Markings

Lake of Consciousness       The prologue likens Consciousness to an infinite lake in which the ripples are ‘things’, as manifestation is cosmic energy - that is motion in Consciousness, which appear in Awareness, Consciousness at rest.      So just as ripples arise in, abide in and subside back into the lake so manifestation arises in, abides in and subsides back into Consciousness.

Recovery from stroke       I was not willing to compromise my new insights in the name of recovery.    I liked knowing I was a fluid. I loved knowing my spirit was at one with the universe and in the flow with everything around me. I found it fascinating to be so tuned in to energy dynamics and body language.    But most of all, I loved the feeling of deep inner peace that flooded the core of my very being.

Superintelligent beings       If we are to preserve our blue planet and our human-machine civilization is to survive and thrive, humans should merge with synthetic intelligence, transcend our biological forms, and eventually become superintelligent beings ourselves independent from material substrates – advanced info-beings, infomorphs.    In time, we are to exfoliate human condition and upload humanity onto engineered inner cosmos of our own design.

Information Theory       Information was now front and center with the advances in black hole physics and quantum gravity.    The time was ripe for progress on the foundations of quantum theory, and the feeling in the physics community was that information theory would provide the way forward.    In philosophical terms, this immediately suggests Idealism, the concept that reality is founded in abstractions and that our animalistic sensory experience, which insists on the primacy of matter, is merely an illusion.

Understanding the way reality works       It seems likely that we are not yet finished understanding the way reality works and how the universe is actually structured.    At present, for example, there are a number of experiments going on and theories being proposed that, if they prove out, will fundamentally revise our understanding not only of the universe, but of reality, yet again.

Matter       The world, conceived by the finite mind as a multiplicity and diversity of objects made out of dead, inert stuff called ‘matter’, comes into apparent existence when consciousness ignores the reality of itself, and it vanishes out of apparent existence when consciousness wakes up to or recognises itself.

Information is the essence of reality       The new gospel is simple:    Information is the essence of reality—the substrate of existence.    It has an inner aspect giving rise to subjective experience (consciousness) and an outer aspect from which the tapestry of reality is woven.

Self-Perception       Grossly incompetent people lack the skill to identify their own lack of skill, leading to an inflated and distorted self-perception, while    highly competent people are troubled by doubt and indecision, resulting in a self-conscious and distorted perception of themselves (Dunning-Kruger effect) .

Spirituality Defined          Indeed, a strong definition of spirituality could be summed up as the conviction of the ontological reality of one’s personal consciousness, reigning supreme over the objects which appearing within it.

Underlying Unity            The idea of the unus mundus is founded on the assumption that the multiplicity of the empirical world rests on an underlying unity, which is to say that all of the different things in the world belong to one and the same field of potential.    This very same underlying unity is what quantum theory is revealing to us.

QM Interpretation          The longstanding worries about the “interpretation” of quantum mechanics are now settled: we are dealing with information, packets of bits, rather than particles and waves with weird, counter-intuitive properties.

Koan       What is true?    That’s the only koan there is; the only one anyone ever needs.

Quantum Theory       Quantum theory is the deepest explanation known to science.    It violates many of the assumptions of common sense, and of all previous science – including some that no one suspected were being made at all until quantum theory came along and contradicted them.    And yet this seemingly alien territory is the reality of which we and everything we experience are part. There is no other.

Communion with Reality       This act of perfect concentration, the passionate focussing of the self upon one point, when it is applied “with a naked intent” to real and transcendental things, constitutes in the technical language of mysticism the state of recollection : a condition which is peculiarly characteristic of the mystical consciousness, and is the necessary prelude of pure contemplation, that state in which the mystic enters into communion with Reality.

Subjectivity & "Many Worlds"            Quantum physics indeed is 'the end of physics' as the foundation of ‘objective’ science.   Yet the subjective and meta-physical truth of quantum physics lies in the ‘many worlds’ theory that is one of its variants – this being a metaphorical recognition of the multiple worlds of awareness concealed within each and every element of our subjective experience, each and every ‘thing’ or ‘being’ we are aware of within the subjective universe of awareness.

Symmetry       Symmetry, unexpectedly, emerged as an abstract notion running like a golden thread through the Book of Nature, intimately mirroring the structure of the tapestry of reality.

Past-Present-Future       There is no way to say unambiguously what the past was really like until we know its future in the form of the present; as in a work of art, each part of the universe acquires its full meaning only in its relation to the whole.