Spacetime and Mindmatter

The core of Sufi teaching is that some kind of higher organs form in us as a consequence of right attention (mindfulness) to experience. The presumption (mine) is that the person so formed is enabled to function properly in the next dimension. “Salvation” in this context has a developmental meaning.

In the Western Christian concept, salvation is projected principally as a divine gift, but achieved by the will to live in accordance with divine law known through revelation and believed in—and that belief itself is a function of the will. We shall fail in this effort, human that we are, but it is the consistency that counts, the sincere intention and its steady implementation. The backstory here is the Fall; it degraded our natures. Therefore the model is that of a blissful state, a descent therefrom for faults of our own, and a return to bliss achieved, as it were, by a reform of our fallen nature. Call it re-development.

The first model suggests that we came into being unfinished, mere potentials, and that ascent is akin to growing up. The second suggests perfectly created beings who fell and must recover.

The Eastern model suggests, more or less explicitly, that souls are really gods but ignorant of their status—and a fall of sorts is implied because that ignorance may have been acquired willfully. If so, these gods have lost the crucial aspect I associate with divinity. And to speak of “sparks of God” does not correct the problem. The meaningful idea of God, for me (an adherent to negative theology that I am) does not support, in relation to God, any kind of division, whether into sparks or not, any kind of evolution, attributes, acts, thoughts, or anything else farmable in thought. Something like the Cosmos may have attributes, may evolve, etc. We can say nothing about God.

So where to go from here? Seriously. How to see this correctly?

Humanity, it seems to me, has no answer. The totality of wisdom consists of different ways of interpreting the contradiction between consciousness and the mindless over against. Dualism of the radical kind (Mazdaism) is one answer. In that view the mindless is one, the mindful the other polarity, both preexistent from eternity. The omnipotent creator (Western monotheism) at least accounts for mind, but don’t ask too many questions about the mindless; the answer will be that God does what he will. Denial of the mindless is the third approach; all is mind; the rest is illusion (e.g. Buddhism). Materialism completes the picture by denying mind; all is matter.

The solution is probably hidden in this quaternity. The most mind-blowing fact in experience is that we can dream the future. Just once, unambiguously, is enough. I’ve experienced it (link). Such an experience convinces me that our concept of time is very iffy. And if of time, probably also of space. In the Real world, and I do not mean this cosmos here, the contradiction I identified above may not be present. Occasionally, for very good reasons, well understood over there, big bangs generate cosmoses of space and time to get some necessary work accomplished. Once over there, we’ll understand it. And we’re all bound over there. Our problem here is cosmocentricity, if you like. We can’t imagine a reality without space and time, mind and matter—nicely separated. Einstein tried, with his spacetime continuum. But don’t try to picture that. Failure is guaranteed.