In this episode we start to look at the framework the fabulous Peter Mark Adams gave me way back when I started to explore this topic, and we particularly focus in on the idea that to make sense of the phenomena of Magick we need to understand that the cosmos is organised & moved by cosmic intelligences. At the highest levels these are indistinguishable from the vastness of the cosmos - the Constellations, Stars and Planets! To get our arms around this we visit with Ervin Laszlo, author of The Intelligence of the Cosmos: Why are we here? and New Answers from the Frontiers of Science, and hear from the amazing Rupert Sheldrake about sun consciousness!
Peters new book
https://www.amazon.com/Power-Healing-Field-Abilities-Ancestral/dp/1644113589
Ervin Lazlos book
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34623088-the-intelligence-of-the-cosmos
Connect
https://t.me/magickworks
https://www.facebook.com/vanesemcneill
Own Magical Egypt
http://www.magicalegypt.com
Transcription:
Hello Lovelies!
I have not seen you since last year!! hahaha too long! Well, I think this year we will start getting into some meat and potatoes, and when I was beginning this journey, Peter Mark Adams gave me a framework, well several, that have been most instructive to me. Speaking of Peter, he has a new book out which is AMAZING, and I just found out that my quote about how amazing it is was published in the book!!! How totally cool is that!!!!!
Well back to Peters framework
In truth, there are bits of it I am trying to understand, and we may have to wait until I can convince him to come and talk to us to get to it all, but there are parts that I can wrap my head around, and so we will start with one of those....
Basically, what Peter did for me was create a framework of which the paradigm thing was a part, and that went BANG in my head when I got it...but let's go on to the next bit, and I will let Peter this time say it for himself......
"Magic has been a constant feature of every human culture from the Upper Paleolithic around 35,000 years ago down to today.
But to understand why it has played such a formative role in our culture and history, we have to drop some of our assumptions about the nature of reality & accept the existence of ways of seeing and relating to the world that lay well beyond the routine ...
In particular, we will require a far more holistic vision of reality, one in which everything is seen as, quite literally, connected to everything else and not just physically ...
But to comprehend the wealth of detail emerging from such a vast stretch of human history, it would be useful to have an organizing
framework in place.
We can make sense of the phenomena through 4 distinct points of view:
the cosmos is organized & moved by cosmic intelligences
At the highest levels, these are indistinguishable from the vastness of the cosmos - the Constellations, stars, and planets;
This was a common assumption in most cultures at least up until
the 18th century. Even Sir Issac Newton considered that the motive power behind his model of the solar system derived from the agency of a celestial Being rather than purely physical factors,
"the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent Being" Principia. Book 3. More anciently, the view was that reality is alive with intelligent beings on every level of existence.
So that is a mouthful! Peter likes to drop some BOMBS hahahah!
So as far as dropping some of our assumptions about the nature
of reality, I think we have started that with the paradigm thing and the Bernardo Kastrup Ideaism idea.... I will put that in my telegram for you, so you have it readily at hand as it is such a great video. So then, what about "the cosmos is organized & moved by cosmic intelligences" part....
That is what we are going to look at today!
And look, to be honest, I think more and more people, philosophers, artists, and even scientists are beginning to realize that the classical concepts of how the cosmos works, based on Newtonian classical mechanics, have run their course. ( And as Peter mentioned above, I am not sure Newton's ideas were as limited as they have been handed down to us! So I think we all get that the universe is not simply bits of matter moving in accordance with mechanistic laws....
But if not that, then what?
To help us understand this, we will spend some time with Ervin Laszlo. Ervin is Ervin a Hungarian philosopher of science, systems theorist, integral theorist, originally a classical pianist. He advocates the theory of quantum consciousness, is a Gemini, is 89 years old, and is the author of the book we will be looking at today called The Intelligence of the Cosmos: Why are we here? and New Answers from the Frontiers of Science. All the cool people seem to like it, like Stan Groff, and Jane Goodall so I think it is worth listening to his story!
His main point makes sense to me and is that the whole system of the cosmos is connected in ways that transcend the materialistic bounds of space and time. In his view, the universe is not made up of chunks of matter, but instead, little packets, or not so little packets of vibration!
OK Kybalion check for a moment....
Principle #3 of Vibration
Nothing rests, everything moves, everything vibrates...and commentators of the Kybalion go on to suggest that this principle explains the differences between different manifestations of Matter, Energy, Mind, and even Spirit. That they only are the result of different "vibrations".
OK so bingo that Kybalion is pretty handy now eh : )
Lazlo goes on to say that the vibrations that make up the cosmos are not random but highly ordered; that they are coherent. Because of that, they are not likely to be the result of mere chance.
To demonstrate this in one maybe not so related example Fred Hoyle a mathematical physicist, said that the probability that a new species would emerge through a chance mutation of their genes is comparable to the likelihood that a hurricane blowing through a scrapyard would assemble a working airplane! Whoa, I love that!
But getting back more on point, David Bohm describes the vibrations as "in formed", which is actually what Veda calls the part of the water that turns into her artwork, or hydroglyphs. It is the part of the water exhibiting consciousness, in her opinion.
Lazlo suggests that a deep dimension spontaneously and effectively informs everything in the cosmos, us included. In fact, we are also "in formed" clusters of vibration in space-time, interacting and coevolving with other clusters both locally and non locally throughout the universe.
The concept of a cosmos as informed vibration is present in the Sanskrit concept of Akasha, the fifth and deepest dimension of the world, beyond yet encompassing the four elemental dimensions or earth air fire and water....later it was seen as an ethereal field underlying the observed world which is how we portrayed it in The Great Work Series...
But, woohoo, now "science" has caught up because quantum physics observations and calculations reveal that at the ultrasmall dimension, space is not empty and smooth; it is grainy and filled with vibrations...so no matter how small the physicists go, that cannot find matter...instead, they find waves and clusters of standing or propagating vibrations!!
Laslo explains that scientists assumed it was matter that vibrates down at those levels and how surprised they were when they looked, and it was not matter. Lazlo quotes Max Plank "As a man who devoted his whole life to the most cleared headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together.... we must assume the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind....that intelligence, he says, is the matrix of all matter!
So what about mind? If the world is vibration, then is mind and consciousness also a form of vibration...well hahah we both know the answer is yes...When I was younger, I spent time with a Dr John Demartini and he has some good stories, and good tools, one of which we will get to quite soon, but he described our body as cell phone, but we were really the signal. So that even if the cell phone crapped out, the signal was still complete, and he actually had a method of proving that to people which generally ended in tears of joy...very cool stuff, but Lazlo says the same... that mind is a real element, in a real world and is not produced by the brain, it is manifested and displayed by the brain....
That also sounds a lot like how Bernardo describes reality as being the manifestation of the big brain!
The vibrations that manifest the cosmic intelligence have a physical as well as non-physical aspect. Viewed from the outside, every cluster of vibration is a physical phenomenon, a pattern of vibration in space and time, but viewed from the inside, from the perspective of the given cluster, it is a perception, an awareness, a feeling of the worlds in and by that cluster. So this internal seemingly subjective, but objectively real aspect is a fundamental feature of the universe, and again better describes what Bernardo is saying that I can, because I butcher Bernardo, so just go watch the video, but you will see the parallels...
But back to the cell phone idea,
NDE's OBE's all of that stuff verify the idea....I won't bore you with them as we all know about them, but in the book, Lazlo reports one ADE, after-death experience, which was really cool...
Betrand Russell was a British polymath. As an academic, he worked in philosophy, mathematics, and logic and wrote many books like The Conquest of Happiness and Why I am not a Christian, so he was a notorious character.
He was also a skeptic and an outspoken debunker of esoteric phenomena who wrote, "I believe that when I die, I shall rote and nothing of my ego will survive.... So imagine his shock when he ended up on the other side, intact!! He was so impressed he had to track down a medium and convince her to deliver these words.....
"You may not believe that it is I, Bertrand Arthur William Russell, who am saying these things, and perhaps there is no conclusive proof that I can offer through this somewhat restrictive medium. Those with an ear to hear may catch the echo of my voice in my phrases, the tenor of my tongue in my tautology; those who do not wish to hear will no doubt conjure up a whole table of tricks to disprove my retrospective rhetoric.
. . . After breathing my last breath in my mortal body, I found myself in some sort of extension of existence that held no parallel as far as I could estimate, in the material dimension I had recently experienced. I observed that I was occupying a body predominantly bearing similarities to the physical one I had vacated forever; but this new body in which I now resided seemed virtually weightless and very volatile, and able to move in any direction with the minimum of effort. I began to think I was dreaming and would awaken all too soon in that old world, of which I had become somewhat weary to find myself imprisoned once more in that ageing form which encased a brain that had waxed weary also and did not always want to think when I wanted to think. . . .
Several times in my life [Lord Russell continued] I had thought I was about to die; several times I had resigned myself with the best will that I could muster to ceasing to be. The idea of B.R. no longer inhabiting the world did not trouble me unduly. Befitting, I thought, to give the chap (myself) a decent burial and let him be. Now here I was, still the same I, with the capacities to think and observe sharpened to an incredible degree. I felt earth-life suddenly seemed very unreal almost as it had never happened. It took me quite a long while to understand that feeling until I realized at last that matter is certainly illusory although it does exist in actuality; the material world seemed now nothing more than a seething, changing, restless sea of indeterminable density and volume."
How cool is that! I love his language!
So we now have the idea that the cosmos is organized, but what about cosmic intelligences? This is a vast topic and demands several talks of its own as it is also one of the most contentious areas in Magick, as far as my interviews went anyway. The answers I got back ranged from ... "its all in your head", to "yes they are totally real", and we will get into that as it is a super cool subject, but for now, I will let Rupert Sheldrake talk to us about a cosmic intelligence we all know and love. It also supports the final piece of Peters statement that "More anciently, the view was that reality is alive with intelligent beings on every level of existence."
At his home in London Rupert explained to me that:
" The mechanistic materialist view is that all of nature's unconscious, and when this became the standard view in science at the scientific revolution in the 17th century, it replaced an idea that was predominant in Europe before that, which was basically an animistic view of nature. Practically all cultures have an animistic view of nature. The universe is alive. The earth is alive. Animal and animals and plants are truly alive in the Middle Ages. There was a form of Christian Animism, which is what gave rise to the great Gothic cathedrals. They have carved foliage. They have beings and creatures all over them. They were great spaces designed to alter the consciousness of those who entered them. And they were a tribute to a vision of nature as a living world, which was both the presence of a living God. And it was within a living God. The mechanistic view sees nature as mechanical and not alive. So I think it's important to realize that there are many forms of consciousness in an animistic view. And what we're seeing now is a revival of animism under the name Panpsychism. Even in electrons and atoms, and humans, consciousness doesn't spring out of a totally unconscious universe. It emerges from levels of consciousness that go right down to the smallest things and up to the largest.
Well, in the Panpsychism or animist view, then all self organising systems have some kind of mind or consciousness, and that includes large objects like the sun and the galaxy. So I think it's a traditional view that the sun is a conscious being. And the other stars, as we now see all the stars in our galaxy and the Milky Way, as included within the whole galaxy. That itself would be a conscious being at a higher level. And all the different galaxies in the universe, billions of them are part of the entire universe, which is also a conscious being at the most inclusive level. So the idea of the sun as a conscious being fits within this general philosophy of nature, which is becoming more and more discussed today. It's a kind of revival of animism within science even and within the philosophy of mind. And the sun has complex electromagnetic patterns all over its surface, andi in the corona around it. And most people, even materialists, think that the interface between our minds and our brains is in the electromagnetic patterns of activity. So I think the sun could well be thinking and conscious. And the interface between its mind and its body is through these electromagnetic patterns, which we can study and measure just as we can study and measure electrical patterns in the brain."
How excellent is Rupert! So to recap, to make sense of the phenomena of magick we need to understand that the cosmos is organized and
moved by cosmic intelligences. At the highest levels, these are
indistinguishable from the vastness of the cosmos - the Constellations, stars and planets, and the sun!
More soon xxx
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