Complete and Downloadable, with my compliments. *The Secret Life of Stones: Matter, Divinity, and the Path of Ecstasy* (2016) by Michael Adzema, Book 1 in the The Path of Ecstasy Series.

This book presents a logical philosophical journey that wanders and explores the terrain leading up to and supporting such overstandings. Then, it hovers above those astonishing revelations and glories in the implications of them for understanding our Reality, our non-separation from each other, our Identity as Self and Divinity, and for guidance for our lives.

In so doing, we peer through a portal wherein we are again one with the Universe. We find ourselves on the edge of a coming together as grand as that which we experienced at conception. We receive the gift of a heritage we long ago and mistakenly repudiated—a worldview in which we are seen as belonging, at home, and once again noble within the world we inhabit.

THE SECRET LIFE OF STONES

Also by Michael Adzema

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From the Return to Grace Series:

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Culture War, Class War: Occupy Generations and the Rise and Fall of “Obvious Truths.” Volume 1. (2013)

Apocalypse Emergency: Love’s Wake-Up Call. Volume 3. (2013)

Apocalypse NO: Apocalypse or Earth Rebirth and the Emerging Perinatal Unconscious. Volume 4. (2013)

Wounded Deer and Centaurs: The Necessary Hero and the Prenatal Matrix of Human Events. Volume 5. (2016)

Planetmates: The Great Reveal. Volume 6. (2014)

Funny God: The Tao of Funny God and the Mind’s True Liberation. Volume 7. (2015)

Experience Is Divinity: Matter As Metaphor. Volume 8. (2013)

Falls from Grace: The Devolution and Revolution of Consciousness.

Volume 9. (2014)

Prodigal Human: The Descents of Man. Volume 10. (2016)

Psychology of Apocalypse: Ecopsychology, Activism, and the Prenatal Roots of Humanicide. Volume 11. (2018)

Back to the Garden: The Psychology and Spirituality of Humanicide and the Necessary Future. Volume 12. forthcoming

The Necessary Revolution. Volume 2. (forthcoming)

Primal Return: Renaissance and Grace. Volume 12. (forthcoming)

Primal Renaissance. Volume 13. (forthcoming)

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.. From The Path of Ecstasy Series:

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The Secret Life of Stones: Matter, Divinity, and the Path of Ecstasy. Volume 1. (2016)

Dance of the Seven Veils I … Primal/Identity Psychology, Mythology, and Your Real Self … Adult to Toddler. Volume 2. (2017)

Dance of the Seven Veils II … Prenatal/Perinatal Psychology, Mythology, and Your Divine Self … Infant to Prenate. Volume 3. (scheduled 2020)

Dance of the Seven Veils III…Periconceptional/Transpersonal Psychology, Mythology, and Your Original Face…Cellular to Soulular. Volume 4. (scheduled 2021)

THE SECRET LIFE OF STONES

Matter, Divinity, and the Path of Ecstasy

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The Path of Ecstasy, Volume 1

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Gonzo Sage Media: Eugene, Oregon: sillymickel@gmail.com

Copyright © 2016 Michael Adzema

All rights reserved.

ISBN-13: 978-1534607439

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This book is dedicated to the five teachers who changed my life and whose ideas are built into the foundation of all I write. In the order they came to me — Carl Jung, Hermann Hesse, Arthur Janov, Stanislav Grof, and Sathya Sai Baba. As well, this book is dedicated to my No-Form family — my strongest supporters and allies — especially Graham Farrant, Martha D. Ello, and Shirdi Sai Baba.

My works are achievements of all of us. I couldn’t be more grateful, and I love you all.

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CONTENTS

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PREFACE xv PART ONE: BEING SHIVA — DESTROYING AND CREATING WORLDS 1 1 Creating Worlds: Many Beings, Many Worlds … While Our Science Is Built on an Assumption, Rooted in Religion, That Humans Are “God’s Chosen Species” 3 2 Destroying Worlds: Our Reality Is Species Determined and the Relativity of Science … Culturally Constituted Realities, Biologically Constituted Realities, and Biological Relativity 10 3 Infinite Worlds: The Spectrum of Realities … Individually, Bioculturally, and Suprahumanly Constituted Realities, and Ultimate Relativity 23 4 The Perinatal Matrix: Bioculturally Constituted Realities, Part 1 … Our Biocultural World and We Are What We’ve Experienced — Our Conception, Gestation, and Birth Create Our Windows to the World 36 5 Cells with a View: Bioculturally Constituted Realities, Part 2 … Conception Creates Our World … Dualities, Dichotomies, Dialectics, Dukkha, Duty, Disillusionment, Gender, Self-Confidence 42 6 Womb with a View: Bioculturally Constituted Realities, Part 3 … Our Womb Experience Configures Our “Good” and Our “Bad” — Our Spiritual-Religious Beliefs and Our Evil — Our “Human Nature” 59 PART TWO: TRANSCENDING WORLDS 67 7 What We Can Know: Why We Know Not, Mind at Large, Levels of Reality Construction, Paradigm Relativity, and Ultimate Interconnectedness 69 8 Beyond “Flat Earth” Materialism: Why We Seek to Know, Usefulness and Limitations of Science, The New Evidence and the New Researchers, The Transpersonal Paradigm, and The Challenge to Know More 79 9 Cultural Transcendence: What We Could Know, Paradigm Dolls, and The Doors of Perception … Only by Leaving Can a Fish Know It Lives in Water 91 10 Species Transcendence and Occupy Science: How We Might Come to Know … Knowledge Begins Where Arrogance Ends … Dropping Our Species-Centrism, We Transcend Scientific Truth 103

PART THREE: SCIENCE AS MYTH 119 11 The Footprint We Have Discovered Is Our Own: When Tradition and Religion Break Down, All Truth Is Liable to Bust Out: The Center of the Onion Is Nothing … The Last Secret to Be Told Is There Is No Secret 121 12 Restoring Nobility to Nature: Morphic Resonance, Lamarck, Morphogenetic Fields, and the Mind of God … All Is Subjectivity, Everything We Think and Do Affects All Reality 132 13 Emanationism Revival: A Revolution in the Direction of Growth — Panentheism, Krause, and the Cyclical Nature of Time and Change 149 PART FOUR: THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF STONES 159 14 The Consciousness of Stones: Idealism, a Profound Overstanding. Matter Matters, It Just Ain’t Material 161 15 The Radical Rational View of Us and It: I Am You, and You Are Me, and We Are We, and We Are All Together — How You Are God, How the Universe Is Friendly. A Proof of the Existence of God 173 16 Invisible Entities and the Universal Game: From Transpersonal Reality to the Falls from Grace and Back Again … Life is a Wiki-Novel 185 17 How “Within” Can Also Be “Outside”: Demystifying the Link Between Consciousness and Matter … The Map of All Reality 197 18 Experience Is Divinity; Cognition Is Illusory: Why We Say One Should “Look Within” … The Highest Reality Is Also the Most Immediate One 211 PART FIVE: MATTER IS MESSAGE 225 19 The Earth Speaks Out on Love, Death, and Liberation: Breadcrumbs from Divinity and Matter Is Message … One’s Experience of Reality Is the Wisest and Most Beneficent of Teachers 227 20 The Universe Speaks Its Intention for Existence: Matter Is Message on Time and Existence, Being and Becoming … The Intention of the Universe … Is Fun 245 21 On Separation and Identity and How the Universe “Feels”: More Letters from hOMe — Trees Speaking on Infinite Identities and Being God, and the Parable of Participation 256 22 The Structure and Purpose of the Universe? Answer — “Tree”: The Map of the Universe and All Its Beings and One Divinity Is Told Us by the Tree 269 23 The Universe Says It Is Friendly … and Funny: More Scripts from the Universal Playwright … The Universe is Helpful as Well as Fun 276 24 The Nature of Everything: Matter Is the Map of God, Direct and Indirect Perception, Form and No-Form Personalities, the Afterlife, and You Are Me and I Am You 290 25 Truth, Lives, and Ecstasy: From Divinity’s Perspective, All Experience Is “Fun” … or at Least “Interesting.” Thank You for Your Service, by the Way 313 26 The Greatest Teaching: Unity Is Divinity, A Blessed Possibility, Coming hOMe, and the Nature of Divinity … “Listen Better” 328 27 Identity and the Sea of Potentiality: Our Soulular Constituted Self, Multiculturalism, Staying Afloat and Navigating Amidst Overwhelming Possibility, a Modern Curse, a Modern Opportunity 339 28 The Secret Life of Stones: Is a Life Most Divine. “It’s All Fucking Magic” … The Greatness of Us as Our Assumed Universal Law and God’s More Likely Address 357 29 The Other Is Our Hidden Face: How the Planetmates Tell Us About Our Inner and Our Supranatural Worlds … Angels in Nature and a Planetmate’s Garden of Play 374 30 Universe Calling, Says It Wants to Help: Splitting Apart, Crisis, and Reunion … At the Portal to a Quantum Jump — Crop Circles, Mandalas, and Gates … The Universe Reaches to Guide Us 390 31 Transition, Belongingness, and Spherical Experience: The Gods Are Crazy and Spheres Unify Dimensions; Analysis Versus Experience, Unity Versus Reunion, Integration Versus Being hOMe; and “The Sounds of Silence” 410 32 “Something Wonderful” Is Already Happening: Reunion with The Universe — UFOs and the Coming Together of Heaven and Earth, Jacob’s Ladder, Contact Between Form and No-Form … a “Family” Reunion 427 33 Birthing Into the Universe: And The Humanity Show. Stay Tuned! The Universe Is a Bible … Read It. The Universe Is Ever Teaching Us … Matter Is a Language … We Are Stars/ Stars Are Us … World Tree … Primal Philosophy 442 34 One at First Sees a God as a Demon: Why We Crucify Our Angels and The Perinatal Veil on the Paranormal … If You Don’t Hear the Heavenly Song, You Need More Spiritual Experience 460 35 Sing the Body Ecstatic: The Path of Ecstasy … We Are Embraced and Loved by a Universe We Finally Know to Be Our hOMe 482 EPILOGUE — The World Is Out to Love You: Expect Less … and More … from Your Wasps. The Rest of the World, Given the Chance, Is Out to Love You 491 AFTERWORD: Continue with Book Two, Womb with a View, and about The Path of Ecstasy Series 497 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 515 NOTES 517 REFERENCES 533 ABOUT THE AUTHOR 541

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PREFACE

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“…that is what this book attempts — the returning to the inanimate world of the status of awareness, aliveness, and intention that Western hubris has stolen from it.”

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Consciousness, Begrudgingly Conceded

You will notice a pattern in our acknowledgment of consciousness as existing in the world outside of ourselves — the nonhuman world: Consciousness outside of humans is a gradual and reluctant acknowledgement throughout Western history. Rooted as it is in medieval Christian notions of dominion over Nature and of humans as being uniquely endowed with souls, science is not the least guilty here. Indeed, its crimes in this regard are epic.

The denial of consciousness in planetmates, which is embedded in science from its Newtonian beginnings, is the basis for our modern ability to thingify all of Nature as resources and items of consumption; thus allowing the torture and abuse of all planetmates to our ends — as food, as ingredients in manufactured items, as brutally treated and bloodily used test subjects, and worse. Pseudo-scientific notions regarding relative levels of consciousness in humans has supported the Nazi holocaust and slavery, as well; just as faux religious notions of the diminished status of females and the nonhuman world of Nature earlier perpetrated The Burning Times and the murder of nine million women at the stake.

Not to be disregarded, flawed scientific understanding of consciousness and feeling awareness attributable to our youngest has resulted in modern high-tech obstetrical birthing procedures, which have brutalized neonates and laid a foundation of horror at the roots of modern personalities. This has had incalculable results, as we see for one thing only, in the random and thoughtless eruptions of violence in modern societies and the abilities of organized violence, by nations and terrorist groups, to perpetrate wars, genocides, and other atrocities. Only reluctantly and gradually are newborns not being brutalized, slapped, wrapped, and isolated — as “modern” practices have heretofore dictated — and humane birthing and infancy methods been implemented. The persistence of the notion that newborns are not conscious, supported as it was in the beginning by science, is hard dying.

For its part, feeling awareness and memory in the prenate — established now beyond any question — fails to put to rest other archaic thinking such as mistaken speculations about a link between myelination and memory. So ideas about an unconscious existence for fetuses, convenient as they are in facilitating our nonchalance about nurturing our babies while still in their womb, simply refuse to die the death they are due. Wherever you look, the refusal to acknowledge consciousness or feeling awareness to an entity or thing allows unrestrained brutality and exploitation there.

Hence, just as the civil rights of minorities, indigenous peoples, women, and children have been only gradually and reluctantly acknowledged over the centuries, so also the awareness and consciousness of the nonhuman world is not the place we start when thinking of it, however much that was the case for our original humans. Remember, for primal humans, the world is alive; consciousness and nobility is awarded planetmates; Nature itself, animate and inanimate, is intentional and aware. This is the way we humans saw the world around us for virtually ninety-five to ninety-nine percent of our history as a species.

With civilization, however, and the burgeoning of an overween­ing ego and a controlling addiction, all of that changed drastically … and conveniently. For the domestication of plants and animals that began civilization allowed an exploitation of the natural world, which burden earlier humans hardly desired. Until we arrive at pervasive Western views which begin with an assumption of non-life, non-awareness for everything nonhuman, and as we have seen, often for humans other than what “we” are like. From there, awareness is as begrudgingly conceded, requiring mountains of indisputable and hard-to-obtain evidence, as one was attributing awareness to a machine, to an artificial intelligence.

Our assumption, from medieval times, is that the world is non-conscious, while humans are … well, most of us. The history of science in the last hundred years has amounted to a gradual giving back to Nature of its status as aware and conscious that was initially taken away by Western hubris in regard to Nature. So, we have animal rights, the “secret life of plants,” the “secret life of the unborn child,” and so on, in a gradual procession of acknowledgment. The understandings of consciousness and aliveness in the inanimate world — the world of matter — which are the most recent and necessary conclusions, arising from the findings of quantum physics and modern consciousness research, are the most difficult to arrive at. We find it nearly impossible to see the world as alive, as our ancestors did, regardless what our sciences now tell us. Yet, that is what this book attempts — the returning to the inanimate world of the status of awareness, aliveness, and intention that Western hubris has stolen from it.

The Book’s Structure

To that end, this book is in several parts, some quite different from the rest. They lay out a pattern of progression from what we commonly think to the majestic flights of insights arrived at with Western blinders removed. In the first four parts, I establish the logical philosophical foundation for the rest of the book, which is Part Five, “Matter Is Message.” For this is meant not to be some visionary, poetic book, full of inspiration and spiritual insight, merely. It is also a serious argument for the actual state of Reality. It has a rational basis — rooted in the most expanded circles of our understandings in science — undergirding the wide-ranging soarings of thought following.

So, if you have no interest in what is, or why it is, and you already think life to be poetic; and you do not want or need a rational basis for your stance — for such a stance in life — then you could easily go directly to the second half of the book, “Matter Is Message.” It is a long book, and I can understand some might want to do that, if only to cut down on their reading. I need mention this because I want all readers to know of the second part of the book and not to miss it. I consider it the most profound, inspirational, and relevant part for these times and the people living in it.

Still, I have constructed the book to be read front to back. It follows a logical order, creating a rational, thoroughgoing, and comprehensive vision, which the latter parts are that much sweeter by. I think you will miss out a little at least by skipping over the earlier chapters.

Whichever of these ways you read it, or some other way — perhaps you are one to have your dessert first and then get your meat and potatoes later, maybe to have dessert then again — my wish for you is that you receive the blessing of reading it with the same joy, and fun, in which I wrote it. I hope the reverence and gratitude I felt as it came through me is sensed by you as well.

In Part One of this book, “Being Shiva — Destroying and Creating Worlds,” I advance an argument based on taking a look at some assumptions we clearly do make and upon which we build all of our knowledge, our science, and our beliefs about what is real. It comes down to anthropocentrism, which is a species-centrism more disastrous for our understandings of trueness than any of the other centrisms — ethnocentrism, egocentrism, or any other.

In doing that I unveil the layers of reality construction upon which we construct that anthropocentrism. This is an epistemological undertaking, for in doing this the intent is, by pulling away the false pillars upon which we build our world, to find out what can be known instead: What might actually be true. What might give us surer footing from which to view our worlds.

In Part Two, “Transcending Worlds,” I begin to advance the notions that we might genuinely consider, once the false ones have been swept away. These are panoramas of understanding that open up once the curtain of anthropocentrism has been pulled to the side. We find a flourishing new world revealed. One that borders on wonder.

In Part Three, “Science as Myth,” I begin, first of all, to touch upon the ways these newer awarenesses have been thought of in the past. And surprisingly, with some of the deconstruction done in the first two parts, we find that science has made some gross misassumptions and thrown away some bathwater that has a viable life in it. I help to resuscitate those ideas, and I show how they actually integrate with some of the outermost rings of our findings from science at this time.

Part Four begins the advance down the freeway to the new world, the new paradigm, the one where matter is discovered to be alive. In “The Consciousness of Stones,” I explain how that position is not just plausible, it is the only rational one left, all things considered. I bring forth some of the reasons — some anthropocentric, some simply habits of thought that are correctible — for why this new cosmic overstanding has not been unveiled before, as well as why significant parts of it, which would have revealed the rest, were historically cast aside.

Part Five, “Matter Is Message” is the heart of the book. It is a comprehensive look at what we can learn having arrived at the position to which the first four parts of the book have brought us. I will say this about it: You will find more reason for optimism and more levity in your being from what will become you here. It gives back what was taken; it returns to you your rightful and honorable place.

I invite you to open your eyes to the aliveness around you. I invite you to join me in a new world.

Let me explain….

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PART ONE

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BEING SHIVA —

DESTROYING AND CREATING WORLDS

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Creating Worlds:

Many Beings, Many Worlds … While Our Science Is Built on an Assumption, Rooted in Religion, That Humans Are “God’s Chosen Species”

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“…the probabilities are enormous that there are, in fact, other beings, unperceivable entities, unknown and unimaginable realities, and other and different senses … and, yes, as one new physics proposition puts it, an infinite number of ‘worlds.’”

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Our Knowledge Is Biologically Relative

Looking first to science, the findings of research from neurophysiol­ogy and neuropsychology are that neural “firings” from external stimuli, after they shoot through interior areas of the brain that deal with fundamental physiological processes, arrive in the cortical areas of the brain where they are then interpreted. Therefore, in a purely psychophysiological way, the world “out there” is not defined in and of itself.

Cultures Create Worlds

In fact, ultimately our world is defined in the part of the person that stores cultural information — the cerebral cortex. What this is saying is that cultures create worlds. One’s view of the world, arrived at through the process of enculturation in a person’s development, is determined by one’s culture, by the knowledge and experiences one has had in interaction with one’s society. The experience of hearing a particular sound is not known to be that of hearing someone talking to us, until the cortex defines those sounds as words.

Biology Creates Worlds

However, notice that before any cultural interpretation, those “messages” have had a journey through areas of the brain that define them prior to or outside of culture. Before any stimuli are interpreted as words, for example, a part of us determines that they are sounds.

That is to say that the organism does not detect the outside world through its senses, it determines the outside world through them. Or at least it interprets that outside world in a way that is determined by its biological makeup. Whatever is in Reality is being scanned, sorted through: In the process of our perceiving, our senses are picking through an infinity of possibilities of what could be detected to select what will be “sensed,” perceived. After that, it is concocted: What the senses have chosen out of everything possible is then determined in terms of its relation to the biology of the organism, meaning what species it is. Then it is interpreted: An understanding of the experience is arrived at which sees it in the context of the culture one is given by one’s society.

A sensation does not discern anything initially, at the moment of sensing. The sensation is interpreted later. The organism does not even distinguish between pleasure and pain — to use one crude but useful example — until later. The pattern of neural firings created by any particular set of stimuli is “objectively” neutral until “interpreted” by an organism relative to its physiological makeup, its species.

This, of course, makes perfect sense. There is nothing inherently painful in a stimulus that is produced by something whose molecules are moving at such a speed and manner that one would measure its temperature at, say, two hundred degrees Fahrenheit. That degree of heat is not “objectively” painful. It would be painful to us, to humans, however. Yet, one could easily imagine a species for which that particular vibrational rate would be within its tolerance range. The quality of pain … the very existence of pain, even … is relative to the perceiving organism, its species. It is determined by the species physiology, and in humans this determination is made for us during the journey of the neural firing through interior areas of the brain, far out of our conscious awareness.

Let us take a more subtle example. There is nothing inherently comforting or even pleasurable in a caress — that is, the pattern of stimuli involving the moving of one particular organism’s surface against another’s, in a particular way. Those “particulars,” along with other aspects, are what go into defining caress by means of a complex communication among billions of neural cells and their components inside the brain. One can conceive of some biological organisms who would interpret such touching as a dire threat. Again, the interpretations of external stimuli are relative to the biological makeup of the perceiver and are decided upon outside of conscious awareness. The qualities of pleasure and all other experience, sensations, and feelings are relative to the perceiver, its biological makeup … generally speaking, its species. Different perceivers, different perceived (experienced) realities.

Our Knowledge Is Anthropocentric

Our examples emphasize that prior to any cultural interpretation — which comes later, during that neural message’s continued journey and now through cortical areas of the brain — a “species” interpretation is made based upon the biological “hardware” of the organism. That is to say that these “vibrational rates” of molecules — using once more the example of temperature — are not in and of themselves even “stimuli” except that certain neurons throughout the body, including “lower” parts of the brain, in a complex intercommunication once again, define them as such: Vibratory rates “out there” are not patterns of neural firings. And to suppose that there is, in some magical-mystical sort of way, a kind of authentic, exact replication of the “out there” by our particular sensory apparatus is not only to state more than is conceivably possible to be stated … and to reveal an adherence to a kind of “faith” that is more reminiscent of religion than true science … it is also indisputably anthropocentric. For even our thus limited sensory apparatus informs us of other sentient creatures whose sensory systems are different than our own, indeed, vastly different in some cases.

Even among the species that we perceive as having the major five senses as we do, we observe differences: An eagle sees farther and better; its vision is two to four times more acute than humans — certainly its world does not look like ours. A dog hears a much wider range of auditory waves — certainly its world does not sound like ours. The sense of smell in canines is particularly telling. What can we make of a species whose ability in that regard is one thousand to ten million times better than us humans. One thousand times better than ours at the low end. Using this ability they can even “see” back in time. They can detect for example who passed by a certain area the previous day, what direction they were moving, and other details.

Can we even imagine what that kind of world is like? And, jumping ahead, tell me exactly how we, humans, are superior to that.

Elephants can hear infrasound, as low as one hertz; dolphins as high as one hundred-thousand hertz. Keep in mind that our range is approximately twenty hertz to twenty-thousand hertz.

What of the abilities of echolocation that dolphins and bats have. For that matter, what do we make of the ability of fish and amphibious animals, including sharks, bees, dolphins, and platypuses, to sense electrical fields. This is called electroreception. With this sensory ability they are able to sense the electrical impulses of other animals. What is it like living in that world? While I’m sure it is nothing like this, just imagine what our world would be like if we could see the fields of wifi around us.

Do humans have anything like the ability of some planetmates to detect the Earth’s magnetic field and use it to navigate for migratory and other purposes? Such animals have magnetoreception, which amounts to having compasses built into their cells to point them in the right direction. Amazingly, in addition to migratory animals like sea turtles, this includes fruit flies and even some forms of bacteria.

Some snakes can detect infrared light. Bees can detect ultraviolet light.

As for plants, you thought them dumb? What scientists have discovered is that, amazingly, some have a sensitivity to touch that is finer and more sophisticated as what we have with our fingers; that they communicate with each other, including about a possible threat from a new pest and overcrowding and other matters. They have hormones similar to our own. That not enough, they have vision, all of them. What is the world as experienced by a plant? On what basis do we say that our world is better or closer to apprehending reality than theirs?

Furthermore, what of species whose senses, as nearly as we can determine with our own, are vastly different from ours, such as a mantis shrimp, which have sixteen different types of color receptive cones compared to our mere three. What of species with less in number than ours? What is the “world” of an earthworm like? What, that of an amoeba? Real world, please step forward.

Our Knowledge Is Biased

Indeed, can we assume, in fairness, that our own senses are capable of perceiving all major aspects of “objective” reality, granting, even, if in limited or distorted fashion? By analogy, it would be ridiculous to suppose that an earthworm or an amoeba … with apparently few, and more limited, senses … “knows” of the existence of our species in any ways other than, if anything, a series of obstacles, changes in pressure or temperature, or, well, whatever it is that comprises an earthworm’s or amoeba’s “worldview.”

Correspondingly, can we automatically assume that our particular number and set of senses, with their particular ranges, are the endpoint, the pinnacle of what is possible in terms of perceiving “world”? If a sixth, a seventh, an eighth, an nth number of “types” of senses were possible, how would we know of that possibility with our five? Would we not be in a situation analogous to that of the earthworm to us? And how would we know what would be perceived with those senses? Why would we bother to, how could we, even, measure the referents in the “out there” corresponding to such hypothetical senses in a way that they would somehow be included in our science?

Furthermore, keeping in mind that earthworm, we can assume, for the sake of argument, that it perceives a Homo sapiens as something earthwormo-centrically akin to pressure, an obstacle, or earthwormo-molecular vibrations, in other words, earthworm hot-or-coldness. That is how it might perceive us. Are there any among my readers who believe it would perceive us the way we do? I doubt it.

Now, understanding that our senses are not omniscient either — they are limited — how would we perceive beings or entities that are outside of or not sufficiently perceived by our limited senses? Indeed, how would we even know of the existence of such other sentient beings — not to mention other even more unimaginable realities — who or which could hypothetically be outside of the range and/or number of our biologically unique senses?

Would we perceive their existence as human changes in pressure, sound, touch, smell, sight, taste? As atmospheric or environmental “ambiance” changes? As solar activity or astronomical phenomena? As change in mood state, or thought pattern? Or hypothalamic or metabolic or heart or respiratory rate change? As nuemenon, “aura,” Words of God, Music of the Spheres?… Indeed, as leprechauns, ghosts, or elves? Or perhaps as forcible elements in dreams? Inspirational thought or feeling? Poltergeists, angels, “allies,” aliens, psychic phenomena?

Our Knowledge Is Limited

Then again, would we even perceive this other or these other “species” of beings and/or unimaginable realities at all? Would they be totally out of the domain of detection by anything within our experience — whether sensory, cognitive, affective, intuitive, imagina­tive, hallucinative?

The point is that we have no, absolutely no, way of knowing what is really real, what it “all” real-ly looks like unless we anthropocentrically assume that we are “God’s chosen species,” the summit of creation, and magically endowed with a one-in-nine-million — that is to say, one out of the approximate number of other known species, excluding bacteria — uniquely correct number of sensations and perfect accuracy of perception. We have no way of knowing even whether or not we are in the same “space” at the same “time” … the quotation marks because space and time are sensorally determined in our species’ unique biological way … as other unperceivable beings, even sentient ones — though with what senses, again, we do not know.

There Are an Infinite Number of Worlds

It should be supremely clear by now, especially among those of us with a transcultural or anthropological familiarity — wherein we are made distinctly aware of the truth-shrouding nature of ethnocentrism — that any serious attempt at discerning truth is not compatible with any variety of self-serving or egocentric agenda, regardless how invisible it might be to us or how unconscious it might be held. And anthropocentrism — the idea that our species, alone, has the inside track, superior to all creation, on perceiving Reality — is such a self-aggrandizing notion.

Thus, it is just as essential to throw off the overweening species-centric intellectual baggage of our Judeo-Christian tradition … which posits “man” as the ruler over nature and as the summit of created species … as it is essential to strive to drop our ethnocentric blinders. Indeed, making this attempt to view from a neutral, Archimedean, non-anthropocentric “window,” it follows logically that the probabilities are enormous that there are, in fact, other beings, unperceivable entities, unknown and unimaginable realities, and other and different senses … and, yes, as one new physics proposition puts it, an infinite number of “worlds.”

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Destroying Worlds:

Our Reality Is Species Determined and the Relativity of Science … Culturally Constituted Realities, Biologically Constituted Realities, and Biological Relativity

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We Cannot Unknow What We Know but We Can’t Know What We Can’t Know

“…to these relativities of space, time, and culture, we must now also include species relativity or biological relativity. That this has not been acknowledged already … can easily be attributed to … our anthropocentrism….”

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Relativity of Science

But what of our science, one might ask, which can reputedly extend the range of our senses? Does it not provide accurate-enough “feedback” or “alternative”-enough perspectives to allow us a glimpse of what is, for truth, really real? Let us just look at what modern science tells us about the observations it makes on the world.

According to Gary Zukav (1979), the author of a widely read overview of the new physics, a major underpinning of modern physics is the realization and discovery that science cannot predict anything, as had been taken for granted, with absolute certainty. Relatedly, the new physics informs us that there is simply no way to separate the observed event from the observer. That is to say that the observer is, her- or himself, an inexcludable variable and always affects the results of an experiment. In a very fundamental way, the perceiver influences what is seen in even the most “scientifically” pure observations and experiments: “The new physics … tells us clearly that it is not possible to observe reality without changing it.”1

Zukav (1979) takes, as an example, that a condition is set up to perceive an event: If it is designed to find waves in light, it discovers waves. If it is designed to find particles, we get particles — in supposedly the same “outside world” … and regardless of the fact that logically light cannot be both a particle and a wave.2 That is the classic example, of course. The structure of the experiment, designed by the observer, determines what will be found. At base, intent is all-important; it leans us toward “discovering” what we are inclined to see.

Now, what is this saying if not just what I have stated in Chapter 1? Is this not the same as saying that we determine ultimately, because of our specific biology, what we sense? That we therein determine the “world” we experience?

Culture, Brute Facts, and Culturally Constituted Realities

Nevertheless, to some extent our social scientists have yet to get that memo from the hard sciences. For example, in line with Elizabeth Anscombe’s (1958) terminology of brute facts, John Searle (1969) claims a distinction between “brute facts” and “institutional facts.” Anthropologist Roy D’Andrade (1984) elaborates on this and goes on to explain what is meant by brute facts:

Not all social-science variables refer to culturally created things; some variables refer to objects and events that exist prior to, and independent of, their definition: for example, a person’s age, the number of calories consumed during a meal, the number of chairs in a room, or the pain someone felt.3

D’Andrade is describing a difference … no doubt one we all would make … between objects in the world or seeming absolutes such as numbers and that which varies by culture — institutional facts, which are also referred to as culturally constituted facts, or realities. Simply put, culturally constituted realities, or institutional facts, are facts, things, realities that are created by culture. In the terms we used in the last chapter, culturally constituted realities are created in the cortex and they are interpretations of what has been given to the cortex of information concocted by a species biology, in interior parts of the brain, which were fed by neural firings determined by what our senses has selected out of the infinity of possibility of what can be sensed in any particular moment and environment.

Culture is Our Template for Understanding

So, you see, culture is the set of understandings and everything related to them that is shared in common by a group. It is the way a particular group sees, creates, and “furnishes” the world. It is the matrix, grid, or framework that is projected onto Reality determining what one perceives and then interprets it. It creates the understand­ings of our perceptions and experiences, as they are configured within the context created by that culture. It is a group’s “window” on the world; it is the template stamped upon Reality; it is the blueprint out of which our perceptions and understandings arise.

Consequently, culturally constituted realities are realities or facts that are created by individual cultures and which exist only for them. They are distinct from brute facts, which can be said to be realities that exist in all cultures: Brute facts can be said to exist outside of cultures, independent of them, regardless that cultures determine the interpretation or meaning of them.

Some basic culturally constituted realities are the different languages; the various religious notions with their supernatural realities and the cultural items and artifacts they impel; specific but commonly held ideas about governance, justice, appropriate behavior, work, play, ritual, leisure, courtesy, fairness, as well as the conventions, institutions, and material culture propelled by them; and much, much more that is considered real and true in a culture but which is not seen or at least is not seen that way in all cultures.

Now, D’Andrade is saying that not all realities are culturally constituted and that there are realities that are independent of culture, and about which all cultures must make determinations and interpretations or with which they must at least interact. The examples he gives of such realities include things like a person’s age, the number of calories in a meal, the number of chairs in a place, and the pain a person feels.

Total Heritage View of Culture Sees It as the Matrix

D’Andrade is speaking to and critiquing a “total heritage” view of culture, espoused by some anthropologists, which holds that all reality is culturally determined … or constituted … including such “brute facts.” In the total-heritage view — espoused in particular by Marshall Sahlins (1976) — even the things we think to be irreducible or independent of cultural interpretations are indeed created by and patterned by … “constituted” by … culture.

To understand the total-heritage take on things, one might use the analogy of the Matrix, as it is portrayed in the movie of the same name. In The Matrix, people live their lives in a completely constructed world, which includes the physical aspects of it — the buildings, parks, highways, everything else one might think of as real, as physical, as material. Naturally, everything that one thinks and imagines is also bounded within that world, knowing no other, after all. It is virtually identical to Plato’s cave, in his “Allegory of the Cave.”4

As many of you know, the “Allegory of the Cave” is a classic explanation of our normal illusory state of consciousness. As most philosophies hold, there is a greater reality than what we know as humans. I was saying much along those lines in Chapter 1. And many wise folks have added that knowing that Reality would enable us to grok the things that are confusing and inexplicable about life.

Now, Plato, in his allegory, compared humans to beings living in a cave and deeming Reality to be the shadows on a wall created by a fire burning behind the participants. The actual reality could be found only by leaving the cave and going into the sunlight outside. So, this allegory is most definitely a total-heritage view, though it does not specify culture as being the factor creating the reflected or illusory quality of our perceptions and understandings. For its part, the total-heritage view, though it considers culture as all-creative of our world, or “cave,” is agnostic about there being any actual reality outside the cave.

In the movie, The Matrix, the only thing other than this comprehensive and totally constructed world that exists, actually exists, are the people in it. However, they exist also in a state outside of the Matrix, but they do not have a clue that they have an existence separate. Again, this is like Plato’s cave allegory.

Thus, the total-heritage view of culture sees it as much like the Matrix or the Cave, with our reality — all of it — being culturally constituted. Or at least that we, as humans, embedded in culture, have no possible way of knowing if there are any brute facts outside of the templates we are given by societies to understand and function in Reality.

By contrast to this total-heritage or “matrix” idea of culture, we have the view that there are “brute facts” also which exist outside of culture which are interpreted by culture, not totally concocted by them.

Biologically Constituted Realities, Species-Specific Facts

For now, though — and however much I agree with D’Andrade that there are realities separate from cultural ones — from what I have been saying in the previous chapter about species creating their “worlds” through the different percepters they have, we can see that these “brute facts” may not be culturally constituted as he asserts, but they certainly are biologically constituted. For the age in years one has, the numbers of anything, and especially pain felt are all realities relative to humans, and some only to humans. We might remember what I said earlier about vibrational rates — that is to say, heat — and its relativity to the perceiving organism. In that example I was making the case that the very existence of pain and pleasure is relative to the species in question. Hence, these supposedly brute facts are actually species-specific facts: They are “brute” only in relation to our particular species.

If a Tree Falls in the Forest….

You might acknowledge that relativity to the perceiver is true of pain, but balk about my saying that species-relativity is true as well regarding numbers of things, as in the other examples D’Andrade gives. Let me address that by referring to an analogous situation involving an age-old philosophical question. For it follows from the species-specific angle on reality I am presenting that the new-paradigm answer to that question is clear: If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? That answer, absolutely not! Sound is as much species-relative as the practice of polygamy is culturally relative. In other words, there are species for which sound does not exist. Everything else we consider existing is also only in relation to humans, so it follows that the numbers of anything is a relative “fact,” as well.

What we call “existing” is actually what is existence relative to one species, our species, Homo sapiens. And we are merely one species out of an estimated one trillion species, which includes bacteria this time, on Earth. That does not even take into account species on other planets, even ones we would be able to perceive, if we were there or they came here. It does not even touch the infinite possibilities of beingness, or “species” that we would have no way of knowing or perceiving or that we would perceive but in some way so we would not even know it to be a living thing. Remember that earthworm who might only perceive us as heat or pressure, which I mentioned earlier, and how we are likely in a similar situation relative to some other beings and species.

Similarly, the event that we perceive as sound-tree-and-forest-interacting may be “perceived” as quite something else with different kinds of and/or more “senses” or, one might say, from a different vantage point. Indeed, different concoctions of the event — combinations of its elements — may be carved out of it, being relative to the other-than-human perceiver, creating different elements of the event, different “numbers” of any elements in it, and creating vastly different and totally unimaginable interpretations! As I said, our senses scan and pick out of an infinity of possibilities of what can be perceived. What it “notices” … or “creates”? … is relative to who we are as a species. Even the determination of that falling tree being an event is relative, hence questionable, ultimately. Relatedly, whether or not there is actually even a physical world in which it occurs is suspect and is something we will deal with at length and in due time in this book.

The Bias Invisible in Science

Regardless, the point of all this is that removing our anthropocentric blinders in this way we must conclude that the world, as experienced, is created of realities that are not only culturally constituted, as anthropologists point out. There are also biologically constituted realities. The “brute facts” to which D’Andrade refers are — nothing brute about them — biologically determined facts. How anthropocentrically arrogant for us to think that our brute facts are brute in some conceivable Ultimate Reality that all existing or conceivable living beings or entities share, meaning are able to perceive … indeed are able to perceive … pretty much the way we do!

Yet this is exactly the arrogance that prevails in all of our sciences. When we imagine other beings in our Universe, as we do in some of our arts, we anthropocentrically assume they would have human features, with only slight variations, with senses similar to ours and perceiving the exact same world, and that they would have evolved in some manner parallel to the way we did on Earth. That is forgivable in our arts and cinema, as in Star Trek and Star Wars, as they are not claiming to be science.

But what is damning and is embedded within and constraining the purview of our sciences is this assumption that the Universe as we have come to know it through our science, with its space, time, stars, Big Bang, galaxies, dimensions, planets, and so on, is the Universe in some ultimate way outside of our humanly limited perception.

What? You don’t think so? You think the cosmos we measure with our humanly-created technology and perceive with our human, our limited, senses, is pretty much like the one that exists outside our perception of it? That our perceived and arrived-at cosmos is the Cosmos? No doubt you think it has to be. You have never questioned it.

However, remember that experiment with the particle and wave, where what we look for ends up being what we see. Ponder that and its implications.

Now, think again for a minute, and you will realize that when science uncovers discrepancies or anomalies, incongruent with their abiding theories, the most they will acknowledge is that their concepts of the elements of the Cosmos are open to reinterpretation and re-inclusion in some other, some grander scheme which, they assume, at some point will validate them in some way they do not see right now. Nowhere do scientists concede their galaxies, black holes, atoms, matter, space, Big Bang, et al, are realities relative only to humans, for all we know. Or, for that matter, that they might not be existing outside of human perception. When it comes to that tree in the forest, there is never any question about it making a sound for scientists. It just does.

Indeed, these are the assumptions scientists all make; except, that is, for a few remarkable ones like Einstein, whose vast perspective on it all led him to conclude there is a spiritual reality for it all beyond and outside of what science can know. Or Roger Jones, the author of Physics as Metaphor (1982) who pulled the blinds to the side on the ultimately empty and insubstantial nature of the concepts assumed in science, specifically its most substantial one, physics. Other than the few like these, the great majority of less stellar scientists will acknowledge that Reality is indeterminate — as they are prodded, by the new physics, to admit — yet they will assume validity for their established understandings, in the face of contrary evidence, if not in the current scheme, then in some other and future one. Which they further presume will be built upon their current assumptions, which at most, at that time, will be refined in parts.

So scientists assume the cosmos they peer into, measure, and study is the same one all other species apprehend. This is regardless the vast differences in the way that universe is perceived by the beings we know about or, for that matter, the scope of any particular species’ perception of it, which we know at least sometimes is far far more far-ranging, advanced, than ours. Despite these facts to the contrary, nowhere in science is it advanced that their interpretations of the cosmos are relative to humans only. Much more about that, upcoming.

Science’s reluctant qualification of indeterminacy is quite a bit different from an acknowledgment of what I am putting forth: Which is that there might be a more valid understanding, or perception, by some conceivable other being or species, in which those elements of the universe we consider to be absolute can be seen to be non-existent or radically wrong. And beyond that … the most important part of this … that in comparison to whom, our interpretations of things are not seen merely to be to be biased as a result of our species identity, but that the very existence of these supposedly absolute things of our world are found to be projections, in their entirety and thus completely insubstantial, of our human psyche … to be mere projections of our uniquely human perspective on things … creations purely concocted of the elements of our unique distinction from Nature. That is a distinction, which I will not elaborate upon now, but which has us as supremely flawed in relation to the rest of Nature. This is something I have demonstrated in several of my works, in particular, Planetmates (2014b) and Prodigal Human (2016a).

Furthermore, consider that physicists talk about the possibility of other dimensions intersecting our world. So these alternate realities share the same time and space … or they share whatever Ultimate Reality we exist in … with us. Yet how could physicists even define these invisible worlds as “other dimensions”? Think about it, are dimensions not also relative to our species, with some other species conceivably apprehending the Cosmos in a completely different way? Is it not possible there are species whose perceptions of Reality — equal to or more valid than ours — would in no way involve those dimensions … perceptions where those dimensions do not exist, as they are overridden by or subsumed within some other perceptual array vastly different from ours? Or, accepting the reality of those dimensions, how can we say with any certainty at all that the brute facts we have in our dimension qualify as brute facts in those dimensions as well?!

At any rate, I am going to leave to the side, for now, the complicating factor of the infinite number of beings and possibilities of existing and perceiving that would exist in each of those different dimensions. I will not even get into the fact that this incredible cosmos with these billions of galaxies — an estimated one hundred billion galaxies with an average of two hundred to four hundred billion stars per galaxy and god-only-knows how many planets coinciding with all those stars, or suns — and infinite numbers of dimensions is still only the cosmos that we — we lowly, humble, and limited perceptually humans — are able to perceive. So how can it not be true that there even more possibilities for ways of perceiving Reality, more possibilities of realities, than even the infinite numbers of them we are able to deduce with our limited senses at this particular time with its limited knowledge as well!!??

And, yes, I realize that some of you readers are jumping ahead and even questioning the reality of entities, beings, perceptions, perceptors, perceivers, percepters, senses, and all else, which I have been leaning on in making my case, and would like to challenge me on that.5 For you will say that they — any being, beings, or entities — also are deduced from what we know from our limited apprehension of the world. So they, too, might be no more than human projections.

Thinking this way, you might say that my theory is empty or insubstantial for it, also, is deduced from our perception of realities, which I am acknowledging to be unspecial and infinitely variable. You might say that even our perception of different and separate perceivers — what I am terming, perceptors — is questionable. How do we know any entities or beings exist, outside of our own one — oneself — if all that we perceive is determined by what we expect and project? Are there even numbers of things — as when D’Andrade asserted numbers were “brute” — let alone beings?

Are we sure that the way we chop up Reality into parts — separate things, separate beings, and so on — so that we might name them and analyze them separate from our perception of them is anything but a product of our biological programming? Does all possible perceptors see the world in terms of parts? How can we say that is the case? Perhaps, indeed, that separation of ourselves from Reality and dissecting of it is just some neurosis or illness … some delusion … that is particularly human to do so. Or at least that it is unique to humans.

But going off on that tack is jumping ahead. For this book will, indeed, take us there and past that point as well. In fact such considerations are specifically addressed in the chapter titled, “The Radical Rational View of Us And It,” Chapter 15. Hang on, and congratulations on your forethought, by the way.

Biological Relativity

At any rate, getting back to culturally constituted facts and those nasty brute facts, again, I was saying there is nothing “brute” about what humans would call brute facts. Rather, they are biologically determined facts. They are facts relative to our species. These “facts” or truths are biologically relative. They are true, with surety, only in relation to our species. They might exist for other species as well, certainly they are shared by many, but a) they are not shared by all, and b) we must conclude they are not even facts the way we know them, for they are necessarily perceived differently by each and every species. That is to say, if they, indeed, even show up as elements or “facts” in their realities, their perceived realities.

Yes, we have another relativity — species relativity — to include with the others we have been coming up with in the sciences.

Einstein let us know that our space and time were relative, not absolute.

Franz Boas and all anthropologists after him helped us to see that our cultural realities were relative, as well. That means that all that we conceive and create as cultural elements can only be understood within the context of the culture they exist within. Which means that anyone outside of that culture — that is, not containing that cultural mental set — will necessarily not quite understand them the way those in the culture do: In fact, in a basic and profound way they will misunderstand them; they will not “get it” the way cultural members do.6 Indeed, many cultural elements are invisible outside of the culture in which they exist. Cultural elements are culturally relative, is the way that is expressed. But more than that, cultures create their own elements, unique to them, and these cultural facts are what D’Andrade above was referring to when he mentioned culturally constituted realities.

Therefore, to these relativities of space, time, and culture, we must now also include species relativity or biological relativity. That this has not been acknowledged already, for it is so obvious, can easily be attributed to the pervasive and unquestioned species-centrism — our anthropocentrism — characteristic of human, especially Western, culture, to date. Again, this is the hidden “flat earth” assumption I was pointing out in Chapter 1, which is reinforced by our religions, especially the Judeo-Christian ones, which assert humans to be superior in Nature and having dominion over all others in Nature. I call anthropocentrism or human superiority to Nature a flat earth assumption because it is equally as obviously true yet ultimately wrong, as well as relative to a perceiver, as is a notion the Earth is flat. Not to mention that seeing Reality outside that assumption of anthropocentrism and acknowledging this species relativity instead would be as momentous and world-changing as was the discovery of the heliocentric nature of our solar system.

Incidentally, this assumption of species superiority — species centrism — is also a central component of the Unapproved and Hidden I describe in others of my works.7

To understand species relativity, we can use those same understandings, discussed above, in regard to time, space, and culture relativity. We will see that all of those understandings are true, as well, for the realities created or constituted by our specific physical constitution, our biology, separate as it is for each species. This is biological relativity, and what it adds to our understanding when seen as analogous to the other relativities is that it tells us:

Our realities can only be understood within the context of our species … other species could not understand them … and we cannot really understand the realities of other species … lower or higher, if in fact there are such categories for species in Ultimate Reality. In some way, large or small, species will misunderstand each other. In fact, in that species are actually distinct from each other, whereas cultures are not … see Note 6 of this chapter … there is much more to biological relativity than there has ever been to cultural relativity. Many elements of our human reality will be invisible to or not even exist within the realities of other species — they are biologically constituted realities. Some things, maybe many or all things, which exist within the perceived and understood realities of other species will be invisible to us or not even exist within our possible world: They are species-specific, biologically constituted realities for them, as well.

Bringing this all together, we now see that there are culturally constituted facts: That is to say, facts that are cultural creations and either do not exist or are not perceived or understood the same from other cultural perspectives — in other words, by people from other cultures. And there are biologically constituted realities: That is, there are those supposed “brute facts” that either do not exist or are not perceived or understood the same from other biological perspectives — in other words, by species, beings, or entities other than the human one. These last are as biologically relative as the first ones are culturally relative.

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Infinite Worlds:

The Spectrum of Realities … Individually, Bioculturally, and Suprahumanly Constituted Realities, and Ultimate Relativity

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“Authentic and convincing experiences of conscious identification with animals, plants, and even inorganic materials and processes make it easy to understand the beliefs of animistic cultures that see the entire universe as being ensouled.” — Stanislav Grof

“…such transpersonal experiences dramatically change our understanding of the nature of everyday material reality … others reveal dimensions of existence that are ordinarily completely hidden to our perception. This … includes discarnate entities, various deities and demons, mythological realms, suprahuman beings, and the divine creative principle itself.” — Stanislav Grof

“…space, including size, is relative to the perceiver…. At the ultimate tiniest [atomic, subatomic], consciousness might come around … and present itself as the hugest consciousness, the Cosmos…. So, literally anything can be.”

“Ultimately our physics … is going to demonstrate that essentially there is no such thing as matter. All there is, is mind and motion.” — Armand Labbe

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The Spectrum of Realities

Furthermore, we can see that these realities exist on a continuum with culturally constituted realities on one end and biologically constituted realities on the other, for there are many in-between facts, which would have to be called bioculturally determined facts or bioculturally constituted realities.

Bioculturally Constituted Realities

How are bioculturally constituted realities defined? Well, they are cultural facts that exist because of the common biology we as a species share, each and every one of us. These are facts that are relative to the pain and pleasure humans experience and the way and degrees in which we experience them.

These are facts relative to the birth and death humans experience and the ways we experience and construe them. These are facts relative to the life cycle and stages of life that are uniquely human and the ways we experience and understand and configure them. Thus, these common biological things and events are facts for the species we call human — they are biologically constituted realities for humans — for they are shared by all humans. Yet they are perceived, construed, interpreted, configured, manifested, acted out, dealt with, responded to, and created around differently by each and every culture, at least slightly differently. These bioculturally constituted realities are cultural constructions built on and around our biological facts (constructions). The constructions, or “facts,” about or related to our common biological realities that arise from these different cultures are, therefore, biocultural facts or realities. They are bioculturally determined facts. I will deal with them in more detail in the next three chapters.

So there are biologically constituted facts, bioculturally constituted facts, and culturally constituted facts all existing on a continuum. That continuum measures the degree to which those facts are “real” … or let us say the degree to which those realities are shared. That continuum tells you the number of “individuals” who share those “facts” … who perceive, hold, and/or engage with those facts, while others do not. Individuals is in quotes in keeping with our analysis that our conceptualization of other members of other species — known and unknown — is based on one of our biologically constituted realities. Separate beings, or “individuals,” itself is a species-relative fact.

Getting back to the spectrum, the more astute of you, I know, have already realized that biologically constituted facts and culturally constituted facts are not even absolute ends of that continuum. That continuum extends out at each of its ends beyond those categories. Do you see that? Do you see how that follows from what I was saying in the beginning about many worlds and infinite numbers of perceivers?

Individually Constituted Realities

If not, follow this: Do you see that even the term culture is not a category with clear boundaries and that it might pertain to a huge group of individuals, whereas subgroups of that would constitute separate cultures, each slightly different from the rest, so they are themselves considered cultures. These subgroups are sometimes called subcultures.

But even they have subgroups and subcultures within them. For a culture is a particular set of understandings or ways of seeing that is held in common by a group. And every group, in that sense, can be considered a culture for, indeed, that is how we define a group: It is a number of people that share a common understanding or way of seeing things, and that might simply be in its intent. But also it usually includes its goals, procedures, and more: special language, sometimes called jargon; group constructions — physical and organizational ones as well as temporal ones, i.e., events; as well as ways of behavior, manners of speaking, rules of courtesy, and the like.

So who is still with me? Well, if you followed all that, you would see that such groups can be continually broken down … can be infinitely broken down, you will soon see … into even smaller subgroups. Neighborhoods can be broken down into separate family cultures, for example. And where from there?

Well, we see that, yes, it is true, each and every individual can her- or himself be considered a culture, in that there are understand­ings, procedures, ways of thinking, and all the rest that are not held in common with anyone else at all but are unique to each individual. That is often referred to as personality, a person’s unique personality, but it goes beyond that to unique facts of each individual that are not even, by other individuals, observable! The difference between individual culture and personality is a matter of emphasis in that individual culture pertains to patterns, realities, facts, and ways of looking at or construing the world primarily from the perspective of the individual, whereas personality usually applies to those things as observed, to the extent they are observed, and referred to by others.

Nevertheless, one might say culture, as it pertains to groups and societies, reduced to its foundation, is simply another way of referring to individual psychologies, or personalities, but doing it cumulatively.

Culture is collective psychology, in a sense. It is the obverse of Jung’s collective unconscious, for it is what is known in a culture, not unknown or unconscious. It could be said that culture is the collective consciousness, viewed in its widest possible way and including all possible elements of a culture, of a group.

Following that? Okay, then, we can see that this end of the continuum, which we were calling culturally constituted realities, really goes further out from its supposed end point to individually constituted realities. These are realities that are unique to an individual and can only be understood within the context of that individual, and when encountered outside of that individual they are likely to be either misunderstood or not seen at all. For those of you following this, we can see that such personal “cultures,” if you will, comprised of individually constructed realities, are different, individual to individual, and that some of those cultural elements are shared widely, while some of those individuals have personal cultures with elements that are so unique and unshared that we have a special term for those individuals. Of course you know this one. For what if I were to put it another way and ask you, simply, what do we call individuals who we can see are “living in their own world.”

Yes, you are correct. The term for that is psychotic.

No, don’t go. We’re not done yet.

Suprahumanly Constituted Realities

Okay, then, let us look at the antipode of that end point, newly seen to be individually constituted realities. On the other end of the continuum, the one we were indicating as biologically constituted realities, we can see that it extends beyond where we thought it ended as well. How, you say?

Well, as I said, biologically constituted realities are those realities shared by a species, some of which are shared only by that species and some are shared to varying degrees, but not to every other species.

Well, the category, species, also, is not absolute. (I see, a couple of you already were thinking this. Good for you!) There are certainly realities that are unique to entire groups of species that have important qualities in common. We see that the categorization of species itself is not absolute. For we can easily draw a line around groups of species and create other entities, which for all we know create their own “constituted” realities.

There are realities constituted by the fact that the perceiver is from the vegetable kingdom — you might call them vegetablely-constituted realities, or from the animal kingdom, planetmatedy-constituted realities, or by virtue of being mammalian (you’ve got it from here), or out of the fact of belonging to one of the many taxonomies or other biological categories of species, or from the fact that all exist on something that they perceive to be Earth … and so on. For all I know there are realities that are shared by all “elements” or “members” (whatever they might be) in our solar system, but none other (heliocentrically-constituted realities?), or by “members” (whatever they might be) of our galaxy of the Milky Way, but are not seen at all or are able to be perceived in other galaxies, other dimensions, or other….

… and here we get into realities we are not capable of knowing exist.

You say they are not perceivers, however, so they cannot create their own realities out of their perceptions. Good one, on that. But how do you know that is true? As one example, is there not serious consideration to the idea that the Earth itself is a seeing, feeling, perceiving being? A Gaia? How can you say it is not? Would it not fit into the category of possible beings that we are not capable of seeing with our percepters? Like I said, earthworms might perceive humans as an obstacle or hot and coldness. So might we not be in the same position relative to these greater beings (or at least, different beings)? So that we as humans are perceiving a planet which is in actuality a form of consciousness (an experiential vantage point, a perceiver), but we mistakenly and “brutely” conceive of it as being lifeless … an Earth that is mere matter and stuff, not conscious or perceiving?

Remember, also, that the majority of humans that have ever lived, which includes many living now, think of, nay they even have direct experience of, Nature and its aspects as being living and to constitute a living, perceiving being. And they deem that Nature to be even higher, far higher in fact, in its apprehension and consciousness than us.

I want to point out that as odd or fantastical as this sounds, this is exactly the notion coming out of some of the consciousness research of the last fifty years. Stanislav Grof, for one, has found that in his modes of LSD psychotherapy, as well as his non-drug modality, holotropic breathwork, people are able to identify with and experience the consciousnesses not only of other planetmates — that is, other species on Earth — but also are able to merge with and experience the consciousnesses of higher orders of beings: the Earth, individual planets, the galaxy, particular collections of people — such as the women of all time (note here that the entities do not even have to be alive in this time and place for them to be part of a collective consciousness … the relativity of space and time, remember?); and even collectives of supranormal beings and realities — archetypal consciousness and its reality, for example. And it is possible to experience consciousness of supposedly inanimate, non-living forms (the secret life of stones, you see?) and even identify with conscious­nesses on the atomic and subatomic levels … which is something coming up. Hold on.

Putting this rather bluntly, Stanislav Grof concurs,

Authentic and convincing experiences of conscious identification with animals, plants, and even inorganic materials and processes make it easy to understand the beliefs of animistic cultures that see the entire universe as being ensouled. From their perspective, not only all the animals, but also the trees, the rivers, the mountains, the sun, the moon and the stars appear to be sentient beings.1

Infinite Worlds

Infinite Organizations of Experience Equals Infinite Beings

Then there is Teilhard deChardin — someone whom Grof cites as presenting a way of conceptualizing the beings and consciousnesses he has come across in his modalities — who advanced the notion that every integrated whole is in fact a form of beingness and that the degree of consciousness inherent in each is relative to the level of complexity of that integrated whole. For reasons that will become clearer as we proceed, I would say there is indeed reason to assert that levels of complexity relate to levels of awareness.

However as for the “higher level” of consciousness being related to the level of complexity — with more complexity being of a higher consciousness than lower complexity — I would say there is evidence indicating the opposite is true. From the perspective of brain-as-reducing-valve, which I will elaborate on shortly, and the viewpoint brought forth in my books, Falls from Grace (2014a) and Experience Is Divinity (2013c), the simplest organizations, the least complex entities, are the highest orders of awareness, in that each reduction into form and the elaboration of that form is one step further removed from the consciousness of stone, the consciousness of space, of the Void … ultimately, of Divinity. So physical reality with its myriad and ever increasing complexities and organizations of complications are steps in removal from unity with Divinity.

On the other hand, regarding the Experience, or Divinity, that physical reality is removed from … and while this is not crucial to the argument being presented here, but as a look ahead … I would say that levels of higher awareness (rather, experience), not physical or energetic complexity, create perceptible and/or conceivable levels of complexity of Experience. That is, that integration of greater and greater complexities of subjective Experience equate to greater levels of consciousness, but that levels of complexity of Experience are an inverse to levels of complexity of matter. But again, that is jumping ahead. Yes, we’ll get to that, as well.

Still, I would join with deChardin in saying that, for all we know, every integrated whole is possibly some form of perceptor, some form of consciousness which is receiving information — “sensory” and otherwise — and combining and integrating it in their unique way.

For example, it is not that strange to believe that each planet is a form of consciousness … just ask astrologers … and that they interact with each other in their own ways. For we see that cells, looking down below us to a microcosm smaller than us, have all the qualities of consciousness — they act, interact, behave, learn, make decisions based on judgments, and so on. So how do we know that planets, galaxies, star systems … the All That Is Itself … would not appear to have the same qualities of an individual actor or perceiver if we were above and able to look down on them, just like we do in observing cells and organs? And, in so doing, see what from a higher experiential awareness would be just as much signs of life, consciousness, behavior, intentional interaction, or whatever are the things of perception and beingness at that level that would be similar to the ones we see as indications of life, consciousness, behavior, intentional interactions, and the like at our level … our admittedly non-ultimate level with its limited and ultimately unknowing perception and experience?

As I have said, Grof has reams of evidence that such an amazing possibility is in fact the case.

Ultimate Relativity

Putting this all together, all realities are relative, all facts can only be understood in context; and those facts and realities can only truly be understood by groups who collectively construct them. So there are an infinite number of beings, an infinite number of species … consequently an infinite number of worlds.

Nope, nothing brute about our facts … at all!!!!!

The continuum we have constructed has on one end the unique individual with mental and experiential constructions that are not shared with anyone else. So these are called individually constructed realities … related to individual psychology. Yes, yes, I know. Some of you are already breaking down that individual into organs and cells and beginning to see that each of these subgroupings also have their unique constructions — their uniquely held “facts” and realities.” Although I will be toying with ideas of that later, such as, do those realities have an infinite regress into the atomic, and beyond. And, indeed, if time and space are both relative, as they are said to be, does this end of the spectrum, at the infinitesimally small, ever even come fully around again and link up with the realities on the other end, with Ultimate Reality? But that is enough on that end for now.

On the other end of the spectrum we have biologically constructed realities and whatever it might be called for the larger “cultures” of beingness and perception beyond them. This includes the galaxies, dimensions, star systems, and such, especially and including the things we do not know exist for there is absolutely no way humans can possibly perceive or know of them, even with our technology, even with any possible technology that humans could come up with in any possible human future.…

As Grof explains them,

While such transpersonal experiences dramatically change our understanding of the nature of everyday material reality, there are others that reveal dimensions of existence that are ordinarily completely hidden to our perception. This category includes discarnate entities, various deities and demons, mythological realms, suprahu­man beings, and the divine creative principle itself. 2

So, we have the spectrum of realities and facts: individually constitute realities, culturally constituted realities, bioculturally constituted realities, biologically constituted realities, and near the end of the spectrum, the whatever-constituted realities — let us call them suprahumanly-constituted realities — of “entities” that comprise those species or “members,” in various levels of organizations extending out further than we could possibly see or imagine. The spectrum describes a progression of increasingly valid or “truer” facts and realities. For they are shared with increasingly larger numbers of members who hold them to be true. This spectrum of validity of realities begins with the individually constituted — putting to the side for now that can be further broken down into groups extending into the subatomic — which has the least number of entities holding them to be true, i.e., only one, an individual. And it extends all the way to the suprahumanly constituted realities, which has the largest group of entities, of members sharing those “facts” and “realities” and holding them to be true.

Ultimate Reality

And then beyond even that we have what we can postulate to be Ultimate Reality, which might not exist, but the term represents whatever reality is or at least comes closest to having realities that are shared — that are “facts,” if you will, that are perceived, shared, “gotten” by ALL individuals — or potentially can be gotten considering the makeup of the species involved — and entities in the Universe. Here is where we start to use the word, God.

So on the other end of the spectrum from the subatomic is Ultimate Reality … and does, then, Ultimate Reality and the subatomic end up joining? How would we know? How could we say it would not? Since space, including size, is conceivably as relative to humans as time is to us, why, even that is possible. It boggles the mind.

Also, I should point out that even the subatomic can be further reduced into conscious experiential beings. That might be hard to understand, but keep in mind our most scientific understanding of the Cosmos has it that at the Big Bang, at the creation of the Universe, everything, the entire Universe we see around us, with all its galaxies, was contained within and emanated out from a spot the size of an atom…. If that can happen, well, if nothing else then, space, including size, is relative to the perceiver…. And this gives further credibility to the idea that, at the ultimate tiniest, consciousness might come around again and present itself as the hugest consciousness, the Cosmos. Yes, truly mind-quaking stuff.

So literally anything could be.

Biologically Constituted Realities, Conclusion

Getting back to culturally constituted realities, so do we then, indeed, create our own reality culturally, of which Marshall Sahlins (1976) writes? Marshall Sahlins is a prominent American anthropologist who stressed the power that culture has to shape the world that people discern and act within and is associated with that total-heritage or Matrix view on reality.

Well, yes, I believe we do live within culturally created worlds, separate from other people in other culturally created worlds.

But I believe we do much more than that. I believe we create it biologically too: I believe that our reality is species-determined prior to that. And while that might sound common-sensical, I contend it is a factor affecting our constructions of reality and determining what we think is real that has been overlooked by all our sciences and by all Western overstandings and for all the time of Western civilization. Yet I profess it has huge significance, affecting the very foundations of human knowledge itself. And the implications of that adjustment to our understandings is what I get into in this book.

Relativity: Cultural and Biological

Finally, however, what does this say about cultural relativity, of which so much is made in anthropological circles? I agree with Sahlins’s position on the total and symbolic nature of culture and with it the resulting extreme cultural relativism which he asserts. As D’Andrade (1987) put it, Sahlins’s view is extreme enough that it undermines even science’s claim to validity and makes of our science, “mere ethnoscience.”3 But I do not imply by my agreement that I believe reality is only culturally determined by any definitional stretch of the term cultural that Sahlins, even from his “total heritage” perspective, could have had in mind. I intend to go further.

How so, then, could I claim, at the outset, that I believe both positions can be true? How can reality be so thoroughly “created” — not only culturally but biologically as well — and yet there be universal commonalities on which to base analyses and cross-cultural understanding? Where I disagree with Sahlins and emphatically agree with D’Andrade on the existence of “brute facts” standing outside and separate from cultural constructions is where D’Andrade (1987), in referring to a quote from Sahlins, writes

I think I agree if … [he] … means that people respond to their interpretations of events, not the raw events themselves. However, if this means that culture can interpret any event any way, and that therefore there is no possibility of establishing universal generalizations, I disagree. I believe that there are strong constraints on how much interpretative latitude can be given to biological and social events. While the letters “D,” “O,” “G,” can be given any interpretation, pain, death , and hunger have such powerful intrinsic negative properties that they can be interpreted as “good” things only with great effort and for short historical periods with many failed converts.4

With this statement of D’Andrade, I enthusiastically agree also. I believe that there are “intrinsic” (biological) determiners of cultures, which create a basic underlying structure. Indeed, as I was saying above, there are bioculturally constituted realities clustered about those biological “facts” of humans.

However, where I feel I take issue with D’Andrade is that I contend that these “intrinsic” determiners are intrinsic to the species, not to the events themselves, as I was delineating above. These brute “facts” are as much biologically relative as items of culture are culturally relative.

This is as important to point out as it is important in physics to keep in mind that particles and waves only exist in relation to an observer. In this regard, as Armand Labbe (1991) put it, “Ultimately our physics … is going to demonstrate that essentially there is no such thing as matter. All there is, is mind and motion.”

At any rate, I contend that our biological “infrastructure,” that is, our bodies and the experiences they make possible — which are species-specific but also common to all humans — results in biocultural, species-specific, and hence transcultural patterns of thought and behavior. Further, these transcultural patterns of thought and behavior create transcultural patterns of social structure, “external culture,” sociocultural behavior, and so on.

At this time, in the next chapter, we will look at some of those biocultural realities or “facts.” Keeping in mind the immense relativity of them — that is, they are only relative to our species, for one thing — unveils startling understandings and revelations and opens the door a little more to the paradigm I am unveiling for you in The Secret Life of Stones.

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The Perinatal Matrix:

Bioculturally Constituted Realities, Part 1 … Our Biocultural World and We Are What We’ve Experienced — Our Conception, Gestation, and Birth Create Our Windows to the World

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Going Beyond Jung … Our Prenatal and Perinatal Experiences Predispose the Nature of Our Mind

“…our conception, gestation, and birth… can be seen to form our underlying myths … but much more than that. They also create the very foundational templates upon which we build our view of reality — physical, social, emotional, spiritual, and philosophical….”

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Our Prenatal and Perinatal Matrix

Carl Jung is one man in particular who decades ago, in many thoroughly encompassing works, expressed similar concepts regard­ing biocultural patterns as being species-specific for humans — the hereditary remnants of what are called instinct in animals, as he put it.

Beyond Jung

Without diminishing the historical importance of his contributions, I need to stress that what I am asserting goes much further than Jung’s contentions. For I believe we biologically determine our view of reality, as a species,

in the biological structures that comprise us and orient us in a world of space; in the biochemical processes that constitute our changingness and situate us in a world of time; and, most saliently, in the individual biological history that is universal for us and unique to us as a species.

So I am saying that our biological structures, processes, and history — i.e., our past experience — create the worlds of space, time, and memory within which we move and have our existence.

By this last one, memory, however, I mean much more than that our past experience comprises the knowledge base or data bank from which we concoct our life schemes and decisions. I also mean much more than that our past experiences affect us in ways of which we are unaware as well, that is to say unconsciously … that we are affected by repressed or forgotten memories. No, I mean to go much farther and deeper than that. I mean that our conception, gestation, and birth — in general, our earliest experiences as a biological organism — can be seen to form our underlying myths … but much more than that. They also create the very foundational templates upon which we build our view of reality — physical, social, emotional, spiritual, and philosophical.

How is this idea — that we have biological parameters of structure, process, and events experienced (one’s personal history) — different from what you already know and why is it important or helpful to know it this way? Well, we, with our species arrogance, believe we have a mind, intellect, ability to reason and be logical, which is separate from all influences … that is somehow detached or transcendent from Reality and Experience. Sure we admit this faculty is imperfect, but we also believe that we can get it more correct using the methods of science. We believe that its incorrectness lies in faulty logic or faulty data. Both of which are correctible.

But what we have no clue about is that these experiences involving our biological reality, separate from that of other types of beings or species, will determine how we interpret our findings and conclusions, even in science. More than that, that like any other paradigm, these earliest of our experiences will direct and constrain us even in terms of where we will look to explore … in order to find out anything. And they will force us to interpret the data we find into constructions of assumptions that will skew and often reverse the interpretation that should arise from them. Yes, that should logically arrive from them. Elsewhere I have called this our basic wrong-gettedness (see Planetmates, 2014b).

Indeed, from the paradigm I am unveiling, in which everything we know and feel flows out of what we once felt and experienced, our reason is discovered to be no more than just a product of them, and not separate, and so is inherently faulty. This perspective reveals our vaunted logic and intellect to be riddled through with a species-arrogance, for reasons I detail in those other works, which often overturns our being able to see what would be obvious to any other species observing the same thing. So, past experience determines the memory out of which we build our logic and reason. We have no detached reason; we only have a species arrogance that we do, which itself emanates from, is determined by, such early experience.

In any case, keep in mind, in asserting all of this, that I am having less of a problem crossing cultural and other boundaries than cognitive psychologists or cultural anthropologists. They are academ­ics who in particular criticized Freud for journeying down this road before me. They were correct. For Freud’s theories were rooted primarily in the cognitive array put up by a particular culture, his, which limited his theories and understandings. Jung went further, though, in finding transcultural symbols, archetypes, which were related to universal human experiences. So Jung sought to go outside of culture as well as outside mere concepts. However when we get to Arthur Janov, whose findings are rooted in raw experience, emanating from the body and from species universal facts, we get into theory which can begin to be universally true.

In that tradition of Janov, but taking it further, is where I operate. What I am asserting is rooted in universal human experience, not just experiences of primal pain, but any and all universal human experience. Hence, I am not like they, cultural anthropologists and cognitive psychologists, who, being academics and intellectuals, get all bogged down in the fact that concepts vary from one entity — person or culture — to another. This is because I am operating not out of shared concepts but common experiences, out of which those concepts arise. I might not know exactly what you mean when you say dukkha, which I can translate into English as meaning suffering. For someone in India, that word might have connotations that I would not get. Then again, someone in the same culture might have a similar problem in not fully understanding exactly what you mean by it.

The point is that I know the experience of suffering, and that is common between us. If additionally I see you after a loved one has died and you are visibly distraught — which is something I know and comprehend because I act similarly at times and I know how that feels — and you say to me “Life is dukkha,” I believe I might know what you are expressing by that on a deep level that compares with and might perhaps even exceed the understandings of that by someone else in your culture, especially if they have not had such or similar experiences.

You see, I know what the word denotes — what it means, not relative to other concepts and in a context of the abstract, which would be connotation; but relative to experience — experience which is shared between humans. The word for me is connected to an experiential reality which I have had; it is not just a concept connecting other concepts in my mind. This goes for my experience of an emotion or other biological experience but can be expanded to mean the experience of the physical world that we share. So that when you point to a chicken’s egg and say huevos, I can understand you because I have, in my experience of the world, also the experience of egg. I would understand you better than a hypothetical person in your culture who had never encountered an egg, or at most had only heard of one. Regardless that you would share your language with that person and not with me, I would understand you better. When you say rojo and you indicate an item that is the color red I also share an understanding with you.

The same kind of understandings about common biological experiences occur across cultures as well. Having experienced birth, child-“rearing,” pain, death and loss of loved ones, joy of achievement, pleasure of sexuality, friendship, separation and love, and so on, I have a common ground with another human … with any other human. For we have all, more or less, experienced these things. It is on the basis of experience, held in common by all humans, that I build my theories. Those are the closest things to those brute facts which I have been talking about. They are biologically constituted realities mixing with culture to create our bioculturally constituted facts.

Our Biohistorical Experiences Determine Our World

Elsewhere I have detailed how our universal but species-specific patterns of biological experience at conception, and throughout gestation, and at birth … and continuing from there but with immensely reduced or nonexistent universality … conditions and shapes all later experience.1

The Past Affects the Present

First, though, do not forget that you already know, and you have no doubt about it, that experiences you have had in the past contribute to what you know, think, and the way you see things in the present. I am not presenting anything strange by looking further back in time to our earliest experiences in Form and unraveling for you how what you learned in your experience at that time has influenced everything you knew and thought, and the way you saw everything, afterward. You do not remember these experiences, and you think you know and see what you know and see within the context of your memory of what you are consciously aware of.

However, Freud dispelled that delusion a long time ago. He showed us, in ways that are obvious to us now, how what we experienced early in our lives taught us things that influenced us ever afterward, in spite of the fact we do not remember them. He showed how we are unconsciously influenced by such forgotten experiences.

Our Earliest Events Predispose the Nature of Our Mind

So, when I take this back even further, showing how even earlier experiences than Freud acknowledged have even greater influence on us, for they occurred earlier and all later “Freudian” events were seen through the “knowledge” or template established already by them, I am not doing anything unusual and am operating in such a strong tradition of psychology as well as what we commonly know to be true: Which is that past experience and learning plays greatly into what we will see and how we will interpret the present.

The only reason this has not been explored this way before is that it was thought that such early experiences as I describe — conception, womb, birth, early infancy, the prenatal and perinatal events — could not be remembered or “recorded” by us in a way to influence what comes afterward. That was a mistaken notion, and it is widely known to have been wrong, at this point. For a long time, there was misinformation about myelin sheaths being necessary for memory to occur, by now long debunked. Furthermore, there was an assumption that memory and knowledge needed a substrate of physicality, that is, a brain, in order for events to be “recorded” or remembered. My field of prenatal and perinatal psychology has upended that notion, as well. I say a lot about what we now know in science in this regard in many of my books in which I focus on what we have learned in the field of prenatal and perinatal psychology.2 But this book is not the one to do that. See my others for that.

For here, though, and based on the knowledge that early experiences even at the cellular level of sperm and ovum are remem­bered, we have had revealed to us some astonishing discoveries about constituted realities that have their roots that far back. Now, let us look at some of them.

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Cells with a View:

Bioculturally Constituted Realities, Part 2 … Conception Creates Our World … Dualities, Dichotomies, Dialectics, Dukkha, Duty, Disillusionment, Gender, Self-Confidence

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We Can’t Know What We Can’t Know, but We Cannot Unknow What We Are

You cannot convince a fish it lives in water. You can only give the fish the experience of being in air; then it will understand.

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My contentions are that these particular … that is to say, these early, these prenatal and perinatal … experience/memory templates are especially related, but not limited, to the following:

Our Experience of Conception Results in Fundamental Constructions of Our Worldview

Let us take conception, for starters. Remember that our existences as a sperm and an ovum coming together to create another individual is a truly unique experience for one’s life. We have nothing like it afterwards. Even in marriage, its closest correlate, there is not such a combining as to actually have “two become one” as some marriage vows relate.

Duality as a Fact of Existence Creating Self and Other

At conception, the sperm/egg dichotomy of self led us to ever afterward perceive duality in the Universe, where there is not, in actuality. Our universal human experiences of these events at conception cause us to see the world, our entire life, this way. That is, as dual and separated.

You might ask does duality come from an experience of being a sperm and an ovum at the same time? Meaning, do we experience sperm and egg as dual when it happens, prior to conception, and therefore construe the world as dual and separated? Probably not. However, being as we are barely removed from Divinity at that point — barely removed from No-Form and still fairly soulular — there might be some of that going on. Still, I think we probably do not have a consciousness of the experience of the sperm and of the egg simultaneously before they have joined.

However, beginning at conception we are aware that what we are is comprised of two 