Signal-Less Communication
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Document prepared for XXVI International Gebser Society Conference, University of Windsor, Windsor, Ontario, Canada, October 2000
Signal-Less Communication and the Awaring of Mutation
The most profound communication is signal-less.
As the lesser is to the greater, the greater is to the whole--thus, as the signaled is to the signal- less, the signal-less is to the whole.
Psychic disturbances, changes of receptivity, increases of resonance for transformation and integration are examples of the signal-less fields through which all signals flow.
A phrase of Einstein is always with me: "Full consciousness is a limit case.” Communication is a field experience that includes but cannot be reduced to any matrix of signaled texts. Integrative consciousness will never be completely expressible as a text limited to any reference-coordinate system.
With quantum theory, non-locality is a term for a mysterious correlation experimentally observed in the interconnectedness of nature. Perception itself seems based on this attribute of non-locality with a property of resonance. A corollary in quantum theory is that subjective experience cannot be limited to human consciousness but must be an attribute of nature at all magnitudes.
Systems theory is built from distinctions, boundaries, and asymmetries. These signal-based distinctions seem to comprise limit-attractors that limit consciousness in certain constructive ways, attenuating overwhelming possibilities in containable forms. But chaos and complexity theory describe how the incalculable gives shape to what is calculable—that is, the emergent forms of strange attractors. The invisible is the origin of the patterning of the visible. In other words, an understanding of chaos/complexity implies the holistic interconnectivity of the signaled with the signal-less.
Jung’s theory of archetypes recognizes
When I recorded this dream in 1993, I knew it brought forth symbols. Throughout the past seven years, these symbols—and those of earlier and of subsequent core dreams—have emerged in fractal, archetypal patternings, informing my consciousness in archaic, magical, mythic, mental, and integral dimensions. Only with the death of my mother a few weeks ago was I capable of experiencing its implications with immediate diaphaneity. Jung’s words come
1 to me: “In the deepest sense we all dream not out of ourselves but out of what lies between us and the other.” So it is I share the dream in all its liminaleities, as recorded in 1993:
Suddenly climbing the rim of an ancient volcano. Climbing up slope to look in. In Tennessee, of all places, overlooking all the scenes of my childhood. Had never heard that the ancient volcano existed, although I had noticed it from the air on my most recent trip and felt deep curiosity. That is why I am there. It is very dark volcanic rock I am scaling. Utilizing all my mountain skills. The cold but shimmering crystals embedded in the black matter are very sharp-edged and tend to slice into my fingertips and lacerate my forearms and shins as I crawl and pull myself upward. At last I have my body over the very edge and behold a vast, unfathomably vast chasm. The ancient crater. On the far side is an even higher rim jutting so steeply into the clouds that it takes my breath away and speeds my pulse to observe its grandeur. I slip myself down gently into the crater zone. There are enormous plunges threatening any mistaken move on my part. The rock itself is also somewhat brittle. My handholds must be tested. Some of these outcrops are not reliable. But I find a body-sized niche to slip into. There I gaze around for an extended contemplation of space-time / history / soul and spirit. Then, abruptly, a very large mountain sheep, a ram, with charcoal gray wool leaps up from inside the crater. Doesn't at first seem to notice me, but I am sure it has smelled me. I am acutely aware of its immediate, wet, wooly, wild smell. I am afraid it will trample me. Lay a hoof on me, or even deliberately attack and stomp me to death. But it leaps elegantly over me and stands above me momentarily before continuing on its way. After an extended meditation, I pull myself out of my niche with great difficulty. As always in the mountains, getting there is half the challenge. I am soberly wide-eyed and alert and using all my mountaineering skills. My senses are honed. But I am not timid nor incapacitated by my appropriate sense of danger. As I am climbing down I come down slope upon another unexpected animal. This is a very dark animal. Smaller than the one who passed me above. This one in fact has a collar. Also, around its neck are several windings of polyester rope. In fact, tangled ends of many strands of rope dangle from its neck as evidence of repeated struggles somehow to escape some obviously concerted efforts to keep the animal in captivity. I feel sorry for the animal but is also repulsively ugly and grotesque and pathetic. On down slope, I am shocked to find walls covered with layers of knifed and painted graffiti. At the end of the wall is a rack for USA Today. In the distance, I see that expeditions are crushing the flora, exploiting the scene.
Little did I know in 1993 how this dream, drawing me to my natal ground in Tennessee, would explicate with at-onceness a decade of profound personal upheavals, discontinuities, non- localities, dissociations and the fadings of many, many walls. Only at the beginning of this month of October, 2000, did I come, in resonance with such a dream, to discover so much more completely the inner world of trauma in which my mother lived for her earthly journey of 82 years, unto her passing. The meaning of this dream, as with any core dream, has not subsisted merely in readings of signals nor with the perception of distinctions.
I was aware at the time that the dream had presentiated living symbols actively and continuously overflowing. For seven years I searched through the symbologies, associations, active imaginings and projections in countless directions, such as Gebser describes in the newly available article, The Invisible Origin:
2 “All three consciousness structures…the mental-rational, the mythical psychic and the magical-vital are becoming transparent with regard to the universal consciousness… In the core dreams a track of the invisible or at least a track of the complex constellation inherent in the invisible origin becomes perceivable: its reflection presses, so to speak, into the invisible and becomes transparent, which makes it evident to mental consciousness. Where this execution of becoming transparent and evident succeeds…our three-membered consciousness structure is integrated within or by the pristine universal consciousness…. It may be allowed to consider the so-called psychical phenomena like the core dreams, as belonging to the charming, appalling, sometimes also demonic interim realm, where they light up not as flash-like intuitions (originating from the spirit), but as images in the twilight zone between invisibility and visibility. But this enables us to execute the mutation into the integral, which makes it possible to experience the world no longer as only unperspectival-mythical or to grasp the world well-aimed perspectively and hence rationally, but to perceive it a- perspectively and a-rationally…as a whole down to its origin.”
Ultimately, in the next seven years I now recognize how I was preparing not only for the death of my mother, but I was participating in that dying process while also participating otherwise in this integrative life-process. The signals we shared were increasingly truncated, entropic.
Not only with my mother but also with many, many lives in my alchemical work have I found myself bewitched as much as enchanted by patterns of “the charming, appalling, sometimes also demonic interim realm” of “images in the twilight zone between invisibility and visibility” and such expressions of the inner world of trauma in liminality.
With my mother, I shared and could have shared nothing of the overwhelming range and intensity of dreams I had between 1993 and her death. My mother and I could never have used such language. In some ways, it seems now that I was not only dreaming about her or with her but even for her, experiencing in signal-less mystery her search for “pristine universal consciousness,” for atonement, and for deliverance.
And yet, in our conversations of the final hours, many with her speaking only monosyllables, and finally only the sound of her breathing, and in that sound, and beyond the threshold of that sound, I experienced with my mother the peace that passes all understanding. In Christian language, I might say the Basileia, the reign of agape irrupting into this life and this world. Mention of samadhi, meaning complete absorption in God, also occurs to me, particularly when noting that the Sanskrit, sam, is similar to the prefix syn, meaning “together with” and Adhi is usually translated “Lord,” paralleling the Hebrew, Adon or Adonai.
In flight from San Francisco to Seattle once, carrying with me a bizarrely complex drawing of the dream, a volcano sculpture in progress, I was glancing out the window to the east. The central valley of California narrowed to its northern apex in forming the Cascade Range. With vigilance I followed the procession of peaks from Mount Lassen to Mount Shasta, tracing the Cascade Range to Crater Lake with its central Wizard Island. Then I watched the more gentle terrain of western Oregon under the aileron edge. That emerald green extravagance brought calmness to the level flight northward, west of Mount Hood, over the Columbia River. As I watched the rolling topography, I tried to discern the geological factors in this vision. Gradually at first, then more rapidly I discerned that a change of forestation, perceived without a perception of depth from this altitude, indicated the enfoldment of mountainous formations. Then, all at once, and with abruptness, I perceived that the uplifting of the Earth’s crust had
3 simply, elementally broken open into the eruptive features of Mount St. Helens, and the same thing had occurred with Mount Adams further on. Then with an awe that is always surprising, I glanced down to Mount Rainier and glided down the path of multitudes of associations I had with the civilization of Seattle.
In the midst of that flight, I had somehow, strangely been caught liminal. I am still there. At once, I could aperspectivally witness those crustal configurations. It all seemed so simple and lucid. A volcano is the Earth’s way of giving way and of allowing some deeply molten, cosmic passion—I will say astral forces—to break out in ranges of weakness, actually. Along the lines of weakness, in the very centers of weakness, comes the release that forms the volcano. All there is to it, I thought. With all the veneration of spirit-forces, with all veneration of the fire goddess Pele, the volcanic phenomena appeared also to be simply rifts and rims and escarpments. And still, I felt equally alive to the complete range of experience—archaic, magical, mythic, mental, integral. None of these dimensions excluded or impinged on the others. All revealed something of the volcanic experience, dreaming, awakening, awaring—as have all these years of resonances, synaireses, renderings.
These words of Gebser evoke the transparency I am trying to express and what it is I want to experience with you now: “Darkness, twilight and daylight are with regard to the structure of the at-once impenetrable and nontransparent walls; but where the three darkness and brightness grades of the consciousness structures become transparent to us, also the walls are fading: a more intensive consciousness, the integral, managing all the prior consciousness structures without further violation by them, becomes capable to conceive through darkness, twilight and possible dazzle the pristine consciousness, or as Sri Aurobindo calls it, the universal consciousness, the origin. Where this happens, our consciousness transforms itself into the integral, thanks to its participation in the pristine and cancels all our “gridlike compulsive ideas.” [IO] “...the all-illuminating clarity of the World Foundation, the Origin, the Tao, the Divine, of God... Tao... samadhi... satori... ‘incessible light’... ‘uncreated light’” [IO] “…the final truth can be perceived, neither represented nor observed, but very well perceived.” [IO]
In these words I hear Gebser at his most liminal: “What is at stake here is neither a loss nor a gain, neither an ascent nor a descent, but a re- arrangement or restructuration, a mutative unfolding that is both positive and negative in the terrestrial arena, in other words, in the space-time world where it appears and is fulfilled. But “outside” this battlefield, arena, scene, and proving ground … is located that “core” which is scarcely touched by terrestrial matters because it is itself only tangential to them. And this “core” or “nucleus” is in all likelihood identical to the presence of origin, and as such also forms, shapes, and directs each and every individual human being.” [EPO 134] “(S)everance from powers which cannot be proven restricts [our] ties to [the] past, which is then lost in uncertainty. At the same time [we] also [forfeit] [the] future, the mirroring of [the] past. The loss is even greater, since the present…necessarily also becomes irrelevant; a nothing, a nowhere, the impalpable point of severance of forlornness.” [EPO 296] “Above and beyond this, it ought not to be forgotten that, in rational terms, what occurs ‘here’ has its correspondence ‘There.’ The Earth is not just a star among stars but a star with other stars. Any sweeping changes on Earth are not only changes of the Earth; they not only occur ‘here’ (on Earth) but also ‘there.’ Whether the changes taking place here initiate similar ones ‘yonder,’ or whether the changes in the ‘yonder’ initiate the changes ‘here,’ is an idle question
4 for anyone aware of the undeniable interconnection of materialized phenomena of which the Earth, like every other star, is a part.” [EPO 297]
The contextuality of awaring and mutation is as real as any emergent texts. So it is of Eros and Logos. My feeling-intuition experience is that the greater field of relatedness is signal-less, and not limited to space-time. Even so, this greater relatedness can be communicated—given receptivity, readiness, and transparency.
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