The following books, published by Inner Traditions, are available on Amazon.com
The Following books, published by The Viola Institute, are available on Amazon.com
Developing Supersensible Perception
Our twenty-first century is popularly called the information age. Girding the planet, information technologies have wired the world into a web-like mesh of information links. Physically all that can be seen of these links is metallic wire, fiber-optic cable, and orbiting satellites. But what do these webs carry that is so invisible to our ordinary senses? What might we see if we acquired supersensory vision? If we had such vision, we would see human-encoded clouds of streaming electrons and photons buzzing through the wires and the cables, auroric clouds of glowing plasma swirling between our satellites. From out of this vortex of radiance our digital devices ceaselessly unpack and convert these vibrating energy spectra into sound, images, and text so that we may hear, see, and communicate with friends and strangers, far and near. Thus harnessed with our technical ingenuity, this radiant electro-magnetic frequency web emerges as the information network of our epoch.
But many believe and have testified to the existence of a vast range of additional networks, webs linking worlds and dimensions far beyond those which our daily senses reveal. These rare psychonauts claim to have developed the ability to access new sensory modes of awareness. Their experiences assure us that with sincere effort and sufficient practice, we too will soon possess the ability to “see” for ourselves. . . .
The full Introduction can be found at:
https://shellijoye.net/introduction-to-developing-supersensible-perception/
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Introduction to Tuning the Mind
This book is about consciousness and how it is structured, and how it may be navigated. Presented here is a psychophysical map, a guide for twenty-first century psychonauts (those highly inquisitive individuals motivated to explore altered states of awareness, states attained through natural ability, or through drugs, prayer, meditation, dreams, religious rituals, or physical exercises.) I have been exploring non-ordinary noetic dimensions for almost fifty years now, ever since, as a young physics student between semesters at Rice University (during the “Summer of Love” in 1967), I first experienced the full impact of ranges and dimensions of my mind tuning in to bandwidths far beyond my normal spectrum of awareness, beyond anything I could ever have previously imagined.
My lifelong search for a map of consciousness began around a small campfire on a lovely Pacific ocean beach just south of Big Sur, California, at around 10 pm on a clear July night, shortly after ingesting three small yellow tablets of LSD (“Owsley acid”). Having just completed the third year of a double major program in mathematics and electrical engineering, my vision of the universe was deeply influenced by such things as frequency charts, Fourier and Laplace transforms, and electromagnetic theories describing invisible energy waves. Suddenly all of these dry theories became vividly alive for me, overlayed and energized by the direct visual, auditory, and tactile experience of other entities in an enormous sea of energy. Astonished, I found myself floating on the vast depths of oceans of consciousness that I had never realized lay beyond the shores of my own familiar mind, and I realized that we are all immersed in planetary and galactic energy fields swirling in and out of our own limited islands of awareness.
The map presented in this book is derived from direct experience. It is also an extension of several major new concepts that have emerged in recent quantum physics and brain research, primarily the “holonomic mind/brain” theory put forth by the neurosurgeon Karl Pribram and the cosmology of the “Implicate/Explicate orders” proposed by the British quantum physicist David Bohm. Woven together, a synergy emerges as the holoflux hypothesis, revealing a new map of consciousness in an expanding universe. The holoflux hypothesis presented here not only offers a new paradigm, a useful tool for thought, but is found to be consistent both with science, and also to be in accord with the writings and verbal traditions of the many metaphysical interpretations brought back by millenia of introspective mystics, saints, and shamanic psychonauts.
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Introduction to The Little Book of Consciousness
The material presented herein is an illustrated integration of both slides and commentary found originally in a presentation of the material based upon my doctoral research, published in my dissertation, and further developed over the past two years at numerous conferences.
The approach that I have taken, both in my research and material presented here, is a cross-disciplinary integral methodology, one that considers established concepts not only from the neurophysiology of Karl Pribram and the quantum physics developed by David Bohm, but also deeply influenced and informed by philosophy, religion, mysticism, and direct perceptual cognitive experience.
We find now, in the 21st early century, that excessive focus and specialization has resulted in a human knowledge that has become increasingly fragmented. The archetypal pattern of the Tower of Babel comes to mind; each domain of knowledge speaking its own highly specialized language in conceptual framework, such that cross-discipline dialog has been impaired. According to the systems thinker, Edgar Morin, the problem seems to be both fragmentation and lack of integration:
An influx of knowledge at the end of the 20th century sheds new light on the situation of human beings in the universe. Parallel progress in cosmology, earth sciences, ecology, biology and prehistory in the 1960s and 1970s have modified our ideas about the universe, the earth, life and humanity itself. But these contributions remain disjointed. That which is human is cut up into pieces of a puzzle that cannot form an image . . . . The new knowledge, for lack of being connected, is neither assimilated nor integrated. There is progress in knowledge of the parts and paradoxical ignorance of the whole.[i]
The integral approach presented here assumes that valid data may be found beyond the traditional methodologies which compartmentalize knowledge. The integral method considers information as valid from multiple and often disparate domains, always with the goal of detecting correlations among them, resonances which might offer new perspectives and alternate paradigms. The theories of Bohm and Pribram present such trans-compartmentalized bridges, offering material with which to perceive new interconnections between neurophysiology, quantum physics, consciousness, and fundamental maps of the universe. Bohm and Pribram became colleagues, working together from within their different specialties, and together a new picture of consciousness in the universe began to emerge. Their theory is quite unique yet provides a clear map for those interested in future consciousness research, or through direct experiential exploration of introspection, prayer, contemplation, or entheogenic-fueled psychonautics.
To Bohm, the larger universe, which he referred to as “the Whole,” consists of two domains, an unfolding explicate order in space-time and a nonlocal (non-temporal, non-spatial) implicate order with additional dimensions as predicted by string theory. Bohm concluded that consciousness will eventually be found, not within space-time, but as primary within the actuality of the implicate order. Pribram’s forty years of laboratory data supports Bohm’s model of the Whole consisting of three hypostases: 1) an explicate order (our space-time cosmos), 2) an implicate order (at the center of space-time, everywhere, and yet nondual), and 3) a continual holoflux energy bridging and communicating with the two orders. The entire Whole, according to Bohm, is continually enfolding and folding between a transcendent implicate order and an immanent explicate order. Pribrams dataconvinced him that perception and memory follow a holographic Fourier-like transformation process between Bohm’s nonlocal implicate order and the brain’s explicate, space-time order.
The integrated ideas of Pribram and Bohm present a map and a
theory of consciousness that is congruent and coherent with established
principles of physics and neurophysiology, while offering a holonomic
mind-brain-field approach in seeking to answer the hard problem of
consciousness. Such a map may be of great use for understanding prayer,
contemplation, and the effects of enthogenic psychedelics for those involved in
exploring inner space.
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[i] Morin, Seven Complex Lessons in Education for the Future, 21.
Introduction to Exploring the Noosphere
The human species is currently in transition, moving beyond the biosphere into an ever-awakening planetary consciousness, the noosphere. According to the Russian geophysicist, Vladimir Vernadsky (1863-1945), the evolution of the noosphere is a natural phenomenon, the third stage of planetary evolution, following the geosphere (inanimate matter) and the biosphere (biological life).[i] The noosphere, a vast network and matrix of consciousness, is populated and energized by the psychic energy of the countless generations who have passed through the biosphere before us. Fueled by these countless psyches, the noosphere is both our individual and collective future, our next psychic home, visited each night within the depths of our sleep, vividly explored during entheogenic-fueled sessions, and reached through a variety of contemplative practices developed over the centuries.
In his voluminous books and essays, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), the renowned 20th century mystic and scientist, presents geological and zoological evidence of the planet Earth as a consciously evolving lifeform,[ii] a global being in the transitional process of awakening into a planetary milieu of reflective self-consciousness. He identifies a distinct axis of successive formsand multiple layers of increasing complexity and centrification running from geogenesis through biogenesis and beyond, into psychogenesis; this axis, he insists, can be seen continuing in the present noetic awakening. He tells us that it is life itself that is engendering this rebirth into a new mode of planetary consciousness, the formation of a complex networked entity which he himself has named the noosphere.[iii]
Where then might we see planetary geophysical features corresponding with Teilhard’s vision of the noosphere? Like the invisible water in which all fish swim, we emerge into and throughout our lives exist within the geomagnetic field of the earth. Constantly bathed by this swirling vortex of geomagnetic radiation, we never see, nor seldom think of the fact that directly below us, occupying half of the diameter of the planet, is a glowing vibrating source of geomagnetic radiant flux emanating from an enormous crystalline iron-nickel[iv] core of glowing energy. Yet we have all seen magnetic compass needles line up with the magnetosphere and for centuries have relied upon this field to chart our course on land, sea, and air. That this is far from a static field can be readily seen in the sworling glow of the aurora borealis, where geomagnetic fields are brightly lit by ionization in the noosphere. Teilhard speculates that eventually “life might use its ingenuity to force the gates of its terrestrial prison by establishing a connection psyche to psyche with other focal points of consciousness across space,” and “the possibility of ‘centre-to-centre’ contacts between perfect centres.”[v]
Teilhard was definitely a unique thinker, one of those rare few
capable of bridging the “two cultures” of science and mysticism. A priest,
mystic, and scientist, he wrote extensively and produced, in scientific terms,
a model for the evolution of consciousness in the universe, leaving behind a
legacy that he hoped would forge a new mysticism, a science-based religious
understanding of the dynamics of cosmos. In an optimistic note, Teilhard,
paleontologist, geologist and priest, at the age of 72, in sight of St. Helena
on passage from New York, writes: “It is with irrepressible hope that I welcome
the inevitable rise of a new mysticism and anticipate its equally inevitable
triumph.”[vi]
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[i] Samson and Pitt, The Biosphere and Noosphere Reader, 17.
[ii] Teilhard, “Universalization and Union,” 91. Essay written in 1953.
[iii] Teilhard, “Centrology,”120.
[iv] “On August 30 2011, Professor Kei Hirose, professor of high-pressure mineral physics and petrology at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, became the first person to recreate conditions found at the earth’s core under laboratory conditions, subjecting a sample of iron nickel alloy to the same type of pressure by gripping it in a vice between 2 diamond tips, and then heating the sample to approximately 4000 Kelvins with a laser. The sample was observed with x-rays, and strongly supported the theory that the earth’s inner core was made of giant crystals running north to south.” from webpage “Structure of the Earth,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_of_the_Earth, accessed 10/27/2011.
[v] Ibid., 110.
[vi] Teilhard de Chardin, The Activation of Energy, (London: William Collins Sons & Co Ltd., 1976), 383.
Introduction to Sri Aurobindo: Quantum Physics and Consciousness
There are many mysteries associated with religious symbols in every culture down through the ages, but prominent among these are the numinous mysteries of the Trinity. Deep reverence for the Trinity can be found in India as Sacchidānanda (an elision of three Sanskrit metaphysical terms, “Sat-Chit-Ananda,” which can be translated as “Existence” (God), “Consciousness” (the Son), and “Love” (the Holy Spirit).
This term, Sacchidānanda, encapsulates the Vedantic metaphysics of the Trinity in texts composed as early as the 4th century CE, and perhaps it is not an accident that it was in that very same century that early Christians in Constantinople (381 CE) codified the doctrine of the Holy Trinity in the Nicene Creed, which has ever since been recited daily by Christians.
What may be more surprising to many is the existence of yet another 400 million humans, neither Christian nor Hindu, who frame their belief within a Buddhist Trinitarian context, viewing the Holy Trinity in metaphysical terms of what is referred to as the “three Bodies of Buddha,” the Nirmaṇakāya, the Dharmakāya, and the luminous Sambhogakāya (three Sanskrit terms which translate as the Immanent, the Transcendent, and the Clear Light “body of bliss” that bridges space-time and transcendence).
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Introduction to The Little Book of the Holy Trinity
There are many mysteries associated with religious symbols in every culture down through the ages, but prominent among these are the numinous mysteries of the Holy Trinity. Widely recognized and revered by both Orthodox Christians and Roman Catholics, the Holy Trinity is invoked in the private and communal prayer of 2.2 billion Christians. At this very moment there must be tens of thousands of Christians around the globe in the act of “signing themselves” (touching the three central fingers of the right hand to forehead, heart and each shoulder in making “the sign of the cross”) while reciting silently or audibly the three manifestations of the Holy Trinity, “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”
Yet those same Christians would likely be surprised to learn that an additional billion people also pray to the Holy Trinity, with great devotion, even though they are not Christians. Deep reverence for the Trinity can be found in India as Sacchidānanda (an elision of the three Sanskrit metaphysical terms, Sat-Chit-Ānanda, words individually translated as “Existence” (God), “Consciousness” (the Son), and “Love” (the Holy Spirit).
This term, Sacchidānanda, encapsulates the Vedantic metaphysics of the Trinity in texts composed as early as the 4th century CE, and perhaps it is not an accident that it was in this very same century that early Christians in Constantinople (381 CE) codified the doctrine of the Holy Trinity in the Nicene Creed, which has ever since been recited daily by Christians.
What may be more surprising to many is the existence of yet another 400 million humans, neither Christian nor Hindu, who frame their belief within a Buddhist Trinitarian context, viewing the Holy Trinity in metaphysical terms of what is referred to as the “three Bodies of Buddha,” the Nirmaṇakāya, the Dharmakāya, and the luminous Sambhogakāya (three Sanskrit terms which translate as the Immanent, the Transcendent, and the Clear Light “body of bliss” which bridges space-time and transcendence).
Yet all of these mutual Trinity-acknowledging Christians, Hindus, and Buddhists would be even more surprised to learn that millions of Muslims also revere the Holy Trinity as a central doctrine in their faith. Among the five million Sufi Alawites living in Syria, Turkey, and Lebanon, the Holy Trinity is honored as the three intersecting, hypostatic emanations of the One God. A common Alawite prayer is the recitation: “I turn to the Gate, I bow down before the Name, and I adore the Meaning.”[1]
This book presents a multidimensional, cross-cultural, picture of the Holy Trinity, related in the context of my own life story. It does this through a trans-disciplinary method called “the integral approach” discussed in the first chapter. By comparing and contrasting approaches to the Trinity as seen from the following three widely different perspectives, new and interconnecting patterns begin to emerge:
- Teilhard de Chardin’s Christian vision of the Omega Point and the Noosphere,
- Sri Aurobindo’s Vedantic Trinitarian metaphysics of the threefold Sacchidānanda, and
- David Bohm’s nondual physics of “the Whole.”
Several of the concepts, particularly those that are central to modern quantum physics and Indian metaphysics, might at first glance seem challenging for the average reader. However, the material as presented does not require any deep or extensive educational background in philosophy or modern physics. The numerous diagrams and figures that have been included provide sufficient visual detail for acquiring a wider and deeper understanding of ideas that are to be discovered in the Trinity.
The Little Book of the Holy Trinity has been written with the hope that the confluence of ideas from multiple subject areas will provide sufficient detail so that the reader might be rewarded with a deeper appreciation, broader understanding, and closer connection to the transcendent mystery that is referred to as the Holy Trinity. It is also hoped that a consideration of the parallel ideas presented here, converging upon this central metaphysical mystery that has arisen in multiple cultures, might lead to a more ecumenical understanding, acceptance, and reverence for all expressions of the Holy Trinity. In this I feel in full accord with the words of the Spanish Roman Catholic priest, Raimundo Panikkar, in speaking of his own book on the Trinity:
My aim at present is simply so to enlarge and deepen the mystery of the Trinity that it may embrace this same mystery existent in other religious traditions but differently expressed. The Trinity, then, may be considered as a junction where the authentic spiritual dimensions of all religions meet.[2]
Each of the five chapters in this book is approximately fifty pages long and biographical in nature; the chapters do not have to be read in sequence. A summary chart is presented in Chapter V, the concluding chapter, which offers a direct comparison of fourteen Trinitarian structures associated with four major religions and the writings of ten philosopher-mystics. For those with an interest in mathematical derivations, AppendixA, “The Fourier Transform,” discusses the subject of imaginary numbers, the derivation of Euler’s Law, and the Mandelbrot set of Real and Imaginary numbers. Appendix B, “Icons and the Holy Trinity,” is a brief discussion of traditional icons depicting aspects of the Holy Trinity, both Christian and Vedantic.
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A Note on Ecumenism
Some years ago, Fr. Bede Griffiths, a Camaldolese Benedictine
monk from Great Britain and an Oxford graduate, had gone to India where he
developed an ecumenical ashram open to Christians, Hindus, Moslems, Buddhists,
and God-seekers of any sort. His experience soon convinced him that the
supposed polytheism of the bulk of India’s population was only an illusion
caused by the various depictions of God inherited from India’s ethnic and
regional diversity, each of which mirrored one or another aspect of nature—all
of it stemming from the one God.[3]
[1] Abi-Talib, Al-Saheefah Al-Alawiyah or The Alawite Book, 17.
[2] Panikkar, Trinity and the Religious Experience of Man, 42.
[3] Kropf, A Response to Contemporary Atheism, 149.
Introduction to Ten Electromagnetic Field Theories of Consciousness
This book is the product of a fifty-year quest to understand the physics of consciousness, a project catalyzed by an intense experience I still vividly recall. It began on a California beach around midnight, just south of Big Sur, on a mild Pacific night in July 1967. Having completed my third year of electrical engineering, I had been offered a summer intern job to program in FORTRAN at a U.S. Navy base near Pt. Mugu, California, just north of Los Angeles.
Prior to that night, the word “consciousness” had never registered in my vocabulary as something worthy of much consideration. Certainly I have no recollection of any mention of consciousness in any engineering classes, and in fact the word was seldom found in academic circles at the time, it being a word bandied about by hippies, as a contemporary neurophysiologist mentions in her book on electromagnetic consciousness: “In 1972, use of the word ‘consciousness’ was regarded by neurophysiologists as unacceptably New-Age.” The nearest I had come to considering consciousness as a concept in its own right was during an elective course on Romantic poetry (Wordsworth, Byron, Keats) where I mused over various poetic metaphors and similes, each trying to capture various states of consciousness. Yet even in an English class, I seldom encountered the use of the specific word “consciousness” in lectures and discussion.
Nevertheless, catalyzed by an epiphany that night on the beach, the word “consciousness” became a real “thing”; for me, an undeniable mystery calling out for further exploration. Henceforth, “consciousness” was no longer some vague abstract term.
The full Introduction can be found at:
https://shellijoye.net/ten-electromagnetic-field-theories-of-consciousness/
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Introduction to Paintings of the Supersensible
Contemporary artists have given us stuffed sharks, gift-wrapped coastlines, and works of art that seems designed primarily to shock the sensibilities of viewers. A 1996 painting by the artist Chris Ofili, titled “The Holy Virgin Mary,” includes a black Virgin Mary beside elephant dung with “an exposed breast formed from lacquered elephant dung and a robe made of pornographic depictions of women’s asses.” In 2015 the painting sold at a Christie’s auction in London for $ 4,500,000. In contemporary galleries throughout the modern world we find works by artists who have distanced themselves far from classical approaches to aesthetics and the beautiful. Today there is virtually no interest shown in the classical engagement with “the beautiful” and “the sublime.”
This “de-sublimation” or “intellectualization” of art has not been a trivial innovation. It seems that artists and the art world in general, influenced by the materialism of science and a newly disenchanted universe, have lost sight of the underlying cultural, psychological, and evolutionary functions of direct contact with the beautiful and the sublime. To be sure, artists and the public have been conditioned by the darker sublimities of the 20th century, among them the trenches of World War I, the atom bomb blast above Hiroshima, and the rise of fascism around the globe.
To counter this trend in art, this book describes the function of art as a catalyst in the growth of human consciousness. It is through what Rudolf Steiner terms “the supersensible” and “supersensible perception” that we come to understand the role of art in the evolution of human perception and awareness. The function of the supersensible in art is illustrated by inclusion of 40 color paintings by the author, who first began painting while working as a lighting consultant to Andy Warhol in his Factory on Union Square in New York in the early 1970s. A short biography of the author during formative years as a painter in New York is presented in the Appendix as “Evolution of a Transgendered Artist.”
Having fallen so far off the radar of the contemporary art scene, it is worth beginning by a focus upon just what is the sublime, first articulated in 1790 by Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Judgement. Though our twenty-first century art now favors the conceptual rather than the beautiful, we examine evidence that works of art do provide an evolutionary function in human culture, and call for a renewed appreciation for the role of the sublime in 21st century aesthetics.
In the first chapter we explore the concept of the sublime from the point of view of modern aestheticians. We then articulate and refine a new approach to the sublime through considering the convergence of concepts from quantum physics, evolutionary psychology, and the emerging field of consciousness research. Kant’s aesthetics of the sublime is taken up and reinforced by the social philosopher Jean Gebser in his concern for facilitating the emergence of an integral mutation of consciousness, as described in his magnificent opus, The Ever Present Origin.
A supersensible aesthetics encourages works of art that find their locus at the intersection of the beautiful, the sublime, and the supersensible, and have the ability to catalyze the transformation of consciousness within individuals from exclusively mental-bound operations into new experiences of emergent supersensible states. This will be a reactivation and a retrofitting of a mode of pre-verbal consciousness which was the early common operation of the human mind prior to the development of human languages.
A supersensible aesthetics will induce the emergent integral consciousness foreseen by Gebser without loss of previous evolutionary structures. In so doing it will open up to us truly new perspectives, previously invisible modalities of the real as our evolving art takes us into ever new dimensions of human consciousness through awakening new modes of supersensible perception.
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