Potential, Differentiation and The Paranormal

"All men know the use of the useful, but nobody knows the use of the useless. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so that I can have a word with him?'
-Chuang Tzu



We certainly realise that the human mind is cojoined by the tangibility of materiality and the intangible. As Gregory Bateson said;" Of all these examples, the simplest but the most profound is the fact that it takes at least two somethings to create a difference."
The materiality and the intangible qualities are composed, by their very nature of an interior and exterior we can easily demonstrate on a sensate basis, although there is the disquieting equal reality that this is an assumption of a relationship that may not accurately model reality, as in the example of a hypercube.


However, if we come out from behind our referencing, conceptual file cabinet full of these folders, we see a melding of a third potential frame of reference.

"Those whose intelligence has gone beyond existence and nonexistence
And who do not abide [in any extremes]
Have realized the meaning of dependent arising,
The profound and unobservable [truth of emptiness]."
-Buddha

This interconnectedness beyond the discursive realm of differentiation, as well, may illustrate a transcendant state of sentient reality, as energy composes both the sensate realm of materiality as well as the transparent. Perhaps in terms of a phenomenon, perhaps, the state of energy unformed in manifestation can be easily manipulated as would a piece of clay. perhaps UFOs and ghosts, or Jinn share commonalities.

http://ufoinfo.com/news/FSR_scientific.shtml

There may be a zero point of material reality, as a form of energy that is an undiscovered country in a potential state between manifestation and non sensate experience and it's location may well occupy this unknown state with one foot planted in one and another on the shore of potential. Many a Sufi can tell you that beyond the illuminating colours, beyond contemplation is the black light. A black, blacker than the blackest, to borrow an expression from the alchemical tradition (nigrum nigrior nigrius). In the same way that Silence can be said to contain all sounds in their non-manifested modality, this blackness, which embraces all, contains the principle of light.

When a newly formed human being is brought into materiality, at that moment, a Sufi would acknowledge that this sentient being is a contingent saint, that is a proverbial drop from an undifferentiated Ocean of Mercy. A Taoist would call this act, the gifting of a state of potential, Hidden Virtue.

What we are observing in it's locus of manifestation is a human being in it's most observable true state, pristine in it's potentiality.

At the same time, G Spencer Brown, would say, upon observing this child, from this point onward, this sentient creation would reciprocally be subject to The Laws of Form and itself begin creating a dynamic of interactive distinctions. perhaps from the point of view of all created things it is equally true that underlying this explicate order, is an implicate order in which the 'totality of existence is enfolded in each region of space (and time).' In other words, any apparently independent object such as a 'fundamental' particle actually contains within itself the sum of all other seemingly independent objects. The late Physicist David Bohm stated that"'Ultimately, the entire universe…has to be understood as a single undivided whole, in which analysis into separately and independently existent parts has no fundamental status."

This entire process is built upon an increasing number of contrivances of meaning, which in of themselves act upon what is perhaps a state of reality we fail to recognize as it is manifested, yet undoubtedly present, a state of unmanifested potential.

Perhaps that in of itself is a state of formless energy. Perhaps meaning embedded within information... if information in of itself is a form of organised energy, layers itself into a state of experiential potential that has an infinite amount of outcomes. Perhaps our individual set of learned reactions, behavior can either tilt us toward the paranormal in a receptive frame or we avoid it, lock it out and deny it's existance. As John lilly observed,"In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true either is true or becomes true". On the other hand, the individuated potential of a human being toward the paranormal is self originated, as Bateson pointed out,.."for all objects and experiences, there is a quantity that has optimum value. Above that quantity, the variable becomes toxic. To fall below that value is to be deprived." No two individuals have the same range of set points for toxicity and deprivation when confronted with the potential of a paranormal experience.

"Meaning is the bridge between consciousness and matter. Any given array of matter has for any particular mind a significance. The other side of this is the relationship in which meaning is immediately effective in matter. Suppose you see a shadow on a dark night. If it means "assailant," your adrenaline flows, your heart beats faster, blood pressure rises, and muscles tense. The body and all your thoughts are affected; everything about you has changed. If you see that it's only a shadow, there's an abrupt change again.That is an example of the implicate order: Meaning enfolds the whole world into me, and vice versa-that enfolded meaning is unfolded as action, through my body and then through the world. The word hormone means "messenger," that is, a substance carrying some meaning. Neurotransmitters carry meaning, and that meaning profoundly affects the immune system. This understanding could be the beginning of a different attitude to mind-and to life"
-David Bohm

Perhaps there is a distinctive psychological profile of a non consensus imaginitive personality that is like open tuning on a radio frequency, or in this case, a symbological bridge that utilises it's capability to reshuffle the deck of informational stereotypes in order to manifest them;

http://www.qtm.net/~geibdan/a1998/jan/cni1.html

One could consider this state of undifferentiated reality, or potential, an unclaimed, invisible and yet manifest form of energy, as all things may be considered to be but manifestations of this energy in a potential, subject to transforming whilst in a field state of storage within materiality.

Perhaps, our artifice of distinctions between the normal and paranormal can be better understood as all matter being in a quantum state.

“I dreamed I was a butterfly, flitting around in the sky; then I awoke. Now I wonder: Am I a man who dreamt of being a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming that I am a man?”
-Chuang Tzu



Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso Rinpoche:

"For example, let's take the appearance of a flower in a dream. This flower is not something that exists, that truly exists, because it's just a dream appearance - there's no real flower there whatsoever. On the other hand, you can't say there's absolutely nothing, because there is the mere appearance of a flower - but just a mere appearance, that's it. That is its nature in terms of how it exists in the world of appearances. There's nothing really there but there is this mere appearance. In a dream there's nothing substantial but there is the mere appearance of something substantial. Thus, its true nature transcends both existence and nonexistence. Its true nature is not something we can describe with these kinds of terms, because it is beyond any type of thing we might be able to think up about it. And so, just like a flower that appears in a dream, all phenomena that appear, wherever they appear, are the same. They all appear in terms of being a mere appearance. There is nothing substantial to them, and their true nature transcends both existence and non-existence - and any other idea."

In the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, a system stops being a superposition of states and becomes either one or the other when an observation takes place. This experiment makes apparent the fact that the nature of measurement, or observation, is not well defined in this interpretation. Some interpret the experiment to mean that while the box is closed, the system simultaneously exists in a superposition of the states "decayed nucleus" and "undecayed nucleus", and that only when the box is opened and an observation performed does the wave function collapse into one of the two states.

Abu Asa'id al-Kharraz: The "place" of this encounter is not outside the Creator-Creature totality, but is the area within it which corresponds specifically to the Active Imagination, in the manner of a bridge joining the two banks of a river. The crossing itself is essentially a hermeneutics of symbols, a method of understanding which transmutes sensory data and rational concepts into symbols (mazahir) by making them effect this crossing."

Perhaps a good example of the reciprocal nature of the means of measurement an observer, being enfolded or reciprocally mirrored with a process is the focus of energy expended in studying synchronicity leads to one experiencing more synchronised events, than if one were not and the potential were null.

The "believers" in ghosts are more likely to experience the manifestation of a ghost than a skeptic would. Laboratory experimentation of PSI events are notorious for both their skeptical or at best, neutral state of observation and the subsequent failure to produce the phenomenon.

The more we actively look for the Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot, the more material these phenomenon become, whether it is a sound recording of a cry, rocks being thrown or a strobe photograph of Nessie's fin. Perhaps we are observing a process of an implicate ordering rather than a empirical materiality.


The more faith, or more accurately the more energy we focus and invest in a conceptual model in a physics of self fulfilling materialisation in a quantum state, accordingly to our input of bias, the more it mirrors back or perhaps processes what we invest.



This is not to be mistaken with delusions or dishonesty or a lack of objectivity, it is in fact, it is simply a unrecognised natural reflection of our own quantum state of observation. Between consensus reality and non consensus reality wherein may lie a truth that is not counterintuitive to either.

The return to undifferentiated consciousness as it applies to the return to the origin of a potential state is the subject of The Tibetan Book of The Dead. The undifferentiated state of consciousness is not surprisingly manifested in the Clear Light.

http://www.geocities.com/RainForest/Vines/1320/implicate.html

So perhaps what we term the paranormal is a undifferentiated state of recognition that simply does not fall into the hands of our all too contrived distinctions. One looks at the paranormal as a problem with a distinct answer or set of answers, the same, not surprisingly applies to physics. Perhaps the answer is one of a interactive process wherein no one answer, or no one variant is true as all are true within the confines of it's locus. It's a dialog rather than an eventual empirical statement.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7jrmkeU78I

Or perhaps the controversial Higgs theory in physics explains the odd capability of some objects to have mass one second and to vanish just as quickly. In an aricle from New Scientist;


"But the Higgs mechanism does not explain why mass, or its energy equivalent, resists motion or reacts to gravity," says Bernard Haisch of the California Institute for Physics and Astrophysics in Palo Alto. He believes instead that inertia and gravity are manifestations of far more familiar effects. When you lift that sack of potatoes or shove your shopping trolley, the forces you feel might be plain old electricity and magnetism.

If the forces are familiar, their origin is anything but. For in Haisch's view, they come out of the quantum vacuum. What we think of as a vacuum is, according to quantum theory, a sea of force fields. The best understood of all these fields is the electromagnetic field, and it affects us constantly -- our bodies are held together by electromagnetic forces, and light is an oscillation in the electromagnetic field.
That these fields pop up in the vacuum is reflected by Heisenberg's uncertainly principle, which states that the shorter the length of time over which an energy measurement is made, the less precise the result will be. So although the energy of the electromagnetic field in the vacuum averages to zero over long periods of time, it fluctuates wildly on very short timescales. Rather than being empty, the vacuum is a choppy sea of randomly fluctuating electromagnetic waves. We don't see or feel them because they pop in and out of existence incredibly quickly, appearing only for a split second. These fleeting apparitions are called virtual photons. "

Perhaps we need not look any further for a Trickster. It could be we have as a birthright, the capability to fool ourselves in a quantum manner, or in the classical sense, we fail to peer behind this near sighted veil of illusion, which we absent mindedly refer to as our Reality as if it were carved eternally, fixed in granite rather than a dynamic, evolving process akin to a metaphor for the inexpressible..


Again, perhaps all of this indicates a process rather than discrete objects and perhaps this dialog between human perception and the reciprocal nature of our realationship with reality stretches further back in our history as a species and will continue long after you and I enter either the grave and enter a brave new world of which we have only fleeting glimpses of, to speculate upon.

"This brings me to a final point, which, I hope will stimulate some debate. It that point at which, I believe science (as its is presently being practiced), and religion part company, or at least betray a different attitude towards knowledge and certainty. Religion is tolerant of mystery, of living with uncertainty and accepting doubt. Philosophers work in a long tradition, revising and illuminating perennial problems of truth, morals and conduct. Writers, artists and composers constantly add to, consolidate or transform their own traditions. Science however, particularly theoretical physics of the latter half of the twentieth century, has constantly been seeking closure. It wants to reach the most fundamental level, the ultimate equation, the "God" particle. Physics had created this final goal for itself and believes it to be an achievable end. The inability to reach such a hypothetical goal can therefore easily be viewed as a personal failure. It is true that ultimate level or explanation may indeed exist. Equally well it may not. It is entirely possible that, in a certain sense, physics could continue to dialogue with nature for the foreseeable future.'-F David Peat


It could be, that despite our best focused efforts at cross purposes, self destructive behavior and rampant egotism, our species is perhaps at the evolutionary threshold of a doorway we cannot begin to grasp,let alone recognise.