Reality 9
© 2019 Daniel Cooper Clark
Some Rights Reserved
A Personal View
Reality 9 –
reality mine.
The Hidden Potentiality
Potentiality, always reaching toward Actuality, is defined by Love, the yearning for another. Potentiality-Love doesn’t obliterate itself to become the other. It is a flow, a moving energy, an urge, directed beyond itself, that maintains the integrity of both itself and its object.
The general condition of Reality 9 is Potentiality. Actuality is a particular aspect of Potentiality.
Just as any material phenomenon exists both as a wave and a particle and can occupy two places at once in a state of quantum superposition, so each person is dual: a potential person and an actual person. I’m now conscious of my actual self, but not of my potential self. Both features of the self are eternal.
Actuality is within Potentiality. My actual self is always within my self of infinite possibilities.
The potential world is liberal, the actual is conservative.
Each existing item in the actual world (including every falsity) has its hidden counterpart in the potential world. And Potentiality – infinity – is the source of yet more items, which surprise the actual world when they arrive here.
Spirituality means an awareness of The Whole. Materiality means cutting out a portion of The Whole and giving that a preferred status. Thus, sectarian religions are materialistic. They limit themselves to a certain tradition, ritual, scripture, and so on.
Nevertheless, acts of devotion are carried out in an environment of specifics. I’m not advocating a “contentless mysticism,” as someone once called it. To love God in a specific way is spiritual if I know that like all actual forms, the God I worship has a counterpart in the potential world.
The actual world is graded into a vertical hierarchy. Sitting at the bottom are illusions and miseries. At the top we find the blissful truth, Goddess and God.
In the potential world the forms are not graded. They’re all equal, that is, horizontal. Furthermore, the potential world is One Person. Or, it is a singular “one” and an infinite plurality of “ones.”
All phenomena in the actual world are eternal, from dog to God. So you see, this is not that “material world” you’ve heard about. The “material world” is the actual world as seen by a materialist. It’s a mistake.
The other world, Potentiality, sustains Actuality – as a battery sustains a light bulb. Both the battery and the bulb are necessary for the light to shine.
Potentialism
Neither one, Potentiality or Actuality, is more real than the other. Reality 9 is made up of both of them together.
In relation to each other, it might be said that Potentiality is Yin and Actuality is Yang. In the potential world, the feminine rules. In the actual world, the masculine rules. But of course Actuality is part of Potentiality, so overall the feminine rules. This is what is meant by saying, “she is the power behind the throne.”
In the actual world, do things die, do people die, do I die? No. That’s a mistake. Nothing here disappears. Everything here exists eternally. Each atom is as eternal as God. Things and persons here are always alive. I don’t die. Or, my moment of “death” is already on the ledger. So, now that I know I’m already dead, I can really start to live!
In Actuality a clear continuum stretches unbroken from illusion to truth, from despair to divinity, from garbage to God. The entire range consists of one substance. No dividing wall separates “matter” from “spirit” as if they were two countries. It’s not that garbage is “matter” and God is “spirit,” and one must change one’s identity to get across the border. While traveling from ignorance to knowledge, we journey across a continuous landscape, a single country, made of Actuality.
Perhaps it could be called “matter” because it’s filled with forms. Or “spirit” because it’s eternal. In any case, it’s all one substance. Duality enters the picture with the difference between Potentiality and Actuality. But then you see, Potentiality being potential and not actual, it doesn’t exist – yet. So, is there really a duality?
Quantumism
“…the “physical vacuum” – as it is called in field theory – is not a state of mere nothingness, but contains the potentiality for all forms of the particle world.” – Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics
“If the universe came from “nothing,” then perhaps nothing was not perfectly empty but had a slight amount of symmetry breaking, which allows for the slight dominance of matter over antimatter today. The origin of this symmetry breaking is still not understood.” – Michio Kaku, Parallel Worlds
“When one knows that the Great Void is full of ch’i, one realizes that there is no such thing as nothingness.” – Chang Tsai, quoted by Capra
“That which seems to the intellect to be Nothing is the incomprehensible Maximum.” – Nicholas of Cusa
Every Little Thing
Every little thing in the actual world also might be found in the potential world, if we could peer into that world, which we can’t, because the things there don’t exist, they pre-exist. What’s more, there’s more in the potential world, since it’s infinite, unlimited. It’s beyond our understanding. However , we’re not inhabitants of only the actual world. We also inhabit the potential world, in our potential forms. But we achieve our completeness in the actual world. All things in the potential world reach toward Actuality. So you see, even though the actual is finite, it’s always being fed by the infinite. It’s always expanding. My guru said, “Krishna is always expanding.” Krishna, too, inhabits both worlds. What’s special about Krishna, about God, about Goddess, is that in Actuality they inhabit a region that touches the infinite. It is tangential to it. We become successful when we move to that region, which is known as the spiritual world.
Death
Death is a mistaken impression. Everything is real, nothing disappears.
Disruption
Love is the original “disruptive technology.” We try to organize things. But new things are always coming in from the Potentiality and mixing us up, pulling the rug out from under us, upsetting the apple cart, blowing our minds, forcing us to reconsider, giving us life. Scientists regularly discover new events that force them to adapt their theories.
Anarchy
Within the Potentiality, which is pure Love, there is no hierarchy. You might say that anarchy reigns there, except that Love’s infinite persons are all parts of one person, She. If there is only one person, how can there be anarchy?
Continuous Creation
In the infinite Potentiality there live an infinite number of souls. They yearn towards God. They know only God. In their potentiality, they have no awareness of themselves. As they gradually pass into the Actuality, they first stay with God. But as their self-awareness grows, they become jealous of God. So they descend to lower levels of Actuality – into the darkness, so to speak. This is painful, but through their suffering they gain complete self-realization, which finally matures into a freely chosen love of God. That’s the drama of the soul. It keeps going on and on, with more souls from the limitless well of the Potentiality continually passing into the Actuality. The Actuality is always expanding. In that sense, even the Actuality has no limit. Creation is continuous. It may appear that a universe will die, just as it may appear that you will die. But that’s a mistaken impression.
Marriage
Reality 9 marries science and religion in a personalist universe.
Worlds
Potentiality: the world of She
Actuality: the world of She and He
Spirituality: the world of She and He and Devotees
Materiality: the world of the Almighty God
Symmetry-Breaking
Potentiality would be hermaphroditic were it not for its slight dominance of the feminine over the masculine. That symmetry-breaking allows for form, motion, and purpose.
Forms
All forms are Her form.
She’s Flexible
Infinite potential power is greater then finite actual power. Potentiality 1 has the edge over Potentiality 5. Generation has more power than regulation. Art outlasts politics. Life beats death. Motion beats stasis. Flexibility beats rigidity.
The Purpose
When the unity of Potentiality 1 enters into Actuality, it arrives as two: the generator – She – and the generated – He.
When the multiplicity of Potentiality 5 enters into Materiality, it arrives as the regulator – Almighty God – and the regulated – the souls, the atoms, and the elemental spirits.
When the two currents of Potentiality converge in Spirituality, they arrive as Goddess, God, and the Devotees. The life of this joyful home is the purpose of Reality 9.
Dualities
Reality 9 is a double duality. It is a duality of the potential and the actual. Then the actual includes a duality of the spiritual and the material.
Raw Consciousness and Time
Potentiality is the world of raw consciousness, of the flux of pure motion and emotion. Entities never leave Potentiality. They get extended from there to Materiality. Then they live in both worlds. Materiality is made up of aleph-nought static states, each of which is a moment of time including everything in space. So it’s more correct to speak of the material worlds, plural, rather than one such world. The entities in those material worlds made of still moments experience flux, or time, because they are of the potential and bridge the gaps between the moment-worlds. They are conscious. Consciousness moves, and has direction. Consciousness leaps between the static “now” universes and allows for a sense of past, present, and future.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
In his Exposition and Defense of the New System of 1695, Leibniz explains his view of “the ultimate elements into which substantial things can be analyzed.” Later he would name the ultimate element a Monad. Here he calls it “an atom of substance.”
But it is hardly an atom as we usually consider one. Of these atoms, he says “their nature consists of force and … from this there follows something analogous to feeling and appetite … resembling our ordinary notion of souls .. there is about them something vital and a kind of perception …”
Having stated that “it is impossible to find the principles of unity in matter alone,” Leibniz remains true to his word. The Monad, his basic unit of reality, displays the characteristics of force (energy), feeling, appetite, vitality, and perception. It is indeed like the standard description of a soul. For Leibniz, reality is essentially spiritual, and personal.
Atoms are people? Well, like people and unlike the conventional material atom, each of Leibniz’s elements is unique – not standardized. He tells of a friend of his trying to find two identical leaves in a garden, and failing to do so. From unique causes, unique results, Leibniz commented, in so many words.
Of additional interest to me is his probing into Possibility. As one who places so much emphasis on Pre-Existence, I’m happy to find similar thoughts in passages such as the following, quoted at length from On the Ultimate Origination of Things (1697):
“First we must notice, from the very fact that something exists rather than nothing, that there is in things that are possible, or in possibility of essence itself, a certain need for existence, or (if I may so put it) a claim to exist; and, to put it bluntly, that essence in itself tends toward existence. From this it further follows that all things which are possible, or express essence or possible reality, tend by equal right towards existence in proportion to the quantity of essence or reality which they include, or in proportion to the stage of perfection which belongs to them; for perfection is nothing else than quantity of essence.
“Hence it is seen to be most evident that out of the infinite combination of possibles, and the infinite possible series, that one exists by whose means the greatest possible amount of essence or possibility is brought into existence.”
Leibniz calls Possibility the Essence. It is the source, the great storehouse. It’s tempting to consider it “the spiritual world,” except that existence is also made up of nothing but Monads, which are spiritual entities.
This “essence in itself tends toward existence.” A big question rises up. Why doesn’t all the essence become existence all at once? He states that the “things” in that world have different quantities of the essence. The greater the quantity, the more likely the passage into existence. I’m not sure I like that story. For me, the pre-existent entities are particles of She. (She is the Potentiality, the Pre-Existence.) She controls the rate of passage. To her, all entities are of equal quality. The flowing into existence is merely her game, her dance. On the other hand, the entities traverse into existence when they want to. They have free will. I know, that’s a contradiction.
Scientists have found most interesting Leibniz’s Correspondence with Samuel Clarke of 1715. Clarke was writing on behalf of Isaac Newton. Newton and Leibniz were at odds over at least two issues. First and most irritating was the quarrel over who had first developed the calculus. (That’s Leibniz’s name for it – Newton called it “fluxions.”)
But more significant was their dispute over the nature of space and time. Newton felt they were absolute, spreading as undifferentiated regulators independent of anything else in the universe, except God. Leibniz felt they were ideas only, and relative to the changing aspects of things. For him, space is defined by things existing together at one time. Time is defined by things succeeding each other in one space. The two can only be defined in terms of each other. Indeed, Leibniz preferred not to speak in terms of space and time. He said there is no such thing as space. But there are places. There is no such thing as time. But there are instants. “… space is that which results from places taken together … In the case of time, nothing exists but instants, and an instant is not even a part of time … time can only be an ideal thing … instants apart from things are nothing … they only consist in the successive order of things …” Things, or substances, are the only entities. Since space and time are not substances, they don’t exist in themselves, but only as concepts regarding the interactions of substances.
Like Parmenides, Leibniz considered existence to be a Plenum (fullness). Everything touches something. Newton was wrong to talk of “empty space.” Leibniz said, “I hold there is no void at all.” He thus eliminated Newton’s problem of “action at a distance.” Monads are contiguous. Forces travel along a network of “communication” between contiguous entities. Furthermore, there’s no such thing as distance.
Then, is there only one place, here? And one instant, now?
Julian Barbour
When Barbour says that each instant is a static and independent instance of the entire universe – that nothing moves from one instant to another, it’s really instant-universes (within which nothing moves) somehow succeeding each other, like frames of a movie creating the illusion of motion – I agree. When he says that the cat who leaps is not the same as the cat who lands – they are two different cats embedded into two different instants – I agree and disagree. When he says that our sense of motion and time is a function of records (“memories”) which are not really ours but are something like computer files loaded into the structure of the instant – I disagree. Finally, when he grants no continuity of self at all across the instants – I definitely disagree.
Reality 9, unlike Barber’s Platonia, allows for the presence of consciousness as a continuum that bridges the gap between the static instants. That was my perception in December of 1961 in my apartment at 437 West 22nd Street in New York City. I was looking down at the rug, pivoting around as I looked. The rug’s image jerked around the circle. It didn’t go smoothly. I wondered if my eye muscles weren’t able to make smooth movements. Then I moved my hand in front of me. Again I sensed that the hand wasn’t really making transitions. It was as if each fractional position was an independent fact, despite my desire to perceive a smooth movement. The metaphor of a succession of still frames on a strip of movie film came to mind. The more I tried to impose a sense of smooth motion on any moving thing, no matter how slowly it moved, the more I got a dizzy feeling that reminded me of what Sartre wrote about in Nausea. I was trying to force onto the world a property that wasn’t there. Motion wasn’t in the world, it was in me. The world was divided up into static instants. I, on the other hand, had some ability to join the instants together. There really were two different worlds operating together. One I called Time, the other Energy. It was similar to the traditional matter-spirit duality. I called it the Time-Energy System.
That Energy is not affected by time. Today, I would identify its home as the Potentiality, a “place” of constant movement. The Potentiality, the pre-existence, is always moving toward existence. Even when it becomes Actuality, it lives in a world that’s always expanding. Barbour has a similar notion of time capsules branching out from Alpha to infinity. But in his reality, which he calls Platonia, there are no souls, just numbers and angles and cards on spindles. Thank God we don’t really inhabit such a misty graveyard. However, unless we develop our consciousness, our self-awareness, our Energy, we might indeed be lost in a world of motionless and emotionless instants no better than his.
Kurt Godel
Godel said that formal logical systems and their proofs, though useful, are by their very nature limited by their methods, and cannot describe the truth of a totality. They are always incomplete. Totality can only be grasped through intuition. So my clever system with its divisons and terms is merely an attempt to see the whole “through a glass darkly.”
Time Is the Expansion of the Actual
“Time” is the word we have for the expansion of the actual. Entities from the Potentiality pass into the Actuality. Each passage is, so to speak, the ticking of a clock. The volume of Actuality has increased by one entity. And it keeps on increasing without cessation. Its volume never decreases. The movement goes in one direction only. Time doesn’t go backward. The “arrow of time” always goes forward. Increase – addition – succession – is real, and constant. Energy is unlimited.
In the infinite Potentiality, where change is an urge – a tendency not yet brought into existence – past, present, and future are simultaneous. The Potentiality is made of motion. But it’s motion itself in motion, and not things moving. No things there. No clocks, no time. It’s totality all at once. Since our consciousness as we live here in Actuality is of the potential essence, we have some possibility of perceiving the past and the future. They are swimming in the ocean of pre-existence along with our raw consciousness. To see the past and future directly, we must strip down and plunge in naked. Really, that’s also the only way to see the present. So few of us are ready for that !
Detachment
In the Bhagavad-gita, Krishna says:
3.27
“I’m the one who’s doing this,”
thinks the ego-bewildered atman,
all of whose activities
are done by the gunas of Prakriti.
3.28
But Mahabaho, someone who knows what’s real
can discriminate and see that guna-karma
is just the gunas relating with the gunas.
With that in mind, you’re never attached.
To paraphrase: Whatever’s happening in the material world is really material nature itself doing things, not us. We’re just along for the ride. We imagine we’re in charge. But really nature’s moving us around like puppets. With that in mind, you don’t feel attached to what’s going on around you.
In terms of Reality 9: In the particle-dominated world of Materiality, we tend to identify with the events embedded within the particles (the moments). Generally, our consciousness hasn’t developed to the point of seeing She and He behind it all. We don’t feel that every atom is glorifying God. We feel that matter is something we can manipulate for our own benefit. But really we’re just watching a movie that keeps on repeating itself endlessly. With that in mind, you’re never attached.
Devotion
The purpose of knowledge is to bring me to devotion. No matter how much I know, it’s useless if I have no love. As Clyde McPhatter sang, “Without love I have nothing at all.” Waves and particles, space and time, categories and sub-categories – they all fade away in Spirituality, where Goddess and God are loved. Krishna is there.
Nicholas of Cusa:
“In God we must not conceive of distinction and indistinction, for example, as two contradictories, but we must conceive of them as antecedently existing in their own most simple beginning, where distinction is not other than indistinction.”
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz:
“The least particle ought to be considered as a world full of an infinity of different creatures.”
Georg Cantor:
“The Absolute can only be acknowledged and admitted, never known, not even approximately.”
Teleology
Potentiality 1 acts as a single wave. Potentiality 5 acts as many particles. But Potentiality in general combines both.
Each of Potentiality 5’s many particles is an infinitesimal wave. And Potentiality 1’s single wave is an infinite particle. The two share the same quality, Potentiality.
Therefore all entities are energies directed outside themselves. As Aristotle said, every entity has an inner purpose, intrinsic to itself, not imposed on it by any external agent, that drives it toward a goal in another time or place that fulfills its own nature. The purpose of an acorn is to become an oak. The purpose of the Sun is to radiate heat and light. Each entity is moving toward a fulfillment of itself.
In Reality 9, the inner seed, and thus the outer goal, of each entity is its life in Spirituality with Goddess and God. That devotional life sits in the center of each thing, including the infinite wave. The infinite wave is She. She yearns to worship the Other, He. Her yearning culminates in Spirituality, where Goddess and God and their Devotees enjoy eternal loving pastimes.
Each soul, being an infinitesimal version of She, has the same inner purpose as She. Every entity is moving toward Spirituality. Spirituality, lodged firmly in the center of Reality 9, is the goal of Reality 9.
But if it is the goal it must also be the source. For teleology is a tautology, employing circular reasoning. (Since the Sun radiates heat and light, then its purpose is to radiate heat and light.) This circle of reasoning includes a long chain of causes and effects, each of which is an absolute and can therefore function as both the beginning and the end of the circle. (A case can even be made for Materiality as the source and the goal.) However, the circle floats, so to speak, on an ocean of She. She has the advantage of being infinite, thus being both inside and outside the circle. And She has her priority: He. Together, they reach their peak in Spirituality. In this sense, Spirituality is the essential origin of it all.
Georg Cantor
For the mathematician Georg Cantor (1845 – 1908), nothing was more important than God. When Cantor developed set theory, which every elementary school student now learns, he based it on a new concept of Infinity, the Absolute Infinity being God. Besides the Absolute, Cantor said, there are two other kinds of infinity. They are the actual infinite and the transfinite. This got him into trouble with other mathematicians. Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas and everyone else since had declared that there’s no such thing as an actual infinite – that is, an infinite realm that can be made subject to mathematical procedures. And the transfinite, nobody had even heard of before.
I’m not a mathematician. Symbolic logic utterly escapes me – along with the details of Cantor’s theorizing. I won’t try to explain what I don’t understand. But I do see a correspondence between Cantor’s three infinities and mine.
His actual infinite is my Potentiality 1. I don’t use the term “potential” the way mathematicians do. They posit a “potential infinite” as a hypothetical state necessary for the sake of performing certain operations within finitude. My infinite Potentiality is a real state in its own right, the source of all else. It is Cantor’s actual infinite, beyond the reach of our intellect.
His transfinite is similar to my Potentiality 5. Cantor describes the transfinite as a realm that can be enumerated. It can be added to. Its constituent elements have their specific identities. Likewise, Potentiality 5 is composed of an infinite quantity of identifiable particles.
All entities within Actuality have emigrated there from the infinite, and retain the infinite at their core. “We are spirits in the material world,” as The Police sang in the 1980s. Christians tend to be dualists, digging a deep trench between the infinite and the finite. Cantor had a rough time with their Thomist condemnations. But I am not a dualist. I am a monist-dualist, subscribing to the achintya bhedabheda tattva of Shri Chaitanya. Like Cantor, I feel the presence of the infinite within the finite to be a continual inspiration. He said:
“The grounding of the principles of mathematics and natural science is a matter for metaphysics.”
“What surpasses all that is finite and transfinite is … the single completely individual unity in which everything is included, which includes the ‘Absolute’ incomprehensible to the human understanding. This is the ‘Actus Durissimus’ which by many is called ‘God.'”
“All forms whether finite or infinite are definite, and with the exception of God, are capable of being intellectually determined.”
“… certain knowledge … can only be obtained through concepts and ideas, which are at best only stimulated by outer experience, but which are principally formed through inner induction and deduction, like something which, so to speak, already lay within us and is only awakened and brought to consciousness.”
“In my opinion, time is an idea … it is nothing other than a relational concept, by whose aid the relation between various motions we perceive in nature is determined.”
“All these particular modes of the transfinite have existed from eternity as ideas in the Divine intellect.”
” … the transfinite not only expresses the extensive domain of the possible in God’s knowledge, but also presents a rich and continually increasing field of ideal discovery. Moreover, I am convinced that it also achieves reality and existence in the world of the created, so as to express more strongly than could have been the case with a mere ‘finite world’ the majesty of the Creator following its own free decree.”
The Ultimate Is Inconceivable
Finitude has an infinite feature and infinity has a finite feature. For instance, even in conventional religious terminology, a body has a soul, and God has a body. Finitude is form or identity or stasis. Infinity is freedom or action or motion. So, since the finite is the limited, and the infinite is the unlimited, then finitude has limited freedom and infinity has unlimited forms.
But the finite and the infinite are of two different states. Finitude is actual and infinity is potential. They’re both real. But finitude exists and infinity pre-exists.
To what extent can we speak of a mathematics of pre-existence? Cantor may have found a way. Like Cantor, I propose that “everything is included” within the Absolute Infinite. That is, every separate thing is included. It is not only singular but also plural.
Indeed, it’s easier to conceive of its plurality – its containing an infinite number of forms – than it is to conceive of its singularity – its boundary. But in fact, it has no boundary. It is not a “set” in the manner of actual sets. Here is the paradox. Potentiality is a form, She, but a form without a boundary. That is the great mystery. That is why the ultimate is inconceivable.
Nicholas of Cusa:
from On Learned Ignorance 109:
“Who, I ask, could understand how it is that the plurality of things is from the Divine Mind? For God’s understanding is His being; for God is Infinite Oneness. If you proceed with the numerical comparison by considering that number is the multiplication, by the mind, of the common one: it seems as if God, who is Oneness, were multiplied in things, since His understanding is His being. And yet, you understand that this Oneness, which is infinite and maximal, cannot be multiplied. How, then, can you understand there to be a plurality whose being comes from the One without there occurring any multiplication of the One? That is, how can you understand there to be a multiplication of Oneness without there being a multiplication of Oneness? Surely, you can not understand it as you understand the multiplication of one species or of one genus in many species or many individuals; outside of these individuals a genus or a species does not exist except through an abstracting intellect. Therefore, no one understands how God (whose oneness of being does not exist through the understanding’s abstracting from things and does not exist as united to, or merged with things) is unfolded through the number of things.”
Krishna
from the Bhagavad-gita:
9.4
All this world is permeated by me,
in my form as the Unmanifest.
All creatures stand in me.
I do not stand in them.
9.5
And, the creatures don’t stand in me.
See how my yoga rules!
My atman creates the creatures,
sustains the creatures,
but doesn’t stand in the creatures.
9.6
Understand – just as the wind blows everywhere
while always situated within space,
so all the creatures are situated within me.
13.13
I’ll tell you what is to be known
knowing it, you’ll attain immortality
it’s the beginingless Supreme Brahman – — they say it neither is nor is not
13.14
everywhere its hands and feet
everywhere its eyes, heads, faces
everywhere it hears, and abides ——– embracing all the world
13.15
shining in the gunas of the senses
and without any senses at all
detached, and supporting everything —— without gunas and enjoying gunas
13.16
inside and outside all creatures
those that move and those that don’t
it’s too subtle to be understood —– close, and placed so far away
13.17
undivided, standing in all creatures
also divided, or so it seems
understood as the creatures’ maintainer — and devourer, and creator
13.18
it’s also the light in all lights
it’s beyond the darkness, they say
it’s knowing, the known, and known by knowing – it stands in the hearts of us all
Thank you.
