What the Bleep #$*! Do We Know, starring Marlee Matlin, a docudrama combining a storyline, animated bits, and interviews with scientists, philosophers, and various authors of spiritual and consciousness viewpoints, launched the contemporary modishness of “quantum reality” in 2004.

This was followed by What the Bleep !? – Down the Rabbit Hole in 2006, and more recently, Black Whole and Thrive released in 2011, taking us even “further down the rabbit hole” where science, psychology, spirituality, philosophy, and religion embrace each other, somewhat clumsily, in a fusion of the ancient and modern. A kind of “unholy” alliance of intellectual abstraction, divine mysticism, religious dogma, and existential free-will that is still evolving. Buddhist and Yoga practices, in particular, seem to be favorite study haunts of western psychoanalysis professionals. The mind awareness practices of these old traditions remind contemporary psychodynamic specialists of the prevailing orthodoxy of the interrelation of unconscious and conscious mental forces as determinants of personality and motivation.

Today’s popularism of a natural affinity existing between psychoanalytical theory and spiritual-mystical postulation has infected both approaches-to-greater-awareness. For good or bad is the question. A question, for the most part, that is going unasked. I guess it would depend on the ultimate goal. If the goal is overcoming mental instability, that’s one thing. If its enlightenment, that’s something else. And if it is enlightenment, are a few initials following someone’s last name, sprinkled with gestalt training sufficient for “passing the board” for authentic realization. Westerners, in particular, Americans, are an impatient and busy lot. We love systematizing, codifying, streamlining of process from goal wished to goal realized.

It’s all metaphor: science, art, philosophy, religion. It’s all descriptive, a paring away of the “solid universe” to supposedly reveal the essence of life. The horizon of ultimate truth is always receding into a distant mystery. It all becomes a notional exercise in explaining a non-solid reality in which we feel a solidness of and within ourselves. We are still on the outside looking in.

Space, unified field, the Holofractographic Universe of Nassim Haramein, aether, that is, ch’i, qi, prana or “life force” by any other name, is illusive, uncontainable by the mind. Yet, the mergence of science and spirituality today holds a popular culture fascination with the notion of a cyclical leaping of individual and collective consciousness toward the full awareness of reality. The feeling that going beyond corporeal experience to energetic concepts and observations is leading us inexorably to the experiential realization of ultimate truth.

Going back to the notion of a vertical ascendency of consciousness, as reflected in the thought of Vladimir Vernadsky (1863-1945) and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), we see a trending toward an ascension model for enlightened transformation. Vernadsky described a succession of phases of development of the Earth: going from the geosphere (inanimate matter) to the biosphere (biological life) to the noosphere (sphere of human thought). As the emergence of life transformed the geosphere, Vernadsky argued that human cognition fundamentally transforms the biosphere. Teilhard postulated:

“that as mankind organizes itself in more complex social

networks, the higher the noosphere will grow in awareness … the noosphere is growing towards an even greater integration and unification culminating in what he referred to as the Omega Point or an apex of thought/consciousness.”

(Noosphere, Princeton Edu. Web 2013.)

<http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Noosphere.html>

Then we have the Gaia Hypothesis, which “posits that the Earth is a self-regulating complex system involving the biosphere, the atmosphere, the hydrospheres and the pedosphere, tightly coupled as an evolving system.”

(Lovelock, James. The Vanishing Face of Gaia. Basic Books, 2009, p. 255.)

Inherent in these geo-mystic hypotheses is the notion of evolving consciousness occurring in all parts of the Whole that is synonymous with evolving awareness of universal processes—inferring a natural path of enlightenment (via reason or mysticism depending on how you personally view it) through intimacy with the workings of the geosphere and the cosmos.

But all of this is in the realm of thought-about, observation-on, and participation-in process. And, while participation gets higher marks for genuine experience, it is not the same as Being. Being is not out or in, separate—observer and observed. The constant as each new layer of dimensional reality is peeled away is another one replacing it, a continuation of process being witnessed through a process of inquiry; a never-ending loop leading back to the same place. If—as suggested by some past and modern theories/doctrines of existence—we affect reality as cause and effect, creating our own life experience, is it simulated from imagination or real? Are we dreaming, while reality passes us by? And no matter how good the dream may be at times, are we missing out on something so indispensable to our existence that we must drive on relentlessly to some innate completion arising within us?

How then do we break the grip of reflecting upon reality, while reality escapes us moment to moment? As mind-matter organisms filtering consciousness, how do we interrupt the flow of words and concepts that hide reality from us? Solid is only a word, as is liquid, gaseous, action, reaction, interaction, causality, and even stillness. The ancient systems, with their nomenclature of descriptive terms, are more experiential in their practices for realizing our energy bodies and their energy matrices. Yet, even in recognizing these subtle flows of charged particles, moving through and around us, we are still involved in “process,” until there is nothing to experience but “being.”

“Dropping the mind,” as in Hindu Vedantic tradition, or accessing “Wisdom Mind,” as in Buddhist tradition, refers to the same state of reality experience. The argument over “self” notwithstanding: the immortal soul, merging into the oneness of the godhead—the atma (Skt.)—alleged by Hinduism; the anatma (Skt.), the not-soul of Buddhism, lacking consensual definition, but implicating a mind-stream, life-continuum mind, or repository of consciousness. However you dissect it, what is being referred to is a state of direct experience without conceptual or analytical aspects, without subject and object, without progression.

So there we have it. Beyond process is the Source. But not the word source. The word source is a metaphor. Metaphor is a “feel good” treatment for the condition of unsolved mystery. Even “enlightenment” is a conceptualization of awakened behavior. It is not Liberation, a complete untethering from conditional reality-view, but rather a metaphor for enlightened activity—a best guess scenario based on observation of others—not to imitate in some codified, doctrinal manner, but to test against reality presenting itself, moment to moment. When the experience of “activity” is free of cause and effect, you might just want to BE.