Adam Blatner

Multi-Dimensional Mind

A conference I attended in late June, 2012 (The British Psychodrama Association Conference west of London) has as its theme Innovations and Integrations. What struck me about the design (above), which is fine, is that it draws on the metaphor of mechanism, clockworks, gears. Someone observed that the mind in its complexity tends to be modeled in terms of the most complex technology. (The problem with current technology is that we don’t know yet where it will lead!) So the complexity of a fine clock harkens back to the wonders of two- to three hundred years ago. In Freud’s time, it involved the mysteries of pressure and volume—fluid dynamics, plumbing. (Indoor toilets were just coming in.) A few decades later the mind was likened to an electrical switchboard, and more recently people are trying to figure out the mind as if it were a computer or more, a network of computers, or the internet.

The problem is that they all deal with rational forms of information processing and no systems other than playful mind are capable of entertaining the wealth of paradoxes involved. Mind varies with attention, motivation, fatigue, levels of consciousness, hunger, other appetites, the presence of distractions, its inclination to be playful or rebellious, and the many other influences that may come into the different individuals involved. This one partakes more of sports and that one more of mathematics. I’ve been impressed by thinkers who find in the phenomena associated with geometric topology or biological processes hints at the paradigm-shifting nature of what we’re learning about how the cosmos works. Chaos and fractals now offer ways to think about quantum mechanics. An of late many physicists and deep thinkers are daring to consider seriously the implications of dimensionality. while this was once imagined to be a science-fiction device, many now take it seriously!

Calabai-Yau representation

Another: Multi-Dimensional?

Calabai-Yau “Dragon” ??  These from the internet!

My hunch is that mind is indeed multi-dimensional; or, that reality is only partly time, space, matter, and energy; it also is information and consciousness, the ways that knowledge is transformed; and it also mixes chaos and order within matrices of play. It is and must be truly inconceivable, but yet mind can in part dare to conceive of it. … and my preference is that of a multi-dimensional form, the Calabai-Yau matrix.

I’m reminded also of the hint of multi-dimensionality in these other drawings—on the left, a Tibetan “yantra” or sacred drawing used for meditation. To the right is another Calabai Yau diagram, and more can be found by clicking on the images on google.

Mind includes categories that can’t be represented mathematically. First of all, their parameters are not precise, but fuzzy: cute-ness, funny, pleasant, confusing, startling, amazing, tiresome, mind-boggling, suspicious, and so forth are not clearly definable. Such qualities are not only subjective, but also they vary with culture and individual temperament, ability, and other individual variables.

Although these pictures are from others’ pens, via the worldwide web, I recognize in my various mandalas a tendency to create similar drawings, and also vaguely have associations to what I have expressed on this page: There are processes of the mind and the social matrix that indeed cannot be specified.

For example, above is a relationship (someone else’s picture, but it feels right to me)—a multi-dimensional relationship that involves the many aspects of connection. (This is how I feel resonant with my dear wife Allee.)

Summary

We are god’s fingertips, tiny cells at the end of the Great Becoming, extending into 3-D space (4-D if we make it space-time) and we are learning to more fully utilize the potentials in that realm to actualize ever-more, create what we can. We’ve only just begun, a speech-enabled species for less than a mere hundred thousand years, on an accelerating upward curve of “progress.” Whoosh! Our job is to become ever-more creative in whatever ways we can—and nice, kind, ethical, and inclusive—weaving those more emotional-social virtues into our progress is intrinsic, not only for its aesthetic values (It’s nice to be nice, it feels all good together), but also practical. We create better collaboratively!

Tags: Confabulations