Thank you for visiting Okunomichi. I chose my pen-name after the title of haiku master Matsuo Basho’s masterpiece, Oku no Hosomichi, the Narrow Road to the Interior. Okunomichi (Oku no Michi) means the Path to Inner Wisdom. After some decades of studying various Eastern and Western mystery schools, I have finally come to see how they are connected. The answer is obvious, through The Ageless Wisdom found around the world since ageless times. But just how, was beyond me.
However, at this time, the world is opening to an outpouring of cosmic energies. Earth and its inhabitants of the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms are awakening and evolving to higher frequencies and higher dimensions. We are being infused by energies from outer space as well as within, and assisted and guided by more highly evolved beings than we, so that we can join them as fully realized beings.
As a physicist and mathematician, it has taken a lot to come to this stage of understanding of metaphysics and spiritual matters. I thank all my teachers and supporters, whether scientists or spiritual, whether in body or not, for getting me here. I was always driven by an intention to understand the true nature of reality. I sought it in the physical realm, and I learned a lot about how to conduct research and how the three-dimensional world operates. But not enough. We must open our minds — and our hearts — and go beyond. Just as the name Okunomichi suggests!
Please read and contemplate what I have prepared for you, beginning with the first essay of the series, and continuing in chronological order since they are presented following previous themes. I will endeavor to keep adding new ideas to share, and I would love to hear from you. Please free to Leave a Reply to contact me (click the link at the top of this article). Or write to Okunomichi575 (at) gmail.com.
Thank you for joining me and the rest of us. —- Okunomichi
In my lifelong search for the true nature of reality, I have come to realize that the cosmology that we hold determines how we see our role in nature and in the universe — and rules our actions. This is especially relevant now, as humanity is on the cusp of a new consciousness. This document contains excerpts about cosmology from three authors, and features the work of Anne Baring in her recent book.
Richard Tarnas, “Understanding the Modern Disenchantment of the Cosmos,” in Sky and Psyche: The Relationship Between Cosmos and Consciousness, ed. by N. Campion and P. Curry, 2006:
… The relationship between sky and psyche defines our world view. It defines the cosmology of a culture, and the cosmology of a culture is essentially the container of that culture. … And when the sky and the psyche are seen as radically separate, this creates a very different world view for the human being to live within than a world view and cosmology in which the sky is ensouled. … when you lose it [the larger loss of the sacred] in the cosmos and nature, then you begin to lose it inside as well.
C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 1963:
Our psyche is set up in accord with the structure of the universe, and what happens in the macrocosm likewise happens in the infinitesimal and most subjective reaches of the psyche.
Anne Barine, Dream of the Cosmos, 2020 :
Anne Baring discusses how humanity has arrived at its present condition and where we go from here. How we understand our here and now rests on our cosmology, our understanding of our role in the Cosmos. Does Cosmos have a dream? If so, what is it? Now in her tenth decade, the author shares the fruits of her extensive studies and experiences. Here are some excerpts from Dream of the Cosmos.
Introduction
pxix Discovering a New Story
We are living at a time of momentous evolutionary change. …
Our consciousness is the infinitesimal spark of cosmic light that is now sufficiently developed for the universe to reveal itself to us through the incredible instruments that science has devised….
It seems that we are immersed in a sea or field or web of energy that is co-extensive with the immensity of the visible universe and the most minute particles of matter.…
If the Cosmos is alive, intelligent and the ground of our consciousness, what might be its Dream?
Ch. 2. The Awakening Dream
p28 The Goddess [Paleolithic and Neolithic Eras, 25,000 BCE Pyrenees to Lake Baikal]
p29 The Shift from Lunar to Solar Mythology [Egypt and Mesopotamia ca. 2000 BCE, Greece ca. 500 BCE]
p29 The Lost Images of the Feminine [Europe 7th millenium BCE]
p30 Everything was woven together in one cosmic web…the idea of the whole Cosmos as an entity with consciousness or soul in which all life participates derives directly from the image of the Great Mother. … What had happened to the image of the goddess?
p31 The Separation from Nature [Babylonia ca 2000 BCE; Book of Genesis]
p32 A Lost Vision of Reality
p33 The Myth of the Goddess (by Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, 1991) tells the story of how, over a period of some 20,000 years, the image of the deity gradually changed from goddess to god, and how the god came to be identified with spirit and mind, and the goddess with nature, matter and body. The image of the goddess was feared and rejected and with it women and every aspect of life that had been identified with the feminine, including, most importantly, the soul, nature and matter. As the feminine principle, personified by the goddess, came to be rejected or downgraded in relation to the masculine one, personified by the god, so spirit and nature were sundered. As this divisive process intensified, conscious mind and instinctive soul, head and heart, became increasingly polarized in human consciousness, leading ultimately to the spiritual, political and ecological crisis of the present time.
p36 She [Shekinah] personified what the kabbalists named the feminine face of God: the wisdom and glory and radiant immanence of the divine ground concealed beneath and within the forms of life. The Shekinah literally means the ‘Presence of God in the world’.
… the Shekinah offers the most complete image of the feminine aspect of spirit to have survived from the ancient past.
p38 …the soul is not in us. We are in the soul.
But more than this: we are of the nature and substance of soul, the nature and substance of spirit.
p39 … To me, the imagery of the Shekinah offered a startlingly complete description of the Soul of the Cosmos.
Ch. 3 The Tree of Life
p41 Through some four thousand years, a revered chain of teachers passed on the tradition of Kabbalah orally; from its remote origins in Babylon and Egypt until the 13th century when a book called the Zohar or Book of Splendour was written in northern Spain.
p42 At the innermost level or dimension of reality is the unmanifest and knowable divine ground; at the outermost the physical forms we call nature, body and matter. Linking the two [the innermost level of reality and the outermost physical forms] is the archetypal template of the Tree of Life — an inverted tree — whose branches grow from its root in the divine ground and extend through invisible worlds of dimensions of being to this one. … Every aspect of creation, both visible and invisible, is interwoven with every other aspect. All is one life, one cosmic symphony, one integrated whole. We participate in the divine life which informs all these mysterious levels of reality. Our lives are inseparable from the inner life of the Cosmos.
p44 The Teaching of Kabbalah [Kab-ba’-lah]
The fundamental teaching of Kabbalah or Kabbalism is the doctrine of emanation and, because of this, the oneness or unity of all cosmic dimensions of reality. Divine Creative Spirit, named as the unmanifest godhead, Ain Soph or Ain Soph Aur — the Limitless Light — is regarded not only as totally transcendent and unknowable but also, through emanation, present in every particle of the visible, created world as well is in the intermediary dimensions of reality veiled from our sight. …The aim of the kabbalist was, and is, to unite the two worlds: the Above with the Below; the invisible divine world with the manifest world.
p45 Worlds with Worlds
Rather than presenting an image of a hierarchical descent from the invisible to the visible, Kabbalah presented the image of worlds nesting within worlds, dimensions within dimensions manifesting, as it were, from within outwards.
p46 If we want to understand the deep roots of our present ecological and spiritual crisis, we can find them in the loss of three important elements: the feminine image of spirit; the direct shamanic path of communion with spirit through visionary and mystical experience as lived by the great contemplatives of all traditions; and the sacred marriage of the masculine and feminine aspects of the divine.
p46 The Shekinah and Divine Immanence
The Shekinah is the image of the Divine Feminine or the Feminine Face of God as it was conceived in this mystical tradition of Judaism, …, and transmitted orally for a thousand years and more until it flowered in the writings of the Jewish kabbalists of medieval Spain and south-western France. In the imagery and mythology of the Shekinah, we encounter the most complete description of cosmic soul and the indissoluble relationship between two primary aspects of the godhead that has been lost or hidden for centuries.
p47 The Shekinah brings together heaven and earth, the invisible and visible dimensions of reality, in a resplendent vision of their essential relationship and union.
p48 The Zohar or The Book of Radiance that appeared in Spain in 1290 was the principal text of medieval Kabbalism… It speaks of the Shekinah as the Voice of God, the Wisdom of God, the Glory of God, … The mythology of the Shekinah as Divine Wisdom and Holy Spirit offers one of the most incandescent, vivid and powerful images of the immanence of the divine in this dimension. It transmutes all creation, including the apparent insignificance and ordinariness of everyday life, into something to be loved, embraced, honoured and celebrated because it is the epiphany or shining forth of the divine intelligence and love that has brought it into being and dwells hidden within it.
p48 The Imagery of the Sacred Marriage and the Transmission of Light
The highly-developed cosmology of this tradition preserves the ancient Bronze Age image of the sacred marriage, reflected in the union of the Divine Father-Mother in the ground of being. There is not a Father God but a Mother-Father who are one in their eternal embrace, one in their ground, one in their emanation, one in their ecstatic and continuous act of creation through all the dimensions that they bring into being and sustain. From the perspective of divine immanence, there is no essential separation between spirit and nature.
The essential concept of this mystical tradition expresses itself in an image of worlds within worlds rather than as a hierarchy of descent. Divine Spirit (Ain Soph) beyond form or conception is the ineffable Light at the root, the Source, the Ground of Being. Emanating as creative Sound (Word), Light, Intelligence and Love, it brings into being successive spheres, realms, or dimensions named as veils or robes which clothe and hide the hidden source, yet at the same time transmit its radiant light.
p49 The Divine Feminine
The Shekinah or feminine face or aspect of the godhead is named as Cosmic Womb, Palace, … She is named as the architect of worlds, source or foundation of our world, …
She brings into being all spheres or dimensions of manifestation which are ensouled and sustained by the ineffable source until she generates the manifest world we know and remains here until such time as the whole creation is enfolded once again into its source.
p53 The Gnostic Imagery of the Divine Mother
p54 I find it fascinating that in Gnosticism the imagery and mythology of the Divine Mother as the Holy Spirit is so similar to the imagery of the Shekinah in the Kabbalah that they seem to belong to one and the same tradition.
In a gnostic text called the Trimorphic Protennoia appears this poem:
I am the voice speaking softly.
I exist from the first.
I dwell within the Silence,
Within the immeasurable Silence.
I descended to the midst of the underworld
And I shone down upon the darkness.
It is I who poured forth the Water.
I am the one hidden within Radiant Waters…
I am the Image of the Invisible Spirit.
I am the Womb that gives shape to the All
by giving birth to the Light that shines in splendour.
p55 The Holy Spirit Today
How could we imagine the Holy Spirit today? Perhaps as the light that manifests as both wave and particle, as the deep unexplored ‘sea’ of cosmic space and the invisible light particles which are the ground of all physical reality, including the extraordinary complex structure and organization of the patterns of energy that we name as matter: a word which comes from mater, the Latin word for mother. After so many billions of years the energy of life has evolved a form, the planet earth, and a consciousness, our own which is slowly growing towards the recognition of its ground and source. Yet, because of the loss of the tradition of the Divine Feminine, we do not know that what physicists, cosmologists and biologists are exploring in the finer and finer gradations of matter they are discovering is what the awe-struck explorers of the Tree of Life in Kabbalah named the Face and the Glory of God; nor that the universe we explore with the Hubble telescope is the outer covering or veil of a vast unseen Cosmos and an unimaginably fine web of luminous and invisible relationships. If only these images of the Shekinah could be restored to us, how differently we might see matter; with what respect we might treat it.
p56 If we could awaken to the sacredness and divinity of life we would begin to see matter and our own bodies in a different light; we would treat them with greater respect. If we could awaken to Her Presence, we could bring matter and spirit, body and soul together, healing the deep wounds inflicted by the beliefs and concepts which have separated them. Even as we accomplish this, we would begin to transmit the light and love of the Holy Spirit flowing to us and all creation.
p56 [A web of light spoke to Anne Baring]:
“My dream, the Dream of the Cosmos, is for you to know Me again,
to realize that you live within My Being, My Light and My Love.”
There was much speculation about the end of the Mayan calendar on the date of the winter solstice, December 21, of the year 2012. The world did not come to an end. What really happened?
Mayan calendar reference: Maya Cosmogenesis 2012 by John Major Jenkins, 1998
Three of the cycles of the Mayan calendar
This article is about the Mayan calendar which has cycles within cycles, extending over an enormous duration of time. We have heard about its date of 13.0.0.0.0. That date represents the time when the old cycle of the 13-baktun, 5125 years, Long Count Calendar ends and a new one begins. In the Gregorian calendar, this date is 2012.12.21 or December 21, 2012. December 21 is the date of the December solstice, also called the winter solstice in the Northern Hemisphere (summer solstice in the Southern Hemisphere).
Why 5125 years? The Mayan date of 13.0.0.0.0 means 13 baktuns, 0 katuns, 0 tuns, 0 uinals, and 0 kin from the reference date of the calendar. This is the number of years in one-fifth of Earth’s astronomical precessional period of about 26,000 years. It is called the precession of the equinoxes.
The Ancients of planet Earth regarded precession as the evolution of life on Earth, the unfolding of spirit and consciousness. To the Maya, 26,000 years is the gestation period of humanity, just as 260 days is the gestation of a human fetus before it is born.
What, in astronomy, is a precessional cycle?
The axis of the spinning earth wobbles like any spinning top, the axis slowly turning in a circle with angular radius 23.5 degrees. This angle of 23.5 degrees is the angle of the tilt of the earth’s axis to the orbital plane around the sun. This is the reason that the tropical zones, the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, are 23.5 degrees north and south of the equator. Moreover, this is the reason we have seasons.
Earth’s precession takes about 26,000 years to complete. This is one precessional period. In the chart, the circle is the precessional circle. At the left is Polaris, the current pole star in the year 2000. Note that Thuban was the pole star in 3000 BCE (5,000 years ago), and then half a precessional cycle from now it will be the brilliant star Vega in constellation Libra, as it was in 12,000 BCE.
How did ancient indigenous people know the precessional cycle without access to highly accurate instruments?
They observed that the north pole star slowly moved in the night sky across the years and decades. It takes 72 years to move one degree in the sky. It may seem like too small a change to detect, but generations of indigenous people have noticed that different stars in different constellations have taken the place of the pole star.
What is so special about the date 13.0.0.0.0?
We convert the date to the Gregorian calendar which is used today, and ask our astronomical software to give us the positions of Earth and Sun relative to the astronomical objects in space around our galaxy, the Milky Way. We reference the Milky Way by the location of its center, the Galactic Center. Here is what we find, and we go on to interpret the specialness of the date in various aspects.
The Galactic Center (GC) is indicated by the arrow in the photo of the Milky Way.
On this date:
Astronomically: The GC is behind an obscuring Black Rift. It is known to be in the constellation of Sagittarius; its location is designated Sag A* (Sagittarius A*). On this date, the Sun is in alignment with the GC as seen from Earth. That is, the Earth, Sun, and Galactic Center are on a straight line. This happens once every 26,000 years.
Astrologically: This alignment means astrologically that it is a conjunction of humans with the Cosmos.
Mythologically: Father Sun conjoins with Mother Galaxy, creating children (Humankind). This takes place at a portal to the Underworld, affecting human consciousness.
Metaphysically: The solar system enters a region of space with certain high energies, according to the Ageless Wisdom teachings.
Esoterically: Generation or regeneration of human consciousness takes place to a new level of evolution.
What is the Galactic Center in astronomy?
* Physical center of the Milky Way Galaxy
* Place where Sun’s ecliptic path crosses the Milky Way Galactic plane, at a 60-degree angle.
* Location of the galactic supermassive black hole in the Great Black Rift noted by Mayan astronomers.
* Earth orbits the Sun at a speed of 67,100 miles per hour, taking a year of 365.2 days for the orbital period.
* As Earth orbits Sun, Sun orbits Galactic Center, taking its solar system with it, the circuit taking 226 million years. Speed of Sun through the Galaxy: around 500,000 mph.
* Our Galaxy the Milky Way is also traveling through space.
* Earth’s path is thus a circular helical spiral with Sun (red) travelling through space. Earth’s path is indicated by the blue curve. The paths of the two inner planets are shown in red and yellow.
Milky Way Astronomy of Galactic Center
A new study of the center of the Milky Way using radio and X-ray images provides the best view so far of the strange space near the center of the Galaxy. This image shows a full-color high-resolution Chandra X-ray Observatory X-ray image of the 1000 by 2000 lightyear region around the center the Milky Way. The X-ray image is colored orange, green, blue, purple, representing increasingly higher X-ray energies (and increasingly more extreme phenomena).
Center of Milky Way, simulation of stars close to Sag A*.
Various Remarks on Precession Effects
Jose Arguelles (The Mayan Factor, 1987): 2012.12.21 marks the conclusion of the passage of our solar system through a galactic synchronization beam.
The authors of Hamlet’s Mill (Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, 1969) contend that ancient cultures believed precession to have a primary influence on the changing destinies of humankind. The authors discuss ancient myths that a future time would come when cosmic harmony would return.
Kryon, October 2015:
If humanity survived past the December solstice of 2012, it would begin its journey of a further evolution of consciousness.
Concluding Remarks
We can safely surmise from observing the growing spiritual activity on this planet that there is something going on with the elevation of human consciousness to higher frequencies, to higher dimensions. Further, that the rate of evolution has stepped up since 2012 together with a shifting perception of time. Now time seems not so much the ruler of our daily activities, but a connection with the short to long cyles from the distant past into the future. We are coming out of our dark period to an understanding of being here now.
We have passed the winter solstice of our dark period. Spring and summer of humanity have not yet arrived, but the winter solstice is a herald of the coming spring.
This essay follows upon decades of contemplation on the nature of reality. Our background in physics and quantum mechanics together with research into Wosite and other world cosmologies have enabled us to form a coherent picture of Universe. We discuss the Wosite universe of Awa as we understand it, based on the teachings of Toyoke Kami and his Motoake cosmology chart. We present the Wosite cosmology in light of the modern thinking of quantum physics.
Awa Universe
Awa means Universe. The syllable A stands for Ama, the Unseen. The syllable Wa stands for Seen, as the physical dimension of Earth. Although our human minds like to categorize concepts to make them more understandable, there is really no separation between Unseen and Seen. You may see translations of ancient literature which speak of Heaven and Earth which are roughly equivalent to…
September 17, 1930 – February 4, 2016. D. Sc., NASA astronaut on Apollo 14 (mission: January 31 – February 9, 1971). Returning from the moon and seeing the Earth from space, Mitchell experienced an epiphany which set his life’s purpose on a new track. He founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) in 1973. Mitchell included consciousness in his dyadic model of reality which he introduced in a publication of IONS September 1995, and described it more fully in his book, The Way of the Explorer, 1996.
A personal note. This author was priviledged to meet Dr. Mitchell at IONS headquarters in Petaluma, California soon after the 1995 paper appeared. We asked a question about the dyadic model and his answer was so clear that it seemed almost a mind-to-mind transmission.
Dyadic Model
Mitchell’s dyadic cosmology is based on modern physics and Ageless Wisdom (Perennial Philosophy). In it, reality is viewed as interconnected/interacting pairs, called dyads, although the connections may not be readily recognized. One such dyad is matter/mind.
This evolutionary cosmology begins 13.8 billion years ago. Our universe arose from the zero-point field: the field of quantum fluctuations that exist at a temperature of absolute zero. Although we would expect that there would be nothing in a vacuum at absolute zero, there is activity. There is a field of energy. This is the field that underlies All That Is, the ground of all being. In the very beginning of our universe, there was only this zero-point energy. This energy was dyadic: dense energy of matter/existence/physicality, and ephemeral energy of mind/knowing/mentality/information/consciousness.
The dense energy produced waves and particles of molecular matter in our physical world. The subtle energy produced information for knowing.
Evolutionary Model of Time and Process
Ever since the beginning, our universe has been subject to the Second Law of Thermodynamics: The total entropy (disorder) of a system either increases or remains constant in any spontaneous process; it never decreases. In the macroscale universe, dissipative structures are either entropic or negentropic (order). These two irreversible (entropic/negentropic) processes operate in the macroscale and effect an arrow of time going only one way, into the future. (Yet, on the microscale, subatomic particles interact in processes that are reversible in time.) While energy is lost into the larger environment, it organizes into more complex structures. It transforms the the original energy potential into a structured macroscale universe that over billions of years produced intelligent, questioning, human beings.
In other words, we live in a self-organizing, creative, learning universe.
Consciousness Model
The dyadic model is also a model of consciousness, or knowing, which is both fundamental and evolutionary. Since information is merely a pattern of energy, its meaning has to be interpreted by a conscious mind. In other words perception and intentionality are a dyad.
The following is a quote from the 1995 paper. Mitchell’s existence and knowing are equivalent to physicality and mentality, or the material world and consciousness.
“Reality in our universe may be said to consist of two things: existence and knowing. These two aspects of reality are interacting evolutionary processes. They stem from two fundamental attributes of nature: energy and information. It is why in this model they are called dyadic.”
Quotes from the book (page numbers given)
“Nature knows nothing of time [hour, minute, second]; all she understands is process.” p122
“At the level of nature, the arrow of time is not defined; it has no meaning.” p124
“The human soul is the coherent structure of information experienced through one’s life.” p185
“The evolving, intelligent awareness that resides in the individual human being will continue to evolve toward the god state.” p186
“The gods do exist. They are the eternal, connected, and aware Self experienced by all intelligent beings.” p216
References
Edgar Mitchell, The Way of the Explorer, Putnam, first edition 1996
In the previous post, we suggested that the universe was created out of chaos which contained all possibilities. This is a worldview of the quantum vacuum which is an emptiness that contains the plenum, the fullness of All That Is. These posts are a continuation of the theme of E. Sahtouris’ Gaia’s Dance, the dance that creates the entire universe. I wanted to write an article on how the quantum vacuum is the quantum plenum. I found that Anne Baring had already done so in her wonderful post, The Quantum Vacuum. She states:
At the quantum level of reality, we are all connected.
The quantum field is the source ground of the visible universe which holds the recorded information of everything that has been, is and will be in the future. It is like a gigantic memory field holding other fields within it which eventually manifest as the “forms” of life on this planet.
Baring quotes physicist Bernard Haisch:
It may represent an unlimited source of energy available everywhere, and perhaps even a way to modify gravity and inertia. The quantum vacuum is, therefore, in reality a plenum.
Compare this with Sahtouris’ All That Is. Aren’t they saying the same thing? Another physicist with a similar view was David Bohm and his What Is, which is so like All That Is.
David Bohm received his doctorate in theoretical physics under Robert Oppenheimer at the University of California, Berkeley Radiation Laboratory. He is the author of Quantum Theory, Prentice-Hall, 1951, and many other books. He is most noted for his treatise, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 1980, a new way for quantum physics to look at the nature of reality and consciousness. His main thesis is that underlying the unfolded explicit order of our three-dimensional physical world is an enfolded (non-physical) implicit order of movement. This resonates with themes from ancient India and Tibet.
Having published a textbook on quantum theory in 1951, Bohm was nevertheless feeling that the customary separation of things of the world into different parts was not working well, and that a new world view was needed in modern physics. He sought to approach the nature of reality as an “undivided wholeness of the universe.” He saw underlying reality was a movement, a process.
In Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980), he introduces the focus of his work:
“I would say that in my scientific and philosophical work, my main concern has been with understanding the nature of reality in general and of consciousness in particular as a coherent whole, which is never static or complete, but which is in an unending process of movement and unfoldment.”
Bohm proposes:
“… a new notion of order, that may be appropriate to a universe of unbroken wholeness. This is the implicate or enfolded order. In the enfolded order, space and time are no longer the dominant factors… Rather, an entirely different sort of basic connection of elements is possible… [as] forms derived from the deeper order. These ordinary notions in fact appear in what is called the explicate or unfolded order.”
“There is a universal flow in which mind and matter are not separate, but are “different aspects of one whole and unbroken movement.”
“Moreover we are now able to understand in a new and more consistent way our proposed notion concerning the general nature of reality, that what is is movement.”
Tibetan Bon Dzogchen
“There are interconnections and resonances between the later quantum philosophy of interdependent wholeness proposed by David Bohm and the metaphysical perspectives of Tibetan Bon and Buddhist traditions. In particular Bohm’s later vision of the necessity of a quantum vision of wholeness within which fragmented organic ‘subunits’ embodying limited consciousness have a relative independence at the same time as being connected to the whole, is shown to be spectacularly resonant with Buddhist Yogacara (Consciousness-Only) and Bon and Buddhist Dzogchen metaphysical perspectives.” — The Tibetan Book of the Undivided Universe: David Bohm’s Quantum Philosophy of Wholeness in the Light of Buddhist Metaphysics by Graham Smetham. See alsoUnbounded Wholeness by Anne Carolyn Klein and Tenzin Wangyal.
The Tarantula is one of the largest known star-forming nebula. Although it looks like chaos, the nebula is really forming stars.
In the Beginning was Chaos
This post was inspired by Elisabet Sahtouris (see previous post) who gave the definition of the Greek word chaos. In many of the creation myths the world began in utter darkness, in chaos, when all was in confusion. How did our orderly world develop out of the confusion? We ask, what is chaos?
Okunomichi has discussed chaos previously. You can find the posts by using the Search box on the right.
Chaos and Gaia’s Dance
The ancient Greek myth of Gaia’s Dance is described in Sahtouris’ Gaia’s Dance (see previous posts):
Once upon a time, there was only a great, dark emptiness called Chaos. There was nothing at all until a beautiful dancing goddess appeared. As she danced and danced, Gaia became Earth with forests and rivers, fishes and birds and animals, and eventually the people of Earth.
In the Greek creation myth, the great darkness and emptiness of Chaos is the great All That Is. How can nothing be everything?
Chaos and Plenum
In ancient Greece, chaos meant the possibility of everything in no-thing. Once things came into being, the universe was called cosmos which means the pattern of All That Is. The Greeks called this fullness in nothingness plenum. Plenum is also used in quantum physics.
The expression, the possibility of everything, reminds me of a benediction by Sanata Kumara (see earlier post). He would say before sending off a mission:
May all possibilities be open to you.
This is equivalent to saying:
May all opportunities be open to you.
Chaos and Plenum
The Greek definition of chaos in emptiness is taken up by physicists who call this emptiness the Quantum Void as well as the Quantum Plenum, for all possibilities are open.
Quantum physicist David Bohm has proposed that the nature of reality as we experience it in our physical world is an explicate order which has its ground in an implicate order. More about about this in the next post.
Order Out of ChaosAccording to Gaia’s Dance
We refer you again to Gaia’s Dance for the story of how Gaia the goddess and Gaia the Earth solved the problem of creating order in a beautiful and harmonious manner.
Order Out of Chaos According to Science
Order out of Chaos by Ilya Prigogine
Order Out of Chaos is the title of a book by Nobel Laureate Ilya Prigogine, physical chemist, and Isabelle Stengers, philosopher. As a physical chemist, Prigogine is concerned with the role of entropy:
“A new unity is emerging: irreversibility is a source of order at all levels. Irreversibility is the mechanism that brings order out of chaos.”
It is beyond our scope to go into the exposition, so we limit ourselves to the remark that quantum mechanics plays a role in this.
Science, Order, and Creativity
Another book of collaboration in which they expose their thoughts about order (in a non-technical way) is the book, Science, Order, and Creativity, by David Bohm and F. David Peat, both theoretical physicists, originally published in 1987. Here is an intriguing statement:
“But according to the metaphor that chaos is order, an increase in entropy has to be understood in a different way that is, in terms of a kind of change of order.”
2022.11.20 The following addendum augments the post.
Edgar Mitchell on Order and Chaos
Edgar Mitchell, astronaut on the 1971 Apollo 14 mission to the moon, wrote a bold book on his “journey through the material and mystical worlds.” The book, The Way of the Explorer, was published in 1996. Here are some of his remarks related to the chaos theory of Ilya Prigogine.
It wasn’t until the late 1970s that a physicist by the name of Ilya Prigogine described the most pervasive and important processes in the macroscale universe as far-from-equilibrium processes. He garnered the Nobel Prize for his work on dissipative structures, which he reported in his book, Order Out of Chaos.
The salient characteristic of Prigogine’s discoveries about dissipative structures is that they are entropic processes, meaning they are not time-reversible.
In nature, time has only one direction. We call this the arrow of time. … The arrow of time is completely defined by the direction of irreversible processes of which there are two in the macroscale universe: entropic and negentropic. …
But the process of the universe, as understood today, is that of transforming the enormous unstructured potential at the moment of the Big Bang into a structured macroscale reality that ten to eighteen billion years later resulted in human beings who can ask questions about that process. Perhaps we are a star’s way of knowing about itself.
The arrow of time is only knowable at the level of macroscale processes where energy is lost into the larger environment, or organizes into more complex structures through irreversible processes.
By looking at very nonlinear behaviors in nature, scientists discovered certain repeating patterns of chaos and order, depending upon the scale of size. The closer one looks at the seemingly chaotic behavior of certain systems, new levels of order seem to emerge from the details. And beneath each level of order is another level of chaos, and so on.
This is the fifth in the series of posts on the true nature of reality. Here we view Reality from a Gaian perspective.
Gaia’s Dance
Gaia’s Dance is a perceptive book about the living nature of our mother planet, Gaia. Scientist Dr. Elisabet Sahtouris can see the evolution of Earth as a dance of powerful energies. Not only does she look into ancient Greek and Vedic myths and past five-billion-year Earth history, but interprets the latest scientific findings and looks ahead into the future as well. She shows us how we’ve crippled Gaia and what we can do to make her healthy again, along with transforming our own human foibles and destiny. The book is entitled, Gaia’s Dance: The Story of Earth and Us, 2018 .This book is written in a comfortable style for non-specialists to understand the complex science. Other titles of Sahtouris include: Earthdance: Living Systems in Evolution, A Walk Through Time: From Stardust to Us; and Biology Revisioned with Willis Harman.
The Dance of the Universe
“Every piece of matter, everything we know, is a beautiful ballet made of countless invisible dancers’ movements together. It is a dance too small to see, and yet so large it is the whole universe!
“This reminded some physicists that ancient people in India had called the universe the dance of Shiva and his wife, Shakti…and the dance of living nature, of the whole universe, is All That Is.
“Physicists everywhere now understand the universe this way, showing us that matter is a moving dance of energy forming endless patterns. What ‘matters’ is the design of the dance. People everywhere are getting this, too, that we are all One, all individually and together a single energy dance, all of us affecting each other’s lives, all of us co-creating our dance now and always.
“Perhaps the biggest question in science now is about the nature of this basic energy of All That Is. Just like the hunt for the tiniest indivisible ‘original’ particle from which all matter is composed, scientists now hunt for the original energy from which all the matter in the universe is made. Some physicists believe it is what we call consciousness as was, and still is, believed in the Vedic science of India; others disagree.”
Sea of Energy Model
Scientists have begun to abandon the popular Big Bang theory. Now scientists believe that the universe that we know began as ripples of energy like waves on a sea of energy, or like the breath of a living organism. In the 20th century, Einstein’s theory of relativity showed that matter is equivalent to energy. And quantum mechanics theory posits that everything is connected, which agrees with the ancient teachings of sages that All is One. What is it that makes All One?
Elisabet Sahtouris suggests we imagine the stuff of the universe as like a musical keyboard. It does make some sense, since musical notes are vibrations of different frequencies. The lowest keys/notes are the particles of Matter, the middle keys are the electromagnetic energies of light, and the highest keys are the high frequencies of Spirit. In this model, each of us is a being of Matter-Energy-Spirit. Einstein showed that matter and energy are the same thing. But what is this “same thing”? We are now beginning to accept the ages-old teaching of the Vedas that this basic stuff is consciousness, consciousness which is Spirit. Consciousness has all these vibrations of energy of the keyboard, from Spirit to Energy to Matter.
Consciousness: All That Is
The universe is All That Is. We are All That Is.
What is “All That Is”? Well, isn’t it what consciousness is — pure energy? Physicists call All That Is the quantum field, a field of pure energy.
We will go into further consideration of the quantum field and we will be sharing further thoughts on consciousness in following posts.
The Evolving Dance
In the final chapter of Sahtouris’ Gaia’s Dance, she shares her wisdom with the reader.
“We humans, as we have seen, are still quite new compared with so many other species, yet we are already forming a still newer and larger global body of humanity. We are taking evolution to a new stage — one in which we are aware of what we are doing, one in which we organize ourselves by ideas instead of by instincts — one in which we can know ourselves as spirit having a human experience, as some people say, and knowing, or waking up to, our Oneness, our presence in All That Is.”
“If people all over the world come to love their own lives as part of Gaia’s Dance, Gaia’s big brain experiment may prove to be well worth the risk. We will all know that we are still young, as a human species, and can make the future as bright as we would like it to be. With our love and cooperation, Gaia’s Dance will go on in creative balance and harmony — both for itself and as part of the greater harmonies of the whole universe.”
In the Beginning …
The ancient Greeks said that the universe originated with the dance of the goddess Gaia. Dancing brought order out of chaos. Let’s take a further look at chaos.
As we approach the Age of Aquarius, we must settle our debt to our mother planet, Gaia.
“Gaia is the Great Mother of All, giver and protector of life.”
Elisabet Sahtouris
We feature the contributions of James Lovelock and Elisabet Sahtouris for showing us to view the Earth as Gaia, a living, breathing, dancing system, and Michael Lindfield for urging us to act as Gaians. Gaia is the Greek name for our mother planet Earth, and as well is a goddess whose dance created All That Is in our universe.
Gaia Theory of James Lovelock
James Lovelock is the inventor of the electron capture detector (which made possible the detection of atmospheric nano-pollutants) and of the microwave oven. Moreover, James Lovelock originated the Gaia theory in the 1970s. Even today, he is an active environmentalist and futurist.
The Gaia Theory describes Earth as a living system, an organism made up of organisms much as the plants and animals and human beings that we know. James Lovelock’s classic book, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, originally published in 1982 by Oxford University Press (OUP), has been republished by OUP in 2016.
Lovelock has published a number of additional books on Gaia and the environment. His recent books include: A Rough Guide to the Future, and The Revenge of Gaia.
Gaia’s Dance and Elisabet Sahtouris
Elisabet Sahtouris PhD is an internationally known evolution biologist, futurist, author and speaker. She has a broad and deep understanding of the scientific and cultural aspects of Earth’s evolution. Sahtouris earlier wrote Earthdance: Living Systems in Evolution, 2000. She has written the highly acclaimed “children’s book for grownups” which she has entitled, Gaia’s Dance: The Story of Earth and Us, 2018 .Gaia’s Dance will be reviewed in detail in the next post.
“As a Gaian we think, feel and act within a deeply sensed knowing that the whole Earth lives inside of us and that we live inside the whole Earth…A Gaian is a microcosm of Gaia — a sacred space of synthesis where Life meets Life and knows itself to be One with All. A human being lives on the Earth while a Gaian lives AS the Earth.”
Michael Lindfield stimulates individuals and organizations to unleash the creativity of the human spirit in meeting the urgent need of our times and the compelling call of a more just and joyful future. Lindfield is co-founder of the Science of Group Work initiative, and he serves as Board President of Meditation Mount in Ojai, California. Lindfield is the author of The Dance of Change.
Question
Can we learn to behave as Gaians before it is too late to save Gaia and ourselves?
Let us learn more about the Gaian worldview as expressed by Elisabet Sahtouris.
Okunomichi 
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