Lyme Liturgy Extras: 1 “One”

You ask what the absolute is. It is the essence of your soul before everything.

Upanishads

Consciousness as the Ground of Being

If you like this sort of thing, I recommend reading the entire article. In any case, I find it interesting how well his subject matter dovetails nicely with passages in the Learning from Lyme Liturgy.

Excerpt:

Federico: Yes. But to understand the overall situation, we have imagine that everything is made of an undivided energy that has the desire and the capacity to experience and know itself. I call this unified field ‘One’. One exists ‘before’ the physical universe, though what physicists call the ‘physical universe’ is only
the informational aspect of reality. The semantic aspect of reality is the inner experience and knowing of One, which current physics does not recognize. Moreover, One exists in a vaster reality that contains the space-time reality we experience.
Out of One emerge conscious entities that, like One, have the desire and capacity to know themselves. Imagine each entity as a point of view or perspective that One has about itself. They are not separate from One, though
their conscious experience is private. To know each other, these entities need to communicate, and to communicate they need symbols, like the words we use. Each entity is like a quantum field and the symbols are like the states of the quantum field, what we call physical particles.
So, the entities are the conscious fields, and they shape symbols within their own fields to communicate with other fields – other entities. The crucial difference with contemporary physics is that these fields have an inner semantic and conscious experience, just like we do. The symbols have meaning that are understood by the conscious fields.

Commentary

The above insights from one of the inventors of the computer chip decades ago relates well with the Learning from Lyme Liturgy text such as the following passage:

All beings in this alive and awake self-dreaming universe present aspects of:
Body – some sort of shape or form manifest in location and terrain;
Mind – some sort of consciousness, awareness or intention;
Speech – some sort of communicative expression of meaningful information singing a
Living symphony of ever forming and reforming clouds and waves of Primordial Intelligence
A marvellous holographic self-mothering Song making itself up as it goes along
Saturated in interconnected living presence pervading all and everything
Manifesting no end of self-organizing life forms, living creatures imagined into sentient being
With all their co-emergent elemental and inanimate phenomena
Comprising luminous intelligence inseparably part of the universal background field continuum
Containing, including and pervading all and everything, micro and macro.

Flowers in their flowering communicate the lovely enlightened language of flowering being
With manifold qualities of form, texture, colour, temperature, scent, beauty, sensitivity;
As with flowers so with all, from microscopic universes to macrocosmic spiralling galaxies….

Another way of putting it more simply is that our universe comes from a field of consciousness which is unborn and undying – just like the present moment which is both of no duration and therefore also of infinite duration as expressed in the Liturgy text: “A present moment sandwiched between infinitely sub-divisible past and future moments We cannot find one or measure one: there is no such thing.” This is an absolute level existens out of which all relative phenomena arise (as per the Upanishads quote at the top of this page). And all relative phenomena are symbols of themselves, symbols expressing various emergent qualities of the One which is formless and thus without characteristics. However, in order to explore its own nature which is without overt characteristics, being beyond space-time or ‘infinite,’ the One creates many by creating relative points in space and time, varieties of shapes and forms which we have grown senses to perceive and explore. As Parmenides wrote: ‘the many cannot be conceived without one.’

It is like the One grew eyes in order to see things and then grew forms for those eyes to have something to see and the same with smell, taste, touch and mind. All are grown by the One for the One to have the ability to explore infinite space and time by creating relative places and times. And this fundamentally awake, open and playful nature is primordially good because it comes from the desire to explore experience.

Anyway, it’s nice to see such an obviously intelligent man of considerable experience in life dedicating so much time exploring such weighty matters whilst remaining grounded in everyday life experiences and trying to integrate his own hard-won personal insights into his chosen field of science which is so much a part of our modern social reality even though it is based erroneously, as he points out, on materialist superstitions such as “the primitive belief in a mechanical universe comprising only lifeless physical particles, the materialist superstition that mind is merely a quantifiable by-product of brain matter…” – or as Federico puts it: “Consciousness and free will are foundational and exist from the beginning rather than emerging with the physical brain.”

PS: the field theory relates very directly with the notion of mandala, also Federico’s description of sentient beings as being comprised fundamentally of consciousness seeking to experience its nature, that each being is grown out of that consciousness which is an expression of the One. This is why mandalas are both physical and awareness-based.

PS2: This material relates to the Three Kayas in Buddhism, something which might warrant a post later on. That said, they have already been implied in the text in the form of mentioning ‘Body, Mind and Speech.’ Federico mentions all three principles with his ‘One’ which is a type of consciousness-field at the base of all reality (Mind), various bodies and beings (Body) and symbol or semantic awareness of all such living entities from cells on up (Speech). So the Mind referred to in the text relates to a universal field continuum out of which all phenomena and experience arise, a ‘self-mothering Song’ of sorts in that this is an auto-poetic universe ‘making itself up as it goes along.‘

PS3: “Our experience is inviolate; we can express it with symbols, words, grimaces and so on, but we are the only ones who know the quality and depth of what we feel. Our feelings have a sort of infiniteness to them because they are bottomless; they have no boundaries.”

Or as poetically expressed in the Liturgy: “Through the portal of any such particular we plunge into an ocean of experiential infinity Where one is many, all are one..“

PS4: “Jane: So if we do not really exist in space time, but at the level of this vaster reality, physical death should not fundamentally disrupt our consciousness?
Federico: Yes, absolutely. We think that when the body dies, it is the end of our consciousness because we have been told that consciousness is produced by the brain. But as I said earlier, it is the other way around. It is the brain that is produced by consciousness. So consciousness uses the body as a tool to know itself.”

As echoed in the Liturgy text: “A marvellous holographic self-mothering Song making itself up as it goes along saturated in interconnected living presence pervading all and everything manifesting no end of self-organizing life forms, living creatures imagined into sentient being with all their co-emergent elemental and inanimate phenomena comprising luminous intelligence inseparably part of the universal background field continuum
containing, including and pervading all and everything, micro and macro.“