My Significant Other is the Kosmos Redux: Part 7 - Back on the Hook

Prelude

I'd like to clear up a little terminology I use in the title before I wrap up this blog series. Redux is a word derived from the French language, and literally means return, though in its original context referred to the return of feudal landowners from years spent fighting the Crusades in the Middle East during the Middle Ages.  I'm not a Christian Crusader (though I'm sometimes accused of  being an Evolutionary Crusader), but before I began this series I hadn't returned to the blog for more than a year, a year that certainly felt, in my personal life, like a prolonged war. 

Kosmos, spelled with a K, is an early Greek term meaning the totality of existence, including not only the physiosphere and biosphere, but also the noosphere, the sphere of mind and culture, and if you like the theosphere, the sphere of spirit.  This differentiates it from the most common usage, Cosmos, which typically refers to the physiosphere (as in Carl Sagan's famous book "Cosmos") and sometimes including the biosphere.  And as I noted earlier, since Kosmos is all-inclusive, once it has become Significant Other, as in my case, divorce is simply not an option - there is literally no where else to go!

I also want to explain a little of my process here on this blog, which is also the process in my art-making.  When I begin I have a faint inclination of where I want to go, what my goal is...but it is faint, a seedling at best.  I begin, I take two steps forward, one step back,  then another back, then another forward...and then, if all goes well, if my faith allows it, it just tumbles out.  It is almost another voice, maybe my deeper self, who knows?  And when it's finished, I almost always step back and wonder, where the fuck did that come from?  And BTW, this is not channeling, this is not a visitation from on external entity whether Abraham or Hierarchy or Seth.  This is simply creativity.  And in that, it may simply be the evolutionary impulse unfolding, from rocks to roses to Rumi to... who knows? 

Fugue

Rocks to roses to Rumi...physiosphere to biosphere to noosphere.  This suggests a hierarchical progression, or perhaps more appropriately a holarchical progression, meaning a progression that transcends previous levels yet also includes and embraces them.  Transcend and include, a series of  nested emergences, where each level is a whole that becomes a part of a bigger whole. For instance, to use the physical world as an example, atoms are wholes that are transcended by molecules, which in turn still include atoms.  And there's more. To paraphrase Ken Wilber, the lower is more fundamental, the higher more significant – atoms are fundamental to molecules, meaning molecules could not exist without atoms, but atoms can do just fine without molecules.  However, molecules are more significant than atoms, hold meaning and qualities that atoms by themselves can never have.  In the same way, the physiosphere is more fundamental then the biosphere since the biosphere could not exist without the physiosphere - no rocks means no roses, yet rocks don't need roses to rock and roll.  But the biosphere holds more meaning, more information if you will.  And of course, the noosphere is more significant than the biosphere, holds more meaning and information, but take away the biosphere and the noosphere simply disappears.  Biosphere more fundamental, noosphere more significant.

This is where a seeming paradox appears when it comes to Kundalini awakening.  This is fundamentally (pun intended) a physical process arising out of the biosphere, or to put it more succinctly, out of the body as an element or an expression of the biosphere.  Its first manifestation is a decidedly biological one, in and of the body, and its continuing presence seems to act on bodily processes, including the biological brain.  The traditional literature describes this as an awakening of dormant possibilities lying asleep in the body; the Hindu version describes it as a coiled snake slumbering at the base of the spine.  And I can assure you, it is an unforgettable biological/physical experience when it arises.  But if we go back to this holarchical notion of physiosphere to biosphere to noosphere, isn't it a regression to return to the biosphere, to bodily processes?  Could this be, to put it in Ken Wilber's terms, an odd example of the pre/trans fallacy, meaning  misinterpreting a regression to pre-conventional or pre-rational experience as a trans-conventional or trans-rational experience - or in this case, mistaking a pre-rational or simply biospheric experience for a trans-rational or higher noospheric experience?

I think a way around this paradox is not to think of Kundalini as an awakening, but rather as an emergence.  I know I'm splitting hairs here, but emergence puts us squarely back on the evolutionary track. Not dormant energies waiting to be awoken from slumber, but possibilities emerging under the necessary conditions.  In my case the necessary condition was my having utterly failed in the noosphere, crashed and burned.  All webs of interlocution had unraveled in a dead end, and as you might remember, suicide was looking decidedly warm and fuzzy.  With the noosphere barren and dry, webs frazzled and disintegrating in heaps all around me, how could I possibly evolve in any meaningful way?  Why bother?

I call it a grace, this emergence of previously undreamed energies and possibilities.  It was as if the presence of the theosphere, the sphere of spirit, sensing my connection to the noosphere as nearing complete disintegration, reached across the void and yanked me up by my bootstraps (or more appropriately, my spinal cord) through the vehicle of the biosphere.  This was not a regression, but in fact a jump start, an overriding of my quickly failing noospheric holon.  A classic case of agape, the love of the higher reaching back to the lower, embracing the lower in its web of interlocution.  And I did nothing to deserve this - no devotional practice, no high ethical standards, no exceptional life of service or humility.  Perhaps the one positive act I made was accepting all responsibility for the mess I'd made of this incredible miracle of life that I was granted, and even that was far more an act of despair then one of courage.

But grace doesn't let you off the hook.  Oh no.  An interlocution with the Kosmos is not a one way conversation, a one-and-done deal and now back to the good life defined by a great plate of lasagna and a little nookie (neither of which, by the way, is precluded - remember, transcend and include!) .  A process is begun, a new responsibility is in effect because this web of interlocution is evolution itself, and you have to own it.  If that Mother of all Significant Others asks "What are you, why are you here, what are you doing here?', you better get down to business and come up with some answers!  Which is why, to come back full circle, art-making and indeed all creativity in any walk or circumstance of life has such a deeply moral and deeply energizing dimension, operating in the imperative to evolve our noosphere through the creation of webs of interlocution that are the hallmark of that very noosphere, the sphere of mind and culture, the sphere of us.  Rocks to roses to Rumi to...who knows?

The End...for now...