Two Kinds of Dualities

Among the many dualities philosophy and ordinary speech present, some are highly time-dependent, others are, you might say, are timeless, sub specie aeternitatis. To pick two on each side, potency-and-act and being-and-becoming are of the time-dependent kind. The living-and-the-dead and phenomenon-and-noumenon, belong to the timeless category. Let’s deal with these last first.

A person might think that living-and-dead are most definitely time-dependent, arguing that everything living dies and does so within time. But the odd thing is, we can’t be sure. Bodies most certainly die, but what are bodies made of? They’re made of elements. Elements do not die. What constitutes a living being is something more than organic elements, characterized by having carbon as a constituent. A corpse still has all those elements the dying person had a moment before dying. Life has fled, as we say, but until we know just what it is, we can’t say that it has disappeared. If life is a transcending force, living-and-dead are permanently here. Only the forms change.

Phenomenon-and-noumenon, the Kantian categories, meaning that which is capable of being perceived and that, behind it, which cannot, the thing-in-itself, are more obviously independent of time. They co-exist. Thus they point at a basic definition of reality.

Turning to the other side, potency-and-act, the Aristotelian categories, are embedded in time. Potency is a capacity to change. It’s a sleeping power and, when it is unfolding, becoming actual, it is transformed from invisibility to manifestation. Becoming-and-being are equivalent categories. But becoming is impossible to picture without time. Aristotle’s word for potential was dunamis, thus “capacity, possibility.” As it unfolds into act, we have dynamism, a word we derive from dunamis. We’re really dealing here with change, very much a here and now sort of thing, arising from philosophical attempts at explaining motions of sundry kinds. They do not tell us anything about the cosmos, which is always in motion too.

For me the timeless dualities produce more food for thought—because I sense that there is something beyond the here and now. The very abstract, modern formulation I most value is the duality offered by David Bohm, the physicist.† In attempts to make room for intelligence in the Cosmic Whole—but it can be extended to include life and spirit—he suggested two orders in the universe. One is conditioned, the other unconditioned. Call this duality necessity-and-freedom. Intelligence—and life, and spirit—belong to the latter. And these may be thought of as existent within the time flow as well as without.

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†I never tire of trying to sell Bohm’s wonderful book, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Routledge, 1996, wherein the relevant passage on this subject is on pages 50-53.

Mysticism, Science

Mysticism and science are more closely related to each other than either is to philosophy. Here I take philosophy in its modern sense—largely engaged in dealing with pure concepts or even simply with grammar and semantics. Both mysticism and science are grounded in experience, the one in the exploration and understanding of transcending realities, the other in examining the physical. Both, of course, have marginal or pseudo forms. In mysticism that manifests as speculation about experience not personally lived; in the other as mathematical science in which any relationship to reality is, at best, produced by instrument readings. Mysticism is rare, science common; the reason for this is that those who have actually experienced the transcending are very few in number; those who have access to matter are many. Herewith two quotes from Shihabuddin Yahya Suhrawardi concerning the mystics:

We deny the right to the Peripatetics [Aristotelians] to speak about the forms and realities which become visible to the visionary contemplatives, for what is in question is a path which scarcely any of them has followed and even in those very few cases the mystical experience remained weak and precarious. The follower of the mystical path who has received his initiation from a master with theosophical experience, or thanks to the special divine assistance which guides the solitary exile—the latter case being very rare—will fully understand that the Peripatetics have entirely overlooked two sublime universes which never figure in their discussions, and there are a number of other things that remain beyond the scope of their philosophy.

…In short, the theosophist who has truly attained to mystical experience is one whose material body becomes like a tunic which he sometimes casts off and at other times puts on. No man can be numbered among the mystical theosophists so long as he has no knowledge of the most holy leaven of mystical wisdom, and so long as he has not experienced this casting off and this putting on.*

A parallel critique of mathematical science is provided by the physicist David Bohm. I’ve quoted this segment before elsewhere. It bears repeating in this context:

All that is clear about the quantum theory is that it contains an algorithm for computing the probabilities of experimental results. But it gives no physical account of individual quantum processes. Indeed, without the measuring instruments in which the predicted results appear, the equations of the quantum theory would be just pure mathematics that would have no physical meaning at all. And thus quantum theory merely gives us (generally statistical) knowledge of how our instruments will function. And from this we can make inferences that contribute to our knowledge, for example, of how to carry out various technical processes….

It follows from this that quantum mechanics can say little or nothing about reality itself. In philosophical terminology, it does not give what can be called an ontology for a quantum system. Ontology is concerned primarily with that which is and only secondarily with how we obtain our knowledge about this.†

The reason why science rules and mysticism is relegated to the category of the airy-fairy is not because one produces truth and the other fantasy. They both produce genuine observations of reality. The decisive reason is that in a collective, social setting, common knowledge must be accessible to the commonality of the population. But transcending experience is only available to the few; the rest must believe. The truth of the mystical, however, is at least indirectly substantiated by the majority of humans who do believe and adhere to one or another of the world’s religions. They have an intuition that the mystics “have something.” And that intuition, of course, comes from the same river the few have actually followed closer to its source.

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*Suhrawardi in Book of Conversations, quoted in Henry Corbin’s Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth, Bollingen, 1977, p. 124.

†Bohm, David and B.J. Hiley, The Undivided Universe, Routlege, 1993, p. 1-2.

Playing with Modern Dualities

A modern version of Aristotle’s elegant concept (that substance is a duality of matter and of form) is David Bohm’s suggestion of two orders in reality. One he calls the conditioned, the other the unconditioned order. They suggest something analogous. The conditioned order for Bohm is matter, in that it follows laws. He proposed the unconditioned kind in order to explain intelligence; he found it impossible to derive it from the material, the conditioned order. Intelligence, as I conceive of it at least, is not something self-existent. It is the characteristic of an agent. Therefore his two orders might be named Matter and Mind.

In Aristotle (as best as I can gather), what we call real is substantial. Therefore neither matter nor form can exist alone. It is their fusion that makes reality. Hence unformed matter and immaterial form both produce categories the ontological status of which is rather fuzzy. It is potential—which gives time itself a strange sort of role. In Bohm, at least conceptually, a hierarchy is suggested. The Conditioned Order, just viewed linguistically, demands a conditioner—whereas the Unconditioned Order can be imagined standing alone.

The mere existence of two orders, one hierarchically beneath the next, suggests that the lower of the two has some meaningful purpose. What is that purpose? Is it the medium in which the mind can give itself expression?

Now to flesh this out a little. The Ultimate Mind can condition all matter. But we know that other levels of mind exist as well—minimally like ours. And if minds like ours exist, they imply an Ultimate mind. And we also know that lesser minds are capable of arranging matter but unable to alter its ultimate “conditioning.” We also know that matter itself manifests in a continuum—from invisible electromagnetic waves on up to planets and such. And gross, dense matter can and does block the flow of the electromagnetic. We know that. If the power of lesser minds is insufficient to even to “arrange” electromagnetic waves—and here I mean directly, by simply willing—and those minds found themselves (voluntarily or otherwise) in a region where dense matter predominates, wouldn’t those minds have suddenly felt a sudden drastic loss of functionality? They would have found it difficult to give themselves expression using subtle matter (not enough of it around) or to see each other (blocked by coarse energy everywhere). And what if self-expression and relationship, thus interacting with their like—were the sources of their creativity and their exercise of love? Would they have felt lost in space and time—and blind?

Such is the grounding for my concept of chemical civilization. The presumption is that long ago we found ourselves genuinely lost—thus in an environment of coarse material density. Next we discovered that our only power to influence matter in this region was at the subatomic level—but sufficient to begin using local matter to build tiny and then ever greater machines—until we could finally, by means of those machines, see ourselves and begin to arrange the matter of this region of reality.

It’s just a suggestion, of course. But such a line of thought, it seems to me, has explanatory powers much greater than many of our other myths. It suggests that the two, the conditioned and the unconditioned, may very well be everywhere—but happiness demands that the agents at every level must be matched to their environment so that they can create and relate. And when they’re not, “going home” becomes Job One.

Densities and Subtleties

In the last post I called our material order dense and others (beyond the Borderzone perhaps) subtle. I was using conventional language quite accessible to those who like to wander in mystical orchards, as it were. This sort of wording became popular in West via Madame Blavatsky (1831-1891), the agent behind the Theosophical Society. Thanks to her prolific writings, for those tired of talking of the soul that mysterious entity came to be changed into the subtle body. Subtle, the word itself, comes from the Latin subtilis, and that word gets its hard meaning from tela, or web, and texere, to weave. Fine, thin, delicate, finely woven.

But let’s suppose that this view of things is parochial, rather than accurate, based as it is on sensory experience. Suppose that our material order is thinned out, rarefied—like high-altitude atmospheres were oxygen is not quite enough to let us breathe. And, by contrast, the so-called immaterial order is where all the density resides—but in an energetic form. Is there some basis for this? Yes.

Our physicists are now reluctantly concluding that 96 percent of the cosmos is made up of dark energy (74%) and dark matter (22%)—and, it seems to me, these two may be the same. Back in 1980 already, in his book Wholeness and the Implicate Order, David Bohm gave a theoretical grounding for this based on quantum theory. Bohm points out that the smallest possible energy wave present in a vacuum (like space) is 10^-33 cm, but waves down to that very tiny wavelength are present. Anything smaller than that renders concepts like space and time meaningless. He continues:

This [wavelength] is much shorter than anything thus far probed in physical experiments (which have got down to about 10^-17 cm or so). If one computes the amount of energy that would be in one cubic centimeter of space, with this shortest possible wavelength, it turns out to be very far beyond the total energy of all matter in the known universe.

What is implied by this proposal is that what we call empty space contains an immense background of energy, and that matter as we know it is a small, ‘quantized’ wavelike excitation on top of this background, rather like a tiny ripple on a vast sea.… In this connection it may be said that space, which has so much energy, is full rather than empty. The two opposing notions of space as empty and space as full have indeed continually alternated with each other in the development of philosophical and physical ideas. Thus, in Ancient Greece, the School of Parmenides and Zeno held that space is a plenum [fullness]. This view was opposed by Democritus, who was perhaps the first seriously to propose a world view that conceived of space as emptiness (i.e., the void), in which material particles (e.g., atoms) are free to move. Modern science has generally favored this latter atomistic view, and yet, during the nineteenth century, the former view was also seriously entertained, through the hypothesis of an ether that fills all space. Matter, thought of as consisting of special recurrent stable and separable forms in the ether (such as ripples or vortices), would be transmitted through this plenum as if the latter were empty. [p. 190-191]

Such considerations eventually led Bohm to suggests that our cosmos is a limited, unfolded, explicated region within a much greater enfolded, implicated region: Reality.

Applying this to our interests, it suggests that which we call life, soul, subtle body, and so on, may be something energetic, real, but undetectable—its subtlety arising from a failure of our instruments to detect it—whereas our intelligence, also a function of this energetic order, has no problems seeing it at all. If we turn the phrasing around, it is our instruments that are insubstantial, not our souls—like catching a butterfly with a net made of air.

If the Big Bang was a sudden thinning out of the Implicate Order, that process may have deprived the agents present within it, us, of ready access to that which makes us whole; my analogy here is oxygen, but suppose we call it life-force, the Chinese ch’i, the Arabic baraka, the Hindu prana, the western grace. And our project here, in this rarefied dimension, is to collect enough of it to give us the power, once more, to get home.

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To pursue David Bohm’s thought in a strictly scientific context, I recommend The Undivided Universe, 1993.

What the Muon Told Me

Elsewhere the other day I had occasion to note (to paraphrase Wikipedia) that an elementary particle is one not known to have a substructure. Not known, to emphasize, to be made up of yet other entities. While I conventionally assent to this, something tells me, “It ain’t so.” Beneath the muon, electron, strange quark, and such must surely be a wealth of structure yet—and so on ad infinitum. But that known refers to us. In a way, as we’re now constituted, we are the limit. In one direction the elementary particle—in another the black hole or the Big Bang, the singularities. Like death itself they are but bulky, visible stone markers of various border zones.

So I went on a walk and, watching the leaves fall, unwrapped an old cosmological fossil from my collection. Like many children so I too have had this thought quite early: Beneath the smallest the yet smaller; above the greatest the even greater. I encountered that same idea later in sophisticated wrapping in David Bohm’s writings on physics, thus Bohm’s suggestion that when we encounter singularities we’ve simply exhausted our theoretical powers and need to shift our gaze further to the left, right, up, or down. New laws will then eventually become perceivable; they won’t abolish our old theories but will render them as applicable to a narrow range of reality rather than to the All. A Grand Unifying Theory will never be discovered because reality is limitless.

To put that into the context of this blog, there is no borderzone. Where we see a radical discontinuity what we really see is simply the darkness of our ignorance. The reason why we cannot see beyond the border (lets call it death), is because we are so well adapted to a narrow range of reality, what we call this, the well-known here and now. What if this is simply a very dense form of reality. When we first came into this region, we couldn’t see a damn thing—because our powers of perception are suited to a much more subtle realm. Let’s suppose that we tried to adapt, to figure out what happened. We began manipulating the coarse matter of this realm at the subatomic level. Our feeble powers could actually do things at that level, not at the gross. Slowly, gradually, we succeeded in shaping structures. These in turn gave us more and more abilities to get a handle on this new environment. We used the matter of this realm itself to make it show us what it is. We learned to maintain these structures—by feeding them, as it were. We devised ways by which they would reproduce. This, of course, is my (let’s call it sci-fi) notion of Chemical Civilization.

We are accustomed to thinking of the realms beyond (heaven, hell, etc.) as different in kind, not merely in degree. But what if they are not? What if Reality has many, many regions with many different kinds of…let me simply call it density. What if matter is always and everywhere present within it, but differences in its structural arrangements make it more or less manipulable by agents. What if there are also agents everywhere, and, like us, have the same characteristics we have. And what if the real difference in kind is that between agents and matter. Arguably that is certainly the case in this here and now. The radical difference we observe in ordinary known reality is between life and matter. Some of us, e.g. Mortimer Adler (see his The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes) would restrict that crucial difference to man, but I apply it to all of life. Agency is present in it everywhere.

Supposing that is true. Supposing, further, that on death, having accumulated subtle energies enough to escape this pocket of coarse density, we find ourselves once more back in a realm much better suited to our “natural” powers. Yes, it has matter, but it is of a much more subtle kind very easily formed by us for self-display and communications. No, we don’t have to eat it in order to “live.” What if our sustenance in those regions is energetic? What if the reason why we were captured in this “pocket” in the first place was because insufficient quantities of those energies reached us here? (Something analogous to that is suggested in Doris Lessing’s Canopus in Argos series.) Would everything then suddenly turn heavenly?

Interesting question. A good answer to that might run as follows. No. Nothing’s really changed except the density—but that does make a difference. Agents there, as here, are free. And they’re either drawn to ever greater unity or ever greater denial of the same. Good guys, bad guys. Still all there. But in realms of lighter density—where we do not need machines by means of which to see and “live”—where space is not, therefore, as demanding a container as it is here, the good guys will congregate with the good, the bad will cling to their like. And some will still vacillate between two minds. Heaven, hell, and purgatory. Your choice. Strong hints like that come to us from the writings of Swedenborg—difficult of access although these are because the old Swede would try to be a prophet and explain every the and and in Genesis in endless volumes of erudition.

Well, my walk is over. The falling leaves are wonderfully bright, so yellow. Sun shines in this lovely pocket of deep density.

On the Trail of the Grail

David Bohm, the physicist, proposed that anomalous phenomena in science—like the Big Bang at the large and the wave-particle paradox at the small end of the spectrum—are due to the limitations of our theoretical frameworks. The theories are based on correct observations, to be sure, but we are now, as it were, on the border of two domains, and the new observations no longer fit. Bohm goes well beyond this and suggests infinite reaches: beyond every border extends a vast geography—which also has a border. Looks like we have borderzones in the realm of physics too. Here a graphic to make Bohm’s view accessible:

Here we might assume that the left Anomalous Region is the sub-atomic and the right one the cosmically large. The arrows point at the borders of our current knowledge where other or “higher” ranges of knowledge are necessary (new theories), to make sense of the observations. The new theories, to be sure, will not “falsify” the old—but render the old as limited cases valid enough, but only within their own domain of observation.

Bohm proposed that as we reach these borders, we must “shift” our theoretical framework (the yellow region). He asserted that a Grand Unified Theory (the grail of theoretical physics) is unachievable. We might think we have it (e.g. Newton’s clockwork universe), but sooner or later new anomalies will start to appear like signs announcing another border crossing—and to cross we must have passports; the driver’s license will no longer do.

When people encounter notions like this—what look alarmingly like infinite regresses—they standard outcry is “Enough already.” We like to limit our infinities with nice, self-enclosed symbols like the lazy eight. The biggest battles in science (and elsewhere) arise when something established once and for all is shaken to its foundations by new observations or experience. The uproar is Sisyphus’ enormous frustration every time he gets his huge rock to the top of the hill and then, just as he is about to sigh in achievement, watching the damned thing roll down again. But this frustration is then also echoed by roars of triumph on the part of those who, under intense and decades long attack (invariably ideological) discover that they were right all along.

This is the situation that surrounds Darwinism now under the assault of the new biology invariably labeled by its proposed answer to what might be called the anomaly of matter: Intelligent Design. What the new biology suggests is that the frame must be moved to understand this strange anomaly—matter preserving form and, horrors, reproducing it, over and over again. Here we have orthodox biology in frustration—and fundamentalist Christians roaring in triumph. But the detection of design in life (and we don’t really need the qualifier, intelligent, at all) should not be viewed as the achievement of closure. If life is designed, who else but God could do it? Du calm, as the French would say—indeed as one of the new biologists also says. Here is a quote from Michael J. Behe, taken from Darwin’s Black Box, Touchstone, 1996, p. 196:

Inferences to design do not require that we have a candidate for the role of designer. We can determine that a system was designed by examining the system itself, and we can hold the conviction of design much more strongly than a conviction about the identity of the designer.

I recommend this book by Behe as a superb demonstration that design is present—and at the biochemical, which is the meaningfully proper, level. Life manifests as the cell. And it as at the cellular level that we must look for its explanation.

To this I might add that the same triumphant “Told you so” we hear from fundamentalist circles concerning life we also hear, although from a smaller circle, concerning the Big Bang. Does the expansion of the universe really prove that it came out of nothing 14 billion years ago? No. The inference of God based on the Big Bang is as faulty as the inference of God from design in life. What it calls for is a moving of our theoretical frames. Endless wonders will then await us. God transcends both microscope and telescope. No pin will pin the Ultimate.

New Paradigm

The image that now begins to emerge of the Cosmos—by means of NASA’s measurements of the effects of dark energy—provides yet another hint that Idries Shah’s fable of the beginnings might be true. I’ve been of that opinion for many years now. Among the myths it comes closest to agree with the cosmos of physics, at least if we accept David Bohm’s suggestion that our universe is a tiny Explicate Order emerging from the vast Implicate Order that is the greater, thus the Cosmos. (I discuss the first subject here on Ghulf Genes; more on Idries Shah’s myth is on this blog here.)

The downside of Shah’s formulation is that it does not suggest the sort of “personalistic” cosmology we’re used to, particularly in the Judeo-Christian tradition. But it contains an assertion of conscious intelligence in the Cosmos while also matching what we are learning from our astrophysics, thus a “beginning” (the big bang)—which can be read as the disturbance of an order of equilibrium—and the unfolding of that new event in a lawful way that we’re now seeing disclosed in the astrophysical observations of the visible universe.

Conversely, the myth also matches what Bohm hypothesizes, namely that alongside the Implicate and Explicate orders reality also manifests a Conditioned and an Unconditioned order. The latter permits intelligence and consciousness. Our own freedom and consciousness, to be sure, are the only direct observables of that order.

That in this realm we are most definitely disconnected from an ocean, if you like, of that Unconditioned order, thus from the realms of spirit and higher intelligence, which may well be equivalent to the ocean of the Conditioned, the physical, which now surrounds us, is also evident. And hence the grand thematic I once envisioned (in an unpublished work called What Does Life Want?) namely a return to that earlier unity, seems quite on—because even the universe, thus the visible, unfolded material realm and thus the conditioned order seems also to be striving for a reabsorption.

We can’t get closer than that, I assume.

The Freedom of Free Will

Free will is one of those abstractions rarely examined in its vast complexity. Its existence is denied in the materialistic conception of reality. Let me spell out the reasons why. Any action whatsoever is traceable to antecedent stimuli; these can be viewed both as causing the choice and as themselves caused by others. In any purely brain-based conception of action, we can trace the “decision” back to two kinds of cell structures: those hierarchically arranged and those based on what might be called legislative structures; concerning the last, a brain node will only fire if a majority of brain cells forming it signal yea. These structures may operate alone or in combination, but all of them respond to stimuli ultimately traceable to physical causes. And in that thoughts themselves are mirrored in brain action, they can be reduced to brain activity alone, the seeming immateriality of thoughts declared as illusory. In this view all action is chemico-mechanically determined. What we call freedom of will therefore translates into saying that we’re ignorant, unconscious, of the precise process that necessarily leads to this action rather than to that one. The roots of the action are theoretically—but not practically—traceable to a status quo ante in which everything experienced by the actor up to that point contributes something, however minimal, including habits, memories, even forgotten memories—the last by absence.

This view of the matter is strongly compelling because, in most of our day-to-day decisions we do act pretty much as above described. Real choices, free choices (assuming they exist) are rare. These rare, free choices do, of course, also habituate us, form memories, attitudes, and leanings that later produce moral behavior automatically. Free choices therefore also become part of the deterministic background that produces our total behavior, most of which arises from our animal heritage. The question that looms, then, is this: How can we discover that we really do have free choice. The curious answer, I would suggest, is that we cannot do so by looking at the will as such. The answer comes from another source, the examination of intelligence or, put more broadly, consciousness. It must have freedom to function.

The basic premise I want to present here, and I’ll cite the source for it in a moment, is that thoughts may be legitimately viewed as mechanical presentations of a brain mechanism, the brain drawing material from memory by association. This presentation, of course, is on a much more sophisticated level than a computer’s search based on key words, for instances, but functionally equivalent. Now if a stimulus produces such a presentation, selection of some part of this presentation for relevance to our situation must take place. Just as Google can and will present a vast number of items in answer to a search, it cannot and does not select the relevant answer. That selection involves an activity outside of the system that produces the thoughts themselves.

David Bohm, the physicist, develops this approach in his book, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (Routledge, 1996, p. 50-53). Let me quote from the cited passage:

There is in this mechanical process [of stimuli producing thoughts] no inherent reason why the thoughts that arise should be relevant to the situation that evokes them. Then perception of whether or not any particular thoughts are relevant or fitting requires the operation of an energy that is not mechanical, an energy that we shall call intelligence. This latter is able to perceive a new order or a new structure, that is not just a modification of what is already known or present in memory. For example, one may be working on a puzzling problem for a long time. Suddenly, in a flash of understanding, one may see the irrelevance of one’s whole way of thinking about the problem, along with a different approach in which all the elements fit in a new order and in a new structure. Clearly, such a flash is essentially an act of perception, rather than a process of thought…, though later it may be expressed in thought. What is involved in this act is perception through the mind of abstract orders and relationships such as identity and difference, separation and connection, necessity and contingency, cause and effect, etc.

We have thus put together all the basic mechanical and conditioned responses of memory under one word or symbol, i.e. thought, and we have distinguished this from the fresh, original and unconditioned response of intelligence (or intelligent perception) in which something new may arise.

Now if the exercise of intelligence, of consciousness, requires an act that arises in an unconditioned (read free) order, the will, which is part and parcel of consciousness, is also rooted in that same order and is, therefore, capable of acting freely.

More Notes on Anxiety

This dimension, and half-awake living along, produces anxiety in me directly in proportion to experiencing ordinary animal awareness. Strange. Poor animals. Too many impending events: a trip up north, a not-too-distance family parting, a septic-to-city sewer transition in the family, workmen doing plastering in this house, the demolition of our backyard, the building of a new garage… All this, vaguely felt, impending, produces the anxiety I feel. It is likely to diminish as I write this, as I take on a more adult stance. And that is little other than a state of concentration.

Concentration seems to open up channels to the influx of a higher energy. But is that really the case? Let me look. The first consequence of concentration is simply calm. Something neutralizes the stimuli that otherwise cause the anxiety. But what is anxiety? It seems to be caused by a barrage of reflexive inner “movements”; they are starts, beginnings of reactions; but they are immediately stopped again because no action can actually start: all of these stimuli come from the future. Still, the body echoes each impulse by producing chemicals—and just as rapidly terminates their production only to start again when the next thought triggers the same foolishly anticipatory and automatic reaction.

This process is interrupted when I focus my attention. What I here call a “higher energy” is simply the awakened presence of a faculty corresponding to what David Bohm called the unconditioned order, thus the order of “agency.” What really happens is that ordinary energy, wasted by mechanical reactions, is no longer wasted, becomes available, and a sensation of higher potency becomes perceptible.

(Here, parenthetically, I note that my use of the concept of energy—higher, lower—is usually sloppy. The higher does not belong to the material order where energy properly belongs.)

Over and over, time and time again, I’ve noticed that anxiety disappears as soon as I become conscious. Nothing changes. Impending events are still there but are no longer threatening. Not surprisingly, I’m never anxious about unpleasant medical procedures on the day when they occur, only in anticipation. States of anxiety, it seems to me, are states of inattention—and readily distinguishable from states of concentrated tension on the one hand and calm control on the other. Neither has that tendency of rattling us. Too bad it is so difficult always to be attentive; turbulent distraction certainly doesn't help me focus. There is a great temptation to float along pleasantly on the stream of time in childish bliss—but the stream sometimes becomes a little rough.