like nature, such a universe would possess rather startling features. If the apparent separateness of subatomic particles is illusory, it means that at a deeper level of reality all things in the universe are infinitely interconnected. The electrons in a carbon atom in the human brain are connected to the subatomic particles that comprise every salmon that swims, every heart that beats and every star that shimmers in the sky. Everything interpenetrates everything and although human nature may seek to categorize and pigeonhole and subdivide, the various phenomena of the universe, all apportionments are of necessity artificial and all of nature is ultimately a seamless web.

In a holographic universe even time and space could no longer be viewed as fundamentals. Because concepts such as location break down in a universe in which nothing is truly separate from anything else, time and three-dimensional space, (like the images of the fish on the TV monitors) would also have to be viewed as projections of this deeper order. At its deeper level reality is a sort of super hologram in which the past, present and future exist simultaneously. […]

If a hologram of a rose is cut in half and then illuminated by a laser, each half will still be found to contain the entire image of the rose. Indeed even if the halves are divided again, each snippet of film will be found to contain a smaller but intact version of the original image. Unlike normal photographs every part of a hologram contains all the information possessed by the whole. The ‘whole in every part’ nature of a hologram provides us with an entirely new way of understanding organization and order.

[…]

Allowing, for the sake of argument, that the super hologram is the matrix that has given birth to everything in our universe, at the very least it contains every subatomic particle that has been or will be – every configuration of matter and energy that is possible, from snowflakes to quasars, from blue whales to gamma rays. It must be seen as a sort of cosmic storehouse of ‘All That Is’.

[…]

Such findings suggest that it is only in the holographic domain of consciousness that such frequencies are sorted out and divided up into conventional perceptions.

But the most mind-boggling aspect of Pribram’s holographic model of the brain is what happens when it is put together with Bohm’s theory. For if the concreteness of the world is but a secondary reality and what is ‘there’ is actually a holographic blur of frequencies and if the brain is also a hologram and only selects some of the frequencies of this blur and mathematically transforms them into sensory perceptions, what becomes of objective reality? Put quite simply, it ceases to exist. As the religions of the East have long upheld, the material world is Maya, an illusion, and although we may think we are physical beings moving through a physical world, this too is an illusion.

We are really ‘receivers’ floating through a kaleidoscopic sea of frequency and what we extract from this sea and transmogrify into physical reality is but one channel from many extracted out of the super hologram

This striking new picture of reality, the synthesis of Bohm and Pribram’s views, has come to be called the-holographic-paradigm and although many scientists have greeted it with scepticism, it has galvanized others. A small but growing group of researchers believe it may be the most accurate model of reality science has arrived at thus far. […]

In a universe in which individual brains are actually indivisible portions of the greater hologram and everything is infinitely interconnected, telepathy may merely be the accessing of the holographic level.

[…]

The holographic paradigm also has implications for so-called hard sciences like biology. Keith Floyd, a psychologist at Virginia Intermont College, has pointed out that if the concreteness of reality is but a holographic illusion, it would no longer be true to say the brain produces consciousness. Rather it is consciousness that creates the appearance of the brain – as well as the body and everything around us we interpret as physical.

Such a turnabout in the way we view biological structures has caused researchers to point out that medicine and our under standing of the healing process could also be transformed by the holographic paradigm. If the apparent physical structure of the body is but a holographic projection of consciousness, it becomes clear that each of us is much more responsible for our health than current medical wisdom allows. What we now view as miraculous remissions of disease may actually be due to changes in consciousness which in turn effect changes in the hologram of the body.

Similarly, controversial new healing techniques such as visualization may work so well because in the holographic domain of thought, images are ultimately as real as ‘reality’. […]

What we perceive as reality is only a canvas waiting for us to draw upon it any picture we want. […]

Perhaps we agree on what is ‘there’ or ‘not there’ because what we call consensus reality is formulated and ratified at the level of the human unconscious at which all minds are infinitely interconnected.

Metaphysical and Multi-dimensional Scenarios

Then there was not non-existent nor existent:

there was no realm of air, nor sky beyond it.

What covered in, and where? And what gave shelter?

was water there, unfathomed depth of water?

Death was not then, nor was there aught immortal:

no sign was there, the day’s and night’s divider.

That one thing, breathless, breathed by its own nature

apart from it was nothing whatsoever.

Darkness there was: at first concealed in darkness,

this All was indiscriminate chaos.

All that existed then was void and formless;

by the great power of warmth was born that unit.

Thereafter rose desire in the beginning,

Desire after the primal seed and germ of spirit.

Sages who searched with their heart’s thought

discovered the existent’s kinship in the non-existent.

Transversely was their severing line extended:

what was above it then, and what below it?

There were begetters, there were mighty forces,

Free action here and energy of yonder.

Who verily knows and who can here declare it,

whence it was born and whence comes this creation?

The gods are later than this world’s production.

Who knows, then, whence it first came into being?

He the origin of this creation,

whether he formed it all or did not form it,

Whose eye controls this world in highest heaven,

He verily knows it, or perhaps he knows it not.

Rig Veda X.129 – The Song of Creation

                   (circa 3.900 a.C.)

Sanskrit translation: Friedrich Max Müller

The Birth of the World

The world is being born now. It is being born continuously. At this very moment, Consciousness creates its possible expressions: Evolution determines its manifestation. Depending on our level of Consciousness and Evolution we as beings participate in it more or less consciously.

The myths of every epoch and its peoples seem to agree that ‘universes’ are born in a primordial and transcendent nothingness from the dreams of an Absolute Consciousness as anomalous waves in the sea of All.

The Supreme Being can thus know itself and understand itself through the universes, just as our image is reflected in a mirror. Each universe is the expression of a new and different equilibrium: each one becomes, in its own way, a relative manifestation that is temporal and dynamic of the All.

Together the universes comprise an infinite ‘multi-versal’ kaleidoscope. They are reflected in that which the Absolute Being acquires infinite Consciousness of Itself, even though it is immobile, generative, eternally omni-comprehensive and totally complete as such.

The Being nourishes itself. The primordial universes give ‘substance’ to the dreams of God, where every reality can exist. These same universes – each and every part – are generated by primordial energies which, in their turn, become archetypes and cosmic phenomena, laws, geometries and vital processes: the instruments through which Consciousness – in its turn distributed on diverse levels – evolves in every atom, in every cell, in every body and in every thought.

In extreme synthesis, interpreting esoteric tradition, these levels of consciousness are represented as primordial ‘forces’ laws and intelligent entities. They are the Eons, according to Gnostic Christian terminology, the Neteru of Egyptian myth or perhaps we might even call them, the ‘Great Old Ones’, to re-evoke the vertiginous visions of H.P. Lovecraft. They are the existential and conscious Archetypes (or pre-Archetypes) of our mind itself: the Primeval Divinities.

In order to exist, the possible expressions of reality have to expand the territory of their own awareness, with the aim of recognizing themselves and finally reconstructing themselves but above all, of re-evolving in the infinite in which they originate, through endless combinations of the possible.

It is as if – paradoxically – the Absolute is insatiable in renewing Consciousness of itself. And every time such Consciousness is dissolved into Nothingness to then create itself again, it renews itself: such dynamics are at once eternal and yet simultaneous, infinite and pulsating, between manifest and immanifest, noumenon and phenomenon, omniscience and exploration, eternity and becoming, order and chaos.

 

Our Universe, in its entirety, is none other than one of these systems of reality: an opportunity for renewed awareness. It is the crystal in which Consciousness splinters into fragments, little by little delineating possible geometries, to then reflect itself infinitely, to evolve and in the final analysis, play hide and seek with itself.

About this Blog

This blog explores:

·          Spiritual Physics

·          Esoteric Kabbalah

·          Inner Alchemy

·          Soul, death and reincarnation

·          Ethics and approaches for renewed Awareness

The themes we are going to explore here are somewhat complex but I have tried to present them as clearly and succinctly as possible so that they are accessible to everyone and not just to experts in the field. My aim has been to make sense of the ideas rather than simply present the superficial facts and to offer readers my personal reflections in a context that is broad and well-versed on a cultural front. 

This blog is related with my recent book Soul and Reality. Fruit of twenty years experience, it is the ‘state of the art’ of my personal research; it describes paths and models in the light of the great changes to come and of the necessary awakening of consciousness that will characterize the imminent future of humanity.

My spiritual path began at an early age in a Catholic setting and then moved on towards Gnostic Christianity and Theosophy. It passed through the experience of Damanhurian community life, encountering various realities in the vast panorama of Italian and international New Age movements and later matured through personal research, (though not solitary or without  moments of sharing and precious comparison). It was stimulated by a study of the neo-Gnostic and Thelemic ideas of Shamanism during a year spent in Africa and by the Sufism of the Middle East, which I explored during the five years I spent there for professional reasons. Since my return to Italy in 2009 my intention has been to focus on achieving a healthy and well-founded spiritual growth but also to promote discussion and cooperation between free thinkers who are interested in being the avant-garde of real renewal, not only in terms of knowledge but above all, of living: individuals who sense that the key to a conscious and authentic re-awakening lies in the values of personal liberty and responsible self-determination.