Confabulations 18:
Human Psychic Development

Adam Blatner, Imagination-ologist

June 17, 2012
 

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Ever-Expanding Mind

God is particles evolving into atoms into stars and galaxies into mother-supernovae into suns into planets into life into more complex forms of mind. Always expanding, diverging, integrating, weaving and branching, finding out what else yet is possible! It's a glorious dance and we are privileged and honored to be at the nexus of several major transformations: We are part of the universe that is becoming aware of itself, and with that awareness we become aware of many corollaries:
 - Oh what fools we have been, oh, how unconscious!
 - Oh what fools we still are, but we are learning to be compassionate with ourselves and each other.
 - Whoa! We're all in this together and it seems that most of us haven't yet recognized that fact!
 - Hey, there's more here than meets the eye, that greets the gross senses! We have tools that reveal worlds upon worlds smaller and larger, faster and slower, more and less intense or forceful in energy, and in other ways.
 - Oh, my, there are so many different ways to play! Explore! Celebrate! Enrich and enjoy! Discover! and all sorts of other good verbs!
 - (Recently) Uh-oh, there might even be other dimensions of being. I don't know how to deal with that.
       (But again, we haven't known what to make of a good many frontiers of our consciousness, but enough of these have been traveled so that the encounter with yet another frontier shouldn't shake us up so much.)
Human Development
First of all, there's embryology, how we emerged from a cell to a full organism. Get this straight: We don't know a millionth of how this operates or why. We have just begun to plot out the what happens and notice a few dynamic attractors, etc. How they evolved? We give that over to an equally mysterious process we call "evolution," which, like the forces of the "market" in the realm of human economics, is imagined to be understandable by human minds---eventually. That none of this will ever be fully understandable---never---because human minds can't begin to comprehend the depth and complexity that it expresses---that mind is itself a perimeter activity of soul emerging into physical space-time---well, that, too is inconceivable. Part of the fun is that we are immersed in the illusion that even if we don't yet know, that we could. That we could never know fully, completely,---well, inconceivable. But again that's part of the paradox of consciousness---it's almost impossible to conceive of yet more consciousness.

Anyway, body-mind in terms of body development and ongoing somato-psychic interactivity is one aspect, although it remains still highly open-ended and mysterious. We know more about this than the dimensions I'll mention next, but still pitifully little.

Then there's child development, which so far in this century has focused on thing-handling, how a young mind makes a map of the world, how it relates socially, needs, belongs. Again what's important to note is that we are just beginning to discover this. The field of play research has mushroomed mainly in the last twenty years and it is nowhere near its peak. Play begins to fuzzy boundaries, and part of our consciousness development has been first the growing awareness of different dimensions of existences that hadn't been known to us before, and then the studies of these phenomena, which created departments in colleges and the illusions of compartments, and then in the last fifty or so years the increasing breakdown of the compartments, boundaries, and discernment of the inter-disciplinary nature of knowledge, and beyond, the inter-dependence of many seemingly diverse trends and forces. So the whole process of psychological development becomes quickly impossibly complex, unable to be grasped. Get this: This is as it should be. It is indeed impossible to comprehend. The problem is that we hold on to the illusion of grasping, knowing for sure, definitely, the whole shebang, got it. And dissolving that illusion is tricky, very deep. We will never ever cease to discover yet more because that's God expanding consciousness for you!

Plato's parable of the cave applies to everything, fundamental reality: We perceive only the surface of things, and in dreams dip slightly below the surface to glimpse at the complexity that seems chaotic. But it isn't. It's just unfolding at levels of complexity beyond the capacity of ordinary mind to grasp. And indeed, only occasionally would we be able to use or integrate more, so even what we are given to understand next is gradual (thank the Angels for their compassion). Occasionally there's a slip up and the human goes mad.

The point of all this is that it is time we own that we are inconceivably complex: We expand into life and the cosmos on so many fronts: Our daily challenges of growing up, older, parenting, aging, dealing with health issues, grief, and so forth; making a living in a changing world; trying to improve collective existence (which is what politics is about); trying to understand the depths of existence and our relationship to it (which is what spirituality is about---and this, alas, too often gets subsumed under the little minds of organizers and becomes 'religion.'). Meanwhile we are inventing, exploring, and, above all, playing. We are ever-expanding in an accelerating fashion---the number and variety of journals, magazines, movies, television shows, social electronic computer-mediated media, photographs, and so forth has accelerated the evolution of our species far beyond what our philosophy and history can explain. That's part of the problem---a kind of ever-increasing culture-lag.

So what if we now begin to use the Calabai-Yau illustrations, models, images, to seek to appreciate the multi-dimensionality of our lives? What if we allow each element---sports, news, hobbies, family, clubs, politics, medical care, travel, internet, etc.---and each category has innumerable and ever-expanding sub-categories and overlaps with other categories---to be imagined to be only one surface of an infinitely dynamic, multi-dimensional process. Imagine one form of the Calabai-Yau manifold on the accompanying webpage of Confabulations 20. (Or, also you can go to Google and then type in Calabai-Yau and click up on "images" and get some more examples!)

My Mandalas

I realized in writing this that my mandalas simply express the shifting dynamics of my essential being. Yours too---I'm just a bit more visually aware of it. And this again is only a visual representative of what is in truth all possible senses---many of them unimaginable to humans---and even we are only dimly aware of sounds that only bats can hear, or smells that only dogs and other far more sensitive animals can pick up, or sea animals that can sense incredibly subtle electrical fields, or elephants who can pick up sounds too low for our ears, etc. So there are many more dimensions than we know. But just for convenience, let it be two-dimensional, without color, pen-and-ink drawings---and these too are pretty complex---and allow them in your imagination to rotate and transform into yet other forms, and to be continually transforming thus. And now shift and superimpose that image on your reflecting on your own mind, your many roles you play in life, and how they overlap. Defeat in one role affects your mood in other roles. Tiredness, distraction, sexual attraction or arousal, residual annoyance at something else, all these overlap continuously with hundreds of other subtle fluctuations in states and changes in your mind. It's all okay! Welcome to the human race.

You mean others do this too? Others are at times brilliant---you know the feeling of "Wow! I didn't know I could do that!" good feeling that might be followed sooner or later by a "I can't believe I was that dumb!" It's all in the flow of the mix. Don't feel any need to come to a conclusion about how great or bad you are---it's really not necessary and makes no difference. Open to this being the game, a very, very, very complex game, of how you will find yourself, your way of helping the world a better place, sometimes just your coping with the burdens of being alive.

God's Game

Part of the fun here is to worship God simply by imagining that God isn't up there judging, he's down here as you, discovering how to play these many games simultaneously. And God is everyone else, too, and everything else, and if you think about it---it's a neo-Spinozan pantheistic theology---it is way too much for any person's brain. But that's okay because God is up to the task of being "everything"---it's the ultimate ultimat-osity of ultimacy---truly worthy of only God--- and it's none of your business to try to grasp on to understanding all of this. If you can let go into understanding how it is you can never understand fully, well, that's a beginning.


  These are facilitated by the  elfairy equivalent of a  molecular biological catalyst in the Earth-biosphere.  
 
Magic exists and operates rather routinely in this other dimension.

The elfairy of early mandala-formation is on the lower right of the four frames to the far left, and some of its simpler creations are shown in various stages of complexi