The Greatest Debate

It is a Tuesday morning in September and I have just been on the phone with a friene discussing the model of the “implicate” (unfolded and yet-to-manifest) order of existence which is described well in The Holographic Universe. I am struck with a resonant insight and sit down to hurriedly tap out an electronic message.

“I believe we began, this morning, one of the really great metaphysical debates of our era, and didn't even notice. "Implicate universe", as a name for the Great Unfolded, is a wonderful term, and raises all kinds of great questions which have been beaten to death in the explicate universe but died the death of the imponderable in our history because they excluded the much larger part of the scene -- the implicate and its means, origins, nature and design.

At the core of this understanding is the major question we tripped over, like a brick on the bathroom floor at midnight. Are they folded different? Or are they just folded up in another part of "it"?

The latter notion is (to use shorthand) scholastic, while the former is Socratic, in my opinion. Including my implicate opinions which have many surprises in store. My perception is that the great tangled sheet of our spacetime is in fact the manifestation of the beings who comprise it, all enfolded in their loops and spirals of trillenia of compression, distortion and interleaving with their creations and decisions.

My “God” is this: the unfolding of all beings. Beyond that, he is numinous Causation, unformed, indiscriminate, all-permeating, unidentified, non-centric, non-terminal, and while not unknowable certainly not describable in any framework to be found in the explicate time-bound and space-bundled part of existence.

The problem with the language of most organized religions, and many of the branches of Christianity in particular, is the imposition by language of explicate frames of reference on the implicate.
We cannot avoid this entirely in any zone, religious or not. Our experiential baseline, from which so many of our expectations are defined, is drawn naturally in large measure from the appearances of the explicate universe. Embedded in the forces and spaces and time-boxes of material apparency, we measure the world in a way that makes sense to our bodies and its extensions. We target our expectations to take place in the same framework.

If anyone ever wondered why the “Wheel” – the endless recycling of beings through lifetimes – seemed to be such a persistent pattern, this mechanism is a key part of the answer – the loop of perceive, evaluate and intend which draws our attention and our ability to create futures repeatedly back to the baseline framwork of human effort and its explicate-universe vocabulary. That vocabulary is a loop of its own which dampens the possible by burying it under the familiar.

So this is not a religious or Christian issue; it is a fundamental philosophical and metaphysical one. Not to say ontololgical and epistemological. How we know is perhaps the key thread. The enduring illusion is that we know from explicate forms and pictures of explicate forms. All our efforts at de-stressing others and relieving them of charge or distress circles around that campfire. The truer picture is that we know from the enfolded to the explicate, and then fool ourselves with the apparencies generated by our knowing, into taking the manifestations more seriously than the sources. This is the Big Lie of all time.

The state of beings in the explicate universe is kind of beaten up by this endless self-whanging. Like a tribe of mad dancers hitting themselves in the head with frying pans in the moonlight: Whack! Gonng! Whack! Gonng! They dance a frenzied circle around the flames, beating themselves toward unconsciousness. Traditionally, the first to render himself knocked out cold is elevated in esteem and privelege among the bucks of the tribe. He gets to paint purple circles around his armpits for a year and his frying pan gets elevated to the top of a tall pole in the center of the village. “Whack! Gonng!”. The dance goes on past midnight – these are hard-skulled bucks, indeed.

“Why are you doing that?”, enquires the anthropologist.

“It is our way,” they answer. “This is how we Know.”

Freud once remarked that it seemed that “every conversation takes place between at least four people.”

“We shall have a great deal to say about this,” he added.

He didn’t know the half of it.

And now, I really have to get to work. Let’s see...where did I leave that frying pan?”

And a Very Merry Christmas to us all.

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