Thursday, April 24, 2025
10:50 a.m. I am reading Dirk’s trialogue and trying to both absorb his explicit message and remain open to hints and nudges that appear at the margin of my attention as I do so. Not easy. Exciting, in a satisfying and also scary way.
We can’t help coming from our 3D-humanness. We can move on from it, or modify it, or build on it, but 3D creatures we must remain until released. But it becomes ever clearer that our consciousness is limited by more than physical constraints (time, energy, attention, circumstances, competing attractions). We are limited perhaps primarily by the idea that we are 3D units (even if the 3D units extend to the non-3D), and that the 3D unit is the appropriate place from which to experience consciousness. We are sometimes trying to figure out how matter can become conscious, how consciousness can arise within individuals, and that’s all wrong. Its only value is to save the phenomena while letting science continue to envision matter as primary.
If consciousness is everywhere – is woven into the warp and weft of reality – then there can be no existing apart from it. It would be like breathing without air, without oxygen.
If we then begin conceiving of the universe as consciousness – as a great thought rather than as a great machine, as the English physicist Sir James Jeans said in the 20th century – then we have to ask different questions, such as, How can it be that anything appears not to share in what must be universal?
And if human consciousness resembles cable cars more than taxicabs, what are the implications? Cable cars move by clamping on to the continuously moving cable beneath the street level, rather than being self-propelled. There’s a difference. For one thing, cable cars can go only where there are cables. They can’t originate motion, but by clamping on to the motive power, they can proceed. Sound at all familiar? Presumably AA and BB in Bob’s fable (to the extent that they were individual) were more like taxicabs.