An imaginative game

Returning to our colleague who experienced a vision, or perhaps briefly entered the Interiority, in the mountains (in the section on Revelation), perhaps a little imagination may be allowed. Let us consider those separate but linked concepts which he beheld and marvelled at. We will accept that they may now be far beyond our capacity to comprehend or describe. They could have been fabulously meaningful, beyond our everyday human capacity to even appreciate them. They became accessible only through a combination of revelation and the triggering of a hitherto inaccessible faculty so that, upon return to the restricted human state, the profundity or profound simplicity of the elements perceived or participated in were beyond his or our capacity to consider. They were as if in the unity of the Holy Spirit.

So, with the caveat that our paltry attempt to now try to imagine them may fall far short of what is required, in the spirit of imaginative licence we will proceed anyway. He mentioned at least four, and perhaps six, separate elements or concepts all linked in a perfectly obvious way. All was beautiful, simple and positive, all good, with no contradictions, conflicts or even suggestion of darkness or evil, which suggests that it was experienced in the beyond or interiority, or whatever we may name it, and was not of this Earth.

Limited by our human capacities, it is probably impossible to construct even an imaginary version; however, let us see how much we can speculate about it. First it is conceived in Awareness. Without awareness there would be no vision or no appreciation of the enhanced state entered into. So the enhanced state plays itself out in our Awareness, making this our most treasured attribute. Our awareness is the gateway to Paradise or into the implicit order, the interiority, where creation is being manufactured. The joy experienced by the visionary suggests that the concepts here on Earth which give rise to joy and appear worthwhile are not in contradiction with the elements of the vision. This however does not alter the fact that the earthly elements, which we will look at shortly, may not be vastly inferior or subordinate to supreme elements in the vision, or within the implicit order.

Now to try to apply the experience of the revelation to the natural and semantic worlds as we know them. In our complex state of existence in which these two combine, where we experience both the natural environment and that created by the semantic structure and demands of our society, we are energised and conditioned both by drives mainly beyond our control and by affects/emotions which we may have to struggle to control or cope with. Beyond both of these, however, through our awareness we have the ability to consider and react to a small number of great concepts or abstractions.

Let us, for the sake of our experiment, attempt to define concepts, not those experienced through apparent or possible revelation by the man on the mountain, simply because we cannot, but concepts we consider worthy of Creation, or at least we hope and pray that they do so. These are experienced in our human condition on Earth.

Later, the British writer, Ben Capel, describes these as follows:

"Plato is conventionally read as suggesting that the perfection of the Absolute Idea (which I would suggest includes notions of justice, dignity, freedom and unbounded love) is the only true stability. The world of appearances, our 'reality', is full of contingency and error. But maybe there's another way of reading him: the Absolute Idea (love, dignity, liberty, justice, etc) is what is fleeting and fragile, and it requires our loving commitment to keep it alive in the face of a brutally homogenising and conformity-inducing 'reality'."

Absolute ideas or concepts defined, perceived and experienced through our Awareness

Love (including compassion)
Beauty (including its appreciation)
Truth (including justice and acceptance of ambiguity)

These three are defined and experienced through our Awareness (soul or contributing to or creating our soul?)

Within each of us is an attribute, a capacity, for exercising Free will and activating, or tapping into, Potentiality. This in turn can energize Creativity, including enterprise. This process may be expressed as an outcome of our awareness of, and response to, Love, Beauty and Truth.

How keen our awareness of Love, Beauty and Truth and how we employ our free will and tap into potentiality may decide the intensity of what perhaps is our greatest human activity - that of Aspiration (for unity).

All of this is going on within a domain of energy, or connected with a greater state through that mysterious and barely perceived energy, which perhaps we sometimes describe as divine grace or the Holy Spirit. Their interaction, or connectedness, is fundamental to creation. Simple though that may appear in a revelation, childishly obvious it seemed in the one case considered, it appears to be virtually impossible for us to conceive and describe this interaction in our limited mortal state.

Now let us consider the opposites, or perversions of, the above.

Hatred, selfishness, self-centredness, pride
Rejection of beauty and/or its criminalizing
Falsehood, disengenuity

These three are defined and experienced as a reaction to the awareness of the possibility of Love, Beauty, and Truth.

The attribute, or capacity, for exercising Free will and activating, or tapping into, Potentiality, thus energising Creativity, including enterprise, becomes warped and is directed instead into determinism, depression, fatalism, victimhood, possibly resulting in vandalism, violence, stealing, cheating, malice, and defamation and, ultimately, fascism and genocide.

All still operating within the same domain of energy, or connected with a greater state through that mysterious and barely perceived energy, but not in harmony with it.

Here is a very simple example of a rejection of the three great absolutes, or goals, of Love, Beauty, and Truth. As this is being written, images of beautiful young women under certain designated ages, posing naked, are deemed pornographic, even where no overt sexual activity is involved. Many, if not most, young women within that specified defined age group display all of the three absolutes of Love, Beauty, and Truth. At a certain age, recognized by some now criminalized writers, they also, above all, reflect Potentiality. This is true whether the posing is playful, artful or even coquettish or burlesque. Our response to it may be warm and receptive or it may be one of rejection and hatred.

The skewing or warping of the great and noble absolutes and the potentiality for good offered through them to us may decide the intensity of what now must replace Aspiration - self loathing, bitterness, disgust, nihilism, anger, monstrousness.

So what is the mechanism which switches an individual from the path of hope to that of despair?

Potentiality is embedded into, or enfolded within, the very substance of both matter and the creative process itself, as in Spring wanting to burst forth. It is an animating force in Creation. Wanting to become. While in our natural state, we have an awareness of the three great beckoning absolutes/objectives of Love, Beauty and Truth, these are much more clearly defined and demanding in our semantic one.

The child born into this world becomes aware of the dissociation and is also faced with the conflicts and pressures of nature and of family and the community, including the possibility of circumstances beyond his or her control. Choice between the path of using the power of potentiality through action and that of accepting victimhood becomes real for some. Those truly dispossessed or incapacitated have less choice of action but still, through their free will, retain the capacity for aspiration. Despair or hope. The two general responses on offer are recognition or rejection of the three great concepts of Love, Beauty and Truth and response to or rejection of potentiality.

If Potentiality is a fundamental characteristic of creation itself and of all matter, Love, Beauty and Truth may be directions or tendencies, sought after by the divine intelligence, as it were becoming. Free will in the individual's capacity to choose may assist the divine intelligence in that process. Aspiration may be both a result and a measure of one's response to the three great concepts and to one's use of free will to tap into the potentiality.

The path chosen may be influenced by the profoundly different levels of awareness between individuals, but in a major way also by the dissociation, which can be seen simply as the fact of being born as a separated individual whose consciousness is now separated from its source. An awareness of the dissociation, conscious or unconscious, should not in itself be the cause, as one can simply feel lost and sad and still aspire to some better state, but the vital trigger to switching paths appears to be in how one exercises free will. This may be the most fundamental test of every one of us, the experiment for which we are placed on the surface of the planet we call Earth.

As we saw, Bohm believed that the transformation of consciousness would be seen in an intense heightening of individuals who have shaken off the 'pollution of the ages' (wrong worldviews that propagate ignorance, such as dominant narratives which promote ideologies), who come into close and trusting relationship with one another and begin to generate the immense power needed to ignite the whole consciousness of the world. In the depths of the Implicate Order, there is a 'consciousness, deep down - of the whole of mankind'.

This of course would also require individuals to choose, using free will, between hope and despair, good and evil, love and selfishness.

The Implicit Order

For simplicity in what follows, love, beauty and truth and potentiality and awareness will be referred to as 'the three plus two'.

All of what has been conjectured in the above scenario, including the three plus two, or our perceptions of them, has been seen in and drawn from our perceived world on this planetary surface. If we continue to be guided by Bohm's ideas, it all emanates, or is extruded or projected, from the implicit order. It follows that the three plus two are neither necessarily elements of the implicit order nor those interconnected elements experienced by the blessed man in his revelation on the mountain, where he may have actually been briefly exposed to the implicit order. This is not to say that love, beauty, truth, potentiality and awareness are not elements of the implicit order, but that all we can say is that they have been created in our explicit milieu. The elements in the implicit order could be at a higher or paramount level or simply beyond our comprehension as living humans. What is tantalizing about the revelation and a few other accounts of similar experiences is that connectedness was involved. This is probably about as far as one can go with this without really losing the way.

A little further speculation, however, may not be too irresponsible. The free play of thought in creative intelligence responding to opposition and contradiction with new proposals - in other words, an act of creation itself - may also be an element in the divine process.

Returning to Earth

We return to Planet Earth, or to the physicality or exteriority of the surface of a beautiful but lonely planet, where we are beset with conflicts and contradictions, and where at times evil appears to dominate, especially where justice and its fellow travellers of deceit and disingenuousness are concerned. Through our awareness we grow to a stage where we are able to first imagine and then reflect upon levels beyond our own, and thus we begin to edge ever beyond our present boundaries, and soon reach points from which it is virtually impossible to communicate with our fellow-humans about what we are both contemplating and experiencing.

Using this enhanced awareness, and our free will or liberty, we reach into the interiority or into it through certain interactions with our fellow humans. Essential to this process may be our involvement with, or appreciation of, love, beauty and truth. If our efforts are persistent or intense, we may generate a response from Potentiality, where and in what way we may never know, or, on the other hand, we may perceive it profoundly even as a shocking or awe-inspiring reaction.

Living with the great idea

Earlier we wrote that we may have a single great idea, held in common within our shared unconscious and also linked from our unconscious with the interiority, linked with creation itself. And that were we to consciously realize this idea and begin to openly share it, we might change the course of humankind.

The great idea is that we begin to equate absolutism with evil and open-mindedness with good. That is, all black and white labelling, all extreme positions, all one-sided dogma, doctrines, ideologies, and their supporting legislation, are evil, while their absence is good.

Let us now try to incorporate this into a way of living and thinking, indeed into a challenge.

We will attempt to use it to reach into the Interiority, into Creation itself, or to more prepare ourselves to be touched by that divine process.

First, it is easier for those of us in a position to actively help those in need. If you are not in a position to help, and indeed you may be excluded from any such activity by society itself, your heart, opinions and prayers can be with those who can help. You will at least, if only silently, be 'taking up sides'. The act of participation is much more significant if it involves commitment and action, not just beautiful thoughts and aspirations, but practical expressions of love, compassion and charity.

But even those who have the liberty and ability to help may not easily find opportunities, and for others progress may seem slow or non-existent, so the challenge, which may be quite a challenge for some of us including this writer, is: To wait calmly, with anticipation yes, but with patience and with no demands.

Every day, every place, is filled with potential and transformed with expectation.

Although we might be alone, bereaved, outcast, desolate or in old age, the atmosphere of the places we find ourselves in is changed from one of Proustian loss and irreplaceability to one of adventure, to a threshold, to a Dantean ledge close to the final dawn.

Instead of a place emptied of all past beauty and promise, it is one filled with the hope of futures beyond imagination and of worlds of endless possibilities.

It is at this moment, however, or shortly after perhaps, that new possibilities may emerge. These will be considered in the coming section titled 'Lights, camera, action!'.

Making a connection

From the section on Revelation, we learn that connectedness may be a fundamental element in our appreciation of Creation and of the Divine. Revelation may express itself through an insight into such connectedness. Relationships are also connections. The most spiritual may be in helping others, especially the dispossesed, in friendships and in intellectual and spiritual communion. Connectedness is also expressed in the blessed union of two or more souls in a state of integration. The integration increases the potentiality for profound spirituality and for Revelation itself.

One of the most sacred examples of such connectedness is in the physical, psychological and spiritual union of a man and a woman. Not just falling in love, but in the lifelong union that can follow, in the garden of love they create, in particular that garden located within the anima of her femininity, which houses them both. When a man and a woman achieve this state, especially in a lifelong union, they truly re-enter the Garden of Eden.

This sacred state is also under attack today, but it is much more than a great human archetype: it is central to humanity itself and men and women would willingly die to maintain it.

A Teilhardian moment

It was dramatically appropriate for Teilhard de Chardin to depart from this life on Easter Sunday, the day of Christian resurrection. This he did in New York on April 10 1955.

Two days later, there were no more than about ten mourners at his church funeral ceremony, and only one fellow-priest, Father Pierre Leroy, accompanied his body on the trip to the Jesuit cemetery at Poughkeepsie.

With one friend only at his burial, unpublished, his works suppressed by the church he had loved, one would think that this should have been his end. But all his manuscripts were in the filing cabinet of Jeanne-Marie Mortier, his private secretary, to whom he had bequeathed them, back in France. Almost from the moment she heard of his passing, in what we might be forgiven for seeing as a Teilhardian, world-changing, nay cosmic, reaction, methodically she began to take them out and pass them to publishers, so that, despite the attempts to censor him by the Church, the first and most famous of his books, The Phenomenon of Man, was published within months of his death and all of his work published worldwide within 21 years.

The success was such that it forced a response from Rome. On June 30, 1962, the Holy Office issued this monitum (warning) regarding the writings of Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin:

"Several works of Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, some of which were posthumously published, are being edited and are gaining a good deal of success.

"Prescinding from a judgement about those points that concern the positive sciences, it is sufficiently clear that the above-mentioned works abound in such ambiguities and indeed even serious errors, as to offend Catholic doctrine.

"For this reason, the most eminent and most revered Fathers of the Holy Office exhort all Ordinaries as well as the superiors of Religious institutes, rectors of seminaries and presidents of universities, effectively to protect the minds, particularly of the youth, against the dangers presented by the works of Fr. Teilhard de Chardin and of his followers.

"Given at Rome, from the palace of the Holy Office, on the thirtieth day of June, 1962.

Sebastianus Masala, Notarius"

Here is an excerpt from one of those undesirable works.

"Greater still, Lord, let your universe be greater still, so that I may hold you and be held by you by a contact at once made ever more intense and ever wider in its extent!" The Divine Milieu.

Seventeen years after Teilhard's death in 1992, Galileo was finally accepted by the Church, 380 years after they first began to censor him.

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