Marshall McLuhan said "Indeed, it is only too typical that the 'content' of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium."
Matter is that content, which blinds physics into separating different phenomenological states, into irreducible 'ontological primitives,' and ignoring or even rejecting outright what can not be measured.
Following a public lecture the other day, I heard an academic declare to the speaker, “stop using the word spiritual, it’s Quantum Reality.” I have two critiques of this statement, the first regarding ‘reality,’ and the second regarding the Physicalist position on ‘spirituality.’
First, there is no ‘Quantum Reality,’ there is only this very Human Reality. There are no hidden dimensions, no parallel worlds, no functioning reality separate from common experience. There is no divide between scales, the quantum and the cosmic are integrally connected, as is Mind and Matter. Mind, consciousness, spirit are not separate from, or sub-agents of ontology, but the “greater than the sum of the parts” relational phenomena fundamental to our reality. What we call spirituality or supernatural is simply that which has no material substance, it is not quantized, it is relational and qualitative. There is no Magic to this, only that which we fail to understand.
This failure has been to divide and classify these countable parts, while turning space into a geometric abstraction, and time into an ontological dimension of substantial beingness - the quantization of a Block Universe, where past, present, and future are slices to be experienced, predetermined, and physically manifest.
Time however is not substantially real, it is only our perception of change and duration, whereas Space is real; as there is no Block Universe, there is also no Void, there is only the Medium.
From my view, as a Buddhist Vajrayana practitioner, and a Monist, there is no separation between Mind and Matter, nor of Light and Space. The Universe is one relational becoming of Conscious Agents (Hoffman) within a Space of Information - as we Buddhists say “Space Is Information.”
For the philosopher Henri Bergson this was framed as the “Holographic Theory of Mind,” where Space and its contents are One, a (Ether) Medium constitutive of both material and immaterial resonances, emergent from the transcendental Mind of Information Space.
In this Hololgraphic Mind approach, everything - Space, Information, Mind, Matter, Radiation, Light - are all emanations of a resonant (tensile) Medium. Matter being one form of vibration with Identity, or spacial and temporal integrity, relating to other Identities, whereas Light is a relational vibration between Identities. Mind and Consciousness are the integral relationality greater than the sum of the parts, evolving as Identities self-organize from primitive to more complex states of relationship. Memory is the history of these relationships embedded in the information network of the Medium.
Second, for those seeking to understand Mind from a Spiritual perspective, the Physicalist Standard Model, and their understanding of the Quantum world, completely rejects not only spirituality, but also Mind, and Consciousness. It is a reductive and deterministic world of parts, separate, countable, and wholly devoid of relationship beyond their interaction through forces.
Seeking justification for spirituality in Physicalism is a fools errand. While people like Depok Chopra see the fuzziness of Quantum Physics as somehow showing or pointing to the immaterial nature of matter as grounding it to Spirituality and validating Spirit, this is far from the truth of the Physicists Standard Model of Particles and Fields. There is still a divide in matter, the void of abstract space, and forces, and attempts to empirically reduce all else to epiphenomena.
One could consider this a theoretical capture associated with Academia and Consensus Reality, or a Stockholm syndrome, where participation requires one to accept the Consensus of those seen as in charge, the capture by the specialist of legitimacy within the debate.
This is important to understand, that the Consensus Reality of Academia is one of the Death of Mind, Consciousness, Free-Will (choice), and the nihilism of reductive materialism falling temporally into the trap of Black Holes and Big Bangs, out of and into Nothingness. This is not the Creativity of Life. I call this “Death Cult Cosmology.”
The important distinction made here is to see beyond the parts, to see the open and creative realm of Mind. In realizing the connective tissue of the Medium as affording more avenues to the Real. That which is thought of as being of the Spiritual realm e.g. ghosts, angels, demons, telepathy, precognition, NDE’s, out of body experiences, and UAP - are possibly all non material emanations of the Networked Medium, not the Quantumization of Materialism.
A further level beyond the focus on this realm based on the Quantum, of our experience of physical experience, is to go one step further, expanding our thinking from that of vibration of a medium to planes of existence within this same medium based on Music theory and Harmonics. As in Music theory with its octaves, so to may the Medium resonate with different octaves of experiential phenomenal reality - this physical realm being perhaps the lowest in the octave ladder.
In Eastern Mysticism this is clearly defined - the Physical realm (or plane), the Astral realm, the Causal realm, and the Soul Realm (with different systems having further distinctions). These realms are not separate spaces but interconnected and fundamental.
In the Harmonics Theory of Ray Tomes this (as in esotericism) is seen as emanating from the top down, from the largest vibrational set forming internal harmonics, each of which then form their own harmonics until the energy density of these harmonics within the Medium emanates Matter.
“The single axiom of the Harmonics theory is that...
the universe consists of a wave which develops harmonics and each of these waves does the same.”
It is my thinking that in the evolution of the Universe this top down emanationism is then followed by the evolution of the Mind from the bottom, back up, and here a feedback loop transforms the minds that can tune to the greater Mind. This evolution of Mind is well defined by Gregg Henriques and his UTOK (Universal Theory of Knowledge). Key to his work are Justification Systems, Behavioral Investment, and Influence Matrix - all integral theories of relationship and process within Human development.
As Matter evolves so does Mind, my question then is how does Spirit evolve? Are we becoming new Beings, not just new Animals (or A.I.). Is reincarnation an evolutionary adaptation to preserve information? G.I. Gurdjieff and P.D. Ouspensky in their Fourth Way philosophy theorized that a Soul is developed like a muscle, you must build a Soul, reincarnation is not a given, it is an evolutionary development that only a few attain.
To sum up - the Spiritual is not Quantifiable, it is not separation, it is relational and integral, it is that which is greater than the sum of its parts. Space is Information, and the Medium (Mind) is the Message.